Initially, the Gestalt psychologists had addressed their intellectual cause to a limited audience of exper-imental psychologists, philosophers and scientists interested in epistemic questions. However, in the intense atmosphere of the Weimar Germany their views gained new significance. With increasing con-fidence in the germ of a new worldview they took several occasions to present their holistic ideas to the
151See [Goldstein and Gelb, 1918, 78ff., esp. 83].
152On the soldier Schneider case see [Goldstein and Gelb, 1918, 1-142]; cf. also [Ash, 1995, 278f.] and [Harrington, 1996, 146f.].
153Cf. [Goldstein, 1927, 617-45], [Goldstein, 1934, esp. 70, 161]; see also [Noppeney, 2000, esp. 82-4].
154Cf. [Ash, 1995, 293f.]; on the the Society for Scientific Philosophy (Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Philosophie) see [Hecht and Hoffmann, 1991, 44, 49f.], [Ash, 1994] and [Hoffmann, 2007a].
155Since the late 1920s, the Gestalt psychologists were quite dedicated to promoting the epistemic implications at various inter-disciplinary congresses. For instance, Köhler took the chance to speak to physicists (1927, 1930), biologists (1927, 1930) and philosopher (1932). He further presented Gestalt at international congresses (Cambridge 1924, New Haven 1929, Copenhagen 1932), as did Koffka, Lewin and others. Cf. [Jaeger, 2003, 287].
broader public.156
The upholders of Gestalt were committed to liberal humanistic views. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the pallet of political ideas at the Psychological Institute of Berlin was liberal and diverse. Max Wertheimer, the intellectual leader of the Gestalt movement, was known as a free-thinking cosmopolitan, who shared his pacifistic beliefs with his friend Albert Einstein. Einstein had “high regards” for Wertheimer as a hu-man being and a psychologist.157 When in September 1922, Einstein needed replacement to represent him at a meeting of a Commission of the League of Nations’ to be held while he was traveling in East Asia, he wrote to Wertheimer: "’I know only one whose free and objective spirit I trust in every respect, and that is you”.158 From 1923 to 1929, other members of the institute, such as Wolfgang Metzger and Rudolf Arnheim, published reviews on current psychological work in the left-wing journalSozialistische Monatshefte(Socialist Monthly). Although these, as a rule, did not touch upon political events, the place of publication sent a signal for itself.159 “Asked to place the Gestalt theorists politically, one former Berlin student who knew them all linked Köhler with the party of Stresemann, Koffka with the Social Democrats, and Lewin with the independent, left-wing Social Democrats”.160
Another liberal side of the Berlin Institute was the multicultural and integrative micro-culture that ma-terialized itself in the Köhler era. During the heyday of Gestalt theory the institute attracted numerous students and scholars from abroad. The list of visitors included Kanae Sakuma from Japan as well as G. Usnadze and Alexander Luria from the Soviet Union but exchange with the United States was particularly intensive.161 Ash points out that Berlin was the most impressive psychological institute in Germany for the number of international visitors and the length of their stays.162 Besides the Berlin Institute represented a peculiar academic harbor for social minorities. There was merely another psy-chological institute in the Weimar Germany that would exhibit a comparable share of women (15, or 48.4%), foreigners (9, or 29%), as well as Jewish staff (see Section 8.1). The institute’s head, Wolfgang Köhler managed to defend this fragile academic microcosm against rightists attacks up until the Gleich-schaltungof all of the German academia, which in Berlin was completed with Köhler’s dismissal in 1935 (see Chapter 11).163
Eventually, Wertheimer openly addressed the intellectual challenge by pronouncing a Gestalt solution to “a problem of our times”. In a lecture to the Kant Society in Berlin, on December, 17, 1924, he described this problem as that of a fundamental discontinuity between science and concrete human experience. In reaction Wertheimer offered the Gestalt theory as a new worldview that promised to overcome philosophical and psychological dualism. The powerfully synthetic Gestalt theory would unify discourses about nature and mind without sacrificing experimental method. If one expands on this idea, the discipline of psychology this way would pertain the role as the fundamental discipline of the human science, inherited from Wundt and Dilthey, without either scarifying its legitimating affiliation with exact science.164
Nevertheless, the search for strictly scientific ways to explain the perceivedGestalten, the effort to inte-grate psychological methods with physical models and a strict commitment to lawful reasoning applied
156Cf. [Ash, 1995, 291].
157From a recommendation letter that Einstein wrote to Schlick to help Wertheimer with a position at the University of Göttingen, 28 April 1922. Cf. [Luchins and Luchins, 1979, 181].
158Wertheimer was reluctant to accept the invitation because he was a Jew, a citizen of Czechoslovakia and spoke rather poor English. He suggested that it would be better to send a Christian with better language skills instead. (Letters form Einstein to Wertheimer, 12 and 18 September 1922; letters from Wertheimer to Einstein, 17 and 19 September 1922. Cf.
[Luchins and Luchins, 1979, 178-180].)
159Metzger, "Psychologie," Sozialistische Monatshefte, from vol. 60 (1923), 635 ff. to vol. 63 (1926); 869-872; Amheim, "Psy-chologie," ebd. from vol. 64 (1927): 230- 233 10 vol. 68 (1929): 450-452.
160On the political views of the Gestalt group cf. [Ash, 1995, 292f.; quoted from p. 293].
161A range of American students came to Berlin with scholarships, e.g. by the National Research Council and other foundations, including J. F. Brown, Donald K. Adams, Karl Zener, Donald McKinnon and Jerome Frank.
162Cf. [Ash, 1995, 210f.].
163For a broad and detailed account on the fate of German psychology in the Nazi era see the collection of essays edited by C.
F. Graumann, [Graumann, 1985].
164The lecture was published a year later under the titleÜber Gestalttheorie (1925, Erlangen); cf. [Wertheimer, 1925]. The English translations was published in 1944, [Wertheimer, 1944]. See also [Ash, 1995, 294-296].
in the holistic framework of mind and matter disappointed, even repelled, those who were looking for a broader humanistic application of the Gestalt ideas. People distant from academic life were disap-pointed as the sparks romanticizing holism in popular did not jump over onto the research directed in psychological laboratories. The ideal of Gestalt lost parts of its popularity.165
On the other side, academicians criticized the Gestalt theory for being monistic, in particular in terms of its courting physical science. Köhler’s “physicalism” was traded amongst his opponents as an insult to the autonomy of the psyche, and thus to psychology.166 Nonetheless, in the academic context the Gestalt theorists were most sharply criticized by a group that could have become their closest allies, i.e.
Felix Krüger and his school of holistic psychology (Ganzheitspsychologie) that resided in Leipzig.
The alternative holistic school of psychology claimed that everything original in the Gestalt doctrine was ideologically charged and short-sighted while everything else was long known to other psycholo-gists. Amongst others, Krüger insisted that “the Gestaltists” seemed unaware that their key postulate
“the whole is more than the sum of its parts” had been central to Wundt and others for many years.
Wertheimer and his entourage have done more than turning the idea into a political party slogan. At the same time, Krüger would stress that the Leipzig school understood holistic processes much more comprehensively incorporating an appreciation for the variety of diffuse experiences that did not (yet) possess structured Gestalten. At Leipzig, these were called “total experiences” and characterized by their associated “affect-color” or “feeling”.167
The key concept introduced by the Leipzig school ofGanzheitspsychologie (as counterpoise to that of Gestalt) was “Structure”. As the Leipzig psychologists saw it, Structure could address individual differ-ences in perception and experience in a way that Gestalt could not. The Leipzigers identified a spectrum of perceptual and cognitive styles into which people should be sorted. In other words, Structure made the study of holistic perception and cognition useful for personality typologies and characterology.168 In a society increasingly preoccupied with racial traits and racial differences this part of the Leipzig agenda got particular attention. The bitter dispute between the two holistic schools endured into the 1950s.169 From a broader socio-political point of view, Gestalt theory eventually became one of many attempts to respond to the challenge of the interwar years. Its protagonists assumed that the switch of perspectives linked with a conceptual change was sufficient to resolve the tensions experienced by the Weimar so-ciety. In the politically highly intense and technologically rapidly evolving society this was not, however, the case. As phrased by Ash, “all of the participants in these Weimar-era debates expected far more of Gestalt theory than it could deliver” [Ash, 1995, 306].
165Cf. [Harrington, 1996, 123f.].
166This criticism was expressed e.g. by the vitalistic biologist Hans Driesch, cf. [Harrington, 1996, 123f.] and [Ash, 1995, 321].
167Cf. [Harrington, 1996, 123-6].
168Cf. [Harrington, 1996, 126f.]. On the subject and matter of the Leipzig School see [Wartegg and Wellek, 1939] and [Wellek, 1954].
169For further information: Graumann’s edited volume provides some detailed surveys both of Gestalt and the Leipzig school ofGanzheitspsychologieon the eve of National Socialism. See in particular the articles by [Geuter, 1985] about Felix Krüger, [Prinz, 1985], [Scheerer, 1985] and [Ash, 1985b] about Gestalt. For further comparisons of the different approches to holistic psychology in the interwar period and the political implications of Gestalt; see [Scheerer, 1989, esp. 20] and [Plaum, 1993, Plaum, 1996].