In trying to understand the first epistolary attempts of the German and Austrian exiles in the United States to reconnect with friends and acquaintances in their respective countries after the Second World War, we would expect a difficult and protracted process of negotiation, ambivalence, and hostility punctuated by a recognition that one cannot simply change one's history, one's identity, or, for that matter, turn one's back on friends of the past. But not all the exiles responded in this way. Indeed, in the example I want to examine, that of the first communications of the noted left political scientist and legal theorist, Otto Kirchheimer, there seems to be no such existential complications but rather a direct engagement with the politics and academic structure of postwar Germany, one that is at once critical, skeptical, and yet politically knowledgeable and located. In this presentation, I would like to suggest that Kirchheimer's attitude may represent a whole species of cases. Furthermore, it may tell us something about the difference between the kinds of exiles who were able to reengage with the home country without complications—though interestingly not live in it—and those from whom this reengagement was a constant struggle of cultural and political identity.

In seeking to attempt to make sense of the émigré who does not manifest a sense of damage by the émigré experience, I looked at the letters of Otto Kirchheimer in the SUNY Albany refugee collection. I found very few letters from the period of the late 1940s devoted to reconnecting with the country left behind. However, there is a rather curious interchange from 1948 in which Kirchheimer was invited by the Kultusminister of Hessen, a certain Dr. Stein, to take up a guest professorship for a year in the law faculty at the University of Frankfurt. Stein had been very critical of the university's reluctance to offer positions to emigrants who had been forced out of Germany, and his invitation was part of his attempt to rectify this situation. Kirchheimer responded he would be pleased to accept the invitation but suggested that to avoid prior conflicts the law faculty should contact him directly. According to a letter from George Dietrich to Hermann Brill, who eventually received the position, no one ever contacted Kirchheimer again.