[2] He moved on to study classical philology at the University of Budapest where he mostly appreciated the teaching of the Latinist Géza Némethy as well as of the Indo-Germanist Josef Schmidt.
[3] After graduation, he travelled extensively in the Mediterranean region and spent time as a visiting student at the Universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Heidelberg, learning from the professors of antiquity and classical philology: Eduard Norden, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Franz Boll.
This regular contact with the Swiss psychologist had originally established the connection to Switzerland, which ultimately led to the permanent emigration to the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
Despite the fact that he was considered an academic outsider, it was during that time that he developed his largest influence as one of the latest representatives of the great tradition of humanistic scholars of antiquity.
[7] Over the course of two decades, from 1934 to 1955, Kerényi maintained an active correspondence with the German writer Thomas Mann on many topics, including mythology, religion, humanism and psychology.
Since his emigration, Kerényi additionally held positions as visiting professor at several universities, including Bonn (1955/56), Oslo and Rome (1960), Zurich (1961) and Genoa (1964).
In early years, Károly Kerényi was mainly influenced by philosophers like Schopenhauer, Bachofen and Nietzsche, writers like Hölderlin and Rilke, and scholars like Wilhelm von Humboldt.
[11] In Kerényi’s understanding, Wilamowitz’ approach stood for an authoritarianism that lay beneath the emergence of National Socialism in Germany, which he couldn’t ethically support.
[15] With regards to Wilamowitz, this was most pronounced, but later, Kerényi also started to distance himself from those aspects in Otto’s and Mann’s understanding of myth that he saw reflected in German nationalism.
[16] Károly Kerényi’s scientific interpretation of the figures of Greek mythology as archetypes of the human soul was in line with the approach of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
[15] Jung described Kerényi as having "supplied such a wealth of connections [of psychology] with Greek mythology that the cross-fertilization of the two branches of science can no longer be doubted.
In a time when human sciences were trying to establish themselves as objective-scientific, he recognized that the only means by which to achieve scientific objectivity was by disclosing each scholar's own individual subjectivity.
[15] Kerényi also anticipated a paradigm shift of the late 20th century, by subscribing to an interdisciplinary approach that combined the subjects of human sciences including literature, art, history, philosophy and religion.
[24] The inclusion of fictional writing into his studies of mythology and humanism is also documented by the publications of his correspondence with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.
Kerényi published a further series of thoughts on European humanism in 1955 with the title Geistiger Weg Europas (Europe’s Intellectual Journey).
Even though Kerényi was fiercely defended by famous Hungarian writers like Laszlo Németh and Antal Szerb, it took until the 1980s before his complete moral and scholarly rehabilitation took place.
[25] The Hungarian writer Antal Szerb has modeled some features of Károly Kerényi into the figure Rudi Waldheim in his novel Journey by Moonlight.