Leo Loewenthal

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Leo Löwenthal (born November 3, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main ; died January 21, 1993 in Berkeley , California ) was a German sociologist of literature.

Life

Löwenthal was a son of the doctor Victor Löwenthal and his wife Rosie geb. Bing. He grew up in Frankfurt in a non-religious Jewish family, nonetheless his “relationship to Judaism and Jews” remained “very central” for him for a while. He attended the Goethe grammar school . After graduating from high school in June 1918, he did military service with a railway regiment in Hanau until September 1918. He then studied without a fixed goal, actually everything except medicine, in Giessen, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. In 1923 he was at the University of Frankfurt with a dissertation on the social philosophy of Franz von Baders. Example and problem of a religious philosophy doctorate.

As early as 1918, he had founded a socialist student group at Frankfurt University. As a twenty year old he was involved in social welfare for East Jewish refugees and worked on a Jewish weekly newspaper. From 1921 he worked as a lecturer at the Free Jewish Teaching House . From 1925 he worked part-time for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research . An attempt to habilitation under Hans Cornelius with a thesis on The Philosophy of Helvétius failed in 1926. He then passed the state examination and worked from 1927–1930 as a teacher of German, history and philosophy at the Liebig secondary school in Bockenheim .

From 1930 Löwenthal was a full-time employee of the Institute for Social Research. In 1932 he took over the management of the journal for social research . Even after the National Socialist seizure of power and the forced closure of the institute by the new rulers, Löwenthal remained the last employee of the institute in Frankfurt to organize its emigration - via Geneva to New York City , where Columbia University provided a property. It was not until 1934 that Löwenthal emigrated to the USA , where, unlike other staff at the Frankfurt School , he stayed after the war. In 1949 he became research director (Research Director) of the station Voice of America and in 1956 received a chair in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, where he lived until his death in 1993.

Along with Theodor W. Adorno , Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, he was one of the founders of the critical theory , also known as the Frankfurt School. His most famous and influential work is likely to have been one that is not commonly associated with his name. In the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno and Horkheimer mention that they wrote the first three theses of the "Elements of Anti-Semitism " in the Dialectic of Enlightenment together with Löwenthal.

In 1977 Löwenthal married Susanne Hoppmann for the second time . The trained translator, who also worked at the university, translated some of Löwenthal's unpublished works into German at the beginning of the 1980s. She lives in Berkeley today.

Löwenthal's studies are among the pioneering works in the field of literary sociology .

Honors

Font directory

  • Alessandra Sorbello Staub: Directory of Leo Löwenthal's publications. In: Peter-Erwin Jansen (ed.): The utopian should strike sparks ... For the hundredth birthday of Leo Löwenthal. (= Frankfurt library publications. Volume 8). Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-465-03117-2 , pp. 182-197.

Works

  • Writings in five volumes. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980–1987 DNB 550655409 :
  1. Literature and mass culture. 1980 ISBN 978-3-518-28501-5
  2. Bourgeois Consciousness in Literature. 1981 ISBN 3-518-06506-8
  3. False prophets. Studies on Authoritarianism. 1982 ISBN 3-518-56507-9
  4. Judaica, lectures, letters . 1984 ISBN 3-518-56508-7
  5. Early philosophical writings . 1987 ISBN 3-518-57848-0

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Leo Löwenthal. I never wanted to take part. An autobiographical conversation with Helmut Dubiel. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1980, pp. 18f.
  2. Peter-Erwin Jansen (ed.): The utopian should strike sparks. Leo Löwenthal on the hundredth birthday. Klostermann Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-465-03117-2 , p. 27.
  3. Biography of the Frankfurt University Library website
  4. Leo Bogart: Leo Lowenthal, 1900-1993 . In: Public Opinion Quarterly . tape 57 , no. 3 , January 1, 1993, ISSN  0033-362X , p. 377–379 , doi : 10.1086 / 269382 ( oup.com [accessed April 1, 2020]).
  5. See Peter-Erwin Jansen:  Löwenthal, Leo. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 24, Bautz, Nordhausen 2005, ISBN 3-88309-247-9 , Sp. 1016-1025.
  6. ↑ Office of the Federal President