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In contrast to the celebrated Martin Heidegger, who was favored by the Nazis and a fervent supporter of the "National Socialist Revolution," remaining a member of the NSDAP until the end, the legacy of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer has unjustly faded from view for a long time. Cassirer came from a Silesian entrepreneurial family that later settled in Berlin. Many members of this family had a significant influence on German cultural life from the early 20th century until the rise of the Nazis.
Ernst Cassirer was born in 1874 in Breslau. He studied law, German literature, and philosophy in Berlin before moving to Marburg to attend lectures on Kant by Hermann Cohen. In 1899, Cassirer completed his doctorate in Marburg under Cohen, focusing on Paul Natorp, the founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, and on Descartes. In 1906, he earned his habilitation in Berlin and began teaching philosophy as a private lecturer. Due to the clarity of his lectures, Cassirer's philosophy courses in Berlin quickly became popular among students, and he gained an excellent reputation among his colleagues. This recognition led to his appointment in 1919 to the newly established University of Hamburg.
In addition to philosophy, Cassirer had a deep passion for chess. His wife, Antonielle (Toni), recounted the unique nature of this passion in her memoirs, "Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer"(My Life with Ernst Cassirer), written in 1948 and published in 1981.
I soon became very interested in the way Ernst worked, even though I couldn’t fully understand what he was working on. He remained completely unaffected by the external disturbances that so often trouble productive people. He had no fear of being jolted out of his train of thought. His ability to concentrate was so strong that if he was interrupted in the middle of a sentence, he could easily continue it many hours later without difficulty. It always seemed to me as if two railroad tracks were running side by side in his mind, and he could simultaneously follow everything happening on both tracks. Because of this, no one who lived with him—myself included—ever learned not to interrupt him while he was working. In hindsight, this was a mistake, as some of our best qualities sometimes turn out to be.
But there was one exception where Ernst's behavior changed—when he played chess. Chess was his hobby, as the English would say. He played it passionately and with such intense mental focus that I could never understand how he could play such a demanding game for relaxation. The strange thing was that he was completely indifferent to who his opponent was. Whether he played with the chess master Lasker or with a young boy who barely knew the rules, the game immediately absorbed him and wouldn't let him go. In chess, the level of deep concentration that one might have expected from his philosophical work suddenly appeared. He was so engrossed when he played that it was nearly impossible to get his attention, even if you asked him a question. He, the most punctual person imaginable, would forget time and place when he played. This strange absorption was also visible externally. When our granddaughter Irene was just five years old, she once looked at some old photographs of her grandfather, suddenly pointed to one of the pictures, and said, "Here, Grandpa has his chess face."
I won’t deny that I didn’t particularly like it when Ernst played chess. His profession left him little time to relax, and I would have liked to share in that relaxation. Chess excluded me even more than his philosophical work did, and I often asked Ernst not to overdo it with the game. It was only during our time in exile that I found it very comforting that there was something that could completely distract him from the overwhelming worries that weighed on him.
During his time in Berlin, Ernst Cassirer had already met Edward Lasker. One of Cassirer’s brothers was married to a cousin of Lasker, making the two men distantly related by marriage. Chess was at least one shared interest between Cassirer and Edward Lasker, and as Toni Cassirer mentioned in her memoirs, the two did play chess games together. The outcome of these games was likely very one-sided, as no records of games played by Ernst Cassirer have survived, nor is there any known evidence of his membership in a chess club.
Edward Lasker also arranged a meeting between Cassirer and World Champion Emanuel Lasker. In his book Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters Edward Lasker recollects these encounters:
"Meeting [Emanuel Lasker] was one of the high points in my life. The striking difference between him and the other masters was that he hardly ever spent any time at the chessboard, unless he had to do it for professional reasons, that is while writing a chess article, or in the midst of a match. He seemed always preoccupied with problems of mathematics or philosophy. When he learned that the brother of the famous philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, was married to a cousin of mine, he did not rest until I had arranged a meeting with Cassirer. Lasker explained to him certain ideas he held on the problems of cognition and on which he proposed to write a book. Out of the first meeting developed a series of long walks which Cassirer, Lasker and I took together, and during which Lasker expanded his strange mathematical approach to the concept of free will and automatism. Encouraged by Cassirer, who was impressed with Lasker's original ideas, the latter pursued his task with tremendous energy for five years, interrupting his work only for short periods in order to to play his world championship matches with Tarrasch and Schlechter, and in 1913 his book appeared, unter the ambitious title: Das Begreifen der Welt (The Comprehension of the Universe). ...
Ernst Cassirer, in discussing Lasker's book with me, made a comment on Lasker's approach to philosophical problems which will be interesting to chess players familiar with Lasker's games. He said that Lasker had brought some remarkably original thoughts to the subject, but that he had a certain naive manner of expounding well-known old ideas together with his new ideas without making any distinction between them, obviously due to the fact that he was not familiar with the enormous philosophical literature of the past. Lasker did his original thinking from the foundation up, and he did not know how much of what he had found had been discovered by others before him.
Lasker was not very familiar with chess literature either. He did not think it was worth spending time on reading chess books, because he felt that a thorough understanding of the general principles was the best guide in the struggle over the board." (Edward Lasker, Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters, Dover 1951, p. 27-29)
From a distant perspective, the meeting between Emanuel Lasker and Ernst Cassirer seems somewhat curious. Cassirer was outstanding in the field of philosophy, but only an enthusiastic amateur in chess. With Lasker, it was likely the opposite, although his philosophical efforts were occasionally viewed with some generosity by commentators.
Antisemitism in Germany was palpable even during the Kaiserreich, and even more so in the Weimar Republic after Germany's defeat in World War I. Toni Cassirer recounts the antisemitic insults they encountered in the neighborhood of their Hamburg residence, which was located in the well-to-do area of Blumenstraße—long before the Nazis came to power. There was significant opposition from some students against Cassirer’s appointment to the university, with antisemitic groups distributing leaflets and calling for a boycott of Jewish professors.
Photo: UHH/Archiv
Other episodes in Toni Cassirer's memoirs shed light on the difficult living conditions of that time. For instance, in the post-war years, Ernst Cassirer received his salary in cash, with the intervals between payments growing shorter as hyperinflation took hold—eventually, it was calculated daily and adjusted to match the inflation rate. The university's caretaker would make his rounds through Hamburg, personally delivering the salary envelopes to the staff's homes. The Cassirers were among the last on the route, receiving their payment just before noon.
This left Toni Cassirer with little time to shop, as the value of the Reichsmark was recalculated at midday, and each day it was worth only half of what it had been the day before. She tried to persuade her husband to request a change in the caretaker's route so they would have more time (and money) for shopping. However, Ernst Cassirer paid little attention to the mundane concerns of everyday life. One day, Toni Cassirer, exasperated, exclaimed to her husband, "Now a dozen eggs cost 10,000 marks!" He briefly looked up from his books, puzzled, and simply asked, "What do you want with 12 eggs?"
Despite the antisemitism in the Weimar Republic, Cassirer was well connected within Hamburg's intellectual and cultural life. Representatives of intellectual life regularly met at the Cassirers' home and one day Albert Einstein was a guest in the Blumenstraße. Perhaps Cassirer and Einstein also talked about their mutual acquaintance Emanuel Lasker. During his Hamburg years, Cassirer's three-volume magnum opus "Philosophie der symbolischen Formen" was published (Volume 1: Die Sprache, 1923; Volume 2: Das mythische Denken, 1925; Volume 3: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, 1929).
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Cassirer quickly realised that it was best to leave the country as soon as possible. He resigned his chair at the University of Hamburg and was forced to retire on 1 October 1933. Cassirer went to England as a visiting professor and in 1935 to Sweden, where he was offered a chair in philosophy at the University of Gothenburg. Cassirer was granted Swedish citizenship in 1939. As he did not feel safe in Sweden - Denmark and Norway were already under German occupation - Cassirer emigrated with his family to the USA in 1941, first teaching at Yale University in New Haven and from 1944 at Columbia University in New York City.
Photo: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
In his book Chess for Fun & Chess for Blood from 1942 Edward Lasker talks about Cassirer's approach to chess:
"Ernst Cassirer once said to me jokingly that what chess has in common with science and fine art is its utter uselessness. I am sure I discerned a note of praise in this remark which was not unconscious. If one were to condemn chess just because it is useless in the utilitarian sense of the word, one might, on the same basis, reject all but commercial art and many branches of higher mathematics which can hardly have any practical application." (Edward Lasker, Chess for Fun & Chess for Blood, Philadelphia 1942, p. 37-38)
Lasker prefaced the book with letters he had received from prominent chess friends with answers to the question why they were interested in chess. One of these letters was from Cassirer.
Photo: Gisela Gresser, Edward Lasker, and Maurice Wertheim (ca. 1940), Collection of World Chess Hall of Fame
Dear Edward Lasker: You have asked me a difficult question; and if you expect an answer from the philosopher rather than the old friend, I am sorry to disappoint you. Rerum cognoscere causas" - to know and understand the causes of things, according to Lucretius - is a principle that will never be achieved, but which, like other unfulfilled ideals and desires, gives me the greatest satisfaction.
I await the publication of your new book with great interest; no doubt it will give me the same pleasure as your book 'Chess Strategy', which I read twenty-five years ago.
In recent years there has been a renaissance in the appreciation of Ernst Cassirer as an important German philosopher of the 20th century. Wolfram Eilenberger, for example, portrayed Cassirer and his thinking in his bestseller Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Great Decade of Philosophy from 2018.
On April 12, 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a stroke, an event that deeply shook Cassirer. The next day, Friday, April 13, Cassirer held a seminar at Columbia University. Afterward, he was persuaded by Professor Ashley Montagu to play a game of chess, losing track of time. Cassirer had intended to be home by 3 p.m., but when he realized he was running late, he hurried to the university exit and tried to hail a taxi. A nearby student offered to help him, but suddenly, Cassirer collapsed and fell, lifeless, into the arms of the student.
