Project Second Wave
The
Second Wave: Young Refugees From Central Europe,
and Their Contributions to American Culture, Science,
and Society
This project has been completed. A book titled, "What Happened to the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution," presenting the results, was published in December 2006 by Macmillan (Palgrave Division).
Gerald Holton Research Professor — Gerhard Sonnert Research Associate — Joan Laws Administrator
Tel: 617-495-4474 Fax: 617-495-0416
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York.
State of Project Second Wave (Fall 2003) What Happened to the Austrian Children in America
| Advisory
Committee
Bernard
Bailyn |
As is well known, a large number of refugees entered the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, leaving behind them the turmoil of Central Europe. Among them was a remarkable group of scholars, intellectuals, artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich von Hayek, Hans Bethe, Erwin Panofsky, Leo Szilard, Kurt Gödel, Thomas Mann, Paul Hindemith, Erik Erikson, Felix and Helene Deutsch, Victor Weisskopf, Paul Lazarsfeld, Herbert Marcuse, Erwin Piscator, Walter Gropius, Billy Wilder, and Kurt Weill--to name a few.
These highly talented persons arrived as adults, in many cases already recognized and acclaimed, bringing with them powerful new ideas and ways of thinking that often transformed their fields in their newly adopted countries. (We should note that America was not the only haven for this illustrious cohort of Central Europeans. Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi, for instance, went to Britain, and Lise Meitner initially to Sweden.) Their seminal achievements and contributions are widely recognized, and well documented and studied.
However, those prominent individuals—we call them members of the "First Wave" of exiles from those years of European upheaval—are not the topic of our project. Rather we focus on the many children and young adults who were also part of the immigration movement. They had been brought up, during their impressionable years, in the cultural milieu of (primarily) Central Europe, without having yet made a career. Upon their early European foundations, these young people had to build an American structure, often despite the traumata of arriving without parents, without command of the language, without means, and with the burden of harrowing memories. They continued their education in the United States, obtained their credentials, and embarked on their careers in their new country. Some of this group produced works and other contributions of the highest caliber; and these achievements resulted, we hypothesize, in many cases from a sort of alchemical reaction within them between the European and American styles and modes of thought and action. Others of this group were less successful or even failed in their careers, and the causes for their difficulties or failures also merit study within this project. But even a short glance suffices to realize that this younger cohort—we call the "Second Wave"—does include an extraordinary crop of highly productive and successful individuals in a great variety of fields.
This is a generation that has brought forth several science Nobelists, such as Arno Penzias, Jack Steinberger, Walter Kohn, and Eric Kandel, as well as a host of other distinguished persons, such as Fay Ajzenberg, Alfred Bader, Lotte Bailyn (née Lazarsfeld), Carl Djerassi, Lukas Foss, Charles Fried, Peter Gay, Hanna Gray, Geoffrey Hartman, Stanley Hoffmann, Gerda Lerner, Herbert Kelman, Henry Kissinger, Eugene Kleiner, Felix Rohatyn, Robert Rosenthal, Henry Rosovsky, Fritz Stern, and many, many others.
Yet, amazingly, little scholarly study exists so far on this younger cohort—those who had to start their careers in America, as opposed to that older, well-studied cohort who came to America in mid-career or later. Heeding Lewis Coser's exhortation that the younger generation's "careers in this country might well be a very important subject of study," our project addresses this lacuna. The intellectual concept of this study has the endorsement of the Committee on Studies and Publications of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose reviewers gave it highly positive and encouraging evaluations.
The underlying proposition of this project is that important aspects of our cohort's early formation, in school, through their immediate families, and through their early life experiences, were likely to influence the later accomplishments and careers for many of them. We examine in detail the nature and extent of these influences. The two central research questions for studying this cohort are:
1. How did these scholars, intellectuals, public servants, entrepreneurs, etc., form personal and national identities against the background of the sharp discontinuities they experienced in their early lives?
2. To what extent did their early cultural and intellectual formation, prior to the disruption, leave a significant residue that shaped or colored their specific, idiosyncratic contributions?
While addressing these questions, a main point of attention and research is the extent to which young female immigrants had different experiences and career results, compared to their male counterparts.
Well-prepared interviews
with members of this Second-Wave cohort, as well as questionnaires, are
the main sources for this study. Although face-to-face interviews are
very time-consuming and also expensive in terms of travel and transcription
costs, our prior experience with such research methodology (in Project
Access which examined the effects of gender on science careers and yielded
two books) has shown that the tremendous benefits make the effort worthwhile.
We are keenly alert to the fact that time is running out for gathering
first-hand information from members of this generation of European born
scholars, intellectuals, and other public figures. Most individuals of
this Second-Wave cohort are approaching retirement or already have retired;
and if their history is not preserved soon, large parts of it will be
irretrievably lost.
For this study, we profit from the advice of an Advisory Committee, and
of some members of the Second Wave themselves. Their guidance has been
valuable in our task of recruiting participants, as well as in designing
the questionnaire and the open-ended interview guideline.
In addition to this being a long-overdue scholarly study, it may be also
relevant for policy-making. On the one hand, the pros and cons of immigration
and the connected issue of national identity have recently become again
the focus of intense debate in the United States. Therefore we expect
that the results of our study may help undergird the arguments for a rational
approach to policy-making in this area. On the other hand, the social
science approach we intend to follow, analogous to that in our two recent
books on factors determining careers in science, may be expected to be
of use to those who are now trying to guide the assimilation of young
immigrants who in the most recent decades have been entering the United
States.
The study is intended to result in articles, presentations
to professional societies and to policymakers, and in
a book. We expect the
interested audience to include historians, Exilforscher,
sociologists, psychologists, persons interested in gender
career disparities, and those concerned, as researchers
or policy makers, with immigration issues.