Bernard Groethuysen (9 September 1880 – 17 September 1946)[1] was a French writer and philosopher. His works, which transgressed the confines of history and sociology, concern the history of mentalities and representations and the interpretation of the experience of the world. In the interwar period, he made the works of Hölderlin and Kafka and the sociology of Germany available in France.[2]
Bernard Groethuysen was the second child of five. His mother Olga Groloff was part of a family of Russian immigrants.[3] His father, Philipp Groethuysen, was a Dutch physician with a practice in Berlin. The elder Groethuysen suffered from psychiatric ailments, and after 1885 lived in the sanitorium in Baden-Baden where he died in 1900. It was here that the younger Groethuysen completed his primary and secondary studies. He went on to study philosophy and history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitätinMunich.[4]
Continuing work on Leibniz, Groethuysen went to Paris in autumn 1904 where he met André Gide and Jean Paulhan and encountered Charles Du Bos, whom he had met in Berlin some time before. Returning each year to the French capital, he became a noteworthy "messenger" between German and French cultures. From 1912, he worked closely with Alix Guillain (1876–1951), a Belgian Communist activist. Both settled in Paris in a small artist's studio on rue Campagne-Première. In February 1915, after World War I broke out in France, he was interned in ChâteaurouxatBitray, a camp reserved for foreign civilians and located in the premises of the insane asylum of the city. His friends Charles Du Bos, Charles Andler and Henri Bergson, petitioned to improve Groethuysen's conditions of detention, and finally persuaded the authorities to let him reside in private accommodations.
Groethuysen's openness of spirit, his appetite for knowledge and his generosity make him one of the great European intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. His translations of Goethe's novels were published by Gallimard. He contributed to the introduction of Kafka in France, writing a preface to Alexander Vialatte's 1946 translation of The Trial. Lucien Herr saw Groethuysen as a "sophist," in the positive sense of the term. Jean Wahl found in Groethuysen a "good European." Pierre Jean Jouve described him as an "extraordinary man." Groethuysen died in 1946 at the Sainte-Élisabeth clinic in Luxembourgoflung cancer. Jean Paulhan wrote a very personal tribute.[5]
Groethuysen's works focused on the philosophy and politics of the eighteenth century, particularly Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution. Groethuysen's 1913 treatise on Denis Diderot was particularly influential on the twentieth century reception of the encyclopedist.[6]
Hannes Böhringer, Bernhard Groethysen: Vom Zusammenhang seiner Schriften, Agora, Berlin 1978.
Klaus Große Kracht, Zwischen Berlin und Paris: Bernhard Groethuysen (1880-1946): Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 2002, ISBN3-4843-5091-1.
Jean Paulhan, "Groethuysens Tod in Luxemburg," Neue Rundschau H. 1, Jg. 81, 1970. Fischer, Frankfurt 1970.
Meike Seiffert, Bernhard Groethuysen: Philosophie der Französischen Revolution Semesterarbeit Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Grin Verlag 2004.
^Joseph Dopp, Chronique, Revue philosophique de Louvain, 1946, vol. =44, n. 3, p. 468.
^Roger Schmit, Critical review of Zwischen Berlin und Paris : Bernhard Groethuysen (1880-1946): Eine intellektuelle Biographie by K. Grosse-Kracht, Archives de Philosophie, 2003, n. 2, v. 66, p. 335.
^Jean Freville, "Bernard Groethuysen est mort," L'Humanité, September 29, 1946
^Bernard Groethuysen, La Pensée de Diderot included in French in the compilation edited by Jochen Schlobach, Denis DiderotWissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1992, ISBN3-534-09097-7, p. 39
