Leo Löwenthal
Encyclopedia
Leo Löwenthal was a German
-Jewish sociologist usually associated with the Frankfurt School
.
as the son of assimilated Jews (his father was a physician), Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic
. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research
in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature
and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis
, and predominantly Jewish, the Institute's members swiftly fled Germany
when Adolf Hitler
came to power in 1933. After a year in Geneva, they settled in New York, where Columbia University
gave them shelter.
Löwenthal maintained a close relationship with his colleagues, even during the war when several of them moved to California and he began to work with the Office of War Information
in Washington. Although Horkheimer
, Adorno
, and Friedrich Pollock
returned to Frankfurt to reestablish the Institute after the war, Löwenthal, like former members Herbert Marcuse
, Franz Neumann
, Otto Kirchheimer
, and Erich Fromm
, chose to remain in the United States. After seven years as research director of the Voice of America
, and another seven years at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences
, he joined the Berkeley
Speech Department in 1956 and shortly thereafter the Department of Sociology. Although officially retiring in 1968, Löwenthal remained vigorously active in departmental and University affairs until virtually the end of his life. From 1968 to 1972, he served on the Budget Committee, and in 1973-74, chaired the Sociology Department.
The celebrated private seminar Löwenthal conducted with graduate students interested in the sociology of literature was launched during the student strike of 1970 and continued to meet through the last months of 1992. As two of its participants, Jim Stockinger and Terry Strathman, remember it, the seminar produced a remarkable “cross-generational dialogue,” whose focus on literature “was particularly liberating” for sociologists unaccustomed to literary analysis. “Good wine, cheese, hearty and spirited debate and a large dose of German conviviality,” they recalled, “made these evenings unforgettable experiences.” As a former teaching assistant of Lowenthal's, Pamela Munro (now an actress) adds that in these evenings in San Francisco, "Lowenthal exuded a Weimarian atmosphere."
Löwenthal's publications were collected during the 1980s, both in German, by the Suhrkamp Verlag, and in English, by Transaction Press. Most notable among them were Prophets of Deceit (written with Norbert Guterman
in 1949), Literature and the Image of Man (1957) and Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (1961). Also included were his early writings on Jewish themes and his last ruminations on postmodernism, against whose dangers he warned. His autobiographical reflections, including fascinating conversations with the German sociologist Helmut Dubiel, were published by the University of California as An Unmastered Past in 1987. The extensive interviews he gave in 1989 to another German interlocutor, Frithjof Hager, dealt with postmodernism
and other contemporary themes; they stimulated a collection of responses by European and American scholars published in honor of his ninetieth birthday as "Geschichte Denken: Ein Notizbuch für Leo Löwenthal" by the Reclam Verlag of Leipzig. For his eightieth, he had been the recipient of a Festschrift of celebratory essays in the journal Telos
.
In the last decade of his life, Löwenthal was richly honored on both sides of the Atlantic. Awarded the Berkeley Citation and the Federal Republic of Germany's Distinguished Merit Cross in 1985, he also received honorary doctorates from the University of Siegen
, the Free University of Berlin
, and the University of Hamburg
. Further, he was given the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Medal and Adorno Prize, as well as a year at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 1985, the first full-length appreciation of his work was published by Michael Kausch as "Erziehung und Unterhaltung: Leo Löwenthals Theorie der Massenkommunikation".
Löwenthal's training in collaborative scholarship and his broad humanistic learning allowed him to play a leading role both in the institutional and intellectual life of the campus as a whole. An early supporter of the Free Speech Movement
, but troubled by the excesses that followed, he was a leading member of the faculty committee chaired by Charles Muscatine
that produced the widely admired report published as Education at Berkeley.
Löwenthal displayed an extraordinary ability to maintain close friendships with scholars in disparate fields and begin new ones with members of very different generations. He remained a vital presence long after his active teaching days were over. His quick, often acerbic wit, uncanny shrewdness in judging – and gleefully gossiping about – people, and manifest zest for living life fully never deserted him. Nor did his intransigent refusal to abandon the long-cherished ideals of his youth, even as he soberly acknowledged the improbability of their ever being realized. Ruthlessly unsentimental and impatient with cant of any kind, he nonetheless refused to succumb to the sour cynicism of those who turn into the deadly adults Horkheimer and Adorno warned against.
Löwenthal died in Berkeley
, California
.
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
-Jewish sociologist usually associated with the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
.
Life
Born in FrankfurtFrankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
as the son of assimilated Jews (his father was a physician), Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research
Institute for Social Research
The Institute for Social Research is a research organization for sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School and critical theory....
in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature
Sociology of literature
Sociology of literature is a subfield of Sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis...
and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
, and predominantly Jewish, the Institute's members swiftly fled Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
when Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
came to power in 1933. After a year in Geneva, they settled in New York, where Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
gave them shelter.
Löwenthal maintained a close relationship with his colleagues, even during the war when several of them moved to California and he began to work with the Office of War Information
United States Office of War Information
The United States Office of War Information was a U.S. government agency created during World War II to consolidate government information services. It operated from June 1942 until September 1945...
in Washington. Although Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was a German-Jewish philosopher-sociologist, famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. His most important works include The Eclipse of Reason and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment...
, Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, and Friedrich Pollock
Friedrich Pollock
Friedrich Pollock was a German social scientist and philosopher. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, and a member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory.- Life :...
returned to Frankfurt to reestablish the Institute after the war, Löwenthal, like former members Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
, Franz Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
, Otto Kirchheimer
Otto Kirchheimer
Otto Kirchheimer was a German jurist of Jewish ancestry and political scientist of the Frankfurt School whose work essentially covered the state and its constitution....
, and Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Life:Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am...
, chose to remain in the United States. After seven years as research director of the Voice of America
Voice of America
Voice of America is the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. It is one of five civilian U.S. international broadcasters working under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors . VOA provides a wide range of programming for broadcast on radio...
, and another seven years at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is an American interdisciplinary research body in Stanford, California focusing on the social sciences and humanities . Fellows are elected in a closed process, to spend a period of residence at the Center, released from other duties...
, he joined the Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
Speech Department in 1956 and shortly thereafter the Department of Sociology. Although officially retiring in 1968, Löwenthal remained vigorously active in departmental and University affairs until virtually the end of his life. From 1968 to 1972, he served on the Budget Committee, and in 1973-74, chaired the Sociology Department.
The celebrated private seminar Löwenthal conducted with graduate students interested in the sociology of literature was launched during the student strike of 1970 and continued to meet through the last months of 1992. As two of its participants, Jim Stockinger and Terry Strathman, remember it, the seminar produced a remarkable “cross-generational dialogue,” whose focus on literature “was particularly liberating” for sociologists unaccustomed to literary analysis. “Good wine, cheese, hearty and spirited debate and a large dose of German conviviality,” they recalled, “made these evenings unforgettable experiences.” As a former teaching assistant of Lowenthal's, Pamela Munro (now an actress) adds that in these evenings in San Francisco, "Lowenthal exuded a Weimarian atmosphere."
Löwenthal's publications were collected during the 1980s, both in German, by the Suhrkamp Verlag, and in English, by Transaction Press. Most notable among them were Prophets of Deceit (written with Norbert Guterman
Norbert Guterman
Norbert Guterman was a scholar, and translator of scholarly and literary works from French, Polish and Latin into English. His translations were remarkable for their range of subject matter and high quality....
in 1949), Literature and the Image of Man (1957) and Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (1961). Also included were his early writings on Jewish themes and his last ruminations on postmodernism, against whose dangers he warned. His autobiographical reflections, including fascinating conversations with the German sociologist Helmut Dubiel, were published by the University of California as An Unmastered Past in 1987. The extensive interviews he gave in 1989 to another German interlocutor, Frithjof Hager, dealt with postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
and other contemporary themes; they stimulated a collection of responses by European and American scholars published in honor of his ninetieth birthday as "Geschichte Denken: Ein Notizbuch für Leo Löwenthal" by the Reclam Verlag of Leipzig. For his eightieth, he had been the recipient of a Festschrift of celebratory essays in the journal Telos
TELOS (journal)
Telos is an academic journal published in the United States. It was founded in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction...
.
In the last decade of his life, Löwenthal was richly honored on both sides of the Atlantic. Awarded the Berkeley Citation and the Federal Republic of Germany's Distinguished Merit Cross in 1985, he also received honorary doctorates from the University of Siegen
University of Siegen
The University of Siegen in Siegen, North Rhine-Westphalia, was founded in 1972. 14,100 students were enrolled at the university as of October 2010.-Faculties:University of Siegen offers in total 126 degree programmes across four faculties:...
, the Free University of Berlin
Free University of Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin is one of the leading and most prestigious research universities in Germany and continental Europe. It distinguishes itself through its modern and international character. It is the largest of the four universities in Berlin. Research at the university is focused on the...
, and the University of Hamburg
University of Hamburg
The University of Hamburg is a university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by Wilhelm Stern and others. It grew out of the previous Allgemeines Vorlesungswesen and the Kolonialinstitut as well as the Akademisches Gymnasium. There are around 38,000 students as of the start of...
. Further, he was given the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Medal and Adorno Prize, as well as a year at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 1985, the first full-length appreciation of his work was published by Michael Kausch as "Erziehung und Unterhaltung: Leo Löwenthals Theorie der Massenkommunikation".
Influence
As the final survivor of the Frankfurt School’s inner circle, Löwenthal achieved international recognition as a symbol of its remarkable collective achievement.Löwenthal's training in collaborative scholarship and his broad humanistic learning allowed him to play a leading role both in the institutional and intellectual life of the campus as a whole. An early supporter of the Free Speech Movement
Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–1965 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley under the informal leadership of students Mario Savio, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and...
, but troubled by the excesses that followed, he was a leading member of the faculty committee chaired by Charles Muscatine
Charles Muscatine
Charles Muscatine was an academic specialising in medieval literature, particularly Chaucer. He participated in the D-day landing on Omaha Beach and was fired by UC Berkeley for refusing to sign a McCarthyite oath...
that produced the widely admired report published as Education at Berkeley.
Löwenthal displayed an extraordinary ability to maintain close friendships with scholars in disparate fields and begin new ones with members of very different generations. He remained a vital presence long after his active teaching days were over. His quick, often acerbic wit, uncanny shrewdness in judging – and gleefully gossiping about – people, and manifest zest for living life fully never deserted him. Nor did his intransigent refusal to abandon the long-cherished ideals of his youth, even as he soberly acknowledged the improbability of their ever being realized. Ruthlessly unsentimental and impatient with cant of any kind, he nonetheless refused to succumb to the sour cynicism of those who turn into the deadly adults Horkheimer and Adorno warned against.
Löwenthal died in Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
.
Works and references
- Leo Löwenthal, Schriften in fünf Bänden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1980-1987,
- Literatur und Massenkultur
- Das bürgerliche Bewußtsein in der Literatur
- Falsche Propheten. Studien zum Autoritarismus
- Judaica. Vorträge. Briefe
- Philosophische Frühschriften
- Leo Löwenthal, Mitmachen wollte ich nie. Ein autobiografisches Gespräch mit Helmut Dubiel, Suhrkamp 1980, ISBN 3-518-11014-4
- “Goethe and False Subjectivity”. Telos 60 (Summer 1984). New York: Telos Press.
- Das Utopische soll Funken schlagen. Leo Löwenthal zum hundertsten Geburtstag, (Hrsg.) Peter-Erwin Jansen, mit zahlreichen Abbildungen, Verlag Klostermann 2000, ISBN 3-465-03117-2
- In steter Freundschaft. Briefwechsel. Leo Löwenthal / Siegfried KracauerSiegfried KracauerSiegfried Kracauer was a German-Jewish writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist...
. 1921-1966, (Hrsg.) Peter-Erwin Jansen und Christian Schmidt, zu Klampen Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-934920-27-6
- Udo Göttlich, Kritik der Medien. Reflexionsstufen kritisch-materialistischer Medientheorien am Beispiel von Leo Löwenthal und Raymond WilliamsRaymond WilliamsRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, Opladen : Westdeutscher Verlag 1996