Chapter 10 - The Tragedy of the Person

Summary

In late 1917, with the war having taken its grim toll on the student population drawn to the service of the Fatherland, after the collapse of General von Falkenhayn’s intended breakthrough at Verdun and the equally calamitous struggle on the Somme in 1916, with an increasingly deteriorating economic situation at the home front, resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and entry of the United States into the war, Edmund Husserl delivered three lectures on “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity” at the University of Freiburg. The initiative for these lectures – “emergency wartime seminars” – came directly from the military High Command, most likely at the personal request of General Erich von Gündell, who had studied under Husserl in Göttingen before the war and was Commander General of the Reserve Corps (Fifth Army), in which Husserl’s two sons fought.