Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters LETTERS TO ROMAN INGARDEN

Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters
12
LETTERS TO ROMAN INGARDEN
Edith Stein (1891–1942) and Roman Ingarden
(1893–1970) were both students of Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938), the father of phenomenology. Stein and
Ingarden corresponded extensively between 1917 and
1938. The letters reveal a friendship that spanned the
adult lives of two important 20th-century thinkers.
While we do not have Ingarden’s letters to Edith
Stein, these 162 of hers to him offer the reader a fascinating window into the life of this philosopher, convert,
Carmelite nun, and martyr of the Holocaust.
Translated from the newest critical German edition by Dr. Hugh Candler
Hunt, this premiere English edition of her correspondence—volume 12 of ICS
Publications’ Collected Works of Edith Stein—gives us a fresh glimpse into Edith
Stein’s life and personality.
Her letters allow the reader to follow Stein through her student years in
Göttingen, her conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, her many attempts to get a
university appointment in Germany, and her decision to become a Carmelite nun and
enter the Carmel in Cologne where she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
The letters also help us understand Ingarden and his life in Poland—including
his intellectual development as he brought phenomenology to Poland, his writings, and the editorial assistance Stein provided for all of the works he published
in German; his marriage, and his academic career. Ingarden, a phenomenologist
and aesthetician, spent his life in the Polish academic world; his final position was
at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
In an effort to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany, Stein transferred to a Carmelite convent in Echt, the Netherlands. But in August 1942 she
nevertheless was arrested by the Nazi S.S. at the Echt Carmel and transported to
Auschwitz. Along with hundreds of others on the transport, she was killed in the
gas chamber within a short time after arriving.
Edith Stein was beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.
In 1999 she was proclaimed a co-patroness of Europe.
Stein’s letters to Ingarden are in the Ingarden family archives in Kraków with
copies in the Edith Stein Archive at the Cologne Carmel. Ingarden asked that his
letters to Stein be returned and she complied. To date, they have not been found.
ICS Publications
Washington DC
www.icspublications.org
ISBN: 978-1-939272-25-6
$22.95
ICS