A memoir of philosophical awakening in the classroom of Edmund Husserl
What the Work Is
My First Göttingen Semester is a memoir by Edith Stein, the German philosopher and later Discalced Carmelite nun. It recounts the period when Stein, then a young student, came to the University of Göttingen to study under the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. The work belongs to Stein’s autobiographical writings and covers a defined, formative stretch of her life: her arrival in Göttingen and her immersion in the philosophical circle gathered around Husserl.
What the Book Is About
The book’s subject is Stein’s own intellectual and personal formation during her first semester at Göttingen. It describes how she came to study with Husserl and how she entered the world of phenomenology — the philosophical movement whose method she would go on to make her own. The memoir is thus a first-person account of a decisive encounter: a student discovering a way of thinking and a community of thinkers that would shape the rest of her philosophical life.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of the work is the experience of philosophical awakening — the process by which a student is drawn into a demanding intellectual discipline and begins to think within it. Stein’s account situates this awakening in the specific setting of Husserl’s teaching and the circle of students around him.
A second theme is the relationship between a teacher and a student. Stein came to Göttingen expressly to study with Husserl, and the memoir documents her early engagement with his thought and her decision, by the end of that first summer, to pursue her doctorate in philosophy under him. Her later recollection was that she chose empathy as her thesis topic because Husserl had treated empathy as the crucial act establishing intersubjectivity but had never fully explained what he meant by it — a gap she set out to fill. That recollection belongs to her autobiographical writing, of which this memoir is a part.
The work also reflects Stein’s place within the phenomenological movement as a whole. She is categorized as a realistic phenomenologist, and her early studies under Husserl and Reinach formed the foundation of a lifelong commitment to the phenomenological method. The memoir captures the moment when that commitment took root.
Structure and Approach
The work is written as a personal, first-person narrative — a memoir rather than a systematic treatise. Its approach is recollective and descriptive: Stein looks back on her own experience as a student and reconstructs the intellectual atmosphere she entered. It is part of her autobiographical writing, alongside her better-known Life in a Jewish Family, and shares that work’s reflective, memory-based character.
Significance and Influence
The memoir is significant as a firsthand record of the intellectual milieu surrounding Husserl at Göttingen and of Stein’s own formation within it. It documents the beginnings of a philosophical career that would produce original contributions to phenomenology — including her dissertation on empathy and her later work bridging phenomenology with Thomism — and it offers insight into the early development of a thinker who would become one of the notable figures of the phenomenological movement.
Stein was born in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), in Lower Silesia, into an observant Jewish family. She was the youngest of eleven children and was born on Yom Kippur, an important Jewish festival of the Hebrew calendar; these facts combined to make her a favorite of her mother. She was a very gifted child who enjoyed learning, in a home where her mother encouraged critical thinking, and she greatly admired her mother’s unwavering religious faith. By her teenage years, however, Stein had become an agnostic. Though her father died while she was young, her widowed mother was determined to give her children a thorough education and consequently sent Edith to study at the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Breslau. At age 19, Stein moved with her family to Breslau to a house bought by her mother, which she later described in her Autobiography.
Stein arrived at the University of Göttingen in April 1913 in order to study for the summer semester with Edmund Husserl. Her studies were interrupted in July 1914 because of the outbreak of World War I. She then served as a volunteer wartime Red Cross nurse in an uninfectious diseases hospital at Mährisch Weißkirchen from 7 April to 1 September 1915. In 1916, Stein moved to the University of Freiburg in order to complete her dissertation on Empathy. Shortly before receiving her degree from Freiburg she agreed to become Husserl’s assistant there. In this role, she differed with Husserl on important issues and made unique contributions to phenomenology as a whole. Her dissertation entitled Das Einfühlungsproblem in seiner historischen Entwicklung und in phänomenologischer Betrachtung (The Empathy Problem as it Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically) was awarded a doctorate in philosophy with the summa cum laude honor. Stein then became a member of the faculty at Freiburg, where she worked until 1918 as a teaching assistant to Husserl, who had transferred to that institution. The University of Göttingen rejected her habilitation thesis in 1919. Although Stein passed her doctoral examination with distinction, her attempts to habilitate failed due to the fact that Stein was a woman. Her rejected habilitation thesis, Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften (Contributions to the Philosophical Foundations of Psychology and the Human Sciences), was published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1922.
While Stein had earlier contacts with Catholicism, it was her reading of the autobiography of the mystic Teresa of Ávila during summer holidays in Bad Bergzabern in 1921 that prompted her conversion and eventually the desire to seek the life of a Discalced Carmelite. Baptized on 1 January 1922, and dissuaded by her spiritual advisers from immediately seeking entry to the enclosed and hidden life of a Carmelite nun, Stein obtained a position to teach at the Dominican nuns’ school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, Stein translated Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate (Of Truth) into German, familiarized herself with Catholic philosophy in general and tried to bridge the phenomenology of her former teacher, Husserl, to Thomism. She visited Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, the same month that Heidegger gave a speech to Husserl on his 70th birthday. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Catholic Church-affiliated Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, but antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. In a letter to Pope Pius XI, she denounced the Nazi regime and asked the Pope to openly denounce the regime “to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name.” Her letter received no answer, and it is not known for certain whether the Pope ever saw it. However, in 1937 the Pope issued an encyclical written in German, Mit brennender Sorge, in which he criticized Nazism, listed violations of the Concordat between Germany and the Church of 1933, and condemned antisemitism.
Although Edith Stein spent eight years with the Dominicans in Speyer as a teacher and considered the Benedictine Abbey of Beuron, according to her own words, “like the antechamber of heaven”, she never thought to become a Dominican or a Benedictine: “It always seemed to me as if the Lord had reserved something for me in Carmel that I could only find there”. Stein entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery St. Maria vom Frieden (Our Lady of Peace) in Cologne-Lindenthal in October 1933 and took the religious name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). In Cologne she wrote her metaphysical book Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being), which attempted to combine the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Husserl. To avoid the growing Nazi threat, the order transferred Edith and her sister, Rosa, who was also a convert and an extern sister of the Carmel, to the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands. There she wrote Studie über Joannes a Cruce: Kreuzeswissenschaft (“Studies on John of the Cross: The Science of the Cross”). In her testament of 9 June 1939 she wrote: I beg the Lord to take my life and my death … for all concerns of the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary and the holy church, especially for the preservation of our holy order, in particular the Carmelite monasteries of Cologne and Echt, as atonement for the unbelief of the Jewish People, and that the Lord will be received by his own people and his kingdom shall come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world, at last for my loved ones, living or dead, and for all God gave to me: that none of them shall go astray. Stein’s move to Echt prompted her to be more devout and even more observant of the Carmelite rule. After having her teaching position revoked by the implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Stein quickly eased back into the role of instructor at the convent in Echt, teaching both fellow sisters and students within the community Latin and philosophy. Even prior to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Stein believed that she would not survive the war, going so far as to write to the prioress to request her permission to “allow [Stein] to offer [her]self to the heart of Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement for true peace” and she also wrote a will. Her fellow sisters would later recount how Stein began “quietly training herself for life in a concentration camp, by enduring cold and hunger” after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.
The Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a public statement condemning Nazi racism read in all churches across the nation on 20 July 1942. In a retaliatory response on 26 July 1942 the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, ordered the arrest of all Jewish converts who had previously been spared. Along with two hundred and forty-three baptized Jews who were living in the Netherlands, Teresa Benedicta a Cruce was arrested by the SS on 2 August 1942. She and her sister Rosa were imprisoned at the concentration camps of Amersfoort and Westerbork before they were deported to Auschwitz. A Dutch official at Westerbork was so impressed by her sense of faith and her calm disposition, so he offered her an escape plan. Stein vehemently refused his assistance, stating: “If somebody intervened at this point and took away [her] chance to share in the fate of [her] brothers and sisters, that would be utter annihilation.” On 7 August 1942, early in the morning, 987 Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was probably on 9 August that Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, her sister Rosa, and many more Jewish people were killed in a gas chamber at Birkenau.
Philosophical Development
Stein’s development as a philosopher is frequently divided into three periods: an early, phenomenological (1916–1925), a middle, comparative (1925–1933) and a late, Christian (1935–1942). In reality the same factors work themselves out throughout her work and propels it forward: 1. a profound understanding of and commitment to the phenomenological method as taught by Husserl and Reinach; 2. a deep sense of responsibility to the other for what we believe and 3. an acceptance of my own inability to form a complete, meaningful worldview without divine assistance. The three periods are best understood as stages of integration of these three factors, with Stein’s baptism New Year’s Day 1922, marking a decisive step on the way and her entering Carmel 14 October 1933 marking another.
Stein’s dissertation on empathy was according to her own account an attempt to fill a gap in Husserl’s work. In her autobiographical Life in a Jewish Family, she recalled that he took empathy to be the crucial act in which intersubjectivity was established, but nowhere detailed exactly what was meant by it. She therefore wanted to undertake this task and thereby clarify this crucial idea for the development of the phenomenological movement. While working as Husserl’s assistant (1916–18) she edited Husserl’s manuscripts of what was later to be published as Ideas II and III, and in the process came to understand the extraordinary importance this act has for our constitution of the intersubjective world, and in particular for the objects studied by psychology and the humanities. When she resigned from her position as Husserl’s assistant, the first work she undertook was on the phenomenological constitution of those objects: the psyche and the spirit. The result was the two treatises of Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, published in Husserl’s Jahrbuch 1922: Psychic Causality and Individual and Community. From this period also dates Introduction to Philosophy, An Investigation Concerning the State, and very importantly Freedom and Grace.
Encouraged to study and compare Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy with that of the phenomenological movement, Stein embarked on a translation project of Aquinas’ De Veritate, which was to be published in two volumes in 1932. The work, which translates Aquinas’ way of thinking into a modern German idiom and restyles it as a contemporary academic treatise, occasioned that Stein engaged with Aquinas’ thought as a phenomenologist, i.e. as someone interested in the matters discussed by Aquinas, as distinct from providing an interpretation of Aquinas’ thought or writing in prolongation of it as a thomist. The most important works from this period are ‘Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison’, in which she discusses the differing methodologies of Husserl and Aquinas and accounts for their differences, Potency and Act, in which she attempts a phenomenological investigation of ‘potency’ and ‘act’ and the twin work of anthropology: The Structure of the Human Person. Philosophical Anthropology and What is the Human Being? Theological Anthropology (the second volume remains a highly developed draft rather than a completed work, since Stein’s lectures were canceled in 1933). During this period she also lectures on women’s education and vocation and on education in general to very large audiences and to great acclaim. In these lectures, published in ESGA 13 and ESGA 16, she works out for herself the important questions concerning social type and essence, which find a fuller development in The Structure of the Human Person.
Her first literal assignment in Carmel was to prepare Potency and Act for publication, a task she accomplished by writing a new book: Finite and Eternal Being – An Ascent to the Meaning of Being. This work proposed a phenomenological doctrine of being (Seinslehre), which knows itself to be Christian, i.e. as taking Christian Revelation to contribute towards the view of the world in which it looks for and finds the meaning of being in being’s unfolding. Stein also worked on Dionysius the Areopagite, translating his works into German and writing (for him) a work supposed to be lost on symbolic theology. Stein’s final work, the Science of the Cross, was a commentary on John of the Cross, which developed the specifically Carmelite understanding of the depths of the soul, already of interest to Stein in her early work.
Legacy and Veneration
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was beatified as a martyr on 1 May 1987 in Cologne, Germany, by Pope John Paul II and then canonized by him 11 years later on 11 October 1998 in Rome. The miracle that was the basis for her canonization is the cure of Benedicta McCarthy, a little girl who had swallowed a large amount of paracetamol (acetaminophen), which causes hepatic necrosis. The young girl’s father, Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a priest of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, immediately called together relatives and prayed for Teresa’s intercession. Shortly thereafter, the nurses in the intensive care unit saw her sit up, completely healthy. Ronald Kleinman, a pediatric specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who treated the girl, testified about her recovery to church tribunals, stating: “I was willing to say that it was miraculous.” McCarthy would later attend Sr. Teresa Benedicta’s canonization. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross is one of the six patron saints of Europe, together with Benedict of Nursia, Cyril and Methodius, Bridget of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena.
Today there are many schools named in tribute to her, for example in her hometown, Lubliniec, Poland Darmstadt, Germany, Hengelo, Netherlands, and Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Also named for her are a women’s dormitory at the University of Tübingen and a classroom building at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Some questioned the beatification of Teresa Benedicta as a martyr, with Daniel Polish saying that the beatification seemed to “carry the tacit message encouraging conversionary activities” because “official discussion of the beatification seemed to make a point of conjoining Stein’s Catholic faith with her death with ‘fellow Jews’ in Auschwitz.” The position of the Catholic Church is that Teresa Benedicta also died because of the Dutch episcopacy’s public condemnation of Nazi racism in 1942; in other words, she died because of the moral teaching of the Church and thus, she is a true martyr. Lubliniec in Poland hosts the Edith Stein Museum (Muzeum Pro Memoria Edith Stein) localised on the first floor of the Courant family house (Edith Stein’s grandparents’ family home). Wrocław hosts a museum called Edith Stein House localised in the house Edith’s mother bought for the family in 1919 on the street then called Michaelisstrasse 38 (today Nowowiejska 38). In Vienna, the Edith-Stein-Haus at Ebendorferstraße 8 is the main location of the Catholic University Chaplaincy and the university pastoral care of the Archdiocese of Vienna. In the spirit of Karl Strobl’s model of the “Catholic Student House”, the house is also home to a chapel consecrated to Edith Stein as well as a dormitory for about 90 students.
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published a book in 2006 titled Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922, in which he contrasted her living of her own personal philosophy with Martin Heidegger, whose actions during the Nazi era, according to MacIntyre, suggested a “bifurcation of personality.” Playwright Arthur Giron wrote Edith Stein, a play that was inspired by Stein’s life. It was produced at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1988. In 1988, Edith Stein was pictured on a German postage stamp with Rupert Mayer SJ in honor of their beatification. In 1991, the Italian musician Juri Camisasca released a song inspired by the life of Edith Stein, Il carmelo di Echt (The carmelite convent of Echt) on the album of the same name. The song was later recorded by Giuni Russo and Franco Battiato. In 1995, Hungarian film director Márta Mészáros made a movie about the life and death of Edith Stein with the title A hetedik szoba (The Seventh Room/Chamber), starring Maia Morgenstern. In 1999, a memorial statue by German sculptor Bert Gerresheim was dedicated in Cologne, Germany. The statue comprises three different views of Stein reflecting her Jewish and Christian faith, and a pile of empty shoes representing the victims of the holocaust. In 2007, Stein’s life and work was dramatised in the novel Winter Under Water (Picador, London) by author James Hopkin. In 2008, the first Stolperstein (Polish: kamienie pamięci) that was ever laid in Poland was placed near Edith Stein’s childhood home at 38 ul. Nowowiejska (formerly the Michaelisstraße) in Wrocław. Other Stolpersteine for her are in Cologne (several) and Freiburg. In 2009, her bust was installed at the Walhalla Memorial near Regensburg, Germany. In June 2009, the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES) was founded, and held its first international conference at Maynooth University, Ireland, in order to advance the philosophical writings of Stein. On 6 June 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, a bell dedicated to her was named by Prince Charles at Bayeux Cathedral. Also in 2014, the book Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps, by Emily Leah Silverman, was published. In 2018, American film director Joshua Sinclair made a movie about the life and death of Edith Stein with the title A Rose in Winter, starring Zana Marjanovic. In April 2024, during a private audience Pope Francis received a formal request from the superior general of the Discalced Carmelites, Miguel Márquez Calle, to declare Stein a Doctor of the Church. The Discalced Carmelites had first launched an international commission to gather the necessary documentation required for the declaration in 2022, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Stein’s conversion to Catholicism and the 80th anniversary of her martyrdom.
