Kerenyi, Carl

Kerényi was born in Temesvár, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Timișoara, Romania), to Hungarian parents of partly German origin. His father’s family was of Swabian peasant descent. His mother was Karolina Halász.

Kerényi learnt German as a foreign language at school, and later chose it as his language for scientific work. He identified himself with the city of Arad, where he attended secondary school, because of its liberal spirits as the city of the 13 martyrs of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848/49.[1] He moved on to study classical philology at the University of Budapest where he mostly appreciated the teaching of the Latinist Géza Némethy as well as of the Indo-Germanist Josef Schmidt.[2] After graduation, he travelled extensively in the Mediterranean region and spent time as a visiting student at the Universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Heidelberg, learning from the professors of antiquity and classical philology: Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Franz Boll. In 1919, Kerényi earned his doctorate in Budapest with a dissertation on Plato and Longinus, Investigations in Classical Literary and Aesthetic History.