ABSTRACT
Herbert Marcuses' was clearly a philosopher by training (although his first degree was in German literature), and by occupation (although he was also employed as a political analyst during the war, and lectured on a wide variety of topics in his later life). He was politically active all his life, although he would have disclaimed the description activist. That was something he admired and supported in others; he saw his own role as supportive and engaged, but hardly as leading a charge. Marcuses never felt any contradiction between being German and being Jewish; his father refused to believe that, as a good German, he could possibly be the subject of discrimination or persecution, and refused to consider leaving Berlin until the very last moment before the war broke out, and then getting out only at substantial risk and cost.
