Man is equipped with two great forces — hope and faith — compared to which his intelligence is a minor matter. It is a harlot, a tool. If you have faith, you will live forward in spite of disappointment. If you have hope, you will let nothing die that once proved worthwhile.
– Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Universal History (1954)
A year-end letter from the Board:
December 2024
Dear Friends,
This has been an unusual year and hard times lie ahead for many of us. So perhaps it behooves us to look back, to reconnect our past to the future, and to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work of creating a better world for all.
The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund has always looked back as well as forward, and has set out, with the co-operation of Rosenstock-Huessy’s heirs, to make his work more accessible and more widely available. None of that comes for free.
We face the world largely through this website, erhfund.org. Ten years ago, the Rosenstock-Huessy Literary Heirs gave us permission to share his recorded lectures and the transcriptions Mark and Frances Huessy made of them. Three years ago, the Fund opened all of Rosenstock-Huessy’s published and unpublished works to scholars and laypeople alike, to make his work readable and searchable online, and available around the world.
This year, we are committing to an overhaul of the website which will not only make his work easier to find and access, but also bring onboard a crowd-sourced transcription project where volunteers help us make legible Rosenstock-Huessy’s voluminous correspondence and a number of his works whose online copies remain difficult to decipher. Please consider making a donation this year to help create a more vital digital presence for Rosenstock-Huessy and his life and work.
Please also consider making a recurring gift so that we may continue our work in the upcoming year; so we can issue a new, updated edition of the combined correspondence of Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig; so we can fund a biography that tells their story; so the website can be kept alive to remind us, as he so often did, that we have only as much future as we recognize of our past.
You can mail a check made out to the Eugen Rosenstock Huessy Fund to our president and treasurer, Lynn K. Jones, at 1226½ State Street, Suite 5., Santa Barbara, CA 93101. You can also make an annual, monthly, or one-time donation here.
Please join us; we can’t do it without you.
Sincerely,
Lynn K. Jones,
president, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund
Please consider supporting one of these projects by making a gift in any amount to the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund. (The amounts given below are only suggestions).
Our website continues to be a resource for scholars and others interested in the work of Rosenstock-Huessy. A monthly donation of $25 will underwrite the cost of maintaining and developing our website, giving free access to researchers and scholars to over 400 hours of taped lectures and a searchable database of his collected works.
$100 will support our online transcription project for a month. The transcription project now has 12 volunteers working on the transcription of the letters.
$500 will underwrite the preservation and digitization of one of Harold M. Stahmer’s interviews. Harold conducted over 60 interviews with former friends, colleagues and students of Rosentock-Huessy, including Freya von Moltke, Harold Berman, Fred Berthold, Mather Elliott, Clint Gardner, Nahum Glatzer, Rivka Horwitz, Bas Leenman, “Spiff” Little, Maurice Mandelbaum, Dick McFalls, Gottfried Michaelis, Lise van der Molen, George Morgan, Bob O’Brien, Cynthia and Leo Oudejans-Harris, Fr. Benedict Reid, and Anca Wittig. A $2,000 donation will fund the preservation of the next batch of interviews.
$750 will provide a traveling grant to a scholar working with the archive at Dartmouth’s Rauner Library. Dr. Brenzel first became involved with the ERH Fund as the recipient of a travel grant to complete research for her doctoral dissertation.