Political police surveillance trivialized and overread Institute members’ Communist ties

Evidence

The political police took up the case, checked the background of a number of Institute members and interrogated several people, Grünberg among them. But even the findings' which were produced about Pollock, whose name most frequently appeared in police files, only showed how self-important and trivial this sort of snooping around for people's political convictions is. According to these findings’, Pollock, together with Felix Weil in his capacity as a member of the board of the Society for Social Research, had had `relations with the central committee of the Communist Party (KPD), had bought an archive belonging to the KPD, and was, like Weil, without any doubt a Communist who had had a not inconsiderable part to play at the time of the Munich Soviet’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how early Frankfurt School members were Marxists operating under Weimar-era political surveillance, paralleling Cold War-era surveillance of leftist intellectuals.