174 Part III: Emigration Years
interest in the manoeuvrings of the parties, their demagoguery and the
fanaticism of their supporters, he was enough of a critic and observer of
social developments to become conscious of the anxieties of the petty
bourgeoisie. As Kracauer had demonstrated in his sociological study of
the white-collar workers, these anxieties encouraged a regression to
totalitarian positions. They stood in the way of forming a commitment
to defend the achievements of parliamentary democracy. Extremist
parties such as the KPD and the NSDAP were hostile to the republic
of 1918 from the outset. Moreover, anti-democratic resentments were
common currency in the army, the justice system and the civil service.
They sought to undermine it at every turn with the declared goal
of replacing the ‘Weimar system’ with different forms of dictatorship.
The most visible sign of this hatred of freedom, tolerance and demo-
cratic forms of life were the violent confrontations on the street and in
the Reichstag in which each side sought to combat and where possible
eliminate the other.
Following the inability of the majority parties to sustain their con-
sensus, the Weimar Coalition collapsed, making the rise of the National
Socialists irresistible. After the elections of September 1930, this was
plain for all to see. In that year the number of Nazi voters leapt from
800,000 to 6.5 million, and on 31 July 1932 the Nazi Party more than
doubled its vote, with 37.8 per cent, making it the largest party in the
Reichstag.
Scarcely had the Nazis entered the Reichstag than Horkheimer
and his closest circle of colleagues in the institute started to reckon
with the possibility that emigration might become unavoidable.^3 The
first preparations to leave the country had already been made; the
institute’s assets were transferred to Holland and a branch was set up in
Geneva with the title of Société Internationale de Recherches Sociales.
Horkheimer was not just responding to the growth in the Nazi vote. His
fears that the public might put up with Hitler and even come to support
him were confirmed by the results of an empirical study of 1929–30 that
had investigated the political attitudes of manual and non-manual work-
ers. This study had been carried out by Erich Fromm with the assistance
of Hilde Weiss. It made use of the novel methods of psychoanalytical,
in-depth interviews to discover the unconscious psychic dispositions
underpinning the opinions, ways of life and attitudes of the blue-collar
and white-collar workers studied.^4 The in-depth interviews were carried
out on the basis of written questionnaires. Instead of standardized
suggested answers, the questionnaires provided a series of questions the
answers to which were supposed to make possible a psychoanalytical
interpretation. In analysing the interviews attempts were made toexplore
workers’ attitudes towards authority. It turned out that members of the
left-wing parties during the Weimar republic were often just as fixated
on authority as members of the middle class or Nazi sympathizers. This
finding forced Horkheimer and his co-workers to recognize the latent