[Levin, Harry] Kahler, Erich von.

The True, the Good and the Beautiful. A lecture delivered at Ohio State University December 10,1959.

Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1959. 8°. 40 pages. Softcover. Inscribed and signed by Erich Kahler “for Harry Levin with gratitude for the splendid Gauss lectures – Erich Kahler – May 1961” (by mentioning Gauss he speaks of “Christian Gauss”) / Also included: “The Nature of the Symbol – Offprint from “Symbolism in Religion and Literature, 1960”

Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of modernism and comparative literature. Levin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler (née Tuchman) and Isadore Henry Levin. His family was Jewish. Levin was educated at Harvard University (where he was a contemporary of M. H. Abrams). According to a biographical memoir by Walter Jackson Bate:

“After graduating summa cum laude in 1933, he was appointed Junior Fellow in then-new Harvard University Society of Fellows, the university’s highest honour bestowed upon graduate students, where he pursued in depth what were to become his three major interests: Shakespeare and the English Renaissance; modern literature generally; and the relation of English and American to other literatures, from Greek and Latin antiquity to the present, all of which are reflected in his early publications, giving him a perspective lacking in the ordinary specialist and scarcely matched in his later years by more than three or four scholars here or abroad. In the 1930s, junior fellows did not normally take a Ph. D., so that Harry, like his noted predecessor, George Lyman Kittredge, remained an A.B., though he was in time to receive six honorary degrees, including ones from Oxford and the Sorbonne, and though he was, over the years, to supervise over ninety doctoral theses.″

Levin began teaching at Harvard in 1939 and that same year he married Elena Zarudnaya. He was named Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1960 and retired in 1983. He continued to live near campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death in 1994. He was survived by his widow Elena and their daughter Marina.

Levin’s course in “Comedy on the Stage” inspired Leonard Lehrman to write the paper, “The Threepenny Cradle,” comparing the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera to Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. In the fall of 1969, in a production of Cradle directed by Lehrman, Levin was the sole patron. In 1970-1971 he encouraged, advised, and became a patron for two other Harvard productions by Lehrman: the U.S. premiere of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune, and a triple-bill in memory of Blitzstein, which was attended by Leonard Bernstein. It was at that production that Levin invited Bernstein to become Norton Lecturer at Harvard, which he did, a year later.
In 1985, the American Comparative Literature Association began awarding the Harry Levin Prize for books on literary history or criticism and in 1997, Harvard University endowed the new chair (position) of Harry Levin Professor of Literature. (Wikipedia)

Erich von Kahler (October 14, 1885 – June 28, 1970) was a mid-twentieth-century European-American literary scholar, essayist, and teacher known for works such as The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Man (1957).

Kahler was born to a Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied philosophy, literature, history, art history, sociology, and psychology at the University of Munich, the University of Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of Freiburg before earning his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1911. In 1912, he married his first wife, Josephine (née Sobotka). In 1933, deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazi regime, he left Germany, emigrating to the United States in 1938 after a period of residence in England. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, where he was known as Erich Kahler.

In the U.S. he taught at The New School for Social Research, Black Mountain College, Cornell University, and Princeton University. He was a friend of Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Herman Broch, who wrote Tod des Vergils at Kahler’s home, One Evelyn Place in Princeton. Kahler’s friends became known as the Kahler-Kreis (Kahler Circle). Like Einstein, Kahler was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He met and married his second wife, Alice (Lili) Loewy, while in Princeton. Kahler’s entire family was very close friends with Einstein. Kahler, his wife Alice, and his mother Antoinette von Kahler corresponded with Einstein.

Kahler’s many books often take up political themes, in addition to the relation of society to technology and science. He was an ardent Zionist, advocated world government, and was also involved in antiwar and anti-nuclear activism. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Kahler died in 1970 at his home in Princeton, survived by his wife, Alice, and a stepdaughter, Hanna Loewy. Alice Loewy Kahler died in 1992.

Hanna Loewy Kahler (September 20, 1925 – March 31, 2007) exchanged letters with theoretical physicist David Bohm, with whom she was for some time engaged to be married, after he left the USA for Brazil and these, as well as other letters in her possession, have contributed to an understanding of historic events surrounding the Solvay Conference of 1927 and Bohm’s exile in Brazil. She became a psychiatric social worker, and is credited to have helped to preserve the papers of Albert Einstein. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Catalogue No.8 – Judaica Collection · Catalogue Twelve – Philosophy · Exil · Exile · Exile Literature · Exilliteratur · Harry Levin Collection · Jewish Philosophers in Exile · Judaica · Judaica – Collection · Judaica – Rare · Kahler, Erich · Levin, Harry · Pamphlets Collection – Harvard · Philosophy Rare · Sociology – Rare · Sociology in Exile
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 17544AB

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