Norbert Elias arrived in England in 1935. With few contacts, the thirty-eight year old Jewish refugee faced a bleak future. Since early youth, his dream had been to become a professor in one of Germany's prestigious universities. 1 He had devoted fifteen years to the achievement of that goal, only to have the Nazi takeover in 1933 result in the virtual elimination of the sociology department at Frankfurt University just as he completed there his doctoral Habilitation, the second 'grand' dissertation required in Germany to qualify for a professorship. 2 As he recalled many years later, this event confronted him with "a strange dilemma," since at almost the very moment of its realization he had been robbed of the future that he had worked so long to achieve. He had been "thrown completely off [his] path in life."3