Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters—Letters to Roman Ingarden trans. by Hugh Candler Hunt (review)

This volume gives us 162 letters and postcards written by Edith Stein (or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) to Roman Ingarden between 1917 and 1938 (the responses of Ingarden have been lost). Stein and Ingarden both belonged to the inner circle around Edmund Husserl (she was, in fact, Husserl’s assistant between 1916 and 1918), and this was the setting in which their friendship began and grew. She mentions Husserl frequently in the letters, always reverently as der Meister, but she also speaks about the particular difficulties of working with him. From these letters we learn more about the exact focus of her work for him—that is, we hear about which manuscripts she ordered and prepared for publication.

In one letter she reveals her strong sense of Prussian identity (she was born and raised in Breslau), and she surprises us when she describes a moment in 1917 when “it suddenly became quite clear to me: today my individual life ceased and everything I am belongs to the [German] state” (letter 7). We also learn about her political activities in Breslau after World War I with the newly formed German Democratic Party.

Of particular interest in this correspondence is the collision between her and Ingarden over Catholicism (she had converted to the Catholic Church in 1922). Ingarden had apparently in one of his 1924 letters spoken of the Church exercising “control of the masses through a body of made-up dogma,” to which she responded (letter 85), asking him how he, who knew how to investigate issues with the greatest care, could bring himself to speak in such half-baked slogans and stereotypes about such momentous matters. She also challenged him to explain how he could be so dismissive of the thought and faith of intellectual giants such as Ss. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. On the occasion of her entrance into religious life as a Carmelite in 1933 she received from him a message that she calls his “very sour substitute ‘congratulations,’” and she expresses to him her regret that he cannot enter into her happiness (letter 160).

But what will perhaps engage the reader of this correspondence most of all, especially the reader looking for new insight into Stein as personality and as woman, is the fact that she clearly loved Ingarden with an unrequited love. In letter 25 she addresses him as “Darling” and says “ Du” to him. Then she pulls back, sensing his reserve, and resumes her practice of calling him “Mr. Ingarden” and saying “ Sie” to him. She often felt that he wrote to her more out of duty than inclination (letter 10), and she once explained a long silence on her part by saying, “you see … all of your letters are curiously void of any sense of involvement” (letter 32). She found it difficult to adapt to his “distance”: “For my part, indeed, I have always had to strongly resist writing [to you] from the perspective of my whole personality” (letter 32). But the correspondence was able to be sustained on the basis of their shared interest in phenomenology and their shared veneration for the person of its founder. In fact, we learn that in 1930 she invested considerable time and effort in helping Ingarden prepare for publication his important work, The Literary Work of Art(Halle, 1931).

The book is very competently introduced by Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz and is well translated (but not fehlerfrei) by Hugh Candler Hunt.