In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (review)

This book includes fifteen essays written since the late 1980s. Though most of the essays have already been published in various journals or volumes in the past, their compilation here, as well as the addition of three new ones, and one newly translated into English, proves very valuable. Aschheim, perhaps the most prominent Israeli historian in the field of German and German Jewish intellectual and cultural history, illuminates many key issues concerning the complicated heritage of these worlds, as well as their current historical representations. In his writing about a variety of "ambiguous legacies," a term used in the title of the third essay in this volume but relevant to many others as well, he often calls for new ways to examine old problems.

Aschheim relates his short preface to the problematic tension between the pre-Auschwitz and post-Auschwitz German culture. This tension between then and now and before and after, is clear through the book. The essays are presented in four parts. Each touches this tension from a different angle. Part 1, "The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now," integrates historical examinations of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, Leo Strauss, Max Horkheimer, and others with evaluations of their impact on current Western culture. The second part, which starts with a short autobiographical excursus about Aschheim's childhood and youth as a son of German Jewish immigrants in South Africa, consists of four essays dealing with various identity issues which are related to the problematic encounters of Germans and Jews before and after Auschwitz. The third and the fourth parts concentrate on the evaluation and analysis of a variety of historical interpretations of German history, and of the Nazism of the Holocaust.

Chapter 3, the longest article in the first part of the book, relates to a set of problems typical to Aschheim's discourse. The chapter deals with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and the three leading figures of the Frankfurt School: Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. In spite of the significant differences between their ideas—which moved between the elitist and neoconservative Strauss to the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt school—Aschheim still looks for certain common denominators. The departure point can be merely biographical—all five were Jews active in Germany in the Weimar Republic, all of them were later in exile in the United States. But this is not enough, of course, in order to discuss them in the same article. One of Aschheim's challenges here is to trace the impact of the common biographic background on their thought, and more specifically on their critique on the modern social sciences.

All five figures were critics of modern mass society, as they knew it. However, none of them formed his or her critique in the way of other contemporary critics like Carl Schmitt or Ernst Junger. Their common Jewish background, it seems, caused their discrete critiques of modernity to be based on humanistic premises, not necessarily because of the Jewish tradition (Strauss was the only one among them to relate in his work explicitly to Jewish sources) but rather mainly because of the sensitivity that their life as Jews in German society (on the margins, as Aschheim says at a certain point) developed in them. They all objected in one way or another to the positivistic-Weberian tendency for a sharp and clear distinction between "science" (mostly social science) and "values" and tried to suggest various alternative models for science. "All sought," as Aschheim puts it in the context of their "marginal" status as Jews, "anti-reductionist, humanizing, and redeeming possibilities rather than forms of hardness and domination" (p. 38). The major problems they dealt with as well as the (ambiguous) solutions they tried to suggest are still relevant at the turn of the twenty-first century, as we continue to struggle with the consequences of modernity.

Chapter 8 consists of a rather short (seven pages) but, to my mind, especially valuable observation of...