Abstract
The focus of this paper is to analyze Sinologist Karl August Wittfogel’s transformation from a German to an American intellectual after his immigration to the United States in 1934. Wittfogel’s career in Germany was defined by his fierce advocacy of Communism and his interest in the history and society of China. Once Wittfogel was forced to emigrate from Germany due to the rise of Nazism, he was able to adjust his political and scholarly views to accommodate trends in American scholarship and politics. His willingness to adapt was aided by the rapidly changing climate of the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s. Wittfogel was able to transform from a politically engaged Communist to an apolitical cultural anthropologist in less than a decade. This intellectual flexibility occasioned his rise to prominence as an anthropologist and eventually as an anti-Communist analyst of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1950s. Supported by a large and powerful anti-Communist intellectual community, Wittfogel became a leading analyst of the Sino-Soviet Alliance and the threat it represented to Western democracy. As his anti-Communist position became fully developed in print – culminating in his master-work Oriental Despotism in 1957 – he lost much of the intellectual flexibility that occasioned his rise from an obscure immigrant Sinologist. With the gradual collapse of the Sino-Soviet Alliance in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wittfogel’s popularity waned and he was no longer able to keep pace with the rapid cultural changes of the mid-1960s. In this way, Wittfogel is a case study in how the intellectual flexibility imposed upon scholars after immigration was an asset because it gave them experience radically accommodating their ideas to dramatic cultural change.