Stein, Edith (1891–1942)

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Stein, Edith (1891–1942)

German philosopher, interpreter of the phenomenologist Edward Husserl and Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a nun and died at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Name variations: Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross; Sister Teresia Benedicata; Saint Teresa Benedicta. Born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland); died on August 9, 1942, in a gas chamber in Auschwitz; youngest of seven surviving children of Siegfried Stein (who had a lumber business) and Auguste Courant Stein (who continued the lumber business after her husband's death); attended Victoria School in Breslau, University of Breslau, and Göttingen University; awarded doctorate from University of Freiburg summa cum laude on August 3, 1916.

Served with the wartime Red Cross (February–October, 1916); worked as personal assistant to Edward Husserl (1916–18); baptized a Roman Catholic (January 1, 1922); taught at St. Magdalena in Speyer (1923–31); entered a Discalced Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany (October 14, 1933); declared venerable, first step in the process of being canonized a Roman Catholic saint (January 26, 1987); second step, beatified (May 1, 1987); elevated to sainthood by Pope John Paul II (October 11, 1998).

Selected publications:

English translation) Life in a Jewish Family, 1891–1916 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986); Finite and Eternal Being (published posthumously, 1950).

As a Jewish scholar of philosophy who converted to Roman Catholicism, then became a nun and died in the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Edith Stein is enigmatic and paradoxical. In her youth, she tried to live by intellect and reason; then, at age 30, she became captivated by spiritual matters. Having sought to live on an elevated, cerebral plane, she found herself persecuted for having Jewish blood. She then tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Pope Pius XI to speak out against Nazi genocide against the Jews.

Some see her as the personification of interfaith unity. Others regard her as one who rejected her people at the darkest moment in their history. The controversy centers less around her right to make personal choices than the treatment of her life story after her death. Critics say the Roman Catholic Church is wrong to single out for sainthood one who rejected her Judaism at the pivotal time when the Nazis killed six million Jews.

Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), on October 12, 1891; it was the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Her father Siegfried died on a business trip when Edith was 21 months old, leaving her mother Auguste Courant Stein to carry on the family lumber business, which she did with great success. Tiny and delicate, the youngest of seven siblings, Stein displayed great intellectual gifts and dedication from her earliest days as a student at the Victoria School in Breslau. When she began school, she took down a volume of Schiller and attempted to read it to her mother. "How far I got at the time, I cannot remember," she wrote. "But it is easy to surmise that such sudden outbursts alarmed my relatives. They called it 'nerves' and tried, as much as possible, to shield me from overexcitement."

As a girl, and throughout her life, she had a small sturdy frame, wavy dark hair and a serious, contemplative demeanor. She was shy and self-contained, and her closest friends were her sisters Erna and Rosa Stein , who were a few years older than herself. Seeking "truth," Stein distinguished herself in philosophy during her early studies at the University of Breslau. Her sister Erna, who also studied there in those years, wrote:

We had a large circle of friends of both sexes with whom we spent our free time and our vacations in an atmosphere of freedom and lack of constraint which was unusual for that time. Because of her unassailable logic and her wide knowledge in matters of literature and philosophy, Edith set the pace for us in these discussions.

Stein enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study with Edmund Husserl, one of the 20th century's most prominent philosophers and an important influence on both Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Husserl founded the school of phenomenology, which studied the nature of experience and held that consciousness exists only in relation to the objects it considers. His idea was that truth is objective, not relative, and that there is a knowable world of phenomena. In Stein's student days, phenomenology was a radical, controversial and exhilarating departure from the "idealism" of Emmanuel Kant. Philosophers like Stein defended it with religious fervor. Many of her professors, including Husserl, and some of her fellow students had converted from Judaism to Christianity, a few for career advancement. Stein herself was without faith. Although her mother was devoutly religious, she had provided little religious training for her children, and she tried, in vain, to persuade Edith to acknowledge God.

Like other philosophy students, Stein called Husserl "The Master." Girlfriends teased her that she thought of Husserl when other girls were dreaming of busserl (Austrian slang for kiss), but her favorite teacher was Adolf Reinach, Husserl's assistant. Edith became one of the favored students whom Adolf and his wife Anna Reinach invited into their home. Stein's unfinished autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, makes clear her admiration for him as a person and a professor and her appreciation that Anna was so gracious in sharing their private hours.

What Stein called this "placid" student life ended on June 28, 1914, when a young Serbian assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, along with Countess Sophie Chotek , in Sarajevo. Austria declared war on Serbia a month later. One by one, European nations joined in the war as each side called in its allies. Edith's lectures at Göttingen were suspended as she and her fellow Germans braced for invasion from Russia or France. Adolf Reinach volunteered for service and went to the front. In April 1915, Stein joined the Red Cross as a nurse's aide and went to work in the typhoid ward at a hospital for infectious diseases in Austria that accepted patients from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On her first leave, she followed the practice of carrying letters her colleagues wanted mailed in Germany. A customs officer accused her of circumventing wartime censorship, and she was acquitted only after an appeal by the Red Cross. At home in Breslau, she taught Latin at her alma mater for a brief time and resumed work on her doctoral thesis.

In this work, "On the Problem of Empathy," she discussed the act of empathy as specific knowledge and then treated subjects that she described as "personally close to my heart and which continually occupied me anew in all later works: the constitution of the human person." In this, she included the self, the stream of consciousness, and aspects of individual personality and character. She submitted her thesis in three volumes to Husserl shortly after Easter 1916, and was awarded her doctorate summa cum laude on August 3. Husserl was then at the University of Freiburg, and she became his private assistant. She felt equal to the position only because other qualified male students were in military service. Husserl was coping with the loss of his 17-year-old son who had died at the front. As he expanded his theories, Stein asked him to read over his former work and evaluate his new thinking in light of it. Husserl's response was that his earlier writing was dated and might as well be burned. Frustrated, she resigned her post early in 1918. Husserl gave her a recommendation, but her applications for teaching posts were ignored, which she suspected was due to Husserl's spite. She returned to Breslau, tutored college and university students and wrote articles and essays.

What was not included in my plans lay in God's plan.
—Edith Stein

Reinach died in action in 1917, which was for Edith a devastating loss. A year later, Anna Reinach asked her to put his papers in order. Stein was impressed by the courage and strength Anna found in Christianity, to which both Reinachs had converted before his death. Then in the summer of 1921, when visiting a Lutheran friend, Edith found in her library the autobiography of the 19th-century French nun Thérèse of Lisieux whose simple devotion to Christ elevated her to mysticism.

Stein studied the teachings of the Catholic Church so thoroughly that priests said she did not need to take formal instruction. Although the Stein family observed the religious holidays, Stein had never had instruction in her Jewish faith. Still, her mother was devout and regarded Edith's baptism on January 1, 1922, as a betrayal. Stein sought to join the Carmelite Order like St. Thérèse had, but the nuns urged her to wait in deference to the feelings of her mother and because she could do so much good in the world. Stein accepted a teaching position at St. Magdalena, a training institute for women teachers in Speyer. There she lived ascetically among Dominican nuns, rising early, wearing patched linen clothes and kneeling through three masses a day. When a nun commented that it was sometimes hard to stay awake during prayers, Stein rebuked her for her laziness. She lectured on the education and role of Catholic women, calling for more options in both religious and secular life. She said of priesthood for women, "Dogmatically, it seems to me that nothing could prevent the church from introducing such an unheard-of novelty."

Stein felt that she could win understanding for the Jews, and their history in Germany, by writing Life in a Jewish Family, the story of her life and family, which she thought would underscore the commonality of Jews and Christians as well as the German Jews' historic patriotism to their country.

She translated the letters of the Catholic convert and English cardinal John Henry Newman into German in 1928. The next year, she wrote a comparison of the philosophy of the 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas and phenomenology, the purpose of which was to introduce Thomist thought to modern philosophers. She then began Finite and Eternal Being on which she worked for seven years, but which, when it was finished, could not be published because she was Jewish. (It finally appeared posthumously in 1950.)

Her career as a lecturer before Catholic groups took her to France, Switzerland, and Austria, and she gave up her post at St. Magdalena in 1931. Stein insisted that her basic message was that one was completely dependent upon God. She borrowed a phrase from the Latin orator Cato and called it her ceterum censeo, a reiterated challenge. Increasingly, she felt that it was impossible for a person to exert a direct influence on life and that one was subject to God's plan. She renewed her efforts to obtain a professorship at Freiburg, but was unsuccessful. Martin Heidegger, another protégé of Husserl who knew her from Göttingen, taught there but declined to exert himself on her behalf. Heidegger, the renowned author of Being and Time, won fame for holding that anxiety is both a creative force and a basic characteristic of authenticity. He also supported the Nazis and helped to ban Jews from German academic life.

In 1932, the year Hitler came to power, Stein was appointed a lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, which was run by Catholics. Her services were terminated on April 19, 1933, when Hitler and his Nazi Party banned Jews from teaching.

In the hope that her position as a Catholic, a Jew, and a respected academic would prove to be persuasive, Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI, asking him write an encyclical publicly condemning the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. Critics feel that if the pope had spoken out at that early and pivotal time he could have persuaded German Catholics to stop Hitler, but her request was refused and the pope said nothing. He did, however, send her a papal blessing for herself and her family.

Since she had never established herself as a philosopher and her academic career had been ended because of her Jewish heritage, Stein felt the time was right to fulfill her dream of becoming a nun. Her niece, Suzanne M. Batzdorff , recalled running into Edith at the dentist's office when Suzanne was 12 and boldly telling Stein she was abandoning her people. Batzdorff wrote: "She remained gravely attentive throughout and then replied that she did not see the step she was about to take as a betrayal. Entering a convent could not, she said, guarantee her safety, nor could it shut out the reality of the world outside. As a Carmelite, she said, she would remain a part of her family and of the Jewish people. To her, that was entirely logical; to us, her Jewish relatives, it could never be a convincing argument. Despite our love for her, a gap had opened between us that could never be bridged."

Soon after Stein's 42nd birthday, she left for the Carmelite convent in Cologne. Her mother, who was 84, bade her a tearful, loving farewell, but never saw her again. Stein's older sister Rosa also decided to convert to Catholicism, although she waited until after their mother's death in 1934. Stein the intellectual became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the humble nun. Growing up in a prosperous family, she had never done housework; now she mopped the convent floors and dusted its banisters and tables awkwardly, but happily. Her prioress commented that her joining the convent was "a descent from the height of a brilliant career into the depths of insignificance." Stein had found a more joyous approach to life. To entertain the other nuns, she acted in a Chaucerian skit in a red wig, and she became sufficiently tolerant of human frailty that she fell asleep during meditation.

Just before Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), November 9, 1938, when the Nazis stepped up their persecution by rounding up Jews and destroying their property, Stein wrote to the mother superior of an Ursuline convent in Dorsten, Germany: "I cannot help thinking again and again of Queen Esther , who was taken from her people for the express purpose of standing before the King for her people. I am a very poor and helpless little Esther, but the King who chose me is infinitely great and merciful."

Rosa Stein joined her sister in the convent, although she did not take vows. Edith tried to transfer to a Swiss convent for safety, but declined to go when nuns there refused to take

Rosa. For Stein's safety and that of her fellow nuns, her superiors transferred her, along with Rosa, to Echt in the Netherlands. Satisfied with convent life, she nonetheless remained involved with the world. Stein began writing a life of St. John of the Cross. When her sister nuns said they would not vote in the country's elections because they were rigged, Stein objected and said they must do their duty and vote. She, as a Jew, was disenfranchised. Edith and Rosa were summoned for questioning by the SS police in the spring of 1942; instead of greeting them with the official "Heil Hitler!," she saluted, "Praised be Jesus." The Netherlands were occupied by German forces, and when Dutch bishops protested against their attacks on Jews, the Nazis rounded up Catholics of Jewish origin. On the evening of August 2, immediately after the hour of meditation, they arrested the Stein sisters. Nuns who were present said Edith told Rosa, "Come. We are going for our people." She asked that the nuns send them clothes, showing that she was ignorant of what lay ahead.

While she was being held by the Nazis, Edith wrote to her mother superior urging her to fight on behalf of her and her sister. Early on August 7, 1942, Rosa and Edith Stein were deported from the Westerbork detention camp to Auschwitz. She dropped "heart-rending" notes from the train as they passed through towns where she had lived. Edith Stein and her sister Rosa died in the gas chamber, probably on August 9, 1942, soon after their arrival at Auschwitz. Their brother Paul, his wife, and their sister Frida Stein also died in the Holocaust.

Less than 50 years later, in 1987, Edith Stein was declared venerable by the Roman Catholic Church, the initial step towards canonization. That same year, two-year-old Teresa Benedicta McCarthy of Massachusetts, who had been named after Stein, recovered without ill effect after swallowing a massive overdose of Tylenol. Her parents had asked friends to pray to Sister Teresa Benedicta—Edith Stein—while their daughter lay suffering from severe liver damage in the hospital, and doctors could provide no scientific explanation for her complete recovery. This was judged by the Catholic Church the miracle performed through the intercession of Stein necessary for her canonization. On October 11, 1998, she was pronounced a saint and a martyr for Catholicism by Pope John Paul II, who spoke of her as "an eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the church." Stein's canonization—perhaps, although not definitely, the first of a person born Jewish since the early years of the Church—came amidst bitter protests from many Jewish groups, which noted that she had been killed not because she was Catholic but because she was Jewish. (At Auschwitz, she is said to have answered a guard's question by declaring herself Catholic; the Nazi responded by calling her a "damn Jew.") Many also questioned the Vatican's reasons for canonizing a Jewish convert who, on becoming a nun, offered her life to God "for the sins of the unbelieving people" while the Church itself had still not responded fully to questions about its conduct during the Holocaust. While not replying to such criticisms directly, the pope alluded to them during the canonization mass for Stein in St. Peter's Basilica. "In celebrating now and later the memory of the new saint," he said, "we will be unable not to also remember year after year the Shoah, that savage plan to eliminate a people, which cost millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters their lives."