Horkheimer reframed the Institut’s 1949 return as honoring German resisters, not compensation

Evidence

On July 13, 1949, the university chair that had been taken away sixteen years before was restored, with the slight change that it was now in sociology and philosophy rather than social philosophy. With Horkheimer, of course, came the lnstitut itself with its endowment and library. Its reestablishment, he would later recall, was not to be understood as acceptance of a Wiedergulmachung (compensation) by a repentant government, for nothing could make good what Germany had done. It was meant instead as a gesture to honor those Germans who had resisted Hitler by helping the Jews. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 847

Categorization

• QUESTION: The reframing — honoring rescuers rather than accepting compensation — is a striking rhetorical move worth examining against the later institutional history of the reborn Institut and its financial sources.