CARL E. SCHORSKE

Carl E. Schorske, who taught at Wesleyan from 1946–1960 before moving to UC Berkley and eventually Princeton, died Sept. 13, 2015. He was 100 years old. A scholar whose essays centered on Vienna at the turn of the 20th century as the site of the origin of modernist thinking, he returned to Wesleyan in the 1970s as a visitor at the Center for Humanities. He won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1981 for his collection of essays, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, or “genius grants.”

Other books include German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (1955) and Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (1998).

Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth ’78 recalls that he had signed up for “Carl’s Vienna seminar” in the spring semester of his first year at Wesleyan.

“Carl was an extraordinary teacher—erudite, humane and sensitive to the different ways that students learned,” writes Roth. “He was an activist, a scholar and a pedagogue. These aspects of his personality all seemed to work together in his intellectual practice as a scholar-teacher. When he was teaching a subject he was deeply engaged with as a scholar, he said he ‘was really cooking with gas.’ He took culture seriously, and he took enormous pleasure in it, too. That seriousness and capacity for pleasure was something that his students were so fortunate to share in.”

Among those who survive are a daughter, three sons, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by a son, Stephen, in 2013, and his wife of more than 70 years, Elizabeth Rorke Schorske, died last year.