Andrew Jaszi

Andrew Oscar Jászi (Hungarian: Jászi András Oszkár; March 1, 1917 – June 22, 1998) was a Hungarian-born philosopher and literary scholar. He taught as professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 to 1984.

Jászi was born in Budapest into a distinguished family of assimilated Jews. His father, Oszkár Jászi, was a sociologist, historian, and politician who served as Minister of Nationalities in Mihály Károlyi's cabinet during the Hungarian Democratic Republic of 1918–19 before moving to the United States in 1925 to join the faculty of Oberlin College as Professor of Political Science. Andrew Jászi’s mother, Anna Lesznai, was a well-known artist and writer.

After his parents’ divorce in 1919, Jászi moved with his mother and brother George (1915–1992) to Vienna, where he received his primary school education. This was followed by a return to Budapest in 1931 and enrollment in the Deutsche Oberschule (“German High School”). As was typical of those of his background, he was raised bilingual in Hungarian and German, though German remained the primary language of his intellectual work throughout his life.

He finished high school in 1935, then came to the United States to join his father at Oberlin where he earned his B.A. in German in 1938. From there, he went to Harvard to begin his doctoral studies. Drafted into the U.S. army in 1942, he was dispatched to serve as an intelligence officer with the occupation forces in Germany.

Jászi completed his Ph.D. in German at Harvard in 1947. He was hired the following year by the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught classes in German literature until his retirement in 1984. He died at his home in Oakland, California, in 1998.

Jászi enjoyed a campus-wide reputation as an outstanding teacher. Recognized as “one of the most respected critics of German literature in the United States” as well as “one of the most beloved professors of the University,” he developed an original style of teaching that was rigorous yet also accessible to the non-specialist. Methodologically, he favored what has been termed “an ontological approach”; pedagogically, he incorporated Socratic dialogue and what, for lack of a better word, may be called “lecture.” In all this, he brought to his classes, and was capable of eliciting from his students, an exceptional degree of personal engagement.

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