Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000

Peter Burke

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781512600339
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In this wide-ranging consideration of intellectual diasporas, historian Peter Burke questions what distinctive contribution to knowledge exiles and expatriates have made. The answer may be summed up in one word: deprovincialization. Historically, the encounter between scholars from different cultures was an education for both parties, exposing them to research opportunities and alternative ways of thinking. Deprovincialization was in part the result of mediation, as many émigrés informed people in their "hostland" about the culture of the native land, and vice versa. The detachment of the exiles, who sometimes viewed both homeland and hostland through foreign eyes, allowed them to notice what scholars in both countries had missed. Yet at the same time, the engagement between two styles of thought, one associated with the exiles and the other with their hosts, sometimes resulted in creative hybridization, for example, between German theory and Anglo-American empiricism. This timely appraisal is brimming with anecdotes and fascinating findings about the intellectual assets that exiles and immigrants bring to their new country, even in the shadow of personal loss.

1 : THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE

This book is concerned with the special contributions to knowledge made by exiles. For this reason it risks what may be called “triumphalism,” dwelling on successes and forgetting failures. Hence it is important to emphasize, right from the start, that outsiders suffer from limitations, especially the lack of local or insider knowledge. Conversely, insiders as well as outsiders enjoy what are known as “cognitive privileges,” although their contributions to knowledge are not the subject of this book. It has also been observed that “not every work of history written in exile is significant and innovative [. . .] emigrants tend to have their own prejudices, defences and resentments.”¹ This observation is surely valid for other disciplines as well as for history. All the same, the open conflict between different prejudices may lead to new insights.

The reason for writing this study is not simply to list the various contributions that exiles have made to knowledge but also to ask what made those contributions distinctive. It will examine “process” as well as “product,” attempting to discover how the various contributions to knowledge by émigrés were made.² This question might be answered in a word, “deprovincialization.” More exactly, the encounter between the exiles and their hosts led to a process of double deprovincialization. The exiles were deprovincialized by their movement from one culture to another. They also helped to deprovincialize their hosts by presenting them not only with different knowledges but also, still more important, with alternative ways of thinking. In short, exile, and to a lesser extent, expatriation, was an education for both sides of this encounter.

Exile as Education

The fundamental question that this book attempts to answer is whether a distinctive contribution to knowledge has been made by exiles and expatriates in different places and times. This section offers a preview of the conclusions of this study, which the following chapters will attempt to justify. It suggests that exile is a form of education, a tough form of education for the exiles themselves and a gentler one for some of the individuals who encountered them in the hostland.

Presenting exile as education—even as what might be called an unsentimental education—runs the obvious risk of underestimating the negative side of these events. Emigrants who segregate themselves may learn nothing as well as forgetting nothing, as Talleyrand said of the royal family when they returned to France after 1815. Conversely, hosts often fail to learn from the newcomers, and misunderstandings often occur.

All the same, in many cases, something valuable is learned by both parties to the encounter. Exiles gain new insights, a kind of reward for the struggle to survive in an alien culture. Expatriates also learn from their experiences abroad, although the pressures to learn are not so strong in their case, because they have an exit strategy. They have, in a manner of speaking, a return ticket in their pocket, together with the expectation of returning home at some point. As for citizens of the hostland, students who encountered exiled scholars often discovered something that they could not have learned from other teachers, as I can testify from personal experience, in Oxford in the 1950s. The same can be said about students in the former homeland in cases in which exiles returned.

The Return of the Native

Most of this study is concerned with the interaction between exiles or expatriates and the culture of the country to which they have moved, but there is also something to say about the consequences for knowledge in the original homelands of the emigrants. The negative consequences of the “brain drain” are obvious enough, but there are sometimes positive consequences as well, at least when some exiles return or “remigrate.” As we shall see in a later chapter, a number of returned exiles brought new ideas and new methods back with them to Germany after 1945.

Another striking example of “the return of the native” is that of the Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who was sent by his family to study in the United States for almost five years from the age of eighteen onward. Two intense months in England, mainly in Oxford, convinced him that he should have been born an Englishman. When he visited Lisbon, he viewed it “with English eyes rather than Brazilian ones.” It might be argued that he saw Brazil in a similar way after his return to his native province of Pernambuco in 1923. The great strength of the book that made him famous, Casa Grande e Senzala (1933), which views colonial Brazil through the prism of its sugar plantations, was described by one of Freyre’s most perceptive critics, the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, as its combination of the perspectives of insider and outsider, thanks to the author’s two identities, “the Pernambucan and the Englishman.”³

Deprovincialization

The kind of education just described may be summed up as a widening of horizons or a process of deprovincialization. The German theologian Paul Tillich remarked that it was only when he was living in the United States that he “became aware” of his “formerly unconscious provincialism” and that it gradually “began to recede,” so that he no longer viewed Germany as the center of theological studies. According to a community study by two anthropologists, the inhabitants of the village of Átány used to joke that “Hungary is in the center of the world, Átány is in the center of Hungary.”⁴ Joking apart, one possible definition of provincialism is to believe that one’s community is at the center of the world (the American sociologist William G. Sumner defined ethnocentrism as “the view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything”).⁵ Tillich’s testimony is not the only firsthand account of this process. The German historian Hajo Holborn, for instance, who moved to the United States in 1934 and became a professor at Yale, declared, “My transformation into an American has given me a much broader perspective on all things German.”⁶

Similarly, the Peruvian journalist and theorist José Maria Mariátegui, who lived in Italy in the 1920s, declared that his years abroad had widened his horizons and described himself as “departing for a foreign country not in search of the secret of others but in search of our own secret.” As the English writer G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “the object of travel is not to set foot on a foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” The Brazilian journalist (and later, historian) Sergio Buarque, who spent the years 1929–30 in Berlin, declared in later life, “It is only when you get far away that you begin to see your own country whole.”⁷ As the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz once wrote, “An advantage is in-dwelling in every disadvantage.”⁸

Deprovincialization is what has been called an “umbrella term,” erected over different processes. It may be useful to distinguish three such processes. The first is mediation, the second is detachment, and the third is hybridization.

Mediation

Writing about what he called the “function” of refugees, Karl Mannheim emphasized their opportunities for mediation between the culture of their homeland and that of the country to which they had fled.⁹ Mediation includes dissemination, and for this reason a number of printers and publishers will make their appearance in this study. Attempts at dissemination face obvious linguistic obstacles. All the same, the native language of exiles is sometimes an asset as well as a liability in their new home. It is a form of intellectual capital, allowing them to make a living by giving language lessons or by producing grammars and dictionaries. Some of the Greek refugees from the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium gave lessons in ancient Greek, while a number of the French Protestants in exile in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin made their living as language teachers. Their displacement turned many exiles into translators, appropriately enough, perhaps, because they themselves had been “translated” in the archaic sense of that English verb, in other words transferred from one place to another.

Mediation between languages easily extends to mediation between cultures. Greek scholars in Renaissance Italy introduced some of their hosts to the world of ancient Greece. Huguenot refugees spread the knowledge of French culture. Russian exiles in Britain and the United States, among them Isaiah Berlin, George Florovsky, and George Vernadsky, spread the knowledge of Russian culture. German Jewish scholars who came to the United States and Britain from the 1930s onward taught German history and published books about it. Whether they are prompted by nostalgia or the need for employment, some scholars in exile switch from their former speciality to the study of their home culture, like Konstantin Mochulsky, a former specialist in Romance literature who took refuge from the Bolshevik Revolution in Paris and proceeded to publish books in Russian about Russian writers, notably Dostoyevsky.

Conversely, some exiles become specialists in the culture of their new home. The Huguenot Paul de Rapin-Thoyras became famous for his history of England, written in French and read in many parts of Europe. Other Huguenot refugees spread the knowledge of English and German culture in France and elsewhere by translating texts and publishing articles in journals. Eduard Bernstein, a German socialist exile who lived in London between 1888 and 1901, carried out research on seventeenth-century English radical thinkers, and was the first to draw attention to the writings of one of them, Gerard Winstanley. Israel Gollancz, a second-generation refugee, became a professor of English at King’s College London from 1903 to 1930 and a noted Shakespeare scholar.

One Russian historian in exile in Italy, Nikolay Ottokar, became a specialist in the history of Florence. Two Russian exiles who came to Britain, Paul Vinogradoff in the early 1900s and Michael Postan in the 1920s, became authorities on medieval English society, like the Pole Lewis Namier in the case of eighteenth-century England. Among the refugees who arrived in the 1930s, Geoffrey Elton became an authority on England under the Tudors and Nikolaus Pevsner an authority on English architecture. Peter Hennock (originally Ernst Peter Henoch), who chose England in the nineteenth century as his field of research, has noted how immigrants are often “preoccupied with the country of their adoption” and that “as historians they have sometimes felt that they could recognize the crucial elements in their adopted country more clearly than native historians.” As an immigrant, Hennock explained, he could never take English history for granted (illustrating, once again, the uses of detachment).¹⁰

It was not only in England that immigrants helped the natives understand their own culture. Otto Maria Carpeaux, a Viennese who fled to Brazil after 1938, became a leading critic of Brazilian literature, as well as introducing Brazilian readers to a number of major European writers, notably Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.

Like interpreters, anthropologists offer an example of professional mediators, translators between the culture in which they do their fieldwork (a temporary exile) and their home culture. The very idea of “cultural translation” came from a British anthropologist, Edward Evans-Pritchard. Hence we should not be surprised to find that exiles and expatriates have played a major role in the history of anthropology, especially in Britain and the United States. In the case of Britain, the Pole Bronisław Malinowski virtually founded the discipline. In America, the role of founder was played by the German immigrant Franz Boas. Among his students, Robert Lowie (formerly Löwe) came from Vienna and Paul Radin from Russian Poland, while Alfred Kroeber, born in the United States, was the son of immigrants who spoke German at home.

Stay-at-home scholars can also be mediators, sitting in their studies in what have been called “centers of calculation,” especially major cities, collecting the information provided by the exiles and expatriates and making syntheses.¹¹ An obvious example is that of the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was based in Rome but was able to make use of the information provided by Jesuit colleagues. Some of them wrote to him sending their observations (on the comet of 1652, for instance) and answering his questions. Others conversed with Kircher on their return after years of working as missionaries in China, India, and elsewhere.¹² Thanks to this Jesuit network, Kircher was able to publish books on a variety of subjects—on China, geology, medicine, and so on. His contribution to knowledge from his study depended on the work of missionaries in the field, just as they depended in turn on face-to-face encounters with informants.

Distanciation

Like deprovincialization, the concept of “distanciation” is an umbrella covering a number of the consequences of distance. One of most important of these is the ability to see what is often called the “big picture.” Alexis de Tocqueville once compared the theorist to a traveler who climbs a hill to view a city as a whole for the first time: “pour la première fois, il en saisit la forme.” The point had already been made with the same image by the historian August Schlözer: “one can know every single street of a big city, but without a plan or a view from an elevated point, one will not have a feeling for the whole.”¹³

In similar fashion, the distance imposed by exile has allowed some scholars to take a bird’s eye view and see the big picture more clearly than before. Erich Auerbach, for instance, who left the University of Marburg for Istanbul in 1935, after being dismissed from his chair, turned his loss of access to German libraries from a disadvantage into an asset by producing Mimesis (1946), his famous panorama of Western literature from the Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf.

Again, the most famous book by the Brazilian historian-sociologist Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa Grande e Senzala, 1933) was written in exile, first in Lisbon and then in Stanford, following the revolution of 1930 in which Getúlio Vargas came to power. Indeed, Freyre’s friend Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade called Casa Grande one of the few positive consequences of that revolution.¹⁴ The Spaniard Américo Castro worked mainly as a medieval philologist as long as he lived in his native country, but in exile in the United States, he became more ambitious and wrote the book for which he is best remembered, a highly original—and controversial—interpretation of Spanish history, attempting to explain the rise of intolerance and emphasizing what made Spain different from other countries.¹⁵

Not all scholars in exile responded to the challenge of distance in the manner exemplified by Auerbach, Freyre, and Castro. The Austrian philologist Leo Spitzer, for instance, Auerbach’s fellow exile in Istanbul, continued to prefer micro-analysis to macro-analysis, the search for significant ...