Károly Kerényi

Károly (Carl, Karl) Kerényi (Hungarian pronunciation: /[ˈkaːroj ˈkɛreːɲi]/ ; Timișoara, January 19, 1897-Kilchberg, April 14, 1973) was a Hungarian scholar of classical philology and one of the founders of modern studies on Greek mythology.

Life

Hungary, 1897-1943

Károly Kerényi was born to ethnic Hungarian German parents. His father's family was of Banat Swabian peasant descent. His original last name was Kinzig, which was changed. Kerényi learned German as a foreign language at school, choosing it as his language for scientific work. He identified with the city of Arad, where he attended secondary school, due to its liberal spirit as the city of the thirteen martyrs of the Hungarian revolution of 1848/1849. He moved on to study classical Philology at the University of Budapest, where he especially appreciated the teaching of the Latinist Géza Némethy, as well as the Indo-Germanist Josef Schmidt.

After graduation Kerényi traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean region and spent some time as a visiting student at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin, and Heidelberg, learning from professors of Antiquity and Classical Philology Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Franz Boll. In 1919 Kerényi obtained his doctorate in Budapest with a thesis on Plato and Longinus, investigations in literary history and classical aesthetics.

Library of the University of Budapest.

Later he was a secondary school teacher of Greek and Latin. After obtaining his postdoctoral reading degree (habilitation) in 1927, he was invited in 1934 to become professor of classical philology and ancient history (Griechische und Lateinische Philologie und Alte Geschichte) at the University of Pécs. In Budapest he continued to give classes as a private teacher on the history of religions, classical literature and mythology. They were weekly sessions attended by numerous intellectuals, due to their liberal connotations.

After Hungary experienced a strong movement to the political right in 1940, the university system was reformed under political pressure. Professors who did not submit were concentrated at the University of Szeged, and Kerényi was consequently sent there in 1941 against his will, to teach classical antiquity.

The liberal and pro-Western prime minister Miklós Kállay tried in 1943 to reverse the pro-Nazi policy of previous years. He began sending liberal scientists who had already made a name for themselves to Europe, to show that there was also a liberal, anti-fascist Hungary. As part of this push, the Foreign Ministry offered Kerényi to spend a year in Switzerland with diplomatic status. He accepted on the condition that he stay in Ticino, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, instead of in the capital, Bern.

When the Germans entered Hungary in 1944 and a de facto government was established as a result, Kerényi handed over his passport. Like many Hungarians residing in Switzerland at that time with diplomatic status, he thus became stateless overnight, a political refugee.

Switzerland, 1943-1973

Access to the C. G. Jung Institute of Küsnacht, Zurich.

Since 1941, Károly Kerényi was a lecturer at the Eranos lectures in Ascona (Switzerland), to which he had been invited by Carl Gustav Jung. It was to this regular contact with the Swiss psychologist that Kerényi was initially connected with Switzerland, which eventually led him to settle permanently in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. During 1946/47 Kerényi lectured on language and literature. Hungarian at the University of Basel. In 1947 he traveled to Hungary to give his inaugural speech at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with the intention of contributing to the democratic development of Hungary. However, due to warnings of the impending communist overthrow under Mátyás Rákosi, Kerényi immediately turned around and left Budapest again. During the following Stalinist dictatorship he was discredited and censored by the political propaganda of Georg Lukács, the dominant communist ideologue. They withdrew his academic title, which was not restored until 1989, posthumously.

In Switzerland, Károly Kerényi wrote and published the substantial body of his work between 1945 and 1968. Despite his status as an outsider scholar, he at this time became highly influential as one of the last representatives of the great tradition of ancient humanist scholars. Over the course of two decades, from 1934 to 1955, Kerényi maintained an active correspondence with the German writer Thomas Mann on many topics, including mythology, religion, humanism, and psychology. Since his emigration, Kerényi has also held visiting professorships at various universities, including Bonn (1955-1956), Oslo and Rome (1960), Zurich (1961), and Genoa (1964). Between 1960 and 1971 he gave annual lectures at the Institute of Philosophy of La Sapienza University in Rome. From 1948 to 1966 Kerényi was co-founder and director of research at the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, Zurich, where he lectured on mythology until 1962. During these years he lived near Monte Verità, in Ascona. In 1962 he received Swiss citizenship.

Károly Kerényi died on April 14, 1973 in Kilchberg, Zurich, and is buried in Ascona Cemetery. Her second wife, Magda Kerényi, dedicated her subsequent life to preserving and promoting Kerényi's legacy. Since his death in 2004 all documentation of Kerényi's life (photos, correspondence, manuscripts, etc.) that had not been destroyed in Budapest during the war, is archived and accessible at the German Literature Archive in Marbach (near of Stuttgart). His extensive library and the legacy of Magda Kerényi are housed at the University of Pécs, where a street is also named after him.

Scientific work and philosophical body

Philological Foundation

Erwin Rohde.

Image included Eleusis. Archaetypical image of the mother and daughter.

In the early years, Károly Kerényi was influenced above all by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Bachofen and Nietzsche, poets such as Hölderlin and Rilke, and scholars such as Wilhelm von Humboldt. When he studied classical philology, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was the most influential philologist. However, Kerényi was more interested in Erwin Rohde's line of thought on fictional literature in antiquity. This can be seen in his first book, Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung. Ein Versuch ( Greco-Oriental Novels in the Light of the History of Religions ), with which he obtained his postdoctoral degree.

Shortly thereafter, in 1929, Kerényi tired of the official academic line of philology. He increasingly saw the aim of philology in the analysis of the written records of Antiquity as a critical representation of real life, just as archeology is dedicated to the recording of Antiquity through tangible remains. Far from the official line were his first books Apollon (a collection of essays) and Die Religion antike (Religion in Antiquity). Throughout his life, Kerényi explored every classical site in the entire Mediterranean and in 1929 he would meet Walter F. Otto for the first time in Greece, who would later profoundly influence him. Otto inspired Kerényi to focus on the religious element of human life in Antiquity as the central element, thus combining the historical with the theological approach. This orientation can be clearly seen in his works Mythologie der Griechen (The Mythology of the Greeks) and Mysterien der Eleusis (Eleusis. Image archetypal mother and daughter).

Wilamowitz's dissociation and the idea of myth

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.

From then on, Károly Kerényi consciously began to distance herself from the philology taught by Wilamowitz. Kerényi saw in Wilamowitz's approach an authoritarianism that led to the emergence of National Socialism in Germany, something that he could not ethically support. Kerényi developed an increasingly hostile position towards the German idea of myth, which was used as a reference by Nazi Germany. As early as 1934, he expressed perceptive horror at the radicalization of events in Germany. He became a continuing target of Kerényi to establish a liberal and human-psychological idea of the myth that could not be abused by nationalist ideology. This also influenced his position with respect to several of his scientific mentors. With respect to Wilamowitz the estrangement was more pronounced, but later Kerényi also began to distance himself from those aspects of the conception of the Otto and Mann myth that he saw reflected in German nationalism.

Psychological expansion of mythology

Carl Gustav Jung.

Károly Kerényi's scientific interpretation of figures in Greek mythology as archetypes of the human soul was in keeping with the approach of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Together with Jung, he sought to establish mythology as a science in its own right. Jung alludes to Kerényi:

The wealth of relations established by him between Greek psychology and mythology was of such magnitude that the reciprocal fertilization of both branches of science could no longer be put into doubt for longer.

Kerényi wrote in collaboration with Jung the studies Das göttliche Kind in mythologischer und psychologischer Beleuchtung (The divine child in the light of mythology and psychology) and Das göttliche Mädchen (The Divine Maiden), which were published together in 1941 under the title Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie (Introduction to the essence of mythology).

Kerényi saw the theory of religion as a humane and humanistic affair, further enhancing his reputation as a humanist. For him, any view of mythology implied a view of man—and therefore theology always had to be at the same time anthropology. In this humanist spirit, Kerényi defined himself as both a philological-historical and a psychological scholar.

In later years Kerényi further developed his psychological interpretation and replaced the concept of archetypes with what he called Urbild. This became particularly evident in some of his most important publications, such as Prometheus and, above all, Dionysos , probably Kerényi's most important work, which he had devised in 1931 and finished writing in 1969.

Kerényi therefore viewed aspects of Greek religion not as curiosities but as expressions of a true human experience. As a historian of myth, as it was embedded in the details of Hellenic culture, its "characteristic social existence" as he put it, Kerényi opposed his "differentiated thinking about the concrete realities of human life" to "summary thinking." which represented for him the influence of James Frazer in the study of the peoples of Antiquity and especially of the Greek religion.

Kerényi as cultural anthropologist

Dioniso, central theme that would probably be Kerényi's most important work: Dionysus. Raice of indestructible life.

Mostly as a result of her own personal experience, Károly Kerényi highlighted the role of the philologist as interpreter, according to which:

the better he interprets, the more he becomes subject, both as receiver and messenger. All its essence and being, its structure and its own experiences, become a factor that cannot be overlooked for interpretation.

In this sense, Kerényi's understanding of science was very modern for 1944. At a time when the human sciences were trying to establish themselves as objective and scientific, he recognized that the only way to achieve scientific objectivity was by revealing one's own individual subjectivity of each scholar.

Kerényi also anticipated a paradigm shift from the turn of the XX century, by subscribing to an interdisciplinary approach that combined subjects of the human sciences, including literature, art, history, philosophy, and religion. The inclusion of fictional writing in his studies of mythology and humanism is also documented by the publications of his correspondence with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Kerényi published a series of further reflections on European humanism in 1955 under the title Geistiger Weg Europas (Europe's Intellectual Journey).

Among the many personalities with whom Kerényi had significant personal and academic interaction were the Hungarian poets László Németh, Antal Szerb and Pál Gulyás, the psychologist Leopold Szondi, the writer Otto Heuschele and the historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt. Thanks to his essayistic style, Kerényi managed to speak a language that was accessible to many people outside of academia, but this also meant a relative isolation from academic philology.

In Hungary, the scientific achievements of Károly Kerényi were accessible during his lifetime only to a small circle of intellectuals. Of all his publications, only a few have been published in Hungarian. As a prominent member of the old Hungarian intellectual establishment and bearer of an aristocratic name, he was banished from Hungarian cultural life since the 1940s for being too liberal, first by far-right pro-Nazi governments and later by the communist regime. Even though Kerényi was fiercely defended by famous Hungarian writers such as Laszlo Németh and Antal Szerb, it took until the 1980s before his complete moral and academic rehabilitation took place.

Hungarian writer Antal Szerb was partly inspired by Károly Kerényi to create the character Rudi Waldheim in his novel Utas és holdvilág (The Traveler and the Moonlight).

Honors and Awards

• 1929: Fellow at the German Archaeological Institute of Athens
• 1931: Medal of honour of George I of Greece
• 1946: Baumgarten Award
• 1947: Bollingen Foundation Fellowship (maintained until 1973)
• 1961: Member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters
• 1963: Doctor honoris causa de la Facultad de Theología de la Universidad de Upsala
• 1969: Gold Medal of the Humboldt Society
• 1970: Pirckheimer Ring of the city of Nuremberg
• 1989: Post mortem: member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• 1990: Széchenyi Prize of the Hungarian government.

Work

First editions:

Giulio Romano, The fall of the giants (1532-1535), fresh that covers the ceiling of the Hall of the giants at the Palace of Tea, Mantua. Cover image of the German edition Die Mythologie der Griechen (The mythology of the Greeks).

• Apollon. Studien über antike Religion und Humanität (Apollo: the wind, the spirit and the god(1937)
• Das ägäische Fest. Die Meergötterszene in Goethes Faust II (1941)
• Der Mythos der Hellenen in Meisterwerken der Münzkunst (1941)
• Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie (C. G. Jung/Károly Kerényi)Introduction to the essence of mythology(1942)
• Pseudo-Antisthenés, beszélgetések a szerelemről (1943)
• Hermes, der Seelenführer (Hermes, the driver of souls(1943)
• Mysterien der Kabiren (Mysteries of the Cabins(1944)
• Töchter der Sonne, Betrachtungen über griechische Gottheiten (Goddess of the Sun and the Moon(1944)
• Bachofen und die Zukunft des Humanismus. Mit einem Intermezzo über Nietzsche und Ariadne (1945)
• Die Geburt der Helena samt humanistischen Schriften aus den Jahren 1943-45 (1945)
• Prometheus. Das griechische Mythologem von der menschlichen Existenz (Prometheus: archetypical image of human existence(1946)
• Der Göttliche Arzt. Studien über Asklepius und seine Kultstätte (The Divine Doctor(1948)
• Niobe. Neue Studien über Antike Religion und Humanität (1949)
• Mensch und Maske (1949)
• Pythagoras und Orpheus. Präludien zu einer zukünftigen Geschichte der Orphik und des Pythagoreismus (1950)
• Labyrinth-Studien (In the maze(1950)
• Die Mythologie der Griechen (The mythology of the Greeks)
  • Vol. 1: Die Götter - und Menschheitsgeschichten (The gods of the Greeks(1951)
  • Vol. 2: Die Heroen der Griechen (The Heroes of the Greeks) [later published also as Heroengeschichten or Heroen-Geschichten] (1958)
• Die Jungfrau und Mutter der griechischen Religion. Eine Studie über Pallas Athene (Athena: virgin and mother in the Greek religion(1952)
• Stunden in Griechenland, Horai Hellenikai (1952)
• Unwillkürliche Kunstreisen. Fahrten im alten Europe 1952 (1954)
• Geistiger Weg Europes: Fünf Vorträge über Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Homer und HölderlinZürich (1955)
• Umgang mit Göttlichem (1955)
• Griechische Miniaturen (1957)
• Gespräch in Briefen (Mythology and Humanism: the correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi(Thomas Mann/Károly Kerényi) (1960)
• Streifzüge eines Hellenisten, Von Homer zu Kazantzakis (1960)
• Der frühe Dionysos (1961)
• Prometheus – Die menschliche Existenz in griechischer Deutung (1962)
• Die Mysterien von Eleusis (Eleusis: archetypical image of the mother and daughter(1962)
• Tessiner Schreibtisch (1963)
• Religion Die der Griechen und Römer (The religion of the Greeks and the Romans(1963)
• Die Eröffnung des Zugangs zum Mythos (1967)
• Der antike Roman (1971)
• Briefwechsel aus der Nähe (Hermann Hesse/Károly Kerényi) (1972)
• Zeus und Hera. Urbild des Vaters, des Gatten und der Frau (Zeus and Hera: archetypal image of the father, husband and wife(1972)
• Oedipus Variations: Studies in Literature and Psychoanalysis (James Hillman/Károly Kerényi) (1991).

Complete works:

• Complete works in individual volumesMagda Kerényi (ed.). Eight parts in nine volumes. Langen-Müller, Munich 1966–1988
  • Volume 1: Humanistische Seelenforschung (1966)
  • Volume 2: Auf Spuren des Mythos (1967)
  • Volume 3: Tage- und Wanderbücher 1953-1960 (1969)
  • Volume 4: Apollon und Niobe (1980)
  • Volume 5: Wege und Weggenossen (2 volumes, 1985 and 1988)
  • Volume 6: (not published)
  • Volume 7: Antike (Ancient religion(1971)
  • Volume 8: Dionysos: Urbild des unzerstörbaren Lebens (Dionysus: Raíz de la vida indestructible(1976).

• Complete works in individual volumesMagda Kerényi (ed.). Five volumes. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1994–1998
  • Volume 1: Dionysos: Urbild des unzerstörbaren Lebens (1994) (Version in Spanish) Dionysians. Raice of indestructible life. Herder Editorial. 2011.)
  • Volume 2: Antike (1995) Ancient religion. Herder Editorial. 2012.)
  • Volume 3: Humanistische Seelenforschung (1996)
  • Volume 4: Die Mythologie der Griechen (two volumes, 1997) The mythology of the Greeks. Atalanta Editions. 2009/2021.)
  • Volume 5: Urbilder der griechischen Religion: Asklepios. Prometheus. Hermes. Und die Mysterien der Kabiren (1998) First images of the Greek religion. Sixth Editorial Flat. 2022.)

Spanish edition

• First images of the Greek religion. Full volume including the four works: "The Divine Doctor", "Hermes, the driver of souls", "Misterios de los Cabiros" and "Prometheus", 452 pages, translation Brigitte Kiemann, Collection Essayo. Sixth Editorial Flat. 2022. ISBN 978-84-19261-16-8.
• The mythology of the Greeks. Complete work. Two volumes. Imaginatio Vera Collection. Vilaür: Atalanta Editions. 2009/2021.