PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900 1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain By Lynn Zastoupil Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative By Jay Sherry Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire Edited by Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India By Jack Harrington
The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century Edited by Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism By K. Steven Vincent The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783 1840 By Julia Berest The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values By Lisa Szefel Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India Edited by Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity By Hephzibah Israel Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century By Kathrin Levitan Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment Edited by Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning The European Antarctic: Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire By Peder Roberts Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780 1880 By Rama Sundari Mantena Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal By Arie Dubnov Making British Indian Fictions: 1772 182 By Ashok Malhotra At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History Steven E. Aschheim
At the Edges of Liberalism Junctions of European, German, and Jewish History Steven E. Aschheim
AT THE EDGES OF LIBERALISM Copyright Steven E. Aschheim, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-137-00228-0 ISBN 978-1-137-00229-7 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137002297 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aschheim, Steven E., 1942 author. At the edges of liberalism : junctions of European, German and Jewish history / Steven E. Aschheim. pages cm. (Palgrave studies in cultural and intellectual history) ISBN 978 1 137 00227 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 137 00228 0 1. Jews Germany History 1800 1933. 2. Jews Germany Politics and government 20th century. 3. Jews Germany Intellectual life. 4. Jews Cultural assimilation Germany. 5. Liberalism Germany History 20th century. 6. Germany Ethnic relations I. Title. DS134.25.A83 2012 305.892 404309041 dc23 2011047560 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
For Robert Alter, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Jerry Z. Muller
Also by Steven E. Aschheim Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800 1923 (1982) The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890 1990 (1992) Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (1996) Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Time s (2001) In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (2001) Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. (2001) Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (2007)
Contents Permissions ix 1 Introduction 1 Part 1 On the Edges of Liberalism 2 Icons Beyond Their Borders: The German-Jewish Intellectual Legacy at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century 7 3 The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism 21 4 Bildung in Palestine: Zionism, Binationalism, and the Strains of German-Jewish Humanism 39 Part 2 Three German Jews at the Junction 5 Hannah Arendt: Jewishness at the Edges 59 6 The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem 67 7 Comrade Klemperer: Communism, Liberalism, and Jewishness in the GDR: The Later Diaries, 1945 1959 87 Part 3 Evil at the Edges 8 Locating Nazi Evil: The Contrasting Visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer 105 9 The Bonfires of Berlin: Historical and Contemporary Reflections on the Nazi Book Burnings 117 10 Imaging the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil 125 11 The Ambiguous Political Economy of Empathy 133 Part 4 Encounters at the Junction: Jews and Western Culture 12 Reflections on Insiders and Outsiders 145 13 Toward a Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual: The German and French Cases Compared 157 vii
viii Contents 14 Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience 171 15 Between Rights, Respectability, and Resistance: Reframing the German-Jewish Experience 185 Afterword and Acknowledgments 195 Notes 197 Index 269
Permissions Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. 2007 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. (re: chapters 2 and 4). Steven E. Aschheim, The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism. Menasseh ben Israel Institute, University of Amsterdam, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute. (re: Chapter 3) Steven E. Aschheim, A People Apart: Hannah Arendt and the Modern Jewish Experience. Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2007 (no. 5452). Reprinted by permission of the Times Literary Supplement. (re: Chapter 5) Steven E. Aschheim, The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem. The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 76, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 903 933. 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. (re: Chapter 6) Steven E. Aschheim, Comrade Klemperer: Communism, Liberalism and Jewishness in the DDR. The Later Diaries, 1945 59. The Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 36, No. 2. April 2001, pp. 325 343. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications Ltd. (re: Chapter 7) Steven E. Aschheim, Locating Nazi Evil: The Contrasting Visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer. From Moshe Zimmermann, editor, On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime (pp. 17 32). Reprinted by permission of The Hebrew University Magnes Press. (re: Chapter 8) Steven E. Aschheim, The Bonfires of Berlin: Historical and Contemporary Reflections on the Nazi Book Burnings. From Raphael Gross and Yfaat Weiss, editors, Jüdische Geschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte, 2006 (pp. 235 244). Reprinted by permission of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG. (re: Chapter 9) Steven E. Aschheim, Imagining the Absolute: Mapping Western Conceptions of Evil. From Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, editors, The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (London: Routledge, 2004). Reprinted by permission. (re: Chapter 10) Steven E. Aschheim, The Ambiguous Political Economy of Empathy. Published in German as Über die politische Ökonomie des Mitgefühls, Mittelweg 36, 20 Jahrgang, October/November 2011, pp. 75 93. Used by permission of Mittelweg 36. (re: Chapter 11) ix
x Permissions Steven Aschheim. Reflections on Insiders and Outsiders, slightly revised in the present version, was originally written as the introduction to a volume in honor of Ezra Mendelsohn, Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, edited by Richard I. Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). Used by permission. (re: Chapter 12) Steven E. Aschheim, Toward a Phenomenology of the Jewish Intellectual: The German and French Cases Compared. From Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models, edited by Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufmann (2003), pp. 199 216. Reprinted by permission of Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG. (re: Chapter 13) Steven E. Aschheim, Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience. First published in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem; 2010 by the University of Iowa Press. Used with permission. (re: Chapter 14)