Gesammelte Schriften XVI. Briefwechsel 1937–1940
This volume is a documentary edition of Max Horkheimer’s correspondence from 1937 to 1940. It belongs to the Gesammelte Schriften and is edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Its contents are letters rather than a continuous treatise, memoir, or biography: the volume gathers written exchanges to and from Horkheimer during a defined four-year period, and its scope ends with the correspondence of 1940.
The book is therefore best understood as a primary-source collection. It does not offer a retrospective narrative of Horkheimer’s life or a systematic exposition of his philosophy. Instead, it presents the occasional, practical, and intellectual traffic of letters through which Horkheimer maintained personal and professional relationships during the late 1930s. The correspondence is shaped by the conditions of exile, by the institutional work of the Institute for Social Research, and by the political catastrophes of the period in Europe.
Within its own time span, the volume documents Horkheimer’s activity as a director and intellectual organizer. The letters concern the everyday and strategic affairs of the Institute for Social Research, including its academic and publishing work, its relations with collaborators and émigré scholars, and the difficulties of sustaining an intellectual enterprise under conditions of displacement and political emergency. The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the Institute’s journal, and the planning of research and publications are among the kinds of matters that belong to this correspondence. The letters also reflect the wider network of German and European exiles, the practical problems of emigration and financial support, and the changing political situation as war approached and then began.
Intellectually, the correspondence falls within the period in which Horkheimer was developing and defending the project of critical theory. The letters do not present that project as a finished doctrine; they show it in the making, through editorial decisions, arguments with colleagues, requests for contributions, responses to political events, and discussions of work in progress. Themes associated with the Institute’s research in these years—the critique of fascism, the analysis of authority, the situation of the individual under modern social conditions, and the tasks of a critical social theory—inform the correspondence without being reduced to a single argument. Because the volume is made of letters, these themes appear fragmentarily, in relation to particular occasions and interlocutors.
The book also has value as a record of Horkheimer’s working life in exile. It shows the administrative and personal burdens that accompanied intellectual production: correspondence about manuscripts, deadlines, money, travel, affiliation, and the maintenance of scholarly contacts across borders. At the same time, it preserves the tone of a correspondence that was both professional and personal, carried on with friends, colleagues, and institutional partners whose lives and work were affected by the same historical upheavals.
The volume’s limits are as important as its contents. It covers only the years named in its title. It does not continue into Horkheimer’s later American period, his postwar return to Frankfurt, or the later reception of his work. Nor is it a general history of the Institute for Social Research; it is a selection of correspondence that illuminates that history from the angle of Horkheimer’s letters. Readers should expect a chronological documentary record rather than a synthesized account, and they should expect the gaps, asymmetries, and occasional character inherent in a collection of letters.
In sum, Gesammelte Schriften XVI. Briefwechsel 1937–1940 is a scholarly edition of Horkheimer’s correspondence during the years 1937–1940. Its subject is the intellectual, institutional, and personal life recorded in those letters: the work of the Institute for Social Research in exile, the maintenance of critical-theoretical projects under political pressure, and the practical and human realities of scholarly life in a period of crisis.
A further dimension of the volume is its documentation of critical theory as an editorial and collaborative practice rather than only a set of doctrines. The letters show Horkheimer weighing contributions, responding to drafts, coordinating publication, and trying to maintain a shared intellectual vocabulary among dispersed collaborators. In this respect the correspondence is a primary source for how the Institute’s research agenda was negotiated, adjusted, and defended in relation to particular manuscripts and concrete publishing decisions.
The volume also preserves the asymmetries and delays characteristic of exile correspondence. Missing replies, interrupted exchanges, and reliance on intermediaries mean that the letters offer a partial and episodic record; their significance lies precisely in that documentary texture. They allow readers to reconstruct the provisional, often improvised character of the Institute’s work under pressure and to see how Horkheimer’s theoretical commitments were mediated by practical judgments about authors, audiences, and institutional survival. As a scholarly edition within the Gesammelte Schriften, the volume is therefore valuable less for systematic exposition than for the evidence it provides of critical theory’s day-to-day production and self-presentation in a period of crisis.
