Eric Gutkind

Personal

Vocation

German Jewish mystic and philosopher, the author of three books, who formulated his ideas in terms of concepts drawn from the Kabbala. Eric Gutkind belonged to a pacificist-mystical circle of European intellectuals which at different points included Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, L. E. J. Brouwer, Henri Borel, Frederik van Eeden, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Oppenheimer, Walter Rathenau, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair and Rabindranath Tagore. In 1910, he published the book Siderische Geburt: Seraphische Wanderung vom Tode der Welt zur Taufe der Tat (Sideric birth: seraphic peregrination from the death of the world to the baptism of action) under the pseudonym Volker. This book served as a focal point for the pacifist-mystical circle and later became the philosophical manifesto for the New Europe Groups organized in London in the 1920s by the Yugoslavian teacher Dimitrije Mitrinović, which attracted such men as Sir Patrick Geddes, Sir Frederick Soddy and John Cowper Powys. Dimitrije Mitrinović and Gutkind published a number of articles in the literary magazine The New Age. His second book, The Absolute Collective, published in London in 1937, was hailed by Henry Miller as "true in the highest sense, entirely on the side of life." His third book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt, published in the United States in 1952, was a reinterpretation of traditional Judaism. Gutkind died in Chautauqua, New York, on 26 August 1965, aged 88. Link to Wikipedia biography