Influence
Weltsch's works around deal with the subjects of Ethics, Politics and Philosophy. For his ethical and political publications Weltsch received the Ruppin- Prize from the city of Haifa in 1952. His most important work was the Jewish-Zionist weekly paper Selbstwehr (self-defense), which he led from 1919 until 1938. With this work and hundreds of articles he became one of the most important personalities in Jewish life next to Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann and Hugo Bergmann, his early school friend.
Weltsch wrote remarkable essays on philosophers like Henri Bergson and Christian von Ehrenfels, who was the most influential teacher for Weltsch. This was in so far unusual, as most of Weltsch's colleagues and student friends were more following the ideas of Franz Brentano. But people like Bergman and Martin Buber called him a self-thinking, independent philosopher. His influence and help to many others was great, but his role as a cultural consultant is not known to many also due to his shyness. The friendship to Kafka lasted 20 years, and the friendship to Max Brod lasted 75 years from the Piarist school in Prague to Weltschs death in 1964.
Read more about this topic: Felix Weltsch
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations, as all other causes combined.”
—John Abbott. The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty, John Abbott, Crocker and Brewster (1833)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)