Otto Buek

Who was Otto Buek?

Otto Buek was a German philosopher and translator born in St. Petersburg.

He studied philosophy, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Heidelberg, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Marburg. Later he worked as a journalist in Berlin, where he translated works of Tolstoy, Unamuno and Alexander Herzen. Additionally, with Kurt Wildhagen, he edited works by Turgenev, Gogol and two volumes of Ernst Cassirer's edition of Kant's collected writings. During the 1920s, he worked as a correspondent for the Argentine newspaper La Nación.

From a philosophical standpoint, Buek was an advocate of Neo-Kantianism, and as a young man was a disciple of Marburg philosopher Hermann Cohen. He was friends to physiologist and pacifist Georg Friedrich Nicolai, and only one of three intellectuals in Germany who signed Nicolai's 1914 anti-war counter-manifesto, Aufruf an die Europäer. The other two being physicist Albert Einstein and astronomer Wilhelm Julius Foerster.