Scientific emigration

Gerhard Benetka

Sigmund-Freud-Universität

pp. 379-386

in: Werner Leinfellner, Eckehart Köhler (eds), Game theory, experience, rationality, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Since the eighties a new, young generation of scholars has been studying the emigration of German-language scientists after 1933 and 1934/38, respectively. The material that has been collected since then by German and Austrian as well as American, English and Israeli colleagues reveals the contours of a "more differentiated, in some respects more modest picture" of the "intellectual exodus" in Europe as opposed to the past. Given the fact that researchers no longer only focus on the fate of prominent emigrants or on those emigrants who were particularly successful in exile and have now turned to the life and work of those whose careers were less spectacular, the simplistic equation of "losses here", "gains there" has proven inadequate for understanding the "scientific transfer" imposed by fascism. "To inquire only about losses and gains", as the two editors of the volume Forced Migration and Scientific Change. Emigré German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933 write, "presupposes a static view of science and of culture, as though the émigrés brought with them finished bits of knowledge, which they then inserted like building-stones into already established cultural constructs elsewhere." (Ash/Söllner, p.4)