Biography
Born and raised in Florence in a Protestant household, the son of sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand, Hildebrand converted to Catholicism in 1914. He was a vocal opponent of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, fleeing from Germany to Vienna, Austria in 1933 upon Hitler's rise to power. There with the support of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss he founded and edited an anti-Nazi weekly paper, Der Christliche Ständestaat (The Christian Corporative State). For this, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis.
When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Hildebrand was once again forced to flee. He spent eleven months in Switzerland, near Fribourg. He then moved to Fiac in France, near Toulouse, where he taught at the Catholic University of Toulouse. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he went into hiding, until after many hardships, and the heroic assistance of Frenchmen, including Edmond Michelet, he was able to escape with his wife, son (Franz von Hildebrand), and daughter-in-law to Portugal. From there, they traveled by ship to Brazil and then to New York in 1940. There he taught philosophy at the Jesuit Fordham University on Rose Hill, The Bronx, New York.
Hildebrand retired from teaching in 1960 and spent the remaining years of his life writing. He is the author of dozens of books, both in German and English. He was a founder of Una Voce America. He died on January 26, 1977 after a long struggle with a heart condition. He was married to Margaret Denck (died 1957), and then, in 1959, to Alice von Hildebrand (born 1923), also a philosopher and theologian.
He died in New Rochelle, New York, in 1977.
Read more about this topic: Dietrich Von Hildebrand
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)