scholarly journals Repositioning The “Holy Remnant” of Israel: German Jewish Negotiations with Christian Culture on the Eve of the Holocaust

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc A. Krell
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
German Society ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
German Jewish

By maintaining the spiritual centrality of Israel as God’s “holy remnant,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unwittingly perhaps, entered into negotiations with Jewish thinkers over their continued theological and cultural relevance to German society. This paper focuses on the Jewish side of these negotiations by examining the work of three Jewish thinkers who helped shape them, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Martin Buber. Despite their divergence from one another, the theological approaches of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber represent a common attempt to map out the course of twentieth-century Jewish identity construction based on a shared, but at times unacknowledged engagement with Christian thought and culture. Their writings constitute a mutual opposition to the perceived failure of their forbearers in the Wissenschaft des Judentums to balance Jewish particularity and universalism, while at the same time reflecting a desire for varying degrees of mutual coexistence with their Christian contemporaries. Ultimately the work of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber confirmed Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the continuing validity of Jewish existence in relation to God during the Holocaust, while at the same time providing models for a later, dialogical mapping of Jewish identities vis à vis Christianity in an increasingly multicultural, post-Holocaust world.

The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296
Author(s):  
Peter Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Defense ◽  
German Society ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Fritz Haber

AbstractIn April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

The Satyr as Prophet: Notes on the “Jewish” Michelangelo

Images ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Asher Biemann
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Michelangelo Buonarroti ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals ◽  
Hermann Cohen

AbstractFocusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essay argues that there existed a Jewish fascination with the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti that was representative not only of a larger German and Jewish Italophilia at the time but also indicative of Jewish aesthetic concerns. Lodged between popular culture and the intellectual quest for an aesthetics that would problematize the figurative image and the classical sense of the beautiful, the Jewish reception of Michelangelo was guided by the themes of terribilita, unfinishedness, and the destruction of form. What emerges is a consistent dialectic of image and anti-image particularly in the writings of Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch. But what also emerges is that German Jewish intellectuals entertained a great, though often ambivalent, admiration for the Italian Renaissance and the culture of modern Italy.

Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue

Naharaim ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lina Barouch
Keyword(s):  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis paper discusses a series of commentaries and lyrical texts by Martin Buber and Ludwig Strauss, which dwell on Hölderlin’s poetry and the dialogical ideas implicit therein (e.g. the dialogical vocation of the poet). The paper distinguishes between the dialogical ideal and its concretization in language, as the selected texts all strive to develop a dialogical poetics, yet at the same time engage with textual junctures where the dialogical mode collapses. This collapse is also registered in the historical sphere: Buber’s engagement with Heidegger’s paradigmatic Hölderlin studies calls for a comparison with Strauss’s reception of Hölderlin, and therefore points to an absent dialogue between these two contemporary scholars. This historical lacuna, which Buber may have wished to bridge, thus resonates with ideas on the limits of dialogue in the poetic sphere. The paper draws on further Hölderlin scholars, such as Peter Szondi and Winfried Menninghaus, and their discussion of the lyrical results of failed dialogue, and on the ideas of Franz Rosenzweig and Rabbi Nahman, in the mapping of the dialogical ideas of both Buber and Strauss. Strauss himself thus emerges as a scholar and poet who draws both on Hölderlinian motifs and notions and on dialogical ideas in contemporaneous German-Jewish thought.

Ein „Zusammengehen ohne Zusammenkommen“. Der Entstehungsprozess des intellektuellen Netzwerkes um die Zeitschrift Die Kreatur

Naharaim ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-97
Author(s):  
Enrico Rosso
Keyword(s):  
Formation Process ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Analytical Representation ◽  
Problematic Relationship ◽  
Research Article ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Intellectual Environment ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract This research article aims to deliver an analytical representation of the intellectual environment of the culture journal Die Kreatur (1926–1930), a religious-dialogical quarterly edited by Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker and enlivened by some of the most prominent figures of German-Jewish interwar culture (among others W. Benjamin, H. S. Bergman, E. Rosenstock-Huessy, F. Rosenzweig, E. Simon, and L. Strauss). Building on a recognition of the problematic relationship between the dialogical model claimed in the programmatic foreword of the journal and the group narratives enacted by its key contributors, the study attempts to outline the formation process of the intellectual plexus of the journal and to provide a differentiated analysis of its singular constituents via a sociologically informed framework. The representation of the intellectual network of Die Kreatur in accordance with the model of a “circle of circles” provides insight into the elusive dialectic of interaction and divergence that determines the relations between the main actors of the journal and thus contributes to unfold the interplay of biographical intersections and conceptual synergies, as well as incongruities, frictions, and contradictory instances that determines its editorial and philosophical profile.

scholarly journals The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Jessica Ortner
Keyword(s):  
European Archive ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Migrant Literature ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Political Concern ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By partaking in reconsidering what is ‘vital for a shared remembering’ of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union’s political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in European history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar – a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she ‘carries’ a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made inaccessible her family’s past.

The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song

Naharaim ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Rubinstein ◽  
Ynon Wygoda
Keyword(s):  
Martin Buber ◽  
German Language ◽  
National Library ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Biblical Scholar

Abstract Among the hidden treasures squirreled away in the archives of Israel’s National Library lies a fragmented correspondence that sheds new light on the afterlife of a project that was long deemed the farewell gift to the German language and culture from the remnants of its Jewry. It is an exchange of letters between two scholars, whose interest in the German rendition of the Bible occupied them for many years, first in Germany, and later in the land where Hebrew was vernacular and where one might think there would no longer be a need for translations of the Bible; particularly not into a language that aroused considerable aversion in the aftermath of the war. And yet, the 1963–64 exchange between the two Jerusalemites, the Vienna-born and Frankfurt-crowned philosopher, theologian, and translator Martin Buber and the Riga-born, Berlin- and Marburg-educated biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz tells a different story. It shows they both believed the project that began under the title Die Schrift, zu verdeutschen unternommen should be revised once again, after its completion so as to underline its ongoing relevance for present and future readings of the Bible tout court, in German and Hebrew speaking lands alike.

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