Erich von Kahler (October 14, 1885 – June 28, 1970) was a renowned mid-twentieth-century European-American literary scholar and essayist best known for scholarly works like The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Man (1957).
Kahler was born 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 Ber...
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Erich von Kahler (October 14, 1885 – June 28, 1970) was a renowned mid-twentieth-century European-American literary scholar and essayist best known for scholarly works like The Tower and the Abyss: An Inquiry into the Transformation of Man (1957).
Kahler was born 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 Freiberg before earning his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1911. In 1933 he left Germany, immigrating to the United States in 1938. 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 der Vergils at Kahler's home in Princeton. Kahler's friends became...
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