Rudolf Kayser (28 November 1889 — 5 February 1964) was a German literary historian.
Kayser was born in Parchim and began his studies in 1910 in Berlin. He studied literature and received his doctorate with a thesis on Arnim and Brentano. As a young lecturer at the Berlin Lessing University he made his debut in 1918 with the essay The Intellectuals and the Spiritual. In 1919 he became editor for the publisher S. Fischer in Berlin, and from 1922 to 1933 he was senior editor of the Neue Rundschau. Erwin Piscator brought Kayser to the Volksbühne Berlin as dramaturgical advisor in the mid-1920s. In 1930 Kayser wrote a biography of his father-in-law, Albert Einstein, under the pseudonym "Anton Reiser".
Rudolf Kayser was married to Ilse (1897–1934), the stepdaughter of Albert Einstein. They moved to the Netherlands after the Nazi rise to power. After Ilse's death in 1934, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and became professor of German and European literature at Brandeis University. In 1936, he married Eva Urgiss, daughter of German screenwriter and film critic Julius Urgiß. He died in New York City at the age of 74.
His estate is kept in the Israel National Library.
Literature Renate Heuer (Hrsg.): Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren / Archiv Bibliographia Judaica. Band 13: Jaco – Kerr. K. G. Saur, München u. a. 2005, , S. 323–332. Wolfgang Kaelcke: Parchimer Persönlichkeiten. Teil 2, (= Schriftenreihe des Museums der Stadt Parchim. Heft 5). Museum der Stadt, Parchim 1997.
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