Fear of US Customs deportation forced emigre scholars to abandon their radical libraries
Evidence
When Lowenthal was at last able to travel to join Horkheimer, he had to leave behind his collection of radical writings from the German Revolution. Horkheimer was afraid that if Lowenthal’s book-crates were opened by US Customs the Institute’s staff would all be immediately deported. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 166
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The exiled Institute could only survive in America by leaving behind the material archive of its own radical past — a small window onto how emigration severed Continental theory from its documentary base.
- SEED: An essay on what emigre intellectuals had to leave in crates — the physical libraries lost in transit as a material history of exile.
- FICTION: A story spark: a scholar’s crates of banned books sitting unopened in customs, the whole future of a community hanging on one inspector’s decision.
- XREF: connects to: Exiled scholars practiced drastic self-censorship about their host country. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 255
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Exiled scholars practiced drastic self-censorship about their host country. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 255
Broader Connections
- Exiled scholars practiced drastic self-censorship about their host country.
#expands(0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 255