Richard Jakob Kroner

Richard Jakob Kroner was born on March 8, 1884, the first of two sons of the Glatz (Silesia)-based gynecologist Traugott Kroner (1854-1899), and his wife Margarete Kroner née Heymann, who came from a wealthy merchant family from the town of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). Richard Kroner's grandfather on his father's side was a rabbi as was his uncle Theodor Kroner, who was the rabbi of Erfurt. Kurt, the younger brother of Richard Kroner, was born in 1885 and died at the age of 44 in 1929.

Having passed the Abitur at the Gymnasium zu St. Maria Magdalena (grammar school, Breslau) in 1902, Richard Kroner began to study philosophy and literature in Breslau, Berlin, Heidelberg and Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1908 (PhD thesis: Über logische und ästhetische Allgemeingültigkeit). He stayed in Freiburg to continue his research, and founded the philosophical magazine Logos in 1910, for which he was the responsible editor until 1938. Only four years, in 1914, later he qualified as a university lecturer by writing his Habilitation about "Zweck und Gesetz in der Biologie". In 1919, after completing his service in World War I, he became associate professor at the University of Freiburg. At this time, Richard Kroner was devoted to the philosophy of Hegel and was writing his principal work Von Kant bis Hegel, a history of the philosophy of the German Idealismus.

In 1924 Richard Kroner received a full professorship for philosophy in Dresden, where he stayed until 1928. In Dresden, he met Paul Tillich, who later became his colleague at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. One year later he became professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel. In 1930 he founded the "Internationale Hegelgesellschaft," and remained the chairman until 1934. In the same year, Richard Kroner - being a converted Christian with Jewish origins - was forced from the University staff as part of the so-called "Entpflichtungsverfahren;" his books were burnt in public. In 1938 Richard Kroner finally left Germany, and immigrated to England, where a former student of his, M. B. Foster, was teaching in Oxford (Christ Church College). After a short stay in Oxford and Scotland -- where he was invited to read the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews (fall 1939) -- he left Europe in 1940 and came to the United States, eventually securing a position at the Union Theological Seminary (New York). At the Seminary he became a colleague of the well-known Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. He left the Seminary in 1952, and taught at Temple University (Philadelphia) for several years as a professor emeritus.

In 1974 Richard Kroner was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz, one of the highest awards the German State accords. In that same year he died at the age of 90 in the nursing home Schloss Mammern (near the Bodensee, Switzerland).

In 1990 Walter Asmus, professor of pedagogy and a former student of Richard Kroner’s, published a comprehensive biography of Richard Kroner, which can be found in the library of the Leo Baeck Institute.

(Bibliography taken from: Asmus, Walter: Richard Kroner, 1884-1974: ein christlicher Philosoph jüdischer Herkunft unter dem Schatten Hitlers. 2. überarb. und erg. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main; New York 1993, pp. 189-190).

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