Leo Löwenthal (; 3 November 1900 – 21 January 1993) was a German
sociologist and
philosopher
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
usually associated with the
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main ...
.
Life
Born in
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...
as the son of assimilated Jews (his father was a physician), Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic, officially known as the German Reich, was the German Reich, German state from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclai ...
. 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
Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art pop_art.html" ;"title="f. pop art">f. pop artor mass art, somet ...
as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the ''Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung''.
Heterodox and independent
Marxist
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
s, open to new intellectual currents such as
psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek language, Greek: and is a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious mind, unconscious processes and their influence on conscious mind, conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Based on The Inte ...
, and predominantly Jewish, the institute's members swiftly fled
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
when
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
came to power in 1933. After a year in Geneva, they settled in New York, where
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
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
The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other ...
in Washington. Although
Horkheimer,
Adorno, and
Friedrich Pollock returned to Frankfurt to reestablish the institute after the war, Löwenthal, like former members
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse ( ; ; July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German–American philosopher, social critic, and Political philosophy, political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at ...
,
Franz Neumann,
Otto Kirchheimer, and
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and set ...
, chose to remain in the United States. After seven years as research director of the
Voice of America
Voice of America (VOA or VoA) is an international broadcasting network funded by the federal government of the United States that by law has editorial independence from the government. It is the largest and oldest of the American internation ...
, and another year 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
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature' ...
. “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 Löwenthal's, Pamela Munro (now an actress) adds that in these evenings in San Francisco, "Löwenthal 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 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 encompasses a variety of artistic, Culture, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no longer possible to rely upon previous ways of depicting ...
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 (; ) is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. ''Telos'' is the root of the modern term teleology, the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, ...
''.
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
The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public university, public research university in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in West Berlin in 1948 with American support during the early Cold War period a ...
, and the
University of Hamburg
The University of Hamburg (, also referred to as UHH) is a public university, public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('':de:Allgemeines Vorlesungswesen, ...
. 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."
[Michael Kausch: Erziehung und Unterhaltung: Leo Löwenthals Theorie der Massenkommunikation. SOVEC. Göttingen 1985. ]
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, 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
Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
.
Works
* 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,
* "Goethe and False Subjectivity"
''Telos''60 (Summer 1984). New York: Telos Press.
References
* ''Das Utopische soll Funken schlagen. Leo Löwenthal zum hundertsten Geburtstag'' (ed.)
Peter-Erwin Jansen, mit zahlreichen Abbildungen, Verlag Klostermann 2000,
* ''In steter Freundschaft. Briefwechsel. Leo Löwenthal /
Siegfried Kracauer. 1921–1966'' (ed.)
Peter-Erwin Jansen und Christian Schmidt, zu Klampen Verlag 2003,
* Udo Göttlich, ''Kritik der Medien. Reflexionsstufen kritisch-materialistischer Medientheorien am Beispiel von Leo Löwenthal und
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contribu ...
'', Opladen : Westdeutscher Verlag 1996
* Gregor-Sönke Schneider: ''Keine Kritische Theorie ohne Leo Löwenthal. Die Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1932-1941/42)''. Philosophie in Geschichte und Gegenwart Bd. 5. Herausgegeben von Alfred Schmidt und Michael Jeske. Mit einem Vorwort von Peter-Erwin Jansen. Peter Lang Verlag 2014,
External links
*
Biographie des Frankfurter Archivs*
An Unmastered Past:The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lowenthal, Leo
1900 births
1993 deaths
German sociologists
Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
Frankfurt School philosophers
Jewish sociologists
Jewish socialists
Jewish philosophers
Writers from Frankfurt
People from Hesse-Nassau
University of California, Berkeley faculty
Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
German male writers
People of the United States Office of War Information