Max Picard

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Max Picard (born June 5, 1888 in Schopfheim; died October 3, 1965 in Sorengo, Switzerland) was a German writer, important as one of the few thinkers writing from a truly mystical sensibility in the 20th century.

Championed by the religious existentialist Gabriel Marcel and befriended by the poet Rilke, Picard was a deeply introspective and valuable writer in his day — "someone to know" as one contemporary critic put it.

But his stark, rather extreme criticism of modernism may have consigned Picard to seeming irrelevance in the second half of the 20th century. His best work is, at heart, both invocation of and elegy to the ideals, ideas and subtleties that nourished the human spirit in other places and times but which the modern world simply left no place for. After his death in 1965, he almost completely disappeared from the cultural landscape, with a few of his books kept in print in the USA, sadly, by a publisher known as a strident political and religious reactionary.

Yet Picard is too rich, nuanced, deep and humanistic a thinker to be pigeon-holed on the right, and he has much to offer the present age. For example, his contemplative writing often reflects a graceful melding of Christian and Buddhist sensibility, not by prescription or explication but through poetic realization. In his best work, he shifts the reader's consciousness into a dimension where the value of the small, the real, the humble, and the invisible is affirmed and truly felt.

Overall, his writing is mixed - some passages or whole books conspicuously more or less inspired than others. His more ambitious political and social essays, while sometimes narrow with limitations, contain unique insights and valuable perspectives - for example, his insistence that an "atomized" modern world makes it easier for the demonic to arise and consolidate power over more humanistic tendencies in "Hitler In Ourselves" (1947).

Unfortunately some of his best, most distinctive writings (e.g., "The Human Face") are hard to find. This could change if a revival in interest in Max Picard puts more of his work back in print. Of the books currently available, "The World of Silence" is most highly recommended.

See the German version of Wikipedia for more details: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Picard