Professor Ludwig Marcuse (February 8, 1894 in Berlin – August 2, 1971 in Bad Wiessee), was a philosopher and writer of Jewish origin.
From 1933 to 1940 Marcuse lived in France, settling with other German exiles in Sanary-sur-Mer. From 1940 to 1950 he lived in Los Angeles. He returned to Germany at the end of his life.
In 1962, his non-fiction book Obscene: The history of an indignation was published. The work revolves around leading obscenity trials: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (Jena, 1799), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Paris, 1857), Arthur Schnitzler's Round Dance (Berlin, 1920), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley (London, 1960), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (Los Angeles, 1962). A chapter is also devoted to the crusade of Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
His papers are held at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California.
Famous quotes containing the words ludwig and/or marcuse:
“It had been a wonderful evening. And what I needed now to give it the perfect ending was a bit of the old Ludwig Van.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)