The Frankfurt Institute actively financed and sponsored members’ emigration to America.

Evidence

The Institute assisted many people with affidavitsreferences for the immigration authoritiesand also with finance to escape from the old world to the new one. Karl Korsch, for example, who came to New York in 1936 to join his wife, received $100 a month from the Institute to begin with. Ludwig Marcuse, who had once been invited by the Institute to write an outline of a monograph on Turnvater Jahn, which was subsequently rejected, received the offer of an affidavit from the Institute in the spring of 1938, without even having asked for it. When he arrived in New York on Easter Sunday 1939, `a friend from the “Institute of Social Research”, who had booked a room for me’, was waiting on the pier. Walter Benjamin had also frequently been pressed by Theodor and Gretel Adorno, from 1938 onwards, to come to the USA. He hesitated longer and was even more alarmed by the idea of emigrating to America than Ludwig Marcuse, who would have preferred to emigrate anywhere but the New World, which seemed to him not so much new as frightening. Benjamin’s escape therefore became much more difficult; the fact that he died had nothing to do with any lack of assistance from the Institute. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1083

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on intellectual emigration from Nazi Germany and the Frankfurt School’s practical rescue network, e.g. in accounts of the Institute’s American exile years.