Chance events shaped who first led the Frankfurt Institute

Evidence

For Weil, Gerlach would have been the ideal candidate: he was young, with a solid university career behind him, an upper-class communist'; but Gerlach died in October 1922 at the age of thirty-six from diabetes, a disease against which medicine then was still powerless. Two acquaintances in Frankfurt who encouraged Weil at this time with his plans for an institute were Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer. They were rather older than normal for students, since they were originally meant to become businessmen and take over their fathers’ factories’, and they were the only students who were given their doctorates summa cum laude in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 1923 at Frankfurt University'. 24 However, they were not yet in a position to be considered for the directorship of the Institute. After Gerlach's death, Weil negotiated for a time with Gustav Mayer, a fifty-one-year-old Social Democrat living in Berlin. Mayer was a former journalist who had made his name with the first volume of his massive biography of Engels, which came out in 1919. He was Jewish, and in the 1920s had become Professor of History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. It quickly became clear that Mayer's ideological and political position differed from Weil's. For Weil, however, sympathetic collaboration’ `towards a common goal’ between the sponsor and the director of the Institute was a precondition for the foundation to be able to fulfil its purpose. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 38

Categorization

• QUESTION: Gerlach’s early death at 36 rerouted the directorship away from Weil’s ideal candidate — worth noting how different the Institute might have been.
• XREF: connects to: Neumann entered the Institute through a chance library-lawyer meeting with Horkheimer
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Neumann entered the Institute through a chance library-lawyer meeting with Horkheimer

Broader Connections

• Neumann entered the Institute through a chance library-lawyer meeting with Horkheimer #exemplifies (0.95)