Totalitarian ideology and power conflicts

Waldemar Gurian as international relations analyst after the second world war

Ellen Thümmler

pp. 132-153

in: Felix Rosch (ed), Émigré scholars and the genesis of international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Franz L. Neumann (1978: 402–428) describes the political scholar as the intellectual emigrant-archetype between 1933 and 1945, who was able to positively reconcile his/her original academic discipline with the scientific traditions of his/her country of exile. It is not a matter of denying the biographical discontinuity of emigration, but of incorporating this fact constructively into an intellectual biography. This archetype is characterised by a form of opposition to National Socialism that — with the instruments of social science — contributed prolifically to German and European political realignment after the end of the Second World War. At the same time, emigration transformed academic work: a disrupted career, threats, and persecutions, as well as the adjustment to a foreign language, knowledge culture, and academic tradition, all left their marks.