Max Picard
Max Picard was a German-Swiss writer and philosopher, important as one of the few thinkers writing from a deeply Platonic sensibility in the 20th century.
Biography
Born to a Jewish family in Schopfheim, a German village on the Swiss border, Max Picard studied medicine and received his medical degree in 1911. He practiced medicine, first in Heidelberg and later in Munich. Unsatisfied with the positivist and Darwinian orientations of the medical profession at the time, he began as of 1915 to distance himself from it to turn more towards philosophy. In 1919, he immigrated to Switzerland, first to Locarno and later to Brissago.In 1929, he completed work on Das Menschengesicht. In 1934, Die Flucht vor Gott was published. He developed a friendship with fellow immigrant and artist Gunter Böhmer in the late 1930s. In 1939, Picard converted to Roman Catholicism from the Judaism of his youth.
He first met the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in 1947, and developed a friendship and steady correspondence throughout their lives. Marcel provided the foreword to the first French translation of Picard's Die Welt des Schweigens in 1953. Picard received the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis in 1952.
Emmanuel Levinas praised Picard's work in Levinas' collection Noms propres in 1976.
Selected books
- 1917 Expressionistische Bauernmalerei . München: Delphin
- 1921 Der letzte Mensch . Leipzig: E. T. Tal & Co.
- 1930 Das Menschengesicht . München: Delphin
- 1934 Die flucht vor Gott . Erlenbach: Rentsch
- 1947 Hitler in uns selbst . Erlenbach: Rentsch
- 1948 Die Welt des Schweigens . Erlenbach-Zürich/Konstanz: Rensch
- 1954 Die Atomisierung der Modernen Künste . Hamburg: Furche