Surrender-and-Catch, Poetry, Sociology, Morality

Abstract

I begin, once again, autobiographically. Before and even for a while after I met Karl Mannheim, I thought of myself as a poet; in fact, it was more a practical consideration that made me obtain an academic degree after leaving Germany, and I came to be identified as a sociologist (at least of sorts) only in the United States. Before 1933, when I went to Italy, and during the first years there, I also wrote some speculative essays that would be classified as philosophical and that show a continuity with the much later ideas on surrender which surprised (and pleased) me as I reread them, after decades before they were finally published¹ But even in Italy, where I taught in boarding schools whatever was demanded (except for the one year of study and writing my dissertation — on the sociology of knowledge!), I hardly paid attention to the question of what profession I should pursue; then, too, I thought of myself above all as a poet. As I look back at those last years in Germany and the years in Italy, more than half a century ago, I feel, probably distorted by longing, as if I then was in a continuous state of surrender: love, music, poetry, nature. The single person who for a few years before I went away inspired and supported me most in my writing efforts was himself a poet, and like Karl Wolfskehl,² a fellow Darmstädter: Hans Schiebelhuth. Both his and Wolfskehl’s photographs have hung over my desk, at which I am typing these words, for decades.