Paul Cohen-Portheim

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Paul Cohen-Portheim (born 1880 in Berlin ; died October 7, 1932 in Paris ) was a German-speaking Jewish painter, writer and translator.

In an essay published in 1922, he described himself as a believer in “a progressive and higher evolution”; although "the author himself is a Jew, his position would be condemned by an Orthodox of the Mosaic faith as well as by an Orthodox Christian".

Life

Paul Cohen-Portheim was born in Berlin to Austrian parents. He went to school in Geneva, became a painter and lived in Paris when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914. Despite the threat of war, he traveled to England to stay with friends in Devonshire for several weeks. On August 4, 1914, England entered the war. Cohen-Portheim later described his situation at the time with the words: “My apartment and my belongings were in France, my relatives were in Austria and Germany - and myself with summer clothes, painting utensils and £ 10 in an England that you don't come from could emigrate. ”On May 24, 1915, he was interned on the Isle of Man as an“ enemy alien ”together with several hundred men from Germany and Austria-Hungary.

After the First World War, Cohen-Portheim became active as a writer. His early books deal primarily with the question of the spiritual reorientation of Europe. He sees the task of Judaism in being a bridge between East and West: “The Mediterranean was the cradle and starting point of European culture; where it washes Asia is Palestine. It is the gateway through which east to west and west to east penetrate. ”Palestine itself“ will be inhabited by a people who know everything that Europe has to teach and have not forgotten that it once came from Asia , from a people who know the machine and the banks and corporations, and have not forgotten their Hebrew, their Bible and their Kabbalah. It knows the language of the West and the East. "

Paul Cohen-Portheim died in Paris in October 1932 of an illness that he had contracted the month before on a trip to Portugal. His grave is unknown.

effect

Cohen-Portheim's books on Paris, London, France, England and Europe received a lot of attention in the German and English-speaking countries. In a review, Kurt Tucholsky praised the Paris book as "the best Paris guide I know in German". Even today, Cohen-Portheim's book on London is considered a "classic snapshot of London in the years before the Second World War". The list of books by Cohen-Portheim reviewed in the American journal Foreign Affairs shows that readers in the United States interested in foreign policy are particularly interested in the works of this author.

Fonts

  • Asia as an educator , Leipzig 1920
  • The Mission of the Jew , Berlin 1922
  • The occult sources of artistic talent , 2. – 3. Edition Pfullingen 1922
  • Europe's future , Berlin 1923
  • The smile of the seven Buddha , Berlin 1923
  • The Spirit of France and Europe , Potsdam 1926
  • Paris , Berlin 1930
  • England, the unknown island , Berlin 1931
  • Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914–1918 , London 1931
  • London , Berlin 1932
  • The discovery of Europe , Berlin 1933

literature

  • Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography. Vol. VII, Supplement, Tipografia ARTA, Czernowitz 1936, p. 545 (2nd addendum).
  • Cohen-Portheim, Paul. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 5: Carmo – Donat. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-598-22685-3 , pp. 194-203.
  • Entry in AKL -Online ( Cohen-Portheim, Paul In: AKL Online, De Gruyter, Berlin, New York).
  • Sebastian Musch: Paul Cohen-Portheim - Questions of Nationalism, Messianism and Nostalgia in a Prison Camp in England, 1914-1918 . In: Intellectual History Review , Vol. 28 (2018), Issue 4, pp. 555-568.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Die Mission des Juden , Berlin 1922, p. 5.
  2. ↑ See The Neglected Books Page, January 19, 2014.
  3. ↑ The Mission of the Jew, p. 112f.
  4. ↑ See http://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-portheim-paris.html .
  5. ↑ See http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11299532-the-spirit-of-london .
  6. ↑ See reviews of works by Paul Cohen-Portheim in the journal Foreign Affairs .
personal data
SURNAME Cohen-Portheim, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-speaking writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 7, 1932
Place of death Paris