Max Rieser Collection

The Max Rieser Collection documents Rieser's personal and professional life. The bulk of the material concerns Rieser's philosophical writing. Among the papers in the collection are personal and official papers, correspondence, manuscripts, and a small amount of clippings and published material.

Documents providing biographical information on him will be found mainly in Series I, which holds Rieser's personal papers, such as educational, emigration, immigration, identification and other official or government-issued documents. Other biographical data can be extracted from his personal correspondence with family members and friends. Amongst others Emil Luethy (1/5), the Swiss expressionistic artist, and the writer and the poet Jacob Picard were close friends of Rieser. Their correspondence with Rieser can be found in Series II.

The professional correspondence consists of papers that focus on the professional life of Max Rieser. It mostly contains correspondence with the various magazines and newspapers Rieser wrote for and determines the topics and subjects for his articles. Focusing on aesthetics Rieser found a mentor in the editor-in-chief of the magazine Aesthetics and Communication, Thomas Munro, and the correspondence in Series II and the essays (5/14) Rieser wrote on Munro express his worship and admiration.

Series III holds a collection of manuscripts, divided into two topics: Rieser's literary creations of which parts are unpublished (Subseries 1) and his philosophical manuscripts (Subseries 2). The dominant topic is Rieser's nostalgic feelings towards Europe, mostly expressed in iterative overblown descriptions of different locations, especially Vienna and Geneva. The manuscripts related to philosophical questions documents Rieser "scholarly" focus, which was mainly aesthetics, though the knowledge of the European scene as well as the knowledge of Polish opened the philosophy of Poland and the Soviet Bloc to the American public.