Timothy Stanley

Frankfurt School at War

July 19, 2013 timothywstanley@me.com

War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a precursor to the CIA -- and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis... Despite the vast political and cultural gap separating Donovan from Neumann and his team, the spymaster trusted the radicals with the vital security task of providing advice about the Nazis. In the words of John Herz, another young refugee assigned to Neumann’s office (and later a major figure in postwar international relations theory), 'It was as though the left-Hegelian World Spirit had briefly descended on the Central European Department of the OSS.'

William Scheuermann "The Frankfurt School at War," Foreign Affairs - http://fam.ag/13HqNiI

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