Life and work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Bio

Marc Huessy and Freya von Moltke:

"Succinctly we want to give an indication of the place this book occupies in the biographyof Rosenstock-Huessy. He was born July 6, 1888, in Berlin into an assimilated Jewish family. Hischildhood and youth played out in Germany at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of thetwentieth century. He himself says that he understood himself as a Christian from the beginningof his spiritual awakening. There was no sudden conversion. More than once, in that respect, hecited a passage of St. Augustine claiming that the soul is Christian by nature, naturaliterchristiana. That thought fits nicely into Rosenstock-Huessy’s conception of language, in whichhe argues that we only come to ourselves by an appeal that reaches out to us. This is a Johannineunderstanding of Christianity, as we have already noted. The “Word” that is from the beginningand that is with God, is of divine origin and calls us into existence. The divine word that calls usto life precedes the independence of the “I”. Not paganism, but the love of God is at the origin ofhumankind.Recent research has shown that in all probability Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy had decidedto be baptized as early as 1906, but according to his recently discovered baptismal certificate hedid not take this step until 1909 at age twenty-one, and in a very lonely setting. Apparently, eventhe minister who baptized him did not understand the meaning of the text that Rosenstock-Huessy used for baptism, Luke 6:4, as transcribed uniquely in the Codex Bezae: “On that sameday he saw somebody working land on the Sabbath, and he said to him: Sir, if you know whatyou are doing, you are blessed, but if you do not know, you are cursed and an offender of the law”. More than once Rosenstock-Huessy referred to that text to emphasize that it is not the actitself but the spirit in which an act is done that is decisive. In that way he understood hisbelongingness to the Christian tradition. Even more, in that sense he interpreted the core of theChristian tradition!After his time in a traditional classical gymnasium in Berlin, Rosenstock-Huessy studiedhistory of law at Heidelberg. He graduated there in 1909 at the age of twenty-one and completedhis habilitation in 1912 at the faculty of Law in Leipzig. He soon got a position there as aPrivatdozent in the history of medieval law. A Privatdozent had the right to lecture at auniversity, but he was dependent for his income on fees paid by the students attending thelectures. Franz Rosenzweig, although a little older than Rosenstock-Huessy, was among thosestudents, and thus began an intense friendship, cut short by Rosenzweig’s early death in 1929.From his early youth. Rosenstock-Huessy had a passionate love for everything related tolanguage. In his book Ja und Nein, autobiographische Fragmente (1968) he recounts the largenumber of projects he was involved in as a teenager and as a schoolboy in relation to language,such as systematically going through etymological dictionaries and translating classical works,among which were Homer and Shakespeare. Besides the compulsory study of language in school,he undertook to learn Egyptian and was able as a fourteen-year-old to translate the Proverbs ofPtah Hotep. From a very young age, Rosenstock-Huessy saw himself reflected in the words ofJohann Georg Hamann “Sprache ist der Knochen an dem ich ewig nagen werde“ (Language isthe bone I shall gnaw on for all eternity).Rosenstock-Huessy realized that language, speech “das eigentliche Wunder derWirklichkeit ist” (is the true miracle of reality). Speech binds and changes people. Speech createsexchange and dialogue. By speaking, appealing, and responding a new future emerges. History iscreated. Language, time, and history in their reciprocal relationships and unity are the greatthemes that kept Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy occupied all of his life.During the Great War of 1914-1918, on May 29, 1916, when Rosenzweig was located atthe Eastern front in the Balkans as a sergeant, and Rosenstock-Huessy was an officer at theWestern front in Belgium and France, the correspondence began of which the design of thegrammatical method is a part. Following the intensive discussions in 1913, the two men had lostsight of each other for a while. However, in one of the late-night conversations of that earliertime, Rosenstock-Huessy had criticized Rosenzweig for his free-floating Hegelian style ofthinking that enabled him to avoid taking a stance on anything. That conversation deeply shocked Rosenzweig, the more so because his fellow intellectual, Rosenstock-Huessy, admitted that forhis orientation in the world he relied on prayer in a church. On the verge of converting toChristianity as a remedy for his relativism, Rozenzweig visited a synagogue on Yom Kippur, theJewish Day of Atonement, and was deeply impressed by the liturgy of this observance, to whichthe description in the Stern still testifies. Here finally he found the truth for which he could take astand, and conversion was no more necessary! When Rosenstock-Huessy got the news ofRosenzweig’s commitment to Judaism, it prompted the 1916 correspondence, which many yearslater was published in English as Judaism Despite Christianity (1969), edited by Rosenstock-Huessy. In the very last letter of this exchange, Rosenzweig asked Rosenstock-Huessy to write tohim “about ‘The Languages.’” In response, Rosenstock-Huessy sent him a thirty-page letter thatforms the core of Angewandte Seelenkunde.After the First World War, as Rosenstock-Huessy saw it, Germany could not just go onwith business as usual. He himself chose not to return to his pre-war existence, and he refusedattractive job offers from academe, from government, and from the church. The trial of the warand the collapse of the German Empire reinforced his perception that little was to be expectedfrom the existing institutions, including the universities, to help towards the renewal of man andsociety. In order to further develop his grammatical method, he was in need of concreteexperience that would move in this direction. He offered his services to the auto manufacturerDaimler-Benz and began there the publication of a Werkzeitung, the first factory newspaper inGermany, with the intention to starting a dialogue between laborers (18,000 were on strike) andmanagement.He also had a leadership role in the founding in 1921 of the Akademie der Arbeit inFrankfurt, with the same intention of bringing different groups––students, teachers, Communists,socialists, Protestants, Catholics, laborers, jobless people––into dialogue with each other. Someof the Akademie staff members, however, had difficulty accepting Rosenstock-Huessy’sdialogical concept of “reciprocal learning.” The project failed, in particular because hiscolleagues could not accept that the education of adults is more than just the transfer ofknowledge. However, there was a long-term positive resonance from this effort.In early 1923, with a wife and child to support, Rosenstock-Huessy reluctantly returned tothe academy, becoming a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Breslau. He lookedupon this decision as a defeat and failure of all his initiatives. Nevertheless, from his position atBreslau he later actively participated in the founding of the Löwenberger Arbeitslager für Arbeiter, Bauern und Studenten in Silesia. These were work camps for farmers, laborers, andstudents from all walks of life and different political backgrounds: Communists, (national-)socialists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, liberals, conservatives, etc. These work camps may beseen as an example of effective adult education.Within this framework should be mentioned also the meetings some years later at the VonMoltke estate at Kreisau, where during the Second World War representatives of different socialgroups from Germany secretly discussed the future of a post-Hitler new democratic Germanywithin the framework of a new democratic Europe. A number of participants in this KreisauCircle, among them Helmuth James von Moltke, had first become acquainted at the work campsmentioned earlier. By their participation in this Circle they played an important role in theresistance against Hitler and his henchmen, for which Helmuth James paid with his life onHitler’s orders in January 1945. One might say that the Kreisau Circle was the fruit of the laborcamps organized with the cooperation of Rosenstock-Huessy in Silesia. For that reason EugenRosenstock-Huessy is sometimes called the founding father of the Circle.In 1933, when the Nazis come to power, Rosenstock-Huessy immediately condemned thenew regime as a regression to pre-Christian barbarism. He then and there resigned hisprofessorship at Breslau and arranged to emigrate to the United States. Although as a Jew bybirth he would have soon been viciously attacked in Germany, he saw his immediate departurefrom his home country not only as an escape from the immediate threat of persecution but also asa decisive, principled protest against an evil regime. Through the good offices of a friend atHarvard, Prof. Carl Friedrich, Rosenstock-Huessy had a teaching position waiting for him there,where he remained for a year-and-a-half, subsequently moving to Dartmouth College, in NewHampshire. His teaching at Dartmouth from 1935 to 1957 inspired a whole generation ofstudents. As a permanent resident in the United States and a citizen after 1944, Rosenstock-Huessy completed the work on his Soziologie (Volume I, 1956; Volume II, 1958) and later alsohis final great work Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts (1963) to which he added at the endof the first volume Angewandte Seelenkunde as a compact overview and summary of what he inessence had to say about language. He died at his home in Norwich, Vermont, on February 24,1973 .

Source: Introduction to Practical Knowledge of the Soul, by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, translated by Marc Huessy and Freya von Moltke, Wipf & Stock ix-xxxvi. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286922602_Introduction_to_Practical_Knowledge_of_the_Soul_by_Eugen_Rosenstock-Huessy_translated_by_Marc_Huessy_and_Freya_von_Moltke_Wipf_Stock_ix-xxxvi)