Nearly 100 years ago, the Revolution of 1918 toppled the German Empire, leaving in its wake Germany’s first democratic republic. Fourteen years later, the Weimar Republic came to an end, toppled by elites who invited a racist, populist party to take over the government, a party without any coherent policies to address Weimar’s economic crisis. Dictatorship was the solution, since for Hitler the problem was democracy itself.

An intense debate arose already during the Republic about what democracy was: how the people’s will fit with a system of political representation, the role of elites, the place of law in restraining politicians (or the people), and the role of values in a democracy. These debates continued after 1945, in both the United States and West Germany, and continue to influence discussions of democracy today.

Udi Greenberg’s new book argues that the Weimar debates on democracy were borne across the ocean to the United States by a brilliant group of émigrés. These political exiles came to occupy leading positions in the intellectual and policy worlds of the United States, playing a key role in restructuring parts of Harvard University, for example, and helping to create the model of a Cold War university from the 1950s on. They re-exported their ideas to western Germany after the war, contributing to its Cold War democratization. They were “fundamental to the architecture of postwar politics in both West Germany and the United States and in the Cold War alliance between them” (5). Greenberg focuses especially on the exiles’ anti-Communism, their elitism, their search for values underlying democracy, and their quest to make democracies “militant,” able to defend themselves.

Greenberg’s claim is strong, and implies that we cannot understand the U.S. Cold War without the background of Weimar Germany and the émigrés who connected the two. He certainly does not mean to argue that the émigrés alone provided the foundations for the Cold War. One can certainly find indigenous sources for U.S. Cold War principles, ranging from the anti-Communism of the Red Scare in the 1920s, the elitism of the Progressives, debates on how to restrain the passions and interests of the masses through representative government going back to the Federalist Papers, and the assertion that religion or values underpinned democracy in different evangelical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What matters is the way the émigrés’ ideas flowed into the intellectual and political life of North America, to help justify a new, liberal, elitist, and internationally-oriented ideology of the Cold War.

The five intellectuals Greenberg surveys indeed had a remarkable effect on ideas and institutions in both countries. Carl J. Friedrich was one of the most influential U.S. political scientists in the twentieth century; he brought his concept of an elitist democracy as well as his model for providing international training of elites over from Heidelberg University, and was instrumental in connecting the insular Harvard world with Washington, D.C., through new institutes for policy and area studies. He re-exported these models of education as part of the army of émigrés returning with the U.S. occupation. The labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel brought with him from Berlin an affirmation of a pluralist social democracy, where interest groups supplemented individuals in creating social law. Fraenkel became a fervent admirer of Roosevelt-era America, as well as a strong anti-Communist, and helped to develop a new international political science focus at the new Free University in Berlin, an outpost of Cold War democracy. Waldemar Gurian came from a very different background: in the Weimar years he was an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism, echoing Papal attacks on liberal, socialism, and secular modernity. Over the 1930s, Gurian was one of the intellectuals to introduce the notion of “totalitarianism” into popular discourse with his comparisons of Hitler’s Germany and Communism; he moved gradually toward a conservative, values-based notion of liberalism that influenced Catholics in the United States, and that played well in conservative, anti-Communist West Germany. Karl Loewenstein, like Gurian, Fraenkel, and Friedrich influenced by the conservative (indeed, at times fascist) constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, developed Schmitt’s distinction between representative and “radical” democracy into a thoroughgoing critique of direct democracy that linked up with Gurian’s and Friedrich’s discussion of totalitarianism. Loewenstein, along with Friedrich, participated in developing the West German Basic Law, and his notion of a “militant democracy” that could defend itself against mortal threats (especially Communism) left its mark on German law. His “Manichean” world view, Greenberg argues, also justified the anti-Communist battle against internal dissidents in the House Un-American Activities Committee in the United States and against external threats in Latin America, carried out in some cases by dictatorships in the name of freedom. Last and certainly not least, Hans Morgenthau provided an intellectual argument in favor of “realism” in foreign policy, which meant not least recognizing an inevitable tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, a justification for the Cold War and German rearmament that was carried forward by Friedrich’s students Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. These are five thinkers with lasting legacies, whose Weimar roots informed their American ideas and whose American experiences then informed their actions in West Germany after 1945.

The evidence that Greenberg finds—drawn from published sources and seventeen archives—suggests just how influential these five men were. Through the State Department and private funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, they were able to give hundreds of speeches across Germany, to land at universities with the resources and energy to transform them, and to create institutions like the America Houses with their extensive cultural programming in major German cities. German universities like the Free University gained a new international focus, through new curricula in their political science departments and new institutes like the J.F.K. Institute for North American Studies. The DAAD and its U.S. counterpart, the Rockefeller Foundation-funded International Institute for Education, continue to bring German and U.S. scholars and experts into contact. One cannot translate this series of institutional events into a precise causal argument, but certainly no country’s intellectual elites in the social sciences and policy studies were as tightly connected to the United States as the Germans were. Greenberg’s book underlines the role of private foundations and soft power in U.S. Cold War diplomacy.

Greenberg overstates his case for the intellectuals’ influence at times. One must not forget that many German professionals and intellectuals who lived through the Weimar Republic and Nazism came to similar conclusions as Greenberg’s five characters on their own, people like Friedrich’s own mentor Alfred Weber, who called for radical democratic renewal. ^{Footnote 1} Fraenkel did, for example, promote the transformation of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) into an openly reformist party. But the SPD’s own leadership, including even Kurt Schumacher, took a hard line against Communism from 1945 on and sought to distinguish clearly the Social Democratic call for “socialization” (Vergesellschaftung) of heavy industry (shared by others across the party spectrum before 1949!) from putting heavy industry under centralized state control; likewise SPD voices in favor of the “social” or “socialist” market appeared already in the late 1940s. In other words, one can tell the story of the SPD’s transformation at Bad Godesberg in 1959 with little or no reference to Fraenkel (cf. 116). ^{Footnote 2} Similarly, although Friedrich and the U.S. occupation authorities certainly set the parameters for writing the new West German constitution, Greenberg overstresses Friedrich’s specific role. A second assembly with representatives from the individual Länder, such as the Federal Council (Bundesrat), was a highly likely outcome of the process with or without U.S. pressure, since Christian Democrats stressed decentralization and all the democratic parties remembered that the destruction of the Länder in Weimar was an intrinsic part of the end of democracy (cf. 66). ^{Footnote 3} Loewenstein’s proposals for a militant democracy, for constitutional provisions protecting the “free democratic basic order,” as the Basic Law put it, made the most direct contribution to the Basic Law, but even here such proposals were not new. Carl Schmitt had made the extreme argument for a constitutional provision allowing a democracy to ban parties at the end of the Weimar Republic (although in an ironic tone that suggested that liberal democracies could do no such thing). And many provisions existed in Weimar-era law that already limited hate speech, regulated militias that became too violent, and so on. ^{Footnote 4} The problem was, of course, that every attempt to limit Nazi or Communist militias, for example, increased their own sense of martyrdom, that every new trial afforded politicians like Hitler direct access to major news outlets, and that large, radicalized parties were impossible to ban without military dictatorship. The positive reception of Loewenstein’s ideas, which Greenberg shows well (202-3), was possible partly because the ideas were already in the air, and partly because Nazi and Communist ideas had already lost broad popular support.

With these remarks, I am not seeking to undermine what Greenberg has done, but rather to reorient it as the history of a transnational—and contested—dialogue. That dialogue began in Weimar, and included many positions that were deemed after 1945 “anti-democratic” (although in fact a good number of the people with “anti-democratic” positions were working through the problems of democracy itself). ^{Footnote 5} Friedrich, Fraenkel, Gurian, Loewenstein, and Morgenthau developed a particular liberal, anti-“totalitarian” version of the discussion. But they did not hold a monopoly on the issues, and furthermore were not the only German émigré intellectuals in the United States. The big themes that Greenberg focuses on—anti-Communism, the importance of elites, and basic values to be articulated and defended by a militant democracy—may have formed a doctrine in elite circles, but in broader émigré circles all these concepts were contested.

Anti-Communism is the common denominator that links Greenberg’s five intellectuals. The Communist threat represented to them a kind of continuation of the Nazi threat—the Soviet Union the embodiment of everything that contradicted western civilization. For Friedrich, the Soviet Union was the “incarnation of the ‘irresponsible’ masses” that threatened to abolish all social hierarchy (58). For him as a Calvinist and for Gurian as a Catholic, Communism represented the triumph of atheism and the destruction of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For Fraenkel and Loewenstein, Communism destroyed the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. All of them raised anti-Communism to the level of a grand, world-historical conflict between good and evil. Morgenthau presented a similar argument, although less Manichean and paranoid, about the United States’ need to pull Japan and West Germany into an international alliance to halt the expansion of the Soviet Union.

Anti-Communism itself had deeper sources, ranging from liberal fears about an all-embracing, individual-destroying welfare state promoted by Social Democracy, to Christian fears of the destruction of organic personality, colored, perhaps, by a reading of Revelations, to Catholic fears about modernity in general and secular liberalism in particular. These flowed together into an anti-Communism that becomes at times, in Greenberg’s words, “paranoid,” “virulent,” and even “eschatological” (59, 95, 167). Anti-Communism takes on an almost mythic form in Greenberg’s account. But at the same time that Weimar Culture produced all kinds of new myths of an apocalyptic or redemptive future, it also saw the development of theories critical of mythic and ideological thought, by thinkers ranging from Karl Mannheim and Georg Lúkacs to Hans Kelsen. ^{Footnote 6} A good number of the leftists who emigrated to the United States, like Herbert Marcuse, had no truck with the Soviet Union, whose emancipatory myths they demolished. But Marcuse turned his critical mind on anti-Communist Cold War America, too, with its militarism in the name of peace and conformity in the name of freedom. ^{Footnote 7} Ernst Bloch, laboring away not far from Harvard but in isolation, struggled to keep the utopian impulse of the Communist tradition open in his defense of political utopias. ^{Footnote 8} He, like Bertolt Brecht on the West Coast, returned to East Germany to support the other anti-fascism. In short, Weimar émigrés both contributed to the strong anti-Communism of Cold War America and to the anti-anti-Communism that would bear fruit in oppositional movements starting in the 1960s. ^{Footnote 9}

The leading role of elites in democracy forms a second underlying theme of Greenberg’s book, one closely connected with the German liberal tradition. Friedrich’s aim was, in Greenberg’s apt words, the creation of a “democratic managerial class” (25–26) that was to counteract populism and militarism. His position jibed with the anti-Roosevelt opinions of the Harvard administration, and found its institutional articulation in many ways, not least the refounding of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which funds thousands of scholars to the present day. Loewenstein’s and Fraenkel’s defenses of representative as opposed to radical democracy likewise stressed the need for elites to channel and restrain the popular will.

Once again, other German émigrés, and not just on the left, made quite different arguments. Whatever Hannah Arendt’s agreements with Gurian, Friedrich, and the others on the concept of totalitarianism, for example, she celebrated how the American Revolution and also the German Revolution of 1918–1919 brought new leaders forward, seemingly out of nowhere, shaking up the institutions of their societies. She could even write a sympathetic review about Rosa Luxemburg, a Communist heroine if there ever was one. Arendt was elitist, and she firmly believed, with Friedrich, that democracy meant rule by an elite (which actual Communists also believed, for that matter). ^{Footnote 10} The point is, at least in her 1963 On Revolution, Arendt was not just concerned about restraining the masses, but also about enabling them, through leaders sprung from their midst. The role of elites in democracy was subject to debate among the German émigrés themselves.

Basic values constituted a third critical theme for Greenberg: democracies could not be relativistic about their underlying values; democracy meant accepting the basic value of democracy itself, which had to protect itself against any group, no matter how popular, opposed to these values. Gurian was the key figure. With the enthusiasm of a convert, he transformed Catholicism’s bitter fight against liberalism, socialism, and secularism into a focused struggle against atheism and Communism. The theme of basic values to be defended runs through the work of all of Greenberg’s intellectuals. Even Hans Morgenthau, the prophet of realism in foreign policy, as Greenberg shows well, included values as part of the “national interest” that a state defended in the world. Without values, Morgenthau argued, a nation risked falling into the nihilism of pure power politics.

A deeper assumption underlay this notion of a values-based democracy. If the foundation of democracy was a specific set of values, then political actors without those values were not a legitimate part of a democracy. Those “non-democrats,” then, should not enjoy democratic rights. In other words, democratic rights were not universal; were they universal, then a group not in agreement with the basic values of democracy could overthrow the democracy from within. Enemies of democracy were not the only enemy; just as dangerous for a democracy was the notion that a democracy had to respect the will of the people, whatever that will might be. Greenberg quotes the Weimar constitutional theorist Hans Kelsen, who insisted that a democracy by its very nature had to renounce absolute truths. A democratic constitution sets up a procedure that the people use to form opinions and eventually law; if the people decide that they are not in favor of democracy (or the rights of certain individuals, or the value of free speech), then in a certain basic sense, a system of people’s rule is defenseless against the people (174). Kelsen also emigrated to the United States, but to California, far away from Greenberg’s subjects, where he repeated his incisive criticisms of all of the arguments about natural law and absolute values into the 1950s. ^{Footnote 11}

Kelsen like no other pointed out the paradoxes underlying the work of Greenberg’s cohort, especially their affirmation of democracy while claiming the right as the elites to define what “the people” could legitimately do. This contradiction went to the heart of Cold War democracy itself. The power of Hans Morgenthau’s break with the Cold War consensus in the 1960s lies precisely in his ability to pinpoint how U.S. intervention in Vietnam contradicted basic national values in the name of national values. Morgenthau dedicated his book of essays on the topic, published in 1970, to Hans Kelsen. ^{Footnote 12}

Greenberg succeeds in showing how the Weimar experience shaped a group of influential intellectuals, contributed to the recasting of U.S. cultural politics in a Cold War mode, and influenced the development of the Federal Republic. The book’s form, a series of five essays on each individual thinker, tends to lead the reader to an individual’s ideas. A broader discussion of the thinkers as part of a group, or of various groups, would also be interesting. Not only did the five interact personally, as the author notes, it surely also matters, for example, that four of the five were of Jewish descent (and the fifth, Friedrich, willing to help Jewish refugees at a time when many of his fellow Protestants in Germany had jumped on the Nazi bandwagon). Perhaps their experience of the United States as a country where they could escape anti-Semitic hatred allowed them to ignore the racism so prevalent in the U.S. at the time.

Greenberg shows how much of the political discussions of Cold War America were in fact transnational dialogues, part of the larger process of “internationalizing” the United States: he has written, in the end, a compelling American history of German intellectuals. The real success of an intellectual history, however, lies in the way it opens up interesting and challenging ideas for readers, and in this respect as well, Greenberg has succeeded. The reader ends with an acute desire to read more.

One final note: Greenberg has shown the traumatic role of the Weimar Republic in twentieth-century democratic politics. It retains that symbolic power. Today, historians of Weimar spend less time on the problem of the “rise of the masses” that gripped liberal elites in Weimar as well as Greenberg’s own subjects. They focus more on how political elites, including some connected with the liberal parties, contributed to the gridlock that undermined parliament’s legitimacy and eventually conspired behind the scenes to bring a loudmouthed racist with no real social or economic plans to power. The collapse of the Weimar Republic has replaced the discussions so important to the founding of the American republic 250 years ago about the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. It remains our leading example of a democracy that committed suicide. ^{Footnote 13}