German - Jewish Dilemma From the Enlightenment to the Shoah

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Pages:352
ISBN:0-7734-8195-8
978-0-7734-8195-4
Price:$239.95 + shipping
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Essays analyze the principal problems which have affected the evolution of German-Jewish relations since the Enlightenment, showing how the project of emancipation was subverted by powerful countercurrents of antisemitism and anxieties about national identity in a society in the throes of modernization. It emphasizes the importance of social and historical context, offering a differentiated account of the difficulties of emancipation, the sense of alienation which is such a characteristic feature of German-Jewish discourse, and the culmination of various forms of antisemitism in the politics of persecution and genocide. The close focus on specific journals and institutions, writers and texts, reveals the tortuous complexity of German-Jewish relations, with a final emphasis on resistance, survival and commemoration.

Reviews

"It is not often that one comes across a volume of collected scholarly studies which cross the academic divide between the disciplines involved with such ease and skill as this book. . . . few readers, Jew or Gentile, will fail to return to it time and again and gather from it valuable information and, above all, a sense of direction for a future hopefully not distorted once again by optical illusions." – David Maier in Our Congregation.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations, Preface, Introduction

Part 1: THE PROJECT OF EMANCIPATION

Emancipation and its Discontents: the German-Jewish Dilemma (Peter Pulzer)

Models of Differences and Alterity: Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Hermann Levin Goldschmidt (Willi Goetschel)

Christian Wilhelm Dohm's Conception of the Civic Improvement of the Jews (Eoin Bourke)

Johann Peter Hebel and the Sanhedrin of 1807: The Project of Emancipation in Baden (John Hibberd)

The Emancipation debate in Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts 1839-1845(Anita Bunyan)

Philosemitism and Antisemitism: Nietzsche, Sombart, Alfred Weber (Eberhard Demm)

The Abortive Emancipation (Julius H. Schoeps)

Part 2: ANTISEMITISM AND ALIENATION

Varieties of Antisemitism from Herder to Fassbinder (Ritchie Robertson)

Exile, Alienation, Promised Lands: Marx, Freud and Herzl (Robert S. Wistrich)

Antisemitism in the Universities and Student Fraternities: The ‘numerus clausus' Controversy (Edward Timms)

Writing Racism: Artur Dinter's Die Sünde wider das Blut (Florian Krobb)

The German and the Jewish Selves: Arthur Schnitzler's Der Weg ins Freie (John Milfull)

Kafka and the German-Jewish Double Bind (Margarete Kohlenbach)

Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920-1936 (Heather Valencia)

Part 3: PERSECUTION, RESISTANCE AND MEMORY

Responses of German Jewry to Nazi Persecution 1933-1943 (Arnold Paucker)

German Anti-Nazi Exiles and the Jewish Question (David Bankier)

Victor Klemperer and the Language of National Socialism (Roderick H. Watt)

Good Against Evil? H. G. Adler, T. W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust (Jeremy Adler)

The Politics of Memory in Post-Nazi Austria (Robert Knight)

The Cultural Identity of Former German-Jewish Immigrants in Israel (Miryam Du-nour)

Memory: Too Much/Too Little (Gabriel Josipovici)

Index

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