Carl Emil Schorske (March 15, 1915 â September 13, 2015) was an American cultural historian and professor at Princeton University. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book ' (1980), which remains significant to modern European intellectual history. He was a recipient of the first year of MacArthur Fellows Program awards in 1981 and made an honorary citizen of Vienna in 2012.
Born in the Bronx, New York City, to Theodore Schorske and Gertrude Goldsmith. His parents were both German immigrants, his mother being of Jewish origin Schorske received his B.A. from Columbia in 1936 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1950. He served in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, as chief of political intelligence for Western Europe. His first book, German Social Democracy, published by Harvard University Press in 1955, describes the schism of the Social Democratic Party of Germany into a reformist/constitutionalist right faction and a revolutionary oppositionist left faction during the years 1905âÂÂ1917.
Following his war-time service, Schorske taught at Wesleyan University (1946âÂÂ1960), the University of California at Berkeley (1960âÂÂ1969), and Princeton University (1969 until his retirement in 1980), where he was Dayton-Stockton Professor of History. Professor Schorske was named by Time magazine as one of the nation's ten top academic leaders. In 1987 he delivered the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. In 1998 Schorske published Thinking With History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton University Press), a collection of essays on Viennese and general history. He turned 100 in March 2015 and died in September at a retirement community in Hightstown, New Jersey.
In 2004 Schorske received the Ludwig Wittgenstein Prize of the Austrian Research Association (ÃÂsterreichische Forschungsgemeinschaft). He was a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. On 25 April 2012 Schorske was made an honorary citizen of Vienna during a ceremony attended by his wife, Elizabeth Rorke, his granddaughter, Carina del Valle Schorske, and the mayor of Vienna, Dr Michael Häupl. In 1981 he was a MacArthur Fellow.