516 Notes to pp. 132–133
of world markets, he served as adviser to the German General Staff on
food supplies and military policy more generally.
2 Felix Weil obtained his doctorate in 1920 after studying with the social
economist Adolf Weber. ‘He was one of those young people who had
been politicized by the war and the November Revolution, who were
convinced of the practicality and superiority of socialism as a more
advanced form of economic organization, and who devoted themselves to
the study of socialist theories so that they could take up leading positions
in the workers’ movement or in a new socialist order as soon as possible.
But he kept himself at a certain distance while devoting himself to this
goal as a patron of the left and a part-time scholar’ (Rolf Wiggershaus,
The Frankfurt School, p. 13).
3 According to §2 of the Statute of January 1923, the two principal tasks
of the institute are described as follows: ‘First, it aims to cultivate and
promote the scientific research and description of social conditions and
movements of both past and present. This research should be comprehens-
ive and should not be confined to one particular country. Second, the
institute shall focus particularly on the training of young researchers in
the fields of the social and economic sciences, and enable them to pursue
their own independent work.’ See Ulrike Migdal, Die Frühgeschichte des
Frankfurter Instituts für Sozialforschung, p. 51.
4 Apart from those already named, the group included Eduard Ludwig
Alexander, the lawyer and co-founder of the Spartacus League; the eco-
nomist Julian Gumperz; Kuzuo Fukumoto, who had links with the Japanese
communist movement; the historian Karl Wittfogel; the economist Richard
Sorge (who was an assistant to the director designate of the institute, Kurt
Albert Gerlach); the Hungarian philosopher Béla Fogarasi; Konstantin
Zetkin, the youngest son of Clara Zetkin; as well as Rose Wittfogel,
Christiane Sorge, Hedda Korsch, Käte Weil and Hede Massing.
5 See Michael Buckmiller, ‘Die “Marxistische Arbeitswoche” 1923 und die
Gründung des Instituts für Sozialforschung’, p. 158ff.
6 Felix Weil, too, had scholarly ambitions in the sense that he wished to
exert a controlling influence on the development of the institute. In his
memorandum of 1 November 1929, he announced quite openly: ‘I regard
the work of the institute and my participation in it as my life’s task.’ He
evidently had no wish to confine his role to that of financial benefactor.
The first memorandum produced by Kurt Gerlach, the Aachen economics
professor, formulated the programmatic research goals of the new institute
in even vaguer terms than the statute. He says, for example, ‘that the
knowledge of social deprivation in all its implications is indispensable;
as is an understanding of that vast tangle of interacting economic founda-
tions, of political and legal factors right up to and including the final
ramifications of intellectual and spiritual life in the community and in
society. We need only remind ourselves of international trade unions,
strikes, sabotage, revolution as a wages movement, anti-Semitism as a
sociological problem.. .’
Weil’s interventions had led to tensions with Gustav Mayer, the
biographer of Engels. Weil had at first thought of Mayer as a possible
director of the institute, but Mayer rejected the idea that the benefactor
should be in a position to influence the scientific direction of the institute.