page_title: Harold F. Cherniss
section_title: A crucial year in Germany
hierarchical_section_title: Harold F. Cherniss / Life / A crucial year in Germany
caption_attribution_description: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), Dreiviertelfigur stehend nach rechts; Kopf im Profil
context_page_description: Harold Fredrik Cherniss was an American classicist and historian of ancient philosophy. While at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was said to be "the country's foremost expert on Plato and Aristotle."
  According to Tarán, Cherniss's "greatest contribution to scholarship is doubtless his two books on Aristotle, supplemented by The Riddle of the Early Academy ... his published works on Plato, Aristotle, and the Academy are among the very few publications that revolutionized the field... His significance was recognized all over the world not only by classicists and philosophers but by the learned societies of which he was a member and the various universities that awarded him honorary degrees."
  Cherniss's scholarship continues to shape the study of ancient Greek philosophy in several significant ways:
  Cherniss is remembered as a champion of Platonic unitarianism, the contention that Plato's dialogues present a single, consistent and unchanging philosophical system.
context_section_description: From 1927 to 1928, Cherniss studied with some of the leading classicists in Germany: in Göttingen with Hermann Fränkel and in Berlin with Werner Jaeger and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Cherniss thus arrived in the middle of a period (1924–1929) known in Germany as the Golden Era (German: Goldene Zwanziger) of the left-leaning Weimar Republic during which the economy was growing and there was a consequent decrease in civil unrest. These were relatively uneventful years between the hyperinflation of 1921-24 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The 1920s saw a remarkable cultural renaissance in Germany. Influenced by the brief cultural explosion in the Soviet Union, German literature, cinema, theater, jazz, art, and architecture were in the midst of a phase of great creativity. This was also a revolutionary time in classical studies and philosophy. Jaeger had published his famous work Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development in 1923. Martin Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927.
  While Cherniss was studying in Germany, a crucial election campaign splintered the moderate and centrist forces. In 1927, the governing coalition that included the right-wing and anti-semitic German National People's Party, a precursor to Hitler's National Socialist Party, broke apart and precipitated a new election that the left-wing, democratic parties appeared to win. Although the implications were not all apparent during Cherniss's time in Germany, the election he witnessed proved to be a key turning point that fatally weakened the moderate and democratic forces in Germany and paved the way for the rise of Nazism a few years later.
  A visitor to Princeton met with Cherniss many years later and reported that:
  … we somehow got around to taking about Wilamowitz … [Cherniss] said that Wilamowitz would pepper his lectures with remarks about the political situation in Germany and that his students would applaud by loudly stamping their feet on the floor. The remarks were of such a nature that they caused Cherniss to develop an intense dislike for the man. I don't recall how he characterized the remarks, but Solmsen's description of the antidemocratic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Prussian lens through which Wilamowitz viewed Weimar Germany would explain Cherniss's antipathy.
caption: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
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