In 1919 Cassirer was offered professorships at two newly founded universities at Frankfurt and Hamburg under the auspices of the Weimar Republic. He taught at Hamburg from 1919 until emigrating from Germany in 1933. During these years Cassirer completed his three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In 1929-30 he served as the rector of the University, as the first Jew to hold such a position in Germany. In the Spring of 1929 Cassirer took part in a famous disputation with Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, Nevertheless, despite their deep disagreements, Cassirer and Heidegger enjoyed friendly philosophical relations until Cassirer's emigration in 1933. After his emigration Cassirer spent two years lecturing at Oxford and then six years at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. During this time he developed his most sustained discussion of morality and the philosophy of law as a study of the Swedish legal philosopher Axel Hägerström.
Cassirer, like so many German émigrés during this period then finally settled in the United States. He taught at Yale from 1941 to 1944 and at Columbia in 1944-45. During these years he produced two books in English , where the first, An Essay on Man, serves as a concise introduction to the philosophy of symbolic forms (and thus Cassirer's distinctive philosophical perspective) as a whole and the second, The Myth of the State, offers an explanation of the rise of fascism on the basis of Cassirer's conception of mythical thought.
Died of a heart attack while walking on the streets of New York City on April 13, 1945.
At Hamburg Cassirer found Library of the Cultural Sciences founded by Aby Warburg a tremendous resource for the next stage in his philosophical development on the philosophy of symbolic forms. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms itself appeared, in 1923, 1925, and 1929 respectively.The philosophy of symbolic forms is oriented towards the much more general “fact of culture” and thus takes the history of human culture as a whole as its ultimate given datum.
Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more “primitive” forms of world-presentation underlying the “higher” and more sophisticated cultural forms — a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of “symbolic meaning” now have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant's original philosophical conception.
(The Beatiful caricature was drawn by G. J. Southwell)