The paper presents the findings of two recent books on the financial history of the Frankfurt School: Jeanette Erazo-Heufelder, Der argentinische Krösus: Kleine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2017, and Bertus Mulder, Sophie Louisa Kwaak und das Kapital der Unternehmerfamilie Weil. Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2021 (Dutch original 2015). In contrast to the “court histories” of the school, the two authors tell the story of the money that brought the school to life and secured its existence throughout a turbulent period of history. At the center of the books are individuals who have been sidelined until now or even completely ignored by the literature on the Frankfurt School: on the one hand, Felix Weil, who founded and financed the Institute of Social Research and, on the other hand, Erich A. Nadel and Sophie L. Kwaak, two employees of the holding company who managed the accounts of the Weil family and the Institute’s foundations and were responsible for protecting the assets from being seized by Nazis. The books’ thick descriptions induced the author of the present paper to consider an alternative perspective on the Frankfurt School by contemplating Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock as playing confidential games with Weil and others….
On the other side of the Atlantic, the soloist in speculative economics Pollock lost about one million dollars in 1937 alone (in today’s value, this would be around 19.5 million). The historians of the Institute hide these losses behind vague wordings.Footnote16 To give an impression of the value that Pollock lost, one could mention that it equals the amount of 250 one-year support payments that the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars allocated to its recipients at the time.Footnote17
Again, Weil stepped in and donated another $100,000 to the Institute. Horkheimer thanked him in a letter but continued to downsize the Institute to a mere unit subsidizing him, his buddy Pollock, and his new philosophical handyman Adorno. All the other members of the Institute were pressed or persuaded to find a source of income elsewhere. Those who were still in Europe perished because, as Ulrich Fries has recently shown, Horkheimer declined to pay for the ship transfer for Walter BenjaminFootnote18 or to help Andries Sternheim to survive in Switzerland. Sternheim had to return to the Netherlands and died in the HolocaustFootnote19; Benjamin committed suicide on the French-Spanish border.
Later on, Horkheimer was forced to accept a paid position as a white-collar employee at the American Jewish Committee to direct the Studies in Prejudice project.Footnote20 Such alienated labor quickly became too much for him, and he returned after half a year to his house on the West Coast, for presumed reasons of health.
In 1949, Horkheimer accepted an offer to return to Goethe University, followed by his friend Pollock and Adorno. A look at the financial situation of the Institute makes it clear that they needed to return to their hometown because the funds had evaporated, and remaining in the USA would have required them to find an ordinary job. The Germans were given the impression that the returnees were making a great sacrifice if they returned voluntarily to the country of the murderers.Footnote21 To fellow exiles who did not follow the same path, the argument was that they wanted to participate in the re-education of the Germans. For nearly a decade, Horkheimer appeared in many roles and functions: as rector of Goethe University, visiting professor in Chicago, advisor for politicians and bureaucrats, and public intellectual. German critics of the Frankfurt School claimed that Adorno and Horkheimer acted even as the “intellectual founders of Germany’s Federal Republic.”Footnote22
It seems ironic: Kwaak who had singlehandedly prevented ROBEMA from being robbed by the Nazis performed financially better during the occupation than Pollock on Wall Street. As the last transaction of ROBEMA, Kwaak transferred several thousand German marks to Pollock in 1963. The money came from dividends for the years 1941 to 1944 from IG Farben, the famous business conglomerate that had been broken apart after 1945 because of its close collaboration with the Nazi system.
Weil died in 1975 in an economic situation which one could only call poverty. The main beneficiaries of this self-expropriation were two men who pretended to be his friends, Horkheimer and Pollock. They managed to use Weil’s money to fund a life of luxury over a very long period of time, starting with a house in the suburbs of Frankfurt in the 1920s, to condominiums in Manhattan, a newly built bungalow in Pacific Palisades, and lastly, since 1957, residences in Montagnola in the Tessin region of Switzerland (finally, Pollock married a cousin of Felix who did not donate money to any opaque enterprise but rather enjoyed it herself; Pollock died in 1973).
Horkheimer promised to deliver his critical theory of the present from the early 1930s until his retirement in the south of Switzerland. Pollock was more modest and stopped publishing seriously when he cast aside Weil as the director of the imperium of associations, foundations, and corporations. Until his retirement, he helped his friend Horkheimer to concentrate his energy on running a network of intrigues, documented in the four volumes of his correspondence, instead of writing the promised “New Logic,” “Critical Theory,” or whatever.Footnote23
One of Horkheimer’s remarks that is still quoted long after his death in 1976 insisted that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.”Footnote24 Looking into the political economy of the Institute, the institution Horkheimer presided over between 1931 and 1957, one is inclined to respond: “whoever is not willing to talk about the material base of the Institute should also keep quiet about Critical Theory.”Footnote25 The political economy of the Frankfurt School was not hidden in papal archives as both Erazo-Heufelder and Mulder prove in their well-researched histories.
People who met Horkheimer, even those who were critically disposed, remembered him as an impressive individual, a true German professor. Some even referred to the concept of charisma to explain Horkheimer’s interpersonal successes. After reading Erazo-Heufelder and Mulder’s work, one starts considering alternative interpretations of this man and his doings.
The evidence for cleaning out the sponsor of the Institute from the side of the intellectual and the administrative manager is overwhelming. It might have not been entirely perceptible to contemporaneous observers, but it can obviously be reconstructed from the files available for historians and others interested in the case. Why did generations of admirers of the Institute just ignore these facts?
There is an abundance of evidence in novels, movies, and other sorts of popular entertainment to expose swindlers, so-called con men as artist-like impression makers. Interestingly enough, serious academics seem to shy away from considering the existence of similar problematic performers inside the ivory towers of the humanities. They see deviant behavior of academics only in the hard sciences. They are wrong.
Suggesting that an important person in the history of ideas should be regarded as a trickster not only arouses the vehement protest of partisans of that very person, but also probably triggers resistance on the part of the less partisan. To the vast majority of those who are morally on safe ground, it seems sacrilegious to even hypothetically consider that there may be deviants in their highly conforming community after all. This undermining of commonly shared beliefs may perhaps be more readily condoned when framed as a hypothesis. In other words: I am not sure that Max Horkheimer was a trickster, but it seems to me that his most important actions, especially the recognizable implicit strategy and tactics employed, give sufficient reason to at least consider explanations other than those already in circulation.
So, in the world of social theory and social research, how would one be able to recognize a con man?Footnote26 A con man, especially in American literature, is someone who masters more or less sophisticated games to which he invites his presumptive victims with the promise of extraordinary gains. In the end, of course, the victim, called the “mark,” loses. The perpetrator, called the “operator,” usually has helpers. These “coolers” try to prevent the victim from making a fuss, even going to the police or otherwise attacking the con man’s status. The basis on which the con of the “mark” becomes possible in the first place is that the “operator” gains the trust of the “mark.” In other words, if you want to succeed as a con man, you have to be able to win over your future victims, to wrap them around your finger. Maria Konnikova has collected a large number of examples in her extensive study of the confidential game.Footnote27 Each of her con men was indeed an artist of misdirection and impression management.
Can the model of the con man, or the confidence game, be applied to intellectual history? If this were possible, one could close an obvious gap in the theory of the human sciences, which can be seen in the fact that the question of possible deviant behavior has remained a desideratum. In disciplines that are considered “hard,”Footnote28 this gap is filled by those who manipulate or even invent data. One of the last spectacular cases was that of the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. In the reports about him, the term “con man” was used.Footnote29 The financial history of the Frankfurt School, started out by Erazo-Heufelder and Mulder, could become a Kuhnian exemplarFootnote30 for a new specialty in the sociology of deviant behavior in the human sciences.
