Herbert Marcuse's Homecoming (Arts in Brief), nytimes.com login: ephilo pass: ephilo
Related: Herbert Marcuse Archive

"HERBERT MARCUSE'S HOMECOMING Twenty-four years after his death, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse is to be buried in a cemetery in Berlin on Friday, the anniversary of his birth there in 1898. Marcuse, who argued that revolution against the repression of modern society is a precursor to utopian society, was a powerful influence on the student movements of the 1960's. Tomorrow the radical Angela Davis is to be among the speakers at a symposium in Marcuse's honor at the Free University in Berlin, Agence France-Presse reported. Marcuse was a United States citizen when he died in 1979 during a visit to what was then West Berlin.


His wife, Ricky, had him cremated in Austria and sent his ashes to the United States because she "felt that enough Jews had been reduced to ashes in Germany," his grandson Harold Marcuse explained on Marcuse's Web site, The urn spent the intervening years in New Haven. After Harold Marcuse decided to return Herbert's remains to his birthplace, the city government agreed to provide an honorary grave site next to the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. "Why give the Nazis the satisfaction of having purged the country even of the remains of some of its finest intellectuals?" Harold Marcuse asked. "Hasn't Germany finished its 40 years in the desert?"