ABSTRACT

One of the most persistent images in the now extensive literature on the intellectual migration is that of a group of elitist cultural mandarins who were shocked and appalled by the banality, vulgarity, and emptiness of the mass culture they first encountered in exile. Even leftist émigrés, so the conventional wisdom has it, were often extremely hostile to what a recent historian of the migration calls “the new opiates of the people.”1 There can, of course, be little doubt that many German intellectuals, whatever their political inclinations, did find American mass culture abhorrent, especially when they found themselves in such egregious centers of it as southern California.2 And it is no less true, as the famous analysis of “onedimensional man” by Herbert Marcuse demonstrates,3 that Marxists often considered what they saw as pseudo-popular culture to be an obstacle to class struggle in their adopted country.