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With the University in Exile, founded under its roof in 1933, the New School for Social Re-search in New York became a unique institution within the American community of science and the focal point of trends that ought to be remembered in the present times of flight and enforced migration. Due to the expulsion from National Socialist Germany it developed to the central point of refuge for an intellectual elite whose intellectual transfer to the US occurred at the perfect place, in a perfect space of time and with the right messages—above all in support of the gigantic social and economic reform program of the new American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had come into office that same year, in early 1933. The chapter analyses the arriving and work of German speaking scientists as forced migrants at the New School for Social Research. Presenting several biographic cases, mainly of German economists, the text reveals the pragmatism of many emigrés balancing their own activities between being integrated in and sometimes instrumentalized for US-American governmental purposes and living at the margins of political and scientific impact at all. The chapter also describes the constant intra-group processes of self-reflection, debates and negotiations on positioning and identity among the refugee intellectuals between integration, return and transnational orientations.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-99265-5_4

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