Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman Read Online Free PDF

in tension, and liberty in uncertainty, a style of regarding the social world as a source of possibilities that the intellectual can help summon with a different combination of humility and daring.

  CHAPTER 2
 
Berlin Is Burning
    The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
       FRANZ KAFKA
    A photo of Otto Albert at nine years old cuts a profile of a thin, delicate figure with soft, sensitive, brown eyes, a full, but not wide, mouth, dressed the part of the child of Berlin’s professional elite. To these features would be added, as he matured, an unruly shock of hair and an impish, playful, grin; his eyes would evolve into knowing, ever-attuned instruments; what his father’s hands were for the surgeon, OA’s eyes were for the observer of the world. He was by no means a formed being, but some basic traits were there. The son of an upper-middle-class family of assimilated Jews from a city that was a symbol of tolerance, he was self-assured, he could boast—but didn’t—achievement, and he possessed an uncanny ability to charm those around him. With the charm came a remarkable skill in deflecting personal difficulties and avoiding trouble. The combination earned him the confidence of his parents, teachers, and mentors. Multiligual as he already was, to his good looks must also be added his sheer intelligence, ingredients that would have foretold a brilliant career, a model son.
    But it would not be so. The republic that had buoyed the world in which the Hirschmanns prospered came apart, and came apart dramatically, shattering the comforts and status of the household on Hohenzollernstrasse.
    None of this was foretold in the mid-1920s. On the contrary: for the Hirschmanns as for Berlin, there was prosperity and promise. For devoted parents like Carl and Hedwig, their children were spared no expense: holidays, music lessons, weekend outings, birthdays, and fine educations. When it came to Otto Albert’s schooling, there were choices; the parents of bright young Berliners tracked their sons either into classical or practical schools. OA’s parents perceived—and thus promoted—a scholarly orientation. They were also intent on making him a worldly creature. Otto Albert was sent to the Französisches Gymnasium (or Collège Français), where he would spend nine years and from which he would graduate in the spring of 1932. Established after the Edict of Potsdam (1685), it threw open the gates for fleeing French Huguenots. As an emblem of Prussian tolerance and a definition of accommodation, the school promoted a cosmopolitan spirit among its students and alumni. By the second half of the nineteenth century, it began to take in larger and larger numbers of Jews: between 1834 and 1933, over one-third of the school’s one thousand graduates were Jewish. To sneering anti-Semites, it was known as the Franco-Jewish Gymnasium. It undoubtedly appealed to the sons of educated parents, or to those who were keen to have their sons enjoy a more academically inclined education. This was a school that prided itself on intellectual rigor: its classes were small (Otto Albert’s graduating cohort was eighteen fellow students), its professors demanding. Otto Albert rewarded his parents by winning book prizes and special mentions, to Ursula’s chagrin. While French was the language of instruction, the curriculum was resolutely classical, rigorous in languages (Otto Albert was proficient in Greek and Latin and would read to his younger sister from
The Iliad
) but less inclined to scientific or technical subjects. This is not to say that science was completely ignored; Professor Otto Nix, a mathematician, introduced his students to Einstein’s theory of relativity. But for the most part, languages, the humanities, and mathematics absorbed most of the students’ time.

    Otto Albert, 9 years old.
    In a day and age in which well-educated young men, especially those