Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)
Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy has variably been described as an “original thinker,”
a “Christian social thinker,” and someone who possessed an “original
mind” and “dazzling and unique insights.” Despite these
epithets, he has eluded lasting classification in a world dominated by academic,
theological, and mass market conventions that have no room for an intellect
that flowered generations, if not centuries, ahead of its time. In fact, it
is the originality of his thought, his unique approaches to illuminating the
progress of historic upheavals, and his understanding of the role of language
in sociological processes that might eventually lead to a new name for his
contributions to historical, sociological, and theological thought. That day,
however, has not yet come. Whereas his own biography helps readers understand
how he was shaped by certain events, it does not reflect the reality of his
contributions to our understanding of the world.
Eugen Rosenstock was born in Berlin on July 6, 1888, the son of Theodor and
Paula Rosenstock. As a young adult, Theodor had wanted to pursue a scholarly
education, but the death of his father compelled him to find a means of support
for his widowed stepmother and his stepsister. Thus, he entered the field
of banking and eventually became a member of the prestigious Berlin Stock
Exchange. Paula Rosenstock was the daughter of the head of a well-known Jewish
school in Wolfenbüttel. Paula and Theodor had seven surviving children,
of whom Eugen was the fourth child, and their only son.
After spending the first years of his education in a school for wealthy families,
Eugen Rosenstock transferred to the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium. It was a school
known for its rigorous academic standards, particularly in the classics. Although
his academic passions were history and philology (language), Eugen followed
his father’s wish and studied law. After graduation from Gymnasium,
he pursued law at the universities of Zürich, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
In 1909, at the age of 21, he received a doctorate in law from the University
of Heidelberg. Three years later, he had become a Privatdozent and began to
teach constitutional law and the history of law at the University of Leipzig.
At age 24, he was the youngest Privatdozent ever to teach in Germany.
Although his family’s background was Jewish, he was christened in the
Protestant Church at the age of 18. This decision did not seem to him to be
a drastic conversion, since his family already celebrated some Christian holidays,
in keeping with other German families at the time. Gradually, however, his
faith became central to his later work. In fact, it was fully integrated into
his major lifetime works in law, philosophy, labor practices, education, the
social sciences and social history, and voluntary work service.
Early in 1914, Rosenstock went to Florence to conduct historical research
with his brother-in-law, Hermann Michel, an editor of the German encyclopedia
Brockhaus. There he met a young Swiss woman, Margrit Hüssy,
who was studying the history of art. They married that same year, just before
the outbreak of World War I. Drafted at once as a lieutenant in the mounted
artillery, he was stationed at or near the Western front throughout the war,
including 18 months at Verdun. During this period he organized courses for
the troops, replacing the limited instruction in patriotism with broader topics.
In 1916, he and his friend, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, also
on active duty, exchanged letters on Judaism and Christianity. That correspondence
has since become well known, and much of it is now contained in Judaism
Despite Christianity.
Rosenstock was keenly aware that World War I was a historical watershed.
At the end of the war, not wishing to return to teaching at the University
of Leipzig, he sought professional options better suited to a changed world.
Together with a member of the board of Daimler-Benz, the German car manufacturer,
he started and edited the first factory newspaper in Germany, the Daimler
Werkzeitung. Together with Leo Weismantel, Werner Picht, Hans Ehrenberg,
Karl Barth, and Viktor von Weizsäcker, he founded the Patmos Verlag,
publishing works focused on new religious, philosophical, and social perspectives.
Later, he began a journal, Die Kreatur (1926-1930), which was edited
by Josef Wittig, a Roman Catholic; Martin Buber, a Jew; and Viktor von Weizsäcker,
a Protestant. Among the contributors were Nicholas Berdyaev, Lev Shestov,
Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Simon, Hugo Bergmann, Rudolf Hallo, and Florens Christian
Rang. Each of these men had, between 1910 and 1932, in one way or another,
offered an alternative to the idealism, positivism, and historicism that dominated
German universities. Rosenstock himself published Die Hochzeit des Krieges
und der Revolution (The Marriage of War and Revolution, 1920),
a collection of current events essays that were replete with visionary thinking
and practical warnings of confiicts to come. Unfortunately, some of these
conflicts were later to occur.
In 1921, Margrit and Eugen had a son, Hans. In 1925, they legally changed their family name to Rosenstock-Hüssy, but it was not until after Eugen’s emigration to the United States that he used the hyphenated name professionally.
Although never a Marxist, Rosenstock was invited by a group of trade union
representatives to found and direct the Akademie der Arbeit (Academy of Labor)
in Frankfurt/Main in 1921. This institution offered courses and seminars for
blue-collar workers.. Rosenstock resigned in 1923 over differences with the
people who had hired him. Nevertheless, he did not give up his involvement
with adult education and his efforts to give industrial workers a voice of
their own in society.
Rosenstock was awarded a second doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in 1923 for his scholarly medieval study, Königshaus und Stämme in Deutschland zwischen 911 und 1250 (The Royal House and the Tribes in Germany between 911 and 1250). He wrote this work in Leipzig and published it in 1914. He then lectured at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the faculty of social science and social history. In 1923, he was offered a job at the University of Breslau as a full professor of German legal history, a position he held until January 30, 1933.
In 1924, Rosenstock published Angewandte Seelenkunde (Practical
Knowledge of the Soul) in which he first outlined his radically new method
for the social sciences. This new approach to characterizing and understanding
the social sciences was based on language, on the spoken word, and it used
grammar as a method to analyze issues in the social sciences. He later called
the approach “metanomics.” This method remained at the heart of
all his later works and was discussed more comprehensively in his two-volume
Soziologie (1956-1958). Volume I was entitled, “On the Forces
of Common Life (When Space Governs)”, and Volume II carried the title,
“On the Forces of History (When the Times Are Obeyed).” He further
elaborated these ideas in another two-volume book, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts:
Eine Leibhaftige Grammatik in Vier Teilen (The Speech of Mankind:
A Personal Grammar in Four Parts, 1963-1964).
An inspiring and admired teacher, Rosenstock became active in many other ways
at the university. In response to and together with some of his students,
he helped organize voluntary work service camps for students, farmers, and
workers to address the appalling living conditions and atrocious labor conditions
at coal mines in Waldenburg, Silesia. This work camp initiative was known
as the Löwenberger Arbeitslager. Participants in the Löwenberger
initiative later formed the core of the Kreisau Circle, a German resistance
movement against the Nazis.
During that time, a Catholic priest and friend of Rosenstock’s, Josef
Wittig, was excommunicated and thus lost his right to teach church history
at the University of Breslau. Rosenstock stood by Wittig and together they
published Das Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church) in
1927-1928. That work contained two volumes of essays on the life of the Church
and a third volume devoted to documents leading up to Wittig’s excommunication.
While he was still teaching at Breslau, Rosenstock wrote and published the
first of his major works: Die Europäischen Revolutionen—Volkscharaktere
und Staatenbildung (The European Revolutions and the Character of
Nations; 1931). This book showed how 1,000 years of European history
had been created from five different European national revolutions that collectively
came to an end in World War I.
On January 30, 1933, Germany fell to National Socialism, and Rosenstock resigned
from the university at once, but remained in Germany, without working. By
the end of that year and with the help of C. J. Friedrich, professor of government
at Harvard University and the only person Rosenstock knew in the United States,
he was appointed Kuno Francke Lecturer in German Art and Culture at Harvard.
It was at Harvard that Rosenstock-Huessy encountered strong opposition to
the presentation of his ideas in social history and other topics, all of which
were based on his Christian faith. Rosenstock-Huessy frequently mentioned
God in class. He also often attacked pure, objective academic thinking, a
teaching tradition assumed by the Harvard faculty to be a prerequisite for
high scholarship. These attacks grated on the secular beliefs of other Harvard
faculty members. Profound differences of opinion ensued and led, in 1935,
to his accepting an appointment as professor of social philosophy at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He made his home in nearby Norwich, Vermont.
He taught at Dartmouth until his retirement in 1957, having inspired generations
of students.
Despite the falling-out with Harvard, Rosenstock-Huessy had made important
friendships there that helped him in his publishing efforts. His first major
writing task was to develop an English-language revision of his earlier book
on revolutions, and he soon published Out of Revolution: Autobiography
of Western Man (1938). George Allen Morgan, a former Harvard student
under Alfred North Whitehead and himself the author of the classic What
Nietzsche Means, subsequently assisted Rosenstock-Huessy in the preparation
of The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (1946). Further,
Whitehead had strongly supported Rosenstock-Huessy in his disagreements with
members of the Harvard faculty. Rosenstock-Huessy continued his pioneering
efforts on behalf of voluntary work service in the United States. At the urging
of Eleanor Roosevelt, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, and other prominent
figures, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Rosenstock-Huessy to lead the
creation of a special Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the woods
of Vermont. Involving mainly students from Dartmouth, Radcliffe, and Harvard,
its purpose was to train young leaders to expand the 7-year-old CCC from a
program for unemployed youth into a work service program that would accept
volunteers from all walks of life. A pre-existing CCC “side camp”
near Sharon, Vermont, was chosen for this activity, and was named Camp William
James, in honor of that philosopher’s search for a moral equivalent
of war. The camp enjoyed a short term of success as a place where young people
from many walks of life worked together in common enterprise. However, it
was disbanded when the United States entered World War II. The voluntary work
service model at Camp William James, as well as Rosenstock-Huessy’s
writings about voluntary work service, have been cited as infiuential in the
design and development of the Peace Corps.
After World War II and continuing through his retirement from Dartmouth, Rosenstock-Huessy
was a frequent guest professor at many universities in Germany and the United
States. He remained active in lecturing and writing until his final years.
His output comprises more than 500 essays, articles, and monographs, as well
as 40 books.
Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy died in 1959. In 1960, Freya von Moltke, the widow
of the German resistance leader Helmuth James von Moltke, who had opposed
National Socialism and was executed by the Nazis, came to share Rosenstock-Huessy’s
life. Her husband had been one of Rosenstock’s students in Breslau and
a participant in the original Silesian work camps. Rosenstock-Huessy died
on February 24, 1973. Rosenstock-Huessy’s extraordinary insights continue
to influence the lives of a growing number of people from around the world
and from all walks of life.