Leo Löwenthal

Leo Lowenthal ( born November 3, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, † 21 January 1993 in Berkeley, California ) was a German sociologist literature.

Life

Lowenthal was a doctor's son Victor Lowenthal and his wife Rosie born Bing. He grew up in Frankfurt in a non- faith-based Jewish family, nevertheless remained his " relationship to Judaism and the Jewish " for him for a while " very central ". He attended the Goethe -Gymnasium. After Notabitur in June 1918 he performed until September 1918 military service in a railway regiment in Hanau. He then studied with no fixed destination, actually everything except medicine, in Giessen, Frankfurt and Heidelberg. In 1923 he was at Frankfurt University with a dissertation on the social philosophy of Franz Bader. Example problem and a religious philosophy doctorate.

Already in 1918 he had founded at Frankfurt University a socialist student group. The age of twenty he became involved in social assistance for East European Jewish refugees and worked at a Jewish weekly newspaper. From 1921 he worked as a lecturer at the Free Jewish House of Study. From 1925 he worked part-time for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. An attempt to habilitate with Hans Cornelius with a thesis on the philosophy of Helvetius, failed 1926. Afterwards he passed the state exam and worked from 1927 to 1930 as a teacher of German, history and philosophy at the Liebig- secondary school in Bock 's home.

Since 1930, Lowenthal was full-time employee of the Institute for Social Research. In 1932 he took over the managing editors of the Journal for Social Research. Even after the Nazi seizure of power and the forcible closure of the Institute by the new rulers remained Lowenthal as the last member of the Institute in Frankfurt to the emigration - via Geneva to New York, where Columbia University provided a property - to organize. In 1934, emigrated also Lowenthal in the U.S., where he stayed after the war, in contrast to other employees of the Frankfurt School. In 1949 he became director of the Voice of America and received in 1956 a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley where he lived until his death in 1993.

He was next to Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse of the founders of critical theory, which is also known as the Frankfurt School. His most famous and influential work is probably been one that is not commonly associated with his name. Adorno and Horkheimer mention in the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, that they have written "Elements of Anti-Semitism " in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, along with Lowenthal, the first three theses of.

1977 Lowenthal married his second wife Susanne Hopp man. The trained translator who also worked at the University, transferred at the beginning of the 1980s a part of the yet unpublished work Lowenthal into German. She lives in Berkeley.

Lowenthal's studies are among the pioneering work in the field of sociology of literature.

Awards

List of Publications

• Alessandra Sorbello dust: List of Publications by Leo Lowenthal, in: The Utopian to propose spark ... For the hundredth birthday of Leo Lowenthal. Edited by Peter - Erwin Jansen ( Frankfurt library fonts. Band 8), Frankfurt am Main 2000, pp. 182-197.

Works

• Writings in five volumes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1980-1987.

• I never wanted to join. An autobiographical conversation with Helmut Dubiel. Suhrkamp 1980, ISBN 3-518-11014-4.
• In steady friendship. Correspondence. Leo Lowenthal / Siegfried Kracauer. From 1921 to 1966. Edited by Peter - Erwin Jansen and Christian Schmidt. to cleats Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-934920-27-6.