The Correspondence of Paul Tillich 1933-1951

In the International Joint Project funded by the FWF and the DFG, Paul Tillichs (18861965) extensive correspondence from his early American period from 1933 to 1951 is being catalogued and made ac- cessible to researchers in a hybrid edition in three clusters at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna and the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Munich. Paul Tillich, one of the most important and influential Protestant theologians and philosophers of religion of the 20th century, taught at the theological faculties of Berlin and Marburg, the Dresden University of Technology and the University of Frankfurt am Main after completing his studies, doctorate and habilitation. Tillich was one of the first non-Jewish university lecturers to be suspended by the National Socialists in April 1933. After initial difficulties, he found a new place of work in the USA, to which he emigrated in the same year, and made an exemplary career in his new homeland. In addition to teaching at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, Tillich was involved in various self-help groups for emigrants, in the Council for a Democratic Germany during the Second World War and worked on the first volume of his Systematic Theology. The hybrid edition project follows on from a previous project in which Tillichs correspondence from his German period from 1887 to 1933 was edited text-critically and researched academically (I4857). The overall project remedies a serious desideratum in previous research. To date, there has been no edition of his extensive correspondence that meets critical standards. While the correspondence of other important theologians and philosophers of the 20th century is now available in critical editions and has become an indispensable source for reconstructing their thought, this is not the case with Tillich. Only an edition of this kind makes it possible to scientifically explore his career and the ramified networks in which his thought was formed. This applies not only to the history of his work, but also to his biography, which has been insufficiently researched to date. With the edition of Tillichs correspondence from his early American period, the project not only provides a fundamental preliminary work for an indexing of his work in terms of intellectual and ideological history, it also brings aspects and contexts of his work into focus that have remained unconsidered until now. As a result, it opens up completely new perspec- tives on the history of his thought in the complex theological-philosophical and political debates of the 20th century. It is precisely because of the heterogeneity of Tillichs work and his diverse contacts in the social, cultural and various other sciences that his correspondence is of outstanding importance for the development of the intellectual and political history of the 20th century.