By the late 1930s most Jewish émigré intellectuals had rejected class-based analyses of fascism.

Evidence

In articulating this sort of view, Horkheimer saw himself as someone who was using the Institute’s independence to speak the truths which other émigrés, if they were not already blind to them anyway, did not dare to express. In fact the former religious socialists Paul Tillich and Eduard Heimann had in the meantime moved over to the view that there could be no question of fascism having a class character or of a crucial link between fascism and capitalism. The editor of the Neues Tagebuch, Leopold Schwarzschild, a former left-winger, held that Hitler’s support came more from the working class than from the bourgeoisie. Arthur Feiler of the New School of Social Research, who with his colleague Max Ascoli, an Italian émigré, published Fascism for Whom? in 1938, saw Nazism as the German form of Russian Bolshevism. And Franz Borkenau, a former communist and one-time Institute scholarship holder, wrote in his The Totalitarian Enemy in 1939, `Nazism is Brown Bolshevism, just as Bolshevism could be described as “Red Fascism”.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1067

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to conventional Marxist and Totalitarianism-school readings of fascism; relevant to comparison with the Institute’s insistence on fascism’s capitalist class character. — connects to: Most German émigré intellectuals abandoned the fascism-capitalism link by 1939. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1067