Exile left Institute members unable to negotiate, so salary terms were dictated unilaterally

Evidence

Page 262 Horkheimer’s tacticand, where necessary, Lowenthal’s as wellwas to treat regulations and figures relating to financial matters as a domain belonging to Pollock, who, they would claim, was conducting himself like a bourgeois businessman'. Pollock, for his part, used his whole personal manner, his partly pretended and partly genuine dimness and irrationality, to make anyone putting questions abandon the attempt, or else to make their enquiries run aground. He was officially in charge of determining the level of salaries, or rather of salary cuts. His measures here affected the members of the Institute on an individual basis, and they accepted their mutual isolation in these matters, only occasionally grumbling about suspected injustices. Salaries, according to Lowenthal in retrospect, were set in discussions between Horkheimer and Pollock, and communicated to us. We sometimes had difficulties, but there were no negotiations. You have to picture the situationthese people were lucky devils, after all . . . If Marcuse or I had said in 1938, I don’t like it, I don’t want 350 a month, I want 500, otherwise I’m leaving.’ `OK, go.’ Where did we have to go to? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 284

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that Pollock’s pretended dimness was deliberately deployed to make questioners give up is the kind of inside-baseball anecdote only a reader obsessed with the Frankfurt School’s internal politics would relish.
• XREF: connects to: The Institute’s wartime staff in government service could not return afterward — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1634; The exiled Institute refused organized political activity and émigré support work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 152
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The Institute’s wartime staff in government service could not return afterward — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1634; The exiled Institute refused organized political activity and émigré support work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 152