Pushing Time Away : My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna - Softcover

Peter Singer

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9781862077799: Pushing Time Away : My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862077797 ISBN 13: 9781862077799

Publisher: Granta Bks., 2005

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'What binds us pushes time away' wrote David Oppenheim to his future wife, Amalie Pollak, on March 24, 1905. Oppenheim, classical scholar, collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, lived through the heights and depths of Vienna's twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. He perished in obscurity at a Nazi concentration camp in 1943 leaving his grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, without a chance to know him. Almost fifty years later Peter Singer set out to explore the life of his grandfather, and drawing on personal letters and documents, makes startling discoveries. Combining touching family biography with thoughtful reflection questions we face today, Singer gives us a vivid portrait of Vienna when it was the centre of European culture and new ideas, a culture that was both intensely Jewish and distinctly secular. He is finally forced to confront one of the foundations of his own thought: How much can we rely on universal values and human reason?

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About the Author:

Peter Singer is the Ira W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He is the bestselling author of Animal Liberation and The President of Good and Evil (Granta).

From Booklist:

Singer, a philosopher, bioethicist, professor, and author of 16 books, is best known for the "animal liberation" movement, which deals with the ethics of our treatment of animals. He also is the grandson of David Oppenheim, a Jew and a classical scholar who lived in Vienna and died in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. Oppenheim's wife, Amalie, survived the Holocaust and moved to Australia in 1946. Singer found many letters and intimate personal papers in an aunt's home in Australia and in the State Archives of Austria. They included more than 100 letters that Singer's grandparents wrote to his parents and to his mother's sister after they left for Australia in 1938. Singer describes how his grandfather became a friend of Sigmund Freud and how they discussed theories of psychology. Oppenheim later parted with Freud, following instead the first of the great heretics of psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler. Singer's book is an exceptional eulogy to his grandfather. George Cohen
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