The Crisis of Enlightenment: Cultural and Literary Discourses on Traditions of German Culture within Jewish Cultural Circles in National Socialist Germany

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerstin Schoor
Keyword(s):  
National Socialist ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Jewish Descent ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article explores the self-conceptions of German Jews in National Socialist Germany in the context of a critical rereading of 1930s receptions of the German and European Enlightenment. The transformation of the Jewish community and Jewish culture into a part of bourgeois society had taken place in the course of the German and European Enlightenment, from its beginnings to the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. The efforts of the Jewish minority to ‘emancipate’ itself from any form of heteronomy from around 1820—to become self-reliant and responsible citizens in thought and deed—had become a kind of symbol for the progressive reasoning of the Enlightenment. Consequently, given the aggressive antisemitic policies of the National Socialist state, the German-Jewish relationship to the Enlightenment in internal and public debates after 1933 must be viewed as key when exploring the externally damaged self-conceptions of large parts of the German-Jewish minority. For the writers and artists of Jewish descent examined in this article, the relationship to the Enlightenment—and to German and Jewish culture—was once more open to debate.

German-Jewish Esotericism: The Case of Meir Wiener’s Expressionist Kabbalah

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Engel
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
German History ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
New Framework

Abstract The fact that bizarre intellectual trends and teachings, like occultism, parapsychology, and neopaganism played an important role in modern German culture is thoroughly documented by scholars of German history. Experts on German-Jewish history, however, still tend to describe German-Jewish culture as one formed around the ideals of ‘Bildung’ and the Enlightenment. As a result, German-Jewish occultism, mysticism, and other non-Enlightenment texts and authors have received relatively little scholarly attention. The present article aims to help correct this bias by introducing a new framework for the study of German-Jewish culture, and by examining an all but forgotten case study: Meir Wiener and his work. After introducing the term ‘Western esotericism’, developed by scholars of religious studies, the article uses it to explore two of Meir Wiener’s strangest and virtually forgotten works. Wiener, it is shown, produced fantastically esoteric works in the context of German expressionism and Kabbalah studies, which better represent their time and place than scholars have thus far acknowledged.

Hiob in Gath. Deutsch-jüdische Lektüren von Lessings "Nathan der Weise"

2005 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justus Fetscher
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe paper presents a series of German-Jewish readings of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" (1779) stretching from the Enlightenment to the early post-1945 period. Already the first Jewish reader, Moses Mendelssohn, did not focus his interpretation of this drama on the so-called "parabel of the rings," where Nathan is commonly said to preach religious tolerance. Rather, Mendelssohn concentrates on act IV, scene 7, which expounds Lessing's concept of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and Nathan's experience of Christian persecution. With the upsurge of German anti-Semitism in the late 19th and 20th century, this scene served first as a sign of German-Christian empathy for Jewish suffering, and thus of hope, then as a reminder of recent prosecutions. It seemed to foreshadow, and eventually became overshadowed by, the Shoah.

Aus Nordcarolina: The Jewish American South in German Jewish Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-272
Author(s):  
Anton Hieke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
German Empire ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Southern States ◽  
German Jewish

Abstract For many German Jewish papers of the nineteenth century, the United States of America was held up as an ideal. This holds true especially for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, then Germany’s most influential Jewish publication. In America, Jews had already achieved what their co-religionists in Germany strove for until complete legal emancipation with the formation of the German Empire in 1871: the transition from ‘Jews in Germany’ via ‘German Jews’ to ‘Germans of the Jewish faith.’ Thus, the experiences of Jews from Germany in America represented the post-emancipation hopes for those who had remained behind.2 When examined for the representation of Jewry living in the American Southern states,3 it becomes apparent that German Jewish papers in their coverage of America largely refrained from a regionalization. Most articles and accounts concerning Jewish life in the South do not show any significant distinctiveness in the perception of the region and its Jews. The incidents presented or the comments sent to the papers might in fact have occurred in respectively dealt with any region of the United States at the time, barring anything that remotely dealt with slavery or secession prior to 1865. When the Jewish South was explicitly dealt with in the papers, however, it either functioned as an ‘über-America’ of the negative stereotypes in respect to low Jewish piety, or took the place of an alternative America of injustice and slavery—the ‘anti-America.’ Jewish Southerners who actively supported the region during the Civil War, or who had internalized the South’s moral values as supporters of the Confederacy and/or slavery were condemned in the strongest words for endangering the existence of ‘America the Ideal.’ As the concept of the United States and its Jewish life is represented in a largely unrealistic manner that almost exclusively focused on the positive aspects of Jewish life in America, the concept of the Jewish South was equally far from being accurate.

“Only the National Socialist”: Postwar US and West German Approaches to Nazi “Euthanasia” Crimes, 1946–1953

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 861-888
Author(s):  
Michael Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Mass Murder ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Mentally Disabled ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Anti Jewish

In Western historical consciousness, National Socialist mass murder has become permanently identified with the Jewish Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's maniacal project to annihilate European Jewry. From its earliest days, the Nazi Party sought to exclude Jews from German public life, and when the Nazis came to power in January 1933, their anti-Jewish animus became official policy. What followed was legal disemancipation of German Jews, physical attacks on their persons, ghettoization, deportation, and physical extermination in the East. The story of the Holocaust is well known and generally accepted. Yet two years before German Jewish policy swerved from persecution and harassment to genocide, the Nazis were already involved in state-organized killing of another disfavored minority. Unlike the destruction of European Jews, the murder of this group—the mentally disabled—occurred within the Reich's own borders. Launched with the signing of a “Hitler decree” in October 1939 (backdated to 1 September), the centrally organized program targeted so-called “incurable” patients, whose lives were to be ended by a doctor-administered “mercy death” (Gnadentod). The Nazis attached the term “euthanasia” to their program of destruction, bolstering their rationale for it with humanitarian arguments and cost-based justifications, the latter legitimizing euthanasia as a means to free up scarce resources for use by “valuable” Germans. Over time, the restrictive use of euthanasia just for incurable patients ended; thereafter, the Nazis extended the killing program to healthier patients, sick concentration camp inmates, Jewish patients, and a variety of “asocials” (juvenile delinquents, beggars, tramps, prostitutes). The technology of murder developed in the “euthanasia” program—carbon monoxide asphyxiation in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms—would become the model for the first death camps in Poland. Many of the “euthanasia” personnel were likewise transferred to the Polish extermination centers, where they applied the techniques of mass death—refined in murdering the disabled—to the murder of the European Jews.

Spinoza in het Derde Rijk

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Michiel Wielema
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Hidden Agenda ◽  
Mosaic Law ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Hermann Cohen

This article examines a number of racist and antisemitic interpretations of the philosophy of Spinoza put forward by German authors in the period 1880-1940. Particular attention is given to the views of völkisch authors such as Eugen Dühring and Houston Chamberlain, and national-socialist philosophy professors such as Hans Grunsky and Max Wundt, who worked within the newly founded discipline of nazi Judenforschung. Their aim was to isolate Spinoza’s thought from its wider ‘Germanic’ context and to present it as typically ‘Jewish’ ‐ with all the negative connotations that word suggested (derivative, intellectualist, materialistic). According to Grunsky, Spinoza’s hidden agenda in developing his political philosophy had been to subject the ‘Aryan’ peoples to the dictates of a ‘new Torah’. At the same time, however, Spinoza’s own interpretation of Mosaic law as a purely political legislation had helped Immanuel Kant develop a pernicious notion of Judaism as a non-religion. Through Kant’s influence Spinoza’s thought was open to exploitation for antisemitic purposes, just as the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen had feared. The claim that Judaism is not a religion also appears in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The suggestion that Hitler derived some ideas from Spinoza and the Enlightenment generally is still to be examined seriously.

Introduction Against All Odds

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Spiritual Leader ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

In an interview upon his arrival in New York on December 17, 1945, Leo Baeck (1873–1956) assertively proclaimed: “The history of German Jews has ended once and for all.”1 A spiritual leader who embodied German Jewish culture at its core, Baeck was not the only one to announce the end of an era, which musically implied the definitive end of ...

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

Religion and Toleration from the Enlightenment to the Post-Secular Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses the classical question of the relationship between enlightenment and religion. In doing so, the chapter compares Jürgen Habermas's thought to that of Pierre Bayle and Immanuel Kant. For, although Habermas undoubtedly stands in a tradition founded by Bayle and Kant, he develops a number of important orientations within this tradition and has changed his position in his recent work. The chapter studies this change to understand Habermas's position better. It also draws attention to a fundamental question raised by the modern world: what common ground can human reason establish in the practical and theoretical domain between human beings who are divided by profoundly different religious (including antireligious) views?

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