Abstract

Many of Husserl’s disciples were deeply committed to his vision of phenomenology as a cooperative and foundational enterprise. However, even before his passing in 1937, Husserl’s movement, disproportionately composed of Jewish and liberal-Catholic philosophers, faced an existential crisis. Its members were removed from academic posts, forced into exile, and even lost their lives to the Nazi regime. A substantial number of those displaced philosophers found refuge in the United States, aided by connections formed through a pattern of transatlantic exchanges between Harvard and Freiburg. This essay traces the routes émigré phenomenologists followed through the American academy and shows how the networks they established in the early twentieth century shaped the institutions they created on American shores and allowed them to reestablish phenomenology as a philosophical movement in the United States after the death of its founder.