Károly Kerényi
Károly Kerényi handed back his passport in 1944, the moment German forces entered Hungary and installed a right-wing government. Overnight, the Hungarian scholar became a stateless political refugee, settled in Switzerland with no official home to claim. He counted among the founders of modern Greek mythology studies, though in Hungary his ideas reached only a small circle of intellectuals during his lifetime. Abroad, his name multiplied under different spellings: Karl in German, Carl in English, Charles in French, Carlo in Italian. What made a classical philologist break from the teachers who trained him? And how did a Swiss psychologist reshape the way he understood myth itself?
Temesvár, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was where Kerényi was born on the 19th of January 1897. His parents were Hungarian, with partly German roots on his father's side. His father's family was of Swabian peasant descent, and his mother was Karolina Halász. German became the language he later chose for his scientific writing, though he first learned it at school as a foreign tongue. Arad was the city where he attended secondary school. Its liberal spirit, tied to the memory of the 13 martyrs of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49, earned his lasting loyalty.
At the University of Budapest, Kerényi studied classical philology under teachers he valued highly, above all the Latinist Géza Némethy and the Indo-Germanist Josef Schmidt. After graduating, he traveled widely across the Mediterranean and spent time as a visiting student at the Universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Heidelberg. There he learned from Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Franz Boll, three leading names in classical philology. In 1919 he earned his doctorate in Budapest with a dissertation titled Investigations in Classical Literary and Aesthetic History, on Plato and Longinus. A scholarship from the German Archaeological Institute in Athens followed in 1929, deepening his direct exposure to the classical world.
Secondary-school teaching in Greek and Latin came next, followed by his postdoctoral habilitation in 1927. The University of Pécs invited him in 1934 to serve as professor of classical philology and ancient history. In Budapest he kept lecturing privately on religion, classical literature and mythology, drawing many intellectuals to weekly sessions valued for their liberal tone. That liberal atmosphere came under strain after 1940, when Hungary swung sharply to the political right and its universities bent to the pressure. Professors who refused to fall in line were concentrated at the University of Szeged, and Kerényi was sent there against his will in 1941.
Miklós Kállay, the country's liberal prime minister, tried in 1943 to undo the Nazi-friendly course of prior years. He began sending established liberal scientists to Western Europe to prove that a different, anti-fascist Hungary still existed. Kerényi accepted the foreign ministry's offer of a year in Switzerland with diplomatic status, but only on one condition. He insisted on living in Ticino, by the shore of Lago Maggiore, rather than in the capital, Bern.
Since 1941, Kerényi had been lecturing at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, invited by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. That contact, predating his diplomatic posting, was what first tied him to Switzerland and eventually made his emigration permanent. During the 1946-47 academic year, he lectured on Hungarian language and literature at the University of Basel. In 1947 he traveled back to Hungary to deliver his inauguration speech at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, hoping to support the country's democratic development. Warnings of an imminent communist takeover under Mátyás Rákosi sent him straight back out of Budapest.
György Lukács, the leading communist ideologist, ran the propaganda campaign that discredited and banned Kerényi through the following Stalinist years. His academic title was stripped from him, and it was not restored until 1989, after his death. Between 1945 and 1968, working largely outside Switzerland's academic establishment, Kerényi produced the bulk of his written work. Thomas Mann, the German writer, exchanged letters with him from 1934 to 1955 on mythology, religion, humanism and psychology. Visiting professorships followed at Bonn in 1955-56, at Oslo and Rome in 1960, at Zurich in 1961 and at Genoa in 1964. From 1960 to 1971 he gave annual lectures at the philosophy institute of the University of Rome.
The C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, near Zurich, named Kerényi co-founder and research director from 1948 until 1966. He lectured there on mythology until 1962. He lived close to the Monte Verità in Ascona during these years, and Swiss citizenship followed in 1962. Recognition arrived steadily across this period. The Baumgarten Prize came in 1946, followed by a Bollingen Foundation fellowship in 1947 that lasted until his death. In 1961 he joined the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Two years later, the Theological Faculty of the University of Uppsala gave him an honorary doctorate. The Humboldt Society awarded him a gold medal in 1969, and the city of Nuremberg gave him its Pirckheimer-Ring in 1970.
Kerényi died on the 14th of April 1973 in Kilchberg, near Zurich, and was buried in the cemetery of Ascona. His second wife, Magda Kerényi, spent the rest of her life maintaining and promoting his legacy. Since her death in 2004, the surviving photos, letters and manuscripts have been archived at the German Archive for Literature in Marbach, near Stuttgart. All of it had escaped destruction in wartime Budapest. His library and Magda's estate now rest at the University of Pécs, where a street also carries his name. Two honors reached him only after death: membership in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1989, and the Hungarian government's Széchenyi Prize in 1990.
Schopenhauer, Bachofen and Nietzsche shaped Kerényi's earliest philosophical outlook, alongside the writers Hölderlin and Rilke and the scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt. Wilamowitz remained the most influential philologist during his student years, yet Kerényi found Erwin Rohde's thinking on the fiction of antiquity more compelling still. That preference produced his first book, Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung, on Greek-Oriental romances read through the history of religion. The book qualified him to lecture independently.
By 1929, Kerényi had grown tired of philology's official, narrow scholarly line. He came to see philology's real task as reading antiquity's written record as evidence of lived experience, the way archaeology reads physical remains. Two early books marked his first steps in that direction: Apollon, a collection of essays, and Die antike Religion. He spent years traveling to virtually every classical site around the Mediterranean, absorbing what the ground itself could tell him. In Greece that same year, he met Walter F. Otto for the first time, a meeting that would shape him profoundly. The Medal of Honor of George I of Greece reached him in 1931, recognition tied to this same period of direct engagement with Greek antiquity.
Otto pushed Kerényi toward treating the religious element of ancient life as its central core, fusing historical inquiry with theological concern. Mythologie der Griechen and Mysterien der Eleusis, later translated as Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, carried that fusion forward into print.
National Socialism's rise in Germany led Kerényi to see authoritarianism at the root of Wilamowitz's philological method. It was a stance he could no longer support on ethical grounds. He began deliberately distancing his own scholarship from the approach Wilamowitz had taught him. As early as 1934, Kerényi voiced clear-eyed alarm at Germany's radicalizing political direction. He worked steadily afterward toward a liberal, human-psychological idea of myth, one that resisted use as nationalist ideology.
Wilamowitz bore the sharpest edge of this break, but Kerényi's discomfort did not stop there. He later distanced himself as well from strands in Walter Otto's and Thomas Mann's thinking about myth that echoed German nationalism. Both men had shaped his earlier work. Yet that refusal to let myth serve nationalist ideology carried into every collaboration ahead, including his years with the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
Carl Gustav Jung once wrote that Kerényi had 'supplied such a wealth of connections of psychology with Greek mythology that the cross-fertilization of the two branches of science can no longer be doubted.' The two men worked to establish mythology as its own science, reading Greek myth's figures as archetypes of the human soul. Together they compiled Das göttliche Kind, on the divine child, and Das göttliche Mädchen, on the divine maiden. Both appeared in 1941 under the joint title Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie.
Theology and anthropology, in Kerényi's view, could never be separated, since every account of mythology was also an account of humanity. He called himself both a philological-historical and a psychological scholar in this humanist spirit. In his later years he replaced the term archetype with Urbild, a shift that surfaced most clearly in Prometheus and in Dionysos. Dionysos, likely his most crucial single work, began as an idea in 1931 and was not finished until 1969.
James Frazer's influence on the study of ancient peoples and Greek religion represented, for Kerényi, a kind of 'summary thinking' he actively opposed. He set against it his own 'differentiated thinking about the concrete realities of human life.' Greek religious practice, in this view, was no mere curiosity but an expression of genuine human experience. Kerényi located that experience within what he called Hellenic culture's 'characteristic social existence.'
Kerényi once wrote that 'the better he interprets, the more he becomes himself the subject, both as receiver as well as messenger.' He put it directly: 'His whole essence and being, his structure and his own experiences, become a factor that cannot be overlooked for interpretation.' That view of the philologist as interpreter struck contemporaries as strikingly modern already in 1944. At a moment when the human sciences wanted to prove themselves purely objective, Kerényi argued that objectivity came only through disclosing each scholar's own subjectivity.
He also anticipated a later paradigm shift, decades before it arrived, by treating literature, art, history, philosophy and religion as one connected field. His published correspondence with Thomas Mann and with the writer Hermann Hesse shows fictional writing woven directly into his study of myth and humanism. In 1955 he published a further set of reflections on European humanism titled Geistiger Weg Europas. Among the figures with whom he kept up close personal and scholarly contact were the Hungarian poets László Németh, Antal Szerb and Pál Gulyás. He also stayed close to the psychologist Léopold Szondi, the writer Otto Heuschele and the historian Carl Jacob Burckhardt.
Only a handful of Kerényi's books were ever published in Hungarian. As a prominent figure from the old Hungarian intellectual establishment, he was banished from the country's cultural life from the 1940s onward. Right-wing pro-Nazi governments moved first, condemning him as too liberal. László Németh and Antal Szerb defended him fiercely against these attacks, yet full moral and scholarly rehabilitation did not arrive until the 1980s. Szerb went further still, weaving features of Kerényi into a character named Rudi Waldheim in his novel Journey by Moonlight.
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Common questions
When was Károly Kerényi born and when did he die?
Károly Kerényi was born on the 19th of January 1897 in Temesvár, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Timișoara, Romania. He died on the 14th of April 1973 in Kilchberg, near Zurich, and is buried in the cemetery of Ascona.
Why did Károly Kerényi become a stateless refugee in 1944?
Károly Kerényi returned his passport in 1944 when German forces entered Hungary and installed a right-wing government. He had been residing in Switzerland with diplomatic status, so surrendering it made him a stateless political refugee overnight.
How did Károly Kerényi work with Carl Gustav Jung?
Károly Kerényi collaborated with the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung to establish mythology as a science of its own, reading Greek mythic figures as archetypes of the soul. From 1948 until 1966 he served as co-founder and research director of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht, near Zurich, lecturing there until 1962.
What is considered Károly Kerényi's most important book?
Dionysos is described as likely Károly Kerényi's most crucial single work. He began it as an idea in 1931 and did not finish writing it until 1969.
Why did Károly Kerényi break with his teacher Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff?
Károly Kerényi came to see Wilamowitz's philological method as resting on an authoritarianism he linked to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. He distanced himself from Wilamowitz on ethical grounds and worked instead toward a liberal, human-psychological idea of myth.
Where did Károly Kerényi study and teach classical philology?
Károly Kerényi studied classical philology at the University of Budapest and as a visiting student at the Universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Heidelberg. He later taught at the University of Pécs from 1934 and the University of Szeged from 1941, and held visiting professorships at Bonn, Oslo, Rome, Zurich and Genoa after emigrating to Switzerland.
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1 references cited across the entry
- 1BookCollected Works of C.G. Jung: The First Complete English Edition of the Works of C.G. JungC.G. Jung — Routledge — 2015