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

inclined to writing, treated traditional rote learning as something on which one had to cut some teeth, Otto Albert was spared some of the wider social rigidities. The school, like the republic, was adept at allowing teachers and pupils to mold what might have been an oppressive classicism to a more modern form. For while there was no shortage of rigor at the Collège, there was also room for unorthodoxy. Otto Albert’s most memorable teachers were Professor Lindenborn, who taught religion and ethics and introduced the young Hirschmann to Tolstoy as a way to teach Christianity, and Professor Levinstein, who embellished his classes on Goethe by sitting down before his piano and singing Wagner. Evidently, his singing took up too much time to get through all of
Faust
, so Otto Albert and his classmates had to convene in Professor Levinstein’s home at nights to catch up on what got missed in class. Many years later, Hirschmann would recite pages of Goethe’s
Faust
to his new wife and would read it to his young daughters at night, a reminder that the memory of a German culture did not have to remain imprisoned by the ghosts of fascism.

    Otto Albert’s class at the French Gymnasium, 1926. Otto Albert is on the top row, far left.
    When Otto Albert stood for his
Abitur
(his final exam and thesis), on January 29, 1932, his assigned topic was an analysis of a quote from Spinoza: “One should neither laugh nor cry at the world, but understand it.” It was, in the scheme of things, a remarkably appropriate line for what would characterize a leitmotif of his own, much later, compositions. Written under exam conditions of a half day, the young man’s commentary summarized much of what Otto Albert had learned of Hegel, the tradition of German idealism, and Greek literature to treat the quote as a moral injunction for the present. As befitted the school’s aims of creating thoughtful young men for a cosmopolitan republic, the examinerscared less about his command of Spinoza’s own writings (which the young Hirschmann had read but did not imbibe with quite the same determination reserved for Hegel) than the soon-to-be-graduate’s values he would carry forth into the world. The sixteen-year-old’s exam script ended with a plea for an open mind: “Finally, the maxim calls upon us not to mock or fight something at first sight, but to consider, to understand, to penetrate. It is thus directed against the increase of catchphrases. Against this state of affairs, in which—as Goethe put it—a conceptual lacuna is soon filled by a word, Spinoza’s maxim deserves to be defended as an ideal.” 1
    More important to Otto Albert’s educational experience than what transpired in the classroom was what the school offered on the side. It was in the quasi-formal reading groups, or tutorials (
Arbeitsgemeinschaften
), on topics ranging from art history to classical philology and led by faculty, alumni, and upperclassmen that Otto Albert thrived. The idea was to have the students create a parallel curriculum of their own design, one that would reflect their interests beyond the core of languages, humanities, math, and natural science. Otto Albert and his classmates reached out to a Collège Français alumnus, Bernd Knoop, who took Otto Albert under his wing for intensive reading of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
once a week over the course of one school year, 1931–32, culminating in the next summer’s writing assignment on one of the introductory paragraphs of Hegel’s monumental work, which focused on reason and consciousness. Otto Albert parked himself at a great desk in the Staatsbibliothek for weeks, poring over the text and writing his very first independent essay, a dense, twenty-eight-page exegesis. At the time, Hegel was the departure point for any serious student of contemporary German philosophy and social theory, and
Phenomenology
was the ur-text that any ambitious student had to master (or think he was mastering). In the