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the Rothschilds, in the Grüneburgpark, on the northern periphery of the west end. The architect who had designed the League of Nations building in Geneva, Hans Poelzig, had won the competition. She has not yet seen the blueprints but she has been told the building will be sensational. The palais of Versailles celebrated the Sun-King; this colossus would celebrate the Sun-King’s modern equivalent — monopoly-capitalism.
    We all looked at Teddy, expecting him to make a sneering remark, but he just sat there, smiling.
    It was significant, Lore went on, that at the western periphery of the city there was Teddy’s building, the Institute for Social Research, next door to the university, a perfect example of the New Functionalism: four floors, with square, simple straight lines. Its inhabitants were committed to studying the world critically, theoretically and empirically, from the point of view of what was now known as scientific Marxism. It was significant because the two buildings, at opposite ends, were deliberately unlike the architecture in between them. The west end was strictly late nineteenth century — post-1870 bourgeois. Teddy and his Institute were, so to speak, the Marxist David critically confronting the super-capitalist Goliath across the decaying body of the doomed bourgeoisie.
    This remark was, of course, greeted with universal laughter, including Teddy’s.
    According to her research, Luise went on, when the institute was set up four years after the war, it was, like the university, financed by private funds. But then the inflation wiped out most foundations and fatally weakened most possible benefactors. The few that survived did not want to support an organism like the Institute for Social Research, which made no secret of its left-wing ideology, quite apart from the high incidence of Jewish scholars who had found a home there. Fortunately, there was one family left that had retained much of its wealth and was interested in the project, the Weil family. Hermann Weil had been a grain merchant who had made his fortune in Argentina before the war. He had returned for health reasons. During the war he gave his views to the Kaiser, as well as to Ludendorff and others on the general staff, on the devastating effect of the grain shortages on the enemy. In 1916 he told them that the British could only survive another six weeks, at the most. In other enemy countries, he reported, there would soon be a revolution. His son Felix went much further than merely predicting a revolution, as his father had: he took part in bringing one about, or so he hoped. In 1919, while working on his doctorate in economics in Tübingen, he was expelled from the state of Württemberg because of his participation in revolutionary agitation. Four years later he invested much of his inheritance in the institute. Its purpose was to study social life in its entirety, theoretically and empirically, on the unspoken assumption that sooner or later there would be a real revolution, unlike the events of 1918 and 1919, that would not leave much of the pre-revolutionary social and economic power structure intact. Empirically, Luise added, meant studying social life itself, however sordid, directly, tangibly — and not merely going to a library and reading about it in books.
    Teddy gave us an amusing example. A little while ago, Joseph Dünner, a scholarship student at the institute who had communist sympathies, met a tramp, a clochard, in Paris, by the name of Gérard Montbleu. The circumstances were not entirely clear, but probably after a happy night of debaucheries he met the tramp in a bistro near Les Halles at five o’clock in the morning, while he was enjoying his onion soup. The clochard (oh, how he, Teddy, loved the sound of that word) told him lurid stories about the oppression and exploitation of the poor. So the empiricist Dünner invited him to visit him in Frankfurt, at his expense. No more theory — this was the real thing! The