Grünberg concluded his opening address by clearly stating his personal allegiance to Marxism as a scientific methodology. Just as liberalism, state socialism, and the historical school had institutional homes elsewhere, so Marxism would be the ruling principle at the Institut. Grünberg’s conception of materialist analysis was straightforward. It was, he argued, “eminently inductive; its results claimed no validity in time and space,” but had “only relative, historically conditioned meaning.”27 True Marxism, he continued, was not dogmatic; it did not seek eternal laws. With this latter assertion, Critical Theory as it was later developed was in agreement. Grünberg’s inductive epistemology, however, did not receive the approval of Horkheimer and the other younger members of the group. But in the first few years of the Institut’s history Grünberg’s approach prevailed. The Grünberg Archiv continued to stress the history of the labor movement while publishing an occasional theoretical work, such as Pollock’s study of Werner Sombart and Horkheimer’s article on Karl Mannheim.28
The tone of the Grünberg years, a tone very different from that set after Horkheimer replaced him as director, was captured in a letter sent by a student at the Institut, Oscar H. Swede, to the American Marxist Max Eastman in 1927. The relative orthodoxy of the Institut’s Marxism was frustrating to the young Swede, who complained of spending
hours of exasperating argument in a Marxist Institute with a younger generation settling down to an orthodox religion and the worship of an iconographical literature, not to mention blackboards full of mathematical juggling with blocks of 1000 k + 400 w of Marx’s divisions of capital’s functions, and the like. God! The hours I’ve spent listening to the debate of seminaries and student circles on the Hegelian dialektik, with not a single voice to point out that the problems can no longer be solved (if they ever were) by means of straw splitting “philosophical” conceptions. Even the leader [Grünberg], faced with an audience of enthusiastic youth convinced that Relativity is a further installment of bourgeois ideology substituting fluctuating ideas for Newton’s absolute materialism, that Freudism [sic] and Bergsonism are insidious attacks from the rear, and that the war can be waged with the sword in one hand and the “Geschichte der Historiko-materialismus” in the other . . . is constantly being brought up against the inherent contradictions in a Marxian M.I.H. [Materialist Interpretation of History] and being forced to devise defences against the logical conclusion that we may sit with our arms folded and wait for the millenium to blossom from the dung of the capitalist decay. The fact is that Ec[onomic] determinism cannot produce either fighting or creative forces, and there will be no communism if we have to rely for recruits on the sergeanty of cold, hunger, and low wages.29
Ultimately, Swede’s impatience with the unimaginative Marxism of the Grünberg years was to be shared by the Institut’s later leaders, who were to comprise the Frankfurt Schooi; but during the twenties, little theoretical innovation occurred at what the students were to call the “Café Marx.”
Symptomatic of its position were the close ties it maintained with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow under the direction of David Ryazanov.30 It photostated copies of unpublished manuscripts by Marx and Engels brought over weekly by courier from the SPD’s Berlin headquarters and forwarded them to Moscow, where they were included in the collected works, the famous MEGA (Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe).31
At the same time, the Institut began to assemble a group of young assistants with a variety of backgrounds and interests. The least important in terms of the Institut’s later development, but one of the most fascinating individuals to be associated with it at any time, was Richard “Ika” Sorge. The remarkable story of his espionage for the Russians in the Far East prior to and during the Second World War is too well known to require recapitulation here. Independent Socialist and then Communist after 1918, Sorge was also a doctoral student of Gerlach’s at Aachen. He combined his academic activities with such work for the Party as illegal organizing of Ruhr mine workers. In 1921 he married Gerlach’s divorced wife, Christiane, which surprisingly did not cost him the friendship of his professor. When Gerlach went to Frankfurt the next year, Sorge followed. After the sudden death of the Institut’s projected first director, Sorge remained with the group for a brief time, and was given the task of organizing the library. It was a job he did not relish, and when the Party told him to come to Moscow in 1924, his obedience was uncomplicated by a reluctance to leave Frankfurt. In any case, his connection with the Institut, according to Deakin and Storry, “must have been nominal and a cover”32 for his work for the Party. It was not until his public exposure as a spy in the 1940’s that the others learned of his remarkable undercover career.33
Other assistants at the Institut, however, were openly involved with leftist politics, despite the official intention of the founding members to keep it free of any party affiliation. Karl August Wittfogel, Franz Borkenau, and Julian Gumperz were all members of the Communist Party. Political activism as such was thus not in itself a reason for rejection by the group. It could, however, prove a hindrance, as in the case of Karl Korsch, who had been justice minister in the Thuringian SPD-KPD Coalition government in 1923, and continued as a prominent left opposition figure in the KPD until 1926. Wittfogel remembers Korsch’s role in the Institut as central during its first years, but the other surviving members have all disagreed with his version of the facts. Korsch did participate in some of the Institut’s seminars and wrote occasional reviews for its publications before and after the emigration, but was never offered a full membership.34 The reasons were no doubt complex, but Korsch’s stress on praxis, which was to lead him increasingly away from philosophical speculation in later years, certainly played a role. So too did the instability that the others saw in his character.35
From time to time the question of Horkheimer’s possible membership in the KPD has been raised. But hard evidence to support this view seems unavailable, and there is much in his writings and actions that makes his current denial of membership entirely plausible. During their student days together in Munich in 1919, Horkheimer and Pollock were nonparticipatory witnesses of the short-lived revolutionary activities of the Bavarian literati. Although helping to hide left-wing victims of the white terror that followed, they did not themselves join in the revolution, which they considered premature and inevitably doomed by the lack of objective conditions favoring true social change.36 Horkheimer’s earliest political sympathies were with Rosa Luxemburg, especially because of her critique of Bolshevik centralism.37 After her murder in 1919, he never found another socialist leader to follow.
In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung38 (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for skepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness. The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions, he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the course of economic processes. . . . In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.”39 At no time, therefore, whether under Grünberg or under Horkheimer, was the Institut to ally