Kurt Riezler was a German philosopher and diplomat.
12 Facts About Kurt Riezler
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Kurt Riezler studied classics at the University of Munich and was granted his doctorate in economic history with highest honors in 1905.
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Kurt Riezler's prize-winning thesis on the Oikonomika, a classical Greek treatise once attributed to Aristotle, was published.
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Kurt Riezler was an eyewitness to Mirbach's assassination by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on 9 July 1918, having unwittingly ushered the gunman Yakov Blumkin into Mirbach's presence.
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Kurt Riezler later claimed privately that it had been his own idea to transport Lenin in the famous "sealed train" from Zurich through Germany to Russia in April 1917.
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Kurt Riezler consequently played a crucial role in the 1930 inception of the Frankfurt School; for example, it was Kurt Riezler who recommended Herbert Marcuse to Max Horkheimer.
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In 1929 Kurt Riezler sided with Martin Heidegger during the famous "Davos encounter" with Ernst Cassirer and wrote an eyewitness account of this event, "Davoser Hochschulkurse 1929," for the Neue Zurcher Zeitung.
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Kurt Riezler was forced out of the university in April 1933 by the Nazis but, having been allowed by them to draw his pension, remained in Germany for the next five years, publishing books on aesthetics and Parmenides.
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Kurt Riezler was to remain at that institution until his retirement, interspersed with visiting professorships at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.
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Kurt Riezler returned to Europe in 1954, lived for some time in Rome and died in Munich in 1955.
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Kurt Riezler was preceded in death by his wife Kathe, daughter of Martha Liebermann and impressionist painter Max Liebermann.
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Kurt Riezler's survivors included their daughter Maria, wife of Howard B White, a New School professor of political philosophy who had been Leo Strauss's first graduate student; and his brother Walter Riezler, a prominent musicologist, art historian and associate of the Deutscher Werkbund.