"Due to Nazi activity, Marcuse never actually worked in Frankfurt. Anticipating the fascist takeover, the Institute deposited their endowment in Holland. A branch office was established in Geneva where Marcuse began his work with the Institute. He would go to Paris for a short time and then finally in July 1934 to New York. From 1934–1942 Marcuse worked at the Institute’s branch at Columbia University. In 1942 he moved to Washington D.C. to work first with the Office of War Information and then with the Office of Strategic Services. Later Marcuse would teach at Brandeis University and then the University of California, San Diego. He became a United States citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States until his death in 1979."
Herbert Marcuse:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/
——————
"On a hot summer day during Italy’s long 1968, the leader of the French student movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (today a member of the European Parliament and distinguished member of the Green Party) frequently interrupted a lecture being given by Herbert Marcuse in the packed Eliseo Theater in Rome, demanding he own up to his scandalous past as a CIA agent during World War II. The accusation—originally
circulated in the United States by an anonymous source and later picked up by the European press—was inaccurate: the German philosopher did not in fact have any collaborative relationship with the controversial American agency, much less during the war, when the CIA didn’t even exist. Instead, Marcuse had later been under FBI investigation during his period of political notoriety as “father of the student movement” (although, to be truthful, half of the memos connected with that investigation were concerned with protecting him from death threats, especially after 1968). Indirectly, however, the provocation offered by “Danny
le rouge” contributed to bringing to light a period in Marcuse’s life that had previously been neglected. The same was true for other proponents of the so-called Frankfurt School, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, who also participated in the American war effort as political analysts at the Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first American intelligence agency.
In truth, these thinkers never demonstrated any particular embarrassment in connection with their past government service. Rather, on more than one occasion, they proudly defended their participation as one of the few attempts to make the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory a practical tool in the fight against fascism. Precisely when Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno retreated into their Californian exile to write their
Dialectic of Enlightenment—the Frankfurt School’s philosophical urtext, envisioned as a “message in a bottle” for future generations while they faced a present that appeared irremediably evil—the other three Frankfurt scholars produced a formidable number of studies and reports on the “German enemy” that represent the most complex and insightful analyses of Nazi Germany ever put forth by members of the Frankfurt School, as well as an extraordinary historical source for scholars of the Second World War.
The years spent by the three “Frankfurters” in the service of the American government share little of the romanticized life of the secret agent who, immersed in danger, works in the theater of war or the double agent who plots in secret with the enemy; their endeavors much more closely resemble the “labor of the concept” that one associates with a stern German professor.
Directed by the Harvard historian William Langer, the Research and Analysis Branch was in fact the biggest American research institution in the first half of the twentieth century. At its zenith between 1943 and 1945, it included over twelve hundred employees, four hundred of whom were stationed abroad. In many respects, it was the site where post–World War II American social science was born, with protégés of some
of the most esteemed American university professors, as well as a large contingent of European intellectual émigrés, in its ranks. To cite only a few such figures: the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the historian Felix Gilbert, the geographer Richard Hartshorne, the Marxist economists Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, the economist Walter W. Rostow, future Nobel Prize winner Vassili Leontief, the sociologists Talcott Parsons
and Barrington Moore Jr., two-time Pulitzer winner Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the classicist Norman O. Brown, and the Frankfurt School scholars Arkadij Gurland and Friedrich Pollock. These men comprised the “theoretical brain trust” of the American war machine, which, according to its founder, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, would function as a “final clearinghouse” for the secret services—that is, as a
structure that, although not engaged in determining war strategy or tactics, would be able to assemble, organize, analyze, and filter the immense flow of military information directed toward Washington, thanks to the unique capacity of the specialists on hand to interpret the relevant sources. In a global totalitarian war, Donovan was convinced, “intelligence must be total and totalitarian.”
One may situate the activities of Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer for the Research and Analysis Branch within the process of “total mobilization” of the American academic and intellectual world that, after the entrance of the United States into the war, pervaded “the classrooms of [its] colleges” and “rustle[d] the thumbed pages of our scholars.”
The first of the three German scholars to transfer to Washington was Franz Neumann. After a series of careful investigations by the FBI, he was hired in spring 1942 as chief consultant for the Board of Economic Welfare and later, in August of the same year, as chief economist in the Intelligence Division of the Office of the US Chief of Staff. At the beginning of 1943 he would assume the duties of deputy chief of the Central European Section, the subdivision of R&A charged with analyzing and studying Nazi Germany (as well as Austria and the other Central European countries). He gained these senior positions by virtue of the prestige he acquired after the 1942 publication of
Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism—which was itself the fruit of a memorandum prepared at the request of Assistant Attorney General Thurman W. Arnold and a significant contribution to the American war effort.
In 1941 Marcuse had published
Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory in the hopes of securing an academic position. Reluctantly abandoning the Institute for Social Research, he joined the Office of War Information (OWI) with the goal of formulating “suggestions on ‘how to present the enemy to the American people’, in the press, movies, propaganda, etc.” In March of 1943 Marcuse joined Neumann in R&A’s Central European Section as senior analyst and rapidly established himself as “the leading analyst on Germany.”
Kirchheimer, who together with Arkadij Gurland had collaborated with Neumann in 1942 on an important study,
The Fate of Small Business in Nazi Germany, for the US Senate’s Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business, worked for a few months as a consultant for the OSS before, in 1944, being welcomed among the members of the Central European Section as a specialist on the German penal and constitutional system."
(Laudani, Raffaele. Introduction to
Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort [Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer], edited by Raffaele Laudani, 1-23. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. pp. 1-3)