The Institute’s émigré exile research lost the systematic scope of its German inquiries.

Evidence

It was not easy to assess this accurately against the dismal background of European fascism, which was marching from victory to victory. Towards the end of the 1930s, it was no longer possible for the Institute to carry out empirical research simultaneously in Europe and the USA, and it had to be restricted to America. To identify a complex of critical problems related to society which suited American conditions and at the same time fitted in with the Institute’s policy of caution required time. Horkheimer was increasingly impatient in his criticism of the various scientific disciplines, and increasingly severe in his labelling of every theoretical and philosophical tendency which was not critical of society, and which was successful in the USA, as a form of recognition and acceptance of existing conditions. This may partly explain why empirical and collaborative research ceased at the Institute altogether, why from the mid-1930s onwards it was left to Lazarsfeld, who for Horkheimer and Adorno belonged to the positivists, to represent the research methods which had been used by the Institute up till then. It may explain, too, why it was only the journal which continuedand in German. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1035 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In parallel research projects in Vienna and Paris, the Institute’s European branches were to collaborate with the institutes of Marie Jahoda and Otto Neurath. Jahoda, who had been an assistant of Lazarsfeld’s in Vienna and was his first wife, was the main author of The Unemployed in Marienthal, and an active Social Democrat. After Lazarsfeld’s departure, she had become director of the Vienna Economic and Psychological Research Group. Horkheimer hoped to maintain the international character of the Institute’s work, without undue expense, through the co-operation planned with the Vienna group. But the parallel European research never came about. In 1936 Marie Jahoda was arrested for working illegally for the Socialists, and in 1937 she was expelled from Austria. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 691 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The Institute was only a vestige of what it had once been, and in taking on the labour project it had overextended itself. As Gurland, Massing, Pollock and Lowenthal were busy with the study on workers in the time left over from their part-time work in Washington, Horkheimer was, to begin with, left fairly helpless in his office in the AJC building in New York. He was dazed by the bustle there, trying laboriously to put together a staff, and desperately thinking out a programme of work which would satisfy both the expectation that there would be visible activity and short-term results and his own need for long-term theoretical work. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1564 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Institute abandoned empirical research at the end of the 1930s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1035; The émigré Institute had shrunk to a vestige by 1944 — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1564; Political repression destroyed the Institute’s planned European comparative research — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 691

Broader Connections

• The Institute abandoned empirical research at the end of the 1930s #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1035
• Political repression destroyed the Institute’s planned European comparative research #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 691
• The émigré Institute had shrunk to a vestige by 1944 #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1564