Werner Joseph Dannhauser (May 1, 1929 – April 26, 2014) was an American political philosophy professor and magazine editor. A German-Jewish émigré, he became an expert on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and on Judaism and politics and was a longtime professor of government at Cornell University. A protégé of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Dannhauser had earlier been a writer and editor at Commentary magazine during the 1960s.
Early years
Dannhauser was born on May 1, 1929, in Buchau in southwestern Germany.
In early 1939, at the age of nine, Dannhauser came to the United States in order to escape Nazi Germany. An older brother Jacob (1922–1998) and an older sister Rose (1924–2018) also came with him. He became an American citizen in 1944. He completed the rest of his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was active in the congregation known as The Temple.
Dannhauser earned a bachelor's degree from the New School for Social Research in 1951.
Graduate student and instructor
In the mid-1950s, Dannhauser came to the University of Chicago as a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought. There he studied for his Ph.D. under Leo Strauss, whom he had first heard speak at the New School in New York. Dannhauser soon became a disciple of Strauss's; when later characterized as a Straussian, he said "I wear the label with pride".
During the 1955–56 year he was awarded a Fulbright Grant for study in Germany. His efforts as a student in that country included time spent at the University of Berlin and at Heidelberg University.
In the early 1960s, Dannhauser held the position of lecturer in the liberal arts at the University of Chicago. During several summers, he taught classes on poetry and drama at The Clearing Folk School in Door County, Wisconsin. He was also an instructor at the University of Maryland at some point. For 1963–64 he received an appointment as an instructor in government at Claremont Men's College.
By 1963, Dannhauser's doctoral thesis, entitled The Political Philosophy of Nietzsche, was described as having been accepted for publication. But something went awry at that point, for Dannhauser would not finally get his Ph.D. degree until eight years later.
Early on, Dannhauser established a reputation as
a rake, with particular predilictions for gambling and womanizing. (By one tale, Strauss once loaned him money to pay off a poker debt that was threatening to result in physical harm.)
Commentary magazine
Leaving academia, Dannhouser started working as one of the staff members at Commentary in November 1964. His strong Jewish identity and knowledge of European intellectual history appealed to editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz. In March 1966, Dannhauser was named an assistant editor, and subsequently had the title of associate editor.
Political arguments between Dannhauser and fellow editor Ted Solotaroff, especially over the Vietnam War – a U.S. military involvement that Dannhauser strongly favored – led to Solotaroff leaving the magazine, which in turn contributed to the magazine's change in ideological position. In another case, Dannhauser threatened to resign from the magazine unless a piece supporting aggressive U.S. intervention in the war was published. In common with many American Jews, Dannhauser celebrated Israel's victories in the Six-Day War of June 1967.
Dannhauser left Commentary in the summer of 1968. He had played a significant role in shifting the magazine to a more conservative viewpoint, especially regarding Vietnam policy and objections to the excesses of the New Left.
Marriage and family
Dannhauser married Shoshana Zaltzman in 1967. She was an Israeli who studied Semitic languages. She worked as an instructor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also assisted in scholarly translation work; she subsequently was an instructor at Cornell.
Together the couple had two daughters. She died in April 1973 at age 35, of cancer. Dannhauser raised the daughters as a single parent.
Professor
Dannhauser was hired as an assistant professor and became part of the department of government at Cornell as of Fall 1968 (this was despite his not yet having his Ph.D.) There he joined Allan Bloom and Walter Berns, two other former students of Strauss, making the department known as a bastion of political philosophy teaching. The following year the campus and the faculty were shaken by the takeover of the Cornell student union by members of the Afro-American Society in 1969; unhappy with what they saw as the university administration's weak response, Bloom and Berns left Cornell, but Dannhauser stayed.