Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman

on Hohenzollernstrasse with the closest relatives and friends. There, Hedwig’s grief burst in great fits of sobbing. Friends and family tried to comfort her. By contrast, Otto Albert was a model of unfeigned stoicism. The three children retreated down the hallway to the back of the apartment to one of their bedrooms; there they cried together and shared a few words. As evening approached, OA emerged from the bedroom to inform the guests and his mother that he would be leaving very soon for Paris. With all the grief in the room, it was hard to hear this quiet but decisive message. Most, including his sisters, figured it was a going to be a short vacation. On April 2, he was gone—five days before his eighteenth birthday. These were his final hours in Berlin; he would not return until 1979. 34
    Otto Albert had clearly been weighing his options. In the days before his father’s death, news of Peter Franck’s arrest had driven him into hiding; by then, people were learning that address books were inventories of suspects. There was talk that the government would throw Jewish students out of the country’s universities; that became law on April 1. There were also rumors that Jews would be banned from the legal profession; that decree came a week later. Faculties of law were thus gutted of their Jewish students. Antifascist activity had come to a halt “by fiat,” Hirschman noted, shaking his head as he recalled his final days in Berlin, and the Nazis had won. It was clear that fighting within the system (what Hirschman would later call the practice of “voice”)—at least for the timebeing—was not just futile, it was suicidal. It was time to open new vistas (what he would later call “exit”). 35 “Those of us who left at the time,” Hirschman told an American documentary filmmaker years later, “left with the hope that this would be a regime that would somehow break its neck very soon, and that somehow there would be some … action on the part of some section of German society that would prevent this regime from taking root.” 36
    It is possible that this decision to flee was a way of deflecting other sources of pain. It is hard to say for sure since Hirschman was tight-lipped about his final months in Berlin, preferring to layer his traumatic experiences with a heavy armor of silence. We get a rare glimpse into his grief, and his efforts to make something of it, from a letter to his mother written in Paris a year after his father’s funeral. “The calendar tells me that a year has passed, otherwise I wouldn’t know if it has been a month or three years. I have experienced so much joy and so many new things. On the other hand, everything that we experienced and suffered stands so near, insistent, and physical before my eyes.” The rush to embrace the new somewhere else did not succeed in obliterating the grief of the past. While the young émigré uprooted himself in part to allow the challenge of the present to crowd out old sorrows, they did not disappear. “It was the first great pain in my life. I did not have time to think out this pain because after three days the reality of the Paris trip demanded my thoughts. And so it happens that the pain always emerged in the quiet hours.” 37 For the rest of his life, the quiet hours of Easter would summon memories of the loss of his father, the first of a series of losses that would sear his memory of the 1930s.
    Distance and recollection did afford Otto Albert an opportunity to find in a father’s life some significance for a son who was embarking on his own. On September 8, 1933, the day before what would have been his father’s fifty-fourth birthday, the eighteen-year-old fatherless son sat down to muster some rare words of sorrow in a letter to his mother. Characteristically, he also felt compelled to cheer his mother up and thus remind her of the good times. “When I try today to imagine Daddy in spirit I always automatically see him working at his