ABSTRACT
In Mannheim’s letter to his Frankfurt colleague Max Wertheimer, he offers an amplification of the themes of knowledge and distantiation from the 1930 lecture series. According to an apologetic note handwritten on the typed text by Mannheim, the letter was composed after a meeting of the Frankfurt “Kant-Gesellschaft, “ but mailed later. From the context, it seems that Mannheim may have been the presenter on the original occasion. The organization was evidently an important meeting ground for the academics introduced by Becker and Riezler. On July 15, 1931, for example, Max Horkheimer delivered a talk on Marx at the Kant-Gesellschaft, under the title, “History and Psychology.” (MHA) Discussants included Mannheim, Riezler, Tillich, Solm-Rethel, Wiesengrund [Adorno], and Löwith. Wertheimer, who was also born into a Jewish family in the Habsburg Empire (Prague), is regarded as the most original member of the group responsible for the Gestalt theory of psychology, although he published very little. Without a university appointment after his doctorate in 1905, he engaged in private scholarship and secured his habilitation in 1912 at the Frankfurt Commercial Academy, which was the precursor of the university. As a Jew, he did not receive a regular university appointment until 1922. During the Republic he taught in Berlin until 1929, when he became a professor and co-director of the Psychological Institute and Philosophical Seminar in Frankfurt. He was dismissed by the Nazis in the Spring of 1933. He finished his career at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Like Mannheim, he was interested 142 in the epistemological implications of his theory. In his own writings, Mannheim treated Gestalt theory as a continuator of romantic thought, a form of “organicist” and “morphological” method that he sharply distinguished from his own. 68
