The German-Jewish Dialogue: Way Stations of Misrecognition
Heidegger’s Children is a tale of German-Jewish experience, especially among Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum or educated middle-class elite. It helps chronicle what might be called—albeit, with the advantage of historical hindsight—the delusions of Jewish assimilationism, for Heidegger’s children were non-Jewish Jews who first discovered their Jewishness amid the traumas of political anti-Semitism as institutionalized under the Third Reich.
For decades, gifted historians and critics have debated the nature of the German-Jewish experience in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Although the relevant literature continues to mount, and there can be no doubting its quality, some fifty years after the Holocaust almost all the existing narratives remain deeply unsatisfactory. No matter what explanatory tack or perspective one chooses, troublesome and contradictory propositions intervene to upset the prospects for consensus. The issue that continues to defy comprehension may be stated as follows: How could the extermination of the European Jews have been conceived and enacted by the very nation where, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews had been the most successfully integrated? As one historian has formulated the problem: “It is one of the great paradoxes and cruel ironies of recent times that the most calamitous epoch in the turbulent history of the Jews of Europe followed upon or grew out of the phase of their greatest emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation.”1
Commentators have described the fifty-year period prior to Hitler’s seizure of power as the Golden Age of European Jewry. It was at this point that Jews, taking advantage of the new liberal climate of opinion, began to shed their separate identity and integrate themselves within the mainstream of European civic, cultural, and professional life. They accomplished this end within a remarkably short time and with an astonishing degree of success. Within two generations, Jews emerged from the restrictions of ghetto life to assume leading positions in the professions, arts, and sciences. Rabbi Leo Baeck, a leading representative of the “science of Judaism,” viewed modern Germany as the locus of the third golden age of Judaism, following Hellenistic Judaism prior to the destruction of the second temple and Sephardic Judaism before the expulsion from Spain. Prior to the Nazi era, thirteen out of thirty-three German Nobel prizes had been won by Jews. With the collapse of the Second Empire (1918), the last professional restrictions still in force against Jews were lifted. Enjoying full civic equality under the Weimar Republic, Jews thrived in large numbers and in ways that were unprecedented. The list of Jewish artists and writers who flourished during these years reads like a who’s who of German cultural excellence: Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Alfred Döblin, Kurt Tucholsky, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Mahler, Max Reinhart, Fritz Lang, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, Karl Kraus, and Joseph Roth—to list only the better known figures. In his classic study, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, political scientist Franz Neumann set forth the provocative claim that “paradoxical as it may seem … the German people are the least anti-Semitic of all”—implying that anti-Semitism had been foisted upon an unwilling German populace by ruthless Nazi leaders.2 Yet Jewish cultural preeminence was a source of bitter resentment among the German lower-middle class, a factor that played a far from negligible role in German Jewry’s ultimate demise.
Despite these considerable successes, Jewish assimilation often came at a steep cost: for the declared precondition for Jewish acceptance by mainstream German society was the renunciation of one’s Jewishness. Thus, in many cases, identification with the German virtues of Kultur and Geist mandated an abandonment of traditional Jewish concerns. Indeed, with respect to things German, many Jews became plus royaliste que le roi. The writer Ludwig Strauss went so far as to declare that “in a study of Goethe one finds one’s Jewish substance.”3 The Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld once described himself as “a Zionist by grace of Goethe.”4
When in 1782 Wilhelm Dohm published his liberal treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, he made it clear that tolerance could be extended toward Jews only insofar as they would agree to abandon their atavistic religious practices. As the old saying went: “For the Jews as individuals, everything; for the Jews as a people (i.e., as Jews), nothing.” Hence, for those who sought a way out of the ghetto, “Being a Jew became a liability, an embarrassment, a fact not to be mentioned if it could be helped.”5 When Freud, a self-declared unbeliever, posed the question: “What is there still Jewish about you if you have given up all those things that you have in common with your fellow Jews?” he could only respond: “Still a great deal, probably the main thing”—but he was never able to articulate precisely what that “thing” was.6
Kafka, who endowed the idea of civilization qua “dis-ease” with new eschatological meaning, once remarked that getting rid of his father’s Jewishness was to him “the most effective act of piety one could perform.”7 Among the many gradations of meaning his stories and novellas encompass, the profound disorientation of Central European Jewish consciousness circa World War I is surely among the most prominent. No longer Jewish in the traditional shetl sense, in but not of the culture of their adoptive European homelands, Central European Jews were caught in a no-man’s-land of identity crisis and nonbelonging. As one commentator has noted: “Without a conscious appreciation of religion, the guiding force of Jewish tradition was lost, the sense of being connected with, of being one link in the chain of generations that extended backward to the beginnings of civilized life on earth, of being part of a people of timeless significance—the People of God.”8 The great mass of assimilated Central European Jewry wagered everything on the prospect of acceptance by their non-Jewish brethren. How were they to know that, in losing the bet, they would come perilously close to forfeiting their existence as a people?
Kafka’s writings gave consummate expression to the modern Jew’s existential perplexity, despite the vast improvements in the quality of Jewish life in the postemancipation era. Like few of his co-religionists, he possessed keen insight into the lot of what he disparagingly referred to as the “typical Western Jew,” with whom he nonetheless identified, and whom he once described in the following terms: “This means, expressed with exaggeration, that not one calm second is granted me; everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too—something after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work.”9 Many Jews discovered that, while there was no question of going back to the ghetto, the path toward social acceptance remained blocked. Baptized Jews found themselves cut off from their traditional roots, yet shunned by their non-Jewish countrymen. Offspring of affluent Jewish families, so assimilated as to be indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors, found that conversion or a mixed marriage would forever bar them from their parental home. When World War I broke out, Jews viewed enlistment as a proof of national sentiment and volunteered in droves. Out of 120,000 who served, 12,000 died in battle. At stake in a German victory, declared Leo Baeck in the spirit of 1914, was “European culture and humanity.”10
Kafka formulated his own dilemma as a Czech-born, German-speaking Jew in terms of what he called “three impossibilities”: “The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing differently.” (On occasion, he would add as a “fourth impossibility”: “the impossibility of writing.”)11 Whereas the progressivist doctrines of liberalism suggested that Jewish efforts to assimilate would be repaid with professional success and broad social acceptance, the realities of Central European life decreed a different, more sinister outcome.
Even the so-called “Golden Age” of German-Jewish relations was marred by ominous portents and developments. Anti-Semitism, which, according to enlightened opinion, was a medieval atavism destined to be swept away by the march of progress, gained a new and potent hold on European political life. Racial anti-Semitism burgeoned into an ideology that claimed to hold the key to the antagonisms and contradictions of modern life in its entirety. In an age of disbelief, it took on a quasi-eschatological cast. Saul Friedländer has coined the phrase “redemptive anti-Semitism” to describe its functional status as a worldview in which Jews were perceived as responsible for the iniquities of modern civilization in toto. “From the eighteenth century on,” Friedländer observes, “new conspiracy theories pointed to threats from a number of occult groups: Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuits…. Within this array of occult forces, the Jews were the plotters par excellence, the manipulators hidden behind all other secret groups that were merely their instruments.”12 Given the fractious nature of German political life, in which confessional, cultural, and regional divisions frequently outweighed allegiances to Berlin, anti-Semitism’s potential as a unifying political force could hardly be underestimated.
For the anti-Semites, only the Jews’ wholesale removal would be a cure appropriate to the virulence of modernity qua “dis-ease.” Prior to the war, Vienna’s anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger, gave voice to the standard complaints against disproportionate Jewish influence in contemporary European life when he intoned:
In Vienna there are as many Jews as there are grains of sand on the seashore; wherever you go, nothing but Jews; if you go to the theater, nothing but Jews; if you take a walk in the Ringstrasse, nothing but Jews; if you enter the Stadtpark, nothing but Jews; if you go to a concert, nothing but Jews; if you go to a ball, nothing but Jews; if you go to the university, nothing but Jews. We are not shouting Hep, hep, hep, but we strongly object to the fact that in the place of the old Christian Austrian Empire a new Kingdom of Palestine should be arising.13
In 1912, Pan-German League president Heinrich Class published a celebrated pamphlet, If I Were the Kaiser, in which he set forth a program for the complete elimination of Jews from German public life—civil service, politics, the professions, banking, and commerce—that in many respects foreshadowed the anti-Semitic legislation decreed by the Nazis at Nuremberg. As World War I drew to a close and German defeat became imminent, Class urged a “ruthless campaign against Jewry, against which the all too justified wrath of our good, but misled, people must be directed.”14 As the “ideas of 1914”—polemically directed against those of “1789” and central to the ideology of the “German way”—were radicalized with the defeat of four years hence, the conception of the Jews as a “domestic enemy” gained acceptance among nationalistically inclined Germans.
Thus, when the elegist of the German “front experience,” Ernst Jünger, observed in 1930 that, “The Jew can play a creative role in nothing at all that concerns German life, neither in what is good nor in what is evil,” he merely gave voice to the widespread conviction that, in spite of their efforts to assimilate, Jews could never become “real” Germans.15 Jünger thereby perpetuated a credo that had been articulated eighty years earlier by Richard Wagner in “Das Judentum in der Musik”: since Jews dwelled parasitically among other nations, they were devoid of authentic “culture”; hence, they could never be genuinely creative. As is well known, Wagner concluded the essay prophetically by observing that the only solution to the troublesome Jewish question would be (following the precedent of Ahasverus) the Jews’ annihilation (Untergang).16
In the mid-1930s, the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, who in his earlier work emphasized the importance of racial homogeneity (Artgleichheit) and the need to annihilate the “domestic enemy,” opened a conference of German jurists with the declaration: “We need to liberate the German spirit from all Jewish falsifications, falsifications of the concept of spirit which have made it possible for Jewish emigrants to label the great struggle of Gauleiter Julius Streicher as something unspiritual.”17 Hitler had initiated the process of Jewish de-emancipation shortly after his seizure of power. To German Jews, it seemed like merely another temporary setback on the long march out of the ghetto. Who could have suspected that anything as unthinkable as a “Final Solution” lay in store?
Following the Anschluss, Wittgenstein, who hailed from an assimilated, upper-crust Viennese family, remarked that the laws of the Third Reich had finally succeeded in turning him into a German Jew.18 It was a reaction shared by a good number of assimilated Jews who experienced their own Jewishness for the first time under the sign of Nazi persecution. Yet, as the Zionists frequently argued, Jews who voluntarily exchanged their traditional allegiances for the trappings of improved social standing were often deluded about the social implications of their success. Consequently, as the 1930s unfolded, many assimilated Jews were unprepared for the tragic course of the events that followed—though in one of history’s sad ironies, it was often the better-off, assimilated Jews who were able to buy their way out of Hitler’s Germany, while their impoverished brethren perished in great numbers.
Often, the assimilated Jew’s inordinate attachment to things German functioned as an elaborate compensatory mechanism, an ersatz religion. As Isaiah Berlin has aptly observed, viewed psychologically, the passion with which Jewish intellectuals and artists identified with German traditions was often “the result of an inadequate sense of kinship and a desire to have the rift forgotten; since the more insurmountable it was, the greater was the desire to overcome it, or to behave as though it did not exist.”19 In the words of Gershom Scholem: “The unending Jewish demand for a home was transformed into the illusion of being at home…. During the generations preceding the catastrophe the German Jews … distinguished themselves by an astounding lack of critical insight into their own situation.”20 In contrast with the standard efforts to celebrate Jewish influences on German culture as a process of mutual enrichment, Scholem perceived a one-way street that ultimately redounded to Judaism’s distinct disadvantage. He hyperbolically characterized the frequently romanticized “German-Jewish symbiosis” as a series of “continuous bloodlettings, through which the Jews lost their most advanced elements to the Germans.”21 Echoing Scholem’s resignation, the historian Dan Diner described German-Jewish relations as an example of “negative symbiosis.”22
In a similarly skeptical vein, a more recent chronicler of German-Jewish relations has questioned the mutuality of the German-Jewish dialogue. After all: How can there be a dialogue when one of the parties refuses to listen?
The disappearance of the ghettos, the granting of civil rights to Jews, their entry into society, and their adoption of the German language gave rise to a German-Jewish culture, which, however, was never the result of a genuine symbiosis. Instead of inaugurating a dialogue between Jews and Germans, assimilation led immediately to a Jewish monologue, which took place in the Germanic world, was expressed in the German language, and was nourished by the German cultural legacy, but which, in fact, was carried on in a void.23
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy for latecomers to glean portents of doom that were indiscernible to those experiencing the events firsthand. When all is said and done, Fritz Stern’s critical gloss on the German-Jewish nexus seems fair-minded, as well as psychoanalytically apt: “The spiritual stance of German Jewry can perhaps best be described by the word ambivalence: ambivalence about themselves, ambivalence about the Germans, ambivalence about their role in German life.”24
Conventional wisdom has it that the Weimar Republic facilitated a triumph of “outsiders”—modernists, socialists, and Jews; that, for Jews, the sudden dismantling of cultural and legal barriers resulted in an unprecedented integration within the parameters of German society, giving rise to a Jewish cultural renaissance that assumed predominantly secular hues. But this description, while accurate in part, hardly captures the whole story.
In Germany, during the 1920s, Jewish culture itself experienced a remarkable resurgence. To the chagrin of German Jewry, in the aftermath of the Great War, decades of rabid political anti-Semitism gained a new lease on life. (Widespread acceptance of the “stab-in-the-back” myth represented only one index thereof.) Whereas during the first half of the nineteenth century, Jews had been shunned because of their “backwardness,” as assimilation progressed they were scorned as parvenus who had lost touch with their own traditions. Confronted with these painful circumstances and developments, for many German Jews, dreams of successful integration went up in smoke. In fact, one may justifiably speak of a process of dissimilation: a conscious abandonment of the delusory promises of assimilation and a corresponding quest for a meaningful Jewish identity.25
The dissimilation process began in the years prior to World War I. Circa 1900, Martin Buber challenged Jews to rise to the challenge of a “Jewish Renaissance,” which he defined as “the resurrection of the Jewish people from partial life to full life.”26 A few years later, he published a collection of Hasidic tales from eighteenth-century Poland, a summons to Jewish authenticity that had enormous resonance. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews strove to abandon their rituals and traditions in order to assimilate, the Ostjuden had represented a type of anachronistic embarrassment. But the persistence of anti-Semitism spurred a reassessment of their relation to the dominant culture. Hence, increasingly, it was the assimilated, Germanized Jews who were adjudged inauthentic, devoid of genuine Jewish selfhood, and their “primitive” Eastern European brethren who now seemed to embody an authentic Jewish spirit. From them, their well-adapted German coreligionists stood to learn much.
The Jewish Renaissance during the Weimar years was a phenomenon that assumed diverse cultural hues. Buber and Franz Rosenzweig sought to recast Jewish thought in existential terms that would meet the spiritual needs of Central European Jewry. The tradition of Jewish mysticism underwent a revival. In Frankfurt, Rosenzweig became the inaugural director of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, which focused on the needs of adult education. Through Lehrhaus course offerings, many assimilated Jews experienced the sacred texts of Judaism—Torah and Talmud—for the first time. There was even a resurgence of literature and painting dealing with indigenous Jewish themes. As the Zionist author Moritz Goldstein implored fellow Jews on the eve of World War I: “The Jewish drama, the Jewish novel has not yet been written. The creation of a new type of Jew—not in real life, but in literature—is of utmost importance in this respect. We all see life, people, and nature as our artists present them to us…. Jewish writers, to work!”27 Ismar Schorsch has summarized these developments as follows: “If one sector of the community is indeed best accounted for in terms of spiritual bankruptcy, the behavior of another sector constituted a dramatic polar opposite, whose singular achievement was to deepen and culminate the development of a distinct Jewish subculture in a relatively open and voluntaristic setting.”28 During the 1930s, as Hitler consolidated his grip on power and Nazi anti-Semitic measures expanded, the search for a meaningful Jewish identity became an urgent cultural imperative among Germany’s remaining Jews, who had been banned from virtually all walks of German civic life. Soon it became clear that all hopes for a modus vivendi with the Third Reich were chimerical. But, of course, for most of Central European Jewry, this realization came too late.