Henry Cassirer

Henry Cassirer (born November 2, 1911 in Berlin , † December 29, 2004 in Annecy ; actually: Heiner Reinhard Cassirer) was a German-American journalist and writer .

Life

Cassirer was the son of the art dealer Kurt Hans Cassirer (1883-1975) and his wife Eva Solmitz , the industrialist Max Cassirer (1857-1943) was his grandfather. He spent his childhood with his aunt Edith, who was married to the reform educator Paul Geheeb . He attended the Odenwald School , which was financed by his grandfather and was located about 50 km south of Frankfurt am Main .

His uncle, Fritz Solmitz , journalist and social democrat, was tortured and driven to suicide in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp . In 1936 Cassirer fled to London , studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and, after graduating, worked for the BBC , now as Henry Cassirer for the German-speaking services. In 1939 he read England's declaration of war on the Third Reich .

In 1940 he emigrated to the USA and worked at CBS . First he listened to German shortwave stations, then he was the director of the news program he had set up on television. After overcoming some reservations of the FBI , Cassirer was able to acquire US citizenship.

He was approached by the UN after a broadcast on the UN Charter of Human Rights. In 1948 he took up a position as director of the educational radio and television department at the new UNESCO cultural organization in Paris . With great optimism, knowing the valuable content of such broadcasts, he organized programs in India , Senegal, and many other countries between Japan and Alaska.

He was also committed to the physically handicapped, as he himself suffered from paralysis since his stay in India in 1956. He became honorary president of the French organization for the disabled, GIHP . In his later years he settled at the foot of the French Alps. He considered himself a citizen of the world; he had always refused to consider himself a German, a Jew or an emigrant. In addition to specialist books, he also wrote books of memory. His last work was entitled Un siècle de combat pour un monde humaniste .

His legacy stipulates that his ashes should be buried on the grounds of the Odenwald School in Ober-Hambach .

Works

• Television Teaching Today . 1960
• Mass media in an Africa context, an evaluation of Senegal's Pilot project . 1974
• Communication and the future of education . 1974, ed. von Haber, on behalf of the International Association of the World University eV, translated by Ralf Friese
• And everything turned out differently .., A journalist recalls , 1992
• A siècle de combat pour un monde humanist. Témoignage . 2001, (Ed.) Harmattan (editions l ') ISBN 2-7384-9918-X

Web links

• Literature by and about Henry Cassirer in the catalog of the German National Library