Blue shirt, I based most of my comments on Katz’s book. What I also found interesting was Katz’s demonstration of Rabbi S.R. Hirsch’s personal involvement in the Hungarian issue. According to Katz, Hirsch lent instrumental support to the secessionist Orthodox in Hungary. Although he doesn’t come out and say so, the implication is that Hirsch realized that his movement had, to a large degree, failed in Germany; that the majority of Torah observant Jews in Germany would not follow him and form independat kehillot, but rather adhered to the POV of the Wurzberger Rav and stayed part of the EinheitsGemeinde, albeit in orthoprax schuls. (Even Frnkfurt, the seat of the doctrine of Austritt, had such a schul, presided over by the famed and learned Marcus Horvitz, a close talmid of R. Esriel Hildesheimer. That schul was bigger than Hirsch’s IRG and remained so literally until WWII) Rav Hirsch therefore lent his efforts to Hungary where there was a better chance to attain the seperatism he wanted for German Orthodoxy. Perhaps R. Hirsch thought that if he were successful in influencing Hungarian Orthodoxy to secede, German Jews would follow the Hungarian example. All in all Hirsch failed in his attempt to create a real separate Orthodox community in Germany; which was his main quest. He succeeded however in demonstrating that a Jew can be religious, in the fullest sense of the word, both in deed and in creed, and yet be fully engaged in the world at large. I think it was that internal contradiction in his thought that doomed Austrittism from the get go. By contrast, seperatist Orthodoxy succedded in Hungary because, at least in theory, Hungarian Orthodox Jews rejected Hungarian society as well.
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