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The european emigrant experience in the U.S.A.
560
Book Reviews
The European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A., eds Walter H61bling and Reinhold Wagnleitner, in Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Volume 5 (Ttibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992), 289 pp., DM 68.- P.B. The title of this motley collection of essays is somewhat misleading. The Central
European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A. would have been less presumptuous and more indicative of the actual contents of the book. With the exception of two essays on Italian-Americans, all papers deal with mostly twentieth century Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian and Slovene emigration to the U.S. In a way, a more broadly-conceived introduction could have outlined the push-and-pull factors for an ambitious comparative history of the emigrant experience in the U.S. of the peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states in all of its confusing regional variety and the dramatic political dislocations in this hotbed of emotional European nationalis~chauvinism. Individual essays try to do this and indicate that the reason for the non-existence of such a comparative emigration history of the old monarchy are the almost insuperable linguistic obstacles facing the historian dealing with Habsburg history. The essays are arranged into four subgroupings: (1)five essays on the Austrian emigrant experience (largely Jewish) of the World War II era; (2)five essays on the complex East-Central European emigrant experiences in the U.S. (including one Italian essay); (3)three essays on the literary and (4)three essays on the linguistic aspects of the emigrant experience. I will concentrate on some of the more poignant themes and essays in these four sections. The initial set of chapters on the Austrian emigrant experience in the World War II era are the richest and most coherent part of the volume. They are written with the fervor of a younger generation of Austrians who mercilessly debunk the old pieties of 'Austria as a victim of Hitler' held so dearly by the 'Waldheim generation'. They remind us that the expulsion (it was not voluntary 'exile' as many Austrians would like to believe to this day) of the Jews before and after the Anschlup may well have been one of the most devastating self-inflicted 'brain drains' ever perpetrated by a nation upon itself. 'Austrian' intellectual and cultural life, so rich and innovative before and after World War I, never recovered from this mass exodus. Austria's loss was America's gain. About 150,000 Austrian (the numbers are conflicting in individual essays) left in the 1930s for the U.S., among them 40,000 after the Anschlu~. Ninety percent of them were Jewish (mostly Viennese); 80% of them stayed in the U.S. and only 3.5% remigrated back to Austria after the war. The lead essay by the former U.S. ambassador to Austria, Henry Grunwald, himself a Jewish exile from Vienna, presents some interesting reflections of one man's successful assimilation in the U.S. Adi Wimmer on the one hand points out how difficult it turned out to be for these Austrian 'exiles' to adapt and assimilate to their new homeland, and on the other hand, rightly reflects on the outrageous charges of the oppressors and aryaniseres back home in Austria when they piously chided those they forced to leave for their 'save exile'. Wimmer finds it remarkable that to this day no collective hatred of Austria exists among those who had been so brutally dislocated in the Nazi era. While the exiles wanted to forget Austria after the war, and the Austrians tried to wipe out of their memories the indignities and petty nastiness they had inflicted on these people, 'forgetting has not worked for both sides' concludes Wimmer in his highly sensitive if somewhat strident essay. The varieties of the Austrian emigrant experience in the World War II era comes to light in essays by Peter Eppel, Gerald Sch6pfer and Josef Langer. Eppel stresses that Austrians were highly assimilationist in the U.S. even though the many lawyers and doctors had to retake exams if they wanted to practise in their professions, or retool. Considering that 78% of Vienna's celebrated medical faculty was dismissed in 1938 and 20-30% of Austria's best qualified elites left, one senses the scope of the provinciality Austria
History of European Ideas
Book Reviews
561
condemned herself to when the war was over. Official Austria never invited these exiles to come back, largely because of continued anti-semitism. Schrpfer shows then that the Anschlufl cannot explain the entire Austrian emigration to the U.S. in the 1930s. The famous Austrian economists Schumpeter, v.Haberler, v.Hayek and Machlup left in the mid-1930s for personal reasons. More traditional economic'push factors' were at work here. 'Racial persecution', however, led v. Mises, Miirz, Gerschenkron, and Polany into exile in 1938. Langer's sophisticated approach looks at the compatibility of intellectual cultures in Austria and the U.S. as a means to determine the relative success of assimilation. Out of 338 Austrian university faculty members who left Austria in 1938, 103 were social scientists. Marxists such as Hermann Broth remained isolated in the U.S. given the deep American traditions of anti-communism. Freudian psychoanalysts, economic theorists, and well-known empirical social scientists like Paul von Lazarsfeld found a receptive intellectual climate for their scientific paradigms and adapted extremely well and rapidly to the new American environment. Langer's approach of trying to match intellectual climates as a means of judging the relative success of intellectual assimilation looks highly promising for future research but demands deep immersion and knowledge in both intellectual traditions. The rest of the sections of the book get more diffuse as the chapters continue. The 'East-Central European emigration experience', as section II should have been headed, reveal some interesting insights. Jaroslav Rokicki's essay shows how Polish immigrants reconstructed themes and symbols from Polish national history, such as the 'Polish love of freedom', to suit their Polish-American identity. Ivan ~izmi6 has traced the nature of Croatian emigration and Croatian settlement patterns in the U.S. through the highly revealing source of letters sent home by Croatian Catholic priests. Majda Kodri~'s American training shows. Her ambitious essay characterises the nature of more than half a million Slovene emigrants to the U.S. In her complex framework of 'economic, social and kinship factors' she particularly stresses both innovative anthropological data like inheritance patterns in Slovenia and more traditional word of mouth propaganda among relatives to explain the Slovene migration to the U.S. Slovene 'chain migration' to Chicago and Cleveland were fuelled by returnees and--similar to the Croatians-Catholic priests. The detailed empirical studies along the lines of innovative 'push-andpull' factor models by (~izmi~ and Kodri~ promise much richer results than Eva Sandis' somewhat undigested propping of Wemer Sollors' fashionable "descent-consent" paradigm onto Austro-Hungarian emigration. The essays on the literary and linguistic aspects of East-Central European emigration are prolix and do not succeed in giving the volume a tight interdisciplinary framework as the editors hoped for. Like in any such broadly conceived collection of essays it is hard to please the reader. No doubt, there are some pearls included such as Anna Maria Martellone's fascinating piece on the coming of age of Italian ethnic brokers in big city political machines between 1880 and 1930. Martellone is convincing because she demonstrates a mastery of the vast secondary literature on urban American politics from progressivism to the New Deal along with deep research in primary source collection in the U.S. This cannot be said of all the essays in this uneven volume. Gtinter Bischof
Universities of Munich/New Orleans
Volume 21, No. 4, July, 1995
Book Reviews
The European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A., eds Walter H61bling and Reinhold Wagnleitner, in Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Volume 5 (Ttibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992), 289 pp., DM 68.- P.B. The title of this motley collection of essays is somewhat misleading. The Central
European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A. would have been less presumptuous and more indicative of the actual contents of the book. With the exception of two essays on Italian-Americans, all papers deal with mostly twentieth century Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian and Slovene emigration to the U.S. In a way, a more broadly-conceived introduction could have outlined the push-and-pull factors for an ambitious comparative history of the emigrant experience in the U.S. of the peoples of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states in all of its confusing regional variety and the dramatic political dislocations in this hotbed of emotional European nationalis~chauvinism. Individual essays try to do this and indicate that the reason for the non-existence of such a comparative emigration history of the old monarchy are the almost insuperable linguistic obstacles facing the historian dealing with Habsburg history. The essays are arranged into four subgroupings: (1)five essays on the Austrian emigrant experience (largely Jewish) of the World War II era; (2)five essays on the complex East-Central European emigrant experiences in the U.S. (including one Italian essay); (3)three essays on the literary and (4)three essays on the linguistic aspects of the emigrant experience. I will concentrate on some of the more poignant themes and essays in these four sections. The initial set of chapters on the Austrian emigrant experience in the World War II era are the richest and most coherent part of the volume. They are written with the fervor of a younger generation of Austrians who mercilessly debunk the old pieties of 'Austria as a victim of Hitler' held so dearly by the 'Waldheim generation'. They remind us that the expulsion (it was not voluntary 'exile' as many Austrians would like to believe to this day) of the Jews before and after the Anschlup may well have been one of the most devastating self-inflicted 'brain drains' ever perpetrated by a nation upon itself. 'Austrian' intellectual and cultural life, so rich and innovative before and after World War I, never recovered from this mass exodus. Austria's loss was America's gain. About 150,000 Austrian (the numbers are conflicting in individual essays) left in the 1930s for the U.S., among them 40,000 after the Anschlu~. Ninety percent of them were Jewish (mostly Viennese); 80% of them stayed in the U.S. and only 3.5% remigrated back to Austria after the war. The lead essay by the former U.S. ambassador to Austria, Henry Grunwald, himself a Jewish exile from Vienna, presents some interesting reflections of one man's successful assimilation in the U.S. Adi Wimmer on the one hand points out how difficult it turned out to be for these Austrian 'exiles' to adapt and assimilate to their new homeland, and on the other hand, rightly reflects on the outrageous charges of the oppressors and aryaniseres back home in Austria when they piously chided those they forced to leave for their 'save exile'. Wimmer finds it remarkable that to this day no collective hatred of Austria exists among those who had been so brutally dislocated in the Nazi era. While the exiles wanted to forget Austria after the war, and the Austrians tried to wipe out of their memories the indignities and petty nastiness they had inflicted on these people, 'forgetting has not worked for both sides' concludes Wimmer in his highly sensitive if somewhat strident essay. The varieties of the Austrian emigrant experience in the World War II era comes to light in essays by Peter Eppel, Gerald Sch6pfer and Josef Langer. Eppel stresses that Austrians were highly assimilationist in the U.S. even though the many lawyers and doctors had to retake exams if they wanted to practise in their professions, or retool. Considering that 78% of Vienna's celebrated medical faculty was dismissed in 1938 and 20-30% of Austria's best qualified elites left, one senses the scope of the provinciality Austria
History of European Ideas
Book Reviews
561
condemned herself to when the war was over. Official Austria never invited these exiles to come back, largely because of continued anti-semitism. Schrpfer shows then that the Anschlufl cannot explain the entire Austrian emigration to the U.S. in the 1930s. The famous Austrian economists Schumpeter, v.Haberler, v.Hayek and Machlup left in the mid-1930s for personal reasons. More traditional economic'push factors' were at work here. 'Racial persecution', however, led v. Mises, Miirz, Gerschenkron, and Polany into exile in 1938. Langer's sophisticated approach looks at the compatibility of intellectual cultures in Austria and the U.S. as a means to determine the relative success of assimilation. Out of 338 Austrian university faculty members who left Austria in 1938, 103 were social scientists. Marxists such as Hermann Broth remained isolated in the U.S. given the deep American traditions of anti-communism. Freudian psychoanalysts, economic theorists, and well-known empirical social scientists like Paul von Lazarsfeld found a receptive intellectual climate for their scientific paradigms and adapted extremely well and rapidly to the new American environment. Langer's approach of trying to match intellectual climates as a means of judging the relative success of intellectual assimilation looks highly promising for future research but demands deep immersion and knowledge in both intellectual traditions. The rest of the sections of the book get more diffuse as the chapters continue. The 'East-Central European emigration experience', as section II should have been headed, reveal some interesting insights. Jaroslav Rokicki's essay shows how Polish immigrants reconstructed themes and symbols from Polish national history, such as the 'Polish love of freedom', to suit their Polish-American identity. Ivan ~izmi6 has traced the nature of Croatian emigration and Croatian settlement patterns in the U.S. through the highly revealing source of letters sent home by Croatian Catholic priests. Majda Kodri~'s American training shows. Her ambitious essay characterises the nature of more than half a million Slovene emigrants to the U.S. In her complex framework of 'economic, social and kinship factors' she particularly stresses both innovative anthropological data like inheritance patterns in Slovenia and more traditional word of mouth propaganda among relatives to explain the Slovene migration to the U.S. Slovene 'chain migration' to Chicago and Cleveland were fuelled by returnees and--similar to the Croatians-Catholic priests. The detailed empirical studies along the lines of innovative 'push-andpull' factor models by (~izmi~ and Kodri~ promise much richer results than Eva Sandis' somewhat undigested propping of Wemer Sollors' fashionable "descent-consent" paradigm onto Austro-Hungarian emigration. The essays on the literary and linguistic aspects of East-Central European emigration are prolix and do not succeed in giving the volume a tight interdisciplinary framework as the editors hoped for. Like in any such broadly conceived collection of essays it is hard to please the reader. No doubt, there are some pearls included such as Anna Maria Martellone's fascinating piece on the coming of age of Italian ethnic brokers in big city political machines between 1880 and 1930. Martellone is convincing because she demonstrates a mastery of the vast secondary literature on urban American politics from progressivism to the New Deal along with deep research in primary source collection in the U.S. This cannot be said of all the essays in this uneven volume. Gtinter Bischof
Universities of Munich/New Orleans
Volume 21, No. 4, July, 1995