In Uwe Wittstock's "Marseille 1940", one minor character would not let go of me: a young Berliner who scouted escape routes across the Pyrenees for Varian Fry. Thirty years later, the same man wrote one of the most influential books in the social sciences. On Albert O. Hirschman, the courage to leave and the courage to stay.
Marseille, Vieux Port, 14 July 2026
Over the past few weeks I listened to Uwe Wittstock's "Marseille 1940", the story of literature's great escape from occupied France. The book is full of famous names: Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin. What impressed me most was a minor character. A Berliner, twenty-five years old, who did the dangerous everyday work for the American rescuer Varian Fry: changing money on the black market, procuring false passports, scouting routes across the Pyrenees. Fry's small office got more than a thousand people out of the country. Because of his smile, Fry called his young colleague "Beamish", an old word for radiant.
His name was Otto Albert Hirschmann. In 1933, at seventeen, he had fled Berlin, a few weeks after finishing school. He studied in Paris, London and Trieste, fought as a volunteer in Spain in 1936, joined the French army in 1939. After the defeat he came to Marseille. And at the end of 1940, when it became too dangerous for him as well, he walked across the mountains into Spain, on one of the routes he had scouted for others. Spain was only a way station. He travelled on via Lisbon to the United States, with a visa that Fry's connections had helped him obtain.
I came across him again recently, by a roundabout route. In America, Otto Albert Hirschmann had become Albert O. Hirschman, an economist. Thirty years after Marseille he wrote one of the most influential books in the social sciences: "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty". It is regarded as one of the classics of the twentieth century; its concepts have long since become everyday vocabulary in economics and political science. I did not even know his name. Perhaps I am not alone in that.
The book asks something deceptively simple. When something we care about gets worse, a company, a club, a party, a city, a country, we have two options: we can leave, or we can speak up. Hirschman calls them exit and voice. A third force, loyalty, works between the two and can hold us until voice gets its chance. What occupies me most is how the two options are connected: where leaving is easy, speaking up withers, because those who can leave no longer need to argue. Voice, Hirschman writes, is "an art constantly evolving in new directions", and like any art it can be unlearned.
Hirschman kept his own life out of the book, apart from two traces. The dedication is to Eugenio Colorni, an Italian socialist shot by Fascists in Rome in 1944. From him, he writes, he learned to trust small, precise observations rather than grand explanations of the world, and to wait and see what grows from them. And at one point he quotes the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson with the thought that one can actively flee and one can actively stay put.
And then, in 1992, in his late seventies, he returned to the country he had left. His model had claimed that exit weakens voice. In Leipzig and Dresden in 1989 the opposite happened: the wave of emigration did not empty the demonstrations, the two reinforced each other until the Wall fell. Hirschman corrected himself publicly, with evident pleasure in his own refutation, and spoke of his reentry into German politics and history. The man who had left in 1933 returned as a thinker of staying.
This blog is called The Logic of Courage, and perhaps that is why I could not let go of Hirschman. Before he wrote about leaving and staying, he had done both under conditions I can hardly imagine. At seventeen he left Berlin, alone. At twenty-one he volunteered for the Spanish Civil War, at twenty-four for the French army. In Marseille he worked month after month to get others out of the country, as a German Jew in a country that had committed itself, in the armistice treaty, to surrender Germans on demand. He never spoke of this courage afterwards.
With him, courage points in two directions. It takes courage to leave; in 1940 it saved lives. And it takes courage to stay and to object. Which of the two directions is right is decided not by morality but by the situation: whether objection stands a chance of being heard. That question feels very current to me, in companies, in associations, in regions that have been losing, for decades, the very people who could object.
In the tradition I come from, Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, courage and belonging are closely linked. The courage to object comes most readily to those who feel they belong and who have experienced that their contribution can change something. Adler had a word for this that sounds more cumbersome than what it means: Gemeinschaftsgefühl, community feeling. Hirschman's loyalty, that third and strangely pale force, looks distantly related to it, and I want to follow that kinship. I am only beginning to read him, and I will be writing about it here.