Home ON MY GRANDFATHER ERNST CASSIRER
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In the series on the great figures in the history of Göteborgs Högskola I have been asked to speak about my grandfather Ernst Cassirer who held a position as professor of philosophy here in the years 1935 to 1941. I am going to do this entirely in my capacity as a grandson, not as a philosopher. I am myself a docent of nordic languages since 1970 and not at all an expert on the writings of my grandfather, but it is altogether thanks to him that I am standing here, because I would most certainly have been murdered in some extermination camp if Ernst Cassirer had not come to Göteborg.
Not only do I know quite little about my grandfather's philosophy, I don't know very much about him even in his capacity as grandfather. I can't remember having met him until 1938, as my parents and I came to Sweden, but during the three years we were in Göteborg at the same time, i.e. until 1941 when he went to the USA, I must have seen him quite often. All so much the better my grandmother Toni Cassirer wrote a biography over her life with my grandfather which is not only very well written but actually at parts really thrilling, in a clear and perspicuous German. Also several philosophical books have been published lately that discuss Ernst Cassirer's philosophy.
In the history of philosophy Ernst Cassirer is known for his studies on epistemology and Kant; his best known work is Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, which in its entirety has been reprinted in German for the second time after the war this year (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt). His treatment of the symbolic forms of language, art and myth were rather acknowledged and have become so again today.
The foundation of his idea of man as homo symbolicon was laid during WW I. My grandmother tells how Ernst Cassirer went to his work at the Kriegspresseamt every morning to translate war reports from French newspapers in order to mislead the German people about the war results. On the overcrowded streetcar he read his philosophical books, totally unaware of the noise, the bad air and the weak light. At that time my grandfather was a 42 years old "Privatdozent" in Berlin. He thus was born 1874, in Breslau, at the time a German part of Silesia, today Wroclav in Poland. In Breslau two Cassirer owned factories could provide for him so that he could study without any economic troubles. He married his cousin Toni Bondy from Vienna. His own parents also were cousins and the many intermarriages in the family perhaps can explain the many peculiar and outstanding personalities in the family. In Germany two of Ernst Cassirer's cousins are still more well-known than he himself: Bruno Cassirer, the publisher, and Paul Cassirer, the art dealer who introduced the impressionists in Germany. In the family was also a neurologist Richard Cassirer, well-known for his thesis on multi-sclerosis, a conductor Fritz Cassirer and Kurt Goldstein, who is still well known in mo dern neurology. Of course the many intermarriages had a darker side which resulted in exceptionally many suicides. Grandfather, though, only suffered from an easy melancholy in the mornings, tells my grandmother, and he usually was in a sunny and happy mood.
Ernst Cassirer began to study law - his father needed a solicitor for the business, but he very soon changed to Germanistik, and also later, as he had become a philosopher still devoted himself to philosophy of language and the great German poets, above all Goethe, who took a special room in his heart. His father Eduard often complained that his most talented son did not engage himself in the business. It would have been much better if Ernst had taken care of the factory, he used to say, and that the dull Richard had become a scholar.
Ernst Cassirer was fascinated by Kant and went to the well-known Kant specialist Hermann Cohen in Marburg and rather soon he became Cohen's most prominent student in a philosophical direction that was called New-Kantianism. The fact that Cohen was Jewish was to become very important in Ernst Cassirer's carrier, since he already at that time was considered to be a representative of a "Jewish philosophy that was alien to the German Volksseele".
Cassirer wrote his dissertation on Descartes and he included the text of the dissertation in his next work, Leibniz' System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902), for which he received a prize in a contest announced by Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften. Already in this first major work Cassirer showed an ability to put complexes of problems in their historical as well as systematical contexts, a trait that became still more developed in his later publications.
Upon Cohen's strong wish Cassirer applied for positions as Universitätsdozent at several universities: in Berlin, Strassbourg and in Göttingen, but as a representative for "Jewish New-Kantianism" he was not accepted anywhere. There can be little doubt that anti Semitism was a major reason for these setbacks, even if this was still not said publicly. On the other side, there was no need for that; anti Semitism was a normal and predictable ingredient in Germany. Ernst Cassirer had to be prepared for that his being Jewish would have negative consequences for his carrier. The NS "Machtübernahme" in 1933 was only the peak of a ongoing brutalising of xenophobia in Germany which was to be fatal for Jews, gypsies, communists and other "deviant" people.
Early in 1933 a decree was proclaimed which launched the phrase "Recht ist was dem Führer dient". This decree was to become of decisive importance for Ernst Cassirer and his family. At the time the decree was launched my grandfather said, that if not all of Germany's lawyers did protest against this, German would be lost. "Not one single voice of protest was heard", writes my grandmother, and my grandparents decided to leave Germany immediately. A law from 7 April 1933 with the opaque name of "Wiederherstellung des Berufsamtentums" aimed at eliminating all Jews in official positions and made Cassirer's emigration necessary.
At that point of time, Ernst Cassirer had been a full professor at the University of Hamburg since 1919. 1929/30 he was its "Rektor" and in that capacity he had to participate in many official events. Ernst Cassirer did not neglect the possibility to underline the importance of the democratic constitution and he tried to show the roots of democratic thinking i German history and philosophy in order to strengthen that way of reasoning.
In the speeches that Ernst Cassirer held at these occasions, which he himself considered to be mainly political, he reasoned on a far to abstract and distanced level for his view to get any considerable effect. But in one of his rektorial speeches Cassirer claims that "Wissen ist Pflicht" and stresses the responsibilities and duties of intellectual people. This was a very obvious and clear declaration of a standing-point that can even be interpreted as an exhortation to act, more the obvious for those who knew the style of Cassirer's usual writings and lessons, in which abstraction and distance are prominent style-markers.
Cassirer was called the "Olympian" already by his fellow students in Marburg. I guess he got that nickname for his great love and knowledge of ancient Greece with its philosophy and mythology and perhaps this love was also inspired by a psychological longing for the times where there was neither Jew nor Greek. But of course his encyclopaedic knowledge of history of man and of science contributed to his great love for Greek thinking. Another part of the Olympic in Ernst Cassirer is his distance to philosophical problems: he never simplifies matters, and he always tries to illuminate the problems with the viewpoints of all philosophers that have ever uttered any opinion on the subject in question. Due to his enormous reading and almost photographical memory this treatment can make it rather hard to get a clear and concise view of Ernst Cassirer's own standpoint in a question. So when Ernst Cassirer says "Wissen ist Pflicht" this is a unusually strong and straightforwardly put point of view.
For a reader of Sartre the pointing towards man's duty seems existentialist, but as a matter of fact existentialism in its primary form of Heidegger's was actually the school in German philosophy that launched the sharpest criticism against Cassirer's interpretation of Kant. An important and well-known incident in Cassirer's philosophy as well as private life was the disputation between him and Heidegger in Davos 1929. It seems that the bourgeois and "Olympic" Cassirer had no great chance of winning a dispute against the youthful and aggressive Heidegger.
Heidegger may very well have been a more acute philosopher than Cassirer; he was more original, in any case, but the fact that he was the winner of the Davos disputation no doubt also might be explained by the spirit of the times. Heidegger was the "modern" one of the two and his existentialism of "Blut und Boden" caught the wind (and might even have steered the same wind) much more than Cassirer's universal humanism ever could. The fact that Heidegger was known as an overt anti Semit in 1929 did certainly contribute to his success in the Reich: he was the first outspoken nazi that became Rektor of a German university.
I think that one of the possible reasons for the fact that Cassirer never founded any "school" (contrary to Heidegger) is that his personality prevented him from writing in a style that evaded problems, objections or other perspectives in the history of philosophy, all of which together make his writings rather cumbersome and which also makes it impossible to summarise his theories in slogans and catchwords.
As my grandfather left Germany in 1933 I think his decision was not only based upon a rational analysis of the ominous decree "Recht ist was dem Führer dient". I think a very important ingredient was his personality. In the book that my grandmother wrote he appears to have been severely inhibited as to expressing aggression, and I've been told that whenever a quarrel came about in the family (which must have been rather often) he just left the room. This inadequacy made him to a permanent "friendly" person, who even saluted a subordinate university clerk with the same respect as any of the professors. (My Grandmother characterised him in her viennese bourgeois way as having no "Klassenbewußtsein". My personal reflections upon this are 1) that she might have had enough of it for both of them, and 2) that Ernst Cassirer might really not have made any difference between people, because he was equally little interested in them all.So when Ernst Cassirer left Germany in 1933 I think he also left the "room" as a result of this disposition. Even later, during his Swedish period, it is curious to watch his interest in rather obscure Swedish philosophers instead of dealing with problems far more important.
The passages in Toni Cassirer's book that describe what happened in those days are extremely interesting. Immediately after the emigration, during his stay in Oxford 1934/35 as a visiting scholar, my grandfather uttered the intent to write a philosophical essay on (and against) Nazism. Toni Cassirer, though, felt it to be her responsibility to prevent him from doing that. In a very emotional part of her book my grandmother tells how vehemently she had to argue to obstruct Ernst Cassirer from writing something that could harm relatives and friends in Germany. Ernst Cassirer followed her advice and he actually never accomplished his intent. (I do not consider either Essay on Man nor Myth of the state clear and outspoken enough to fulfil that claim.)
My grandmother's very emotional defence for her acting deviates considerably from her usual style, which I suppose is due to reproaches on Ernst Cassirer for not having spoken up while there was still time to do so and perhaps even a possible result to be expected. Not one single person opened his voice against the decree of 1933, my grandmother laments, not understanding that she acted in exactly the same way as she forbade her husband to do so. There is of course one complication: they were not only German, they were Jews. Perhaps Toni Cassirer did after all not consider her to be a Jewish German but rather a Jew in Germany.Toni Cassirer writes a great deal about the difference in connection with her portrait of Cohen.
Her actions are certainly an indication in that direction: the immediate withdrawal from the scene of battle, leaving it to the "real Germans" to fight. Even if times were different in those days as to freedom of utterance and even if the situation in Germany already was difficult, there must have been opposition against Hitler also apart from the communist one. Was there not one newspaper in which the former Rektor of Hamburg's University could have written an article against what he felt was wrong without fear of reprisals? But what this incident also shows is the fact that already in 1933 terror was so dominant in nazi Germany that protests really were dangerous - I've heard that they were so also for "ordinary" Germans.
Ernst Cassirer's friendliness, that I have touched upon earlier, had an important effect in that it obviously was difficult to dislike him. Ardent academic opponents and even anti Semites felt an unwilling admiration and perhaps even a kind of affection for him, and many of his students and listeners became his friends. The most important one of these friends was to be the professor of philosophy at Göteborgs Högskola, Malte Jacobson, who became governor (landshövding) of Göteborgs och Bohus län. He had been listening in on some of Ernst Cassirer's lectures in Germany and he mediated an invitation for a personal professorship for five years in Göteborg. My grandfather accepted the invitation with great pleasure, something that is said to have surprised the faculty in Göteborg: Cassirer was a highly estimated academic and Göteborgs Högskola had only a couple of hundred students. But Cassirer never felt at home in Oxford, because among other things that he was obliged to lecture in English. In Sweden he could speak German since more or less all educated people had learned German as their first language in school, and the structure of the university and of university teaching was more or less the same as he was used to from Germany. So he felt very much at ease in Sweden and he and my grandmother were very proud to become Swedish citizens in 1935, which they both were until their dead (which later prevented Ernst Cassirer from getting his due pension from Germany).
In the memoirs of my grandmother Sweden is pictured more or less like a paradise: Sweden was clean, there was (already at that time) high living standards with no beggars in the streets, and nor was there any anti Semitism. At least, that was what Toni Cassirer believed. She was wrong in that assumption, and even if anti Semitism in Sweden was quite different from anti Semitism in Germany, the situation for refugees who wanted an asylum in Sweden was as repelling in 1935 as it actually is again today.
In this Swedish paradise there also was the wife of the saving angel Malte Jacobsson, Emma. Since she had risen in a Jewish home in Vienna, very much the same as my grandmother's, there was a rapid and deep understanding between the two of them. Nobody is portrayed with the same uninhibited warmth and devotion as Emma Jacobsson, a learned and artistic person who made one at the same time unique social and aesthetic achievement with her knitting industry that provided wives of unemployed workers in Bohuslän with a beautiful and nourishing occupation.
The anti nazi position of most of the professors at Göteborgs Högskola and in Göteborg in general, a standing point for which Torgny Segerstedt was the incarnation, of course contributed to that Ernst and Toni Cassirer felt so well in Göteborg. (Segerstedt was the chief editor of Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, known for its clearsighted attitudes towards nazi Germany. He wrote a special chapter in the history of Göteborg during WW II.)
The first book that Cassirer published in Sweden was Determinismus und Indeterminismus. Über das Kausalproblem in der modernen Fysik. which he had written in England. It happened at that time that my grandmother fell ill and my grandfather for once was forced to go into the kitchen, a place I think he was not very familiar with. He made some tea, which endeavour he accomplished. But as he was to warm the milk he put the bottle directly on the stove with a consequence that he theoretically should have been able to foresee with regard to his newly published book! My grandmother was so happy for that incident that she recovered immediately.
As soon as Ernst Cassirer arrived in Sweden he begun to learn the language and read Swedish philosophers. Somewhat surprising he fished out a romantic poet and philosopher from his oblivion and wrote a book on him: Thorilds Stellung in der Geistesgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. He also became involved in the criticism of the radical rationalism of the domineering philosophical school of Axel Hägerström in Uppsala, which discarded assertions about practical and moral knowledge as superstition. Sweden was the right place to return to his early interest in Renée Descartes and he investigated Descarte's part in the conversion of queen Christina to Catholicism (Drottning Christina och Descartes.).
The appointment of Ernst Cassirer in Göteborg ended in 1941. Another angel of the Jacobsson family emerged: Malte and Emma's daughter Ingrid had noticed an advertisement of a cargo ship with eight beds for passengers from Göteborg to New York. Since Ernst Cassirer had accepted an invitation to Yale University and since the political climate had become highly unhealthy in Sweden after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, my grandparents decided somewhat reluctantly to leave Sweden in May 1941.
In the USA Ernst Cassirer wrote his two last and most popular books, An essay on man and The myth of the state. His state of health had deteriorated under the pressure of the political events and my grandmother writes that she was in constant fear when her husband did not return on scheduled time which happened now and then when Cassirer became totally absorbed by some idea he wanted to pursue in a library.
On the 12th of April 1945 the radio reported that Franklin Roosevelt died calmly in his sleep. "If you promise me to die in the same way", my grandmother said to Ernst Cassirer, "I grant you to die tomorrow". As the obedient husband that he was, he did so. He had a heart attack after his lecture the 13th April and dropped down dead on the street outside of Columbia University, where he held an appointment after Yale.
It is obviously of great use in some times to be an outstanding researcher and also in certain circumstances to have one such as a grandfather. As I said by way of introduction, I had not been standing here had it not been for him. But in evil times being outstanding does not suffice. You also have to be helped by people of principle. To those who acted righteously in the 30ies and to those who do it today, in times that are as evil as they were then, and now as the world needs as many persons who can separate good from evil and say so and act accordingly, my grandfather from his Olympic heaven sends through me his warm and sincere thanks!