Eva Cassirer

Eva Cassirer (Berlin, 28 January 1920 – Calvià [Majorca, Spain], 19 September 2009) was a German philosopher, astronomer and art collector. She was an honorary professor at Technische Universität Berlin. She was awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations in 2011.

Life

Born in Berlin, Cassirer was the daughter of the Jewish industrialist Alfred Cassirer and his wife Elisabeth Johanna Sotscheck (1887-1974); she was also the niece of Ernst Cassirer and Tilla Durieux. Her parents divorced a few years after Eva's birth and her mother married her second husband, Leo Blumenreich, in 1924. Eva, grew up with her mother and stepfather in a shared household in a villa in Berlin-Grunewald Wildpfad 28. Eva kept her birth name. As early as 1922/23, the sculptor Georg Kolbe created a bronze head of Eva Cassirer on behalf of her father. Her biological father died in 1932 and left, among other things, an art collection of oriental decorative arts and Islamic carpets, which he had loaned to the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin; this loan was later converted into a donation by Eva Cassirer.

Eva was brought up as a Christian by her mother. Despite her Jewish father, she was not forcibly marked as Jewish during the National Socialist era. Eva and her mother hid several "illegal" persons in the basement of their villa to evade registration by the police authorities In addition, Eva's former classmate Elisabeth "Lilo" Jacoby was taken into the household after Eva found her on the street Elisabeth's parents, the journalist of the Berliner Tageblatts Bruno Jacoby (b. 1879) and his wife Ella Jacoby née Davidsohn (1889-1942) Part of the villa was rented out to Prince Friedrich Christian of Schaumburg-Lippe, an employee in the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, who pretended not to notice the illegally housed persons. Elisabeth Jacoby survived the Holocaust through the help.

Cassirer studied philosophy and astronomy in the United States and England, and received her doctorate from the University of London in 1957 with The Concept of Time: An Investigation into the Time of Psychology with Special Reference to Memory and a Comparison with the Time of Physics. The philosophy of time remained her main topic thereafter.

From 1965 to 1975, she taught the subject philosophy of science at the University of St Andrews as Senior Lecturer. She was later Honorary Professorin Philosophy at Technische Universität Berlin. In addition, she was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1975, she translated John Langshaw Austin's book Sense and Sensibilia from the English. In 1999, she translated George Pitcher's book The Dog Who Came from the Wild. The Adventure of a Friendship from the American.

Because of their help for those illegally harboured in the Third Reich, Eva Cassirer and her mother were posthumously recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on 11 January 2011.