Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (review)

Let us reverse for a moment Philip Roth's vision that America had turned fascist and that, as a consequence, Hitler had won the war. Imagine instead that he would have been overthrown by his fellow Germans before he had the chance to launch the war and the genocide against European Jewry. Just as Anne Frank might be writing romantic novels in Frankfurt, Salman Schocken might have continued to sell clothes in even more department stores designed by Erich Mendelsohn, and the Jewish team Hakoah Vienna might have won a few more Austrian football championships; thus the heroes of this book might have turned German society of the 1950s and 1960s into an exciting intellectual culture. Imagine Hannah Arendt succeeding Martin Heidegger on his Freiburg chair, Leo Strauss advising Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, George Mosse and Fritz Stern reclaiming Germany's leading role in the study of intellectual history. To be sure, one is well advised to refrain from pondering about the "what ifs" of history—but reading this book one is at least tempted to engage in such intellectual exercises.

Aschheim's Beyond the Border is, however, not at all an invitation for unhistorical speculation of what did not happen, but rather a sober analysis of what has happened. The three essays in this volume concentrate on three different aspects of the German-Jewish legacy. Each of them suggests that German Jews abroad opened particular paths within their respective academic societies. German-Jewish Zionists, many of them of Czech background, represented a more tolerant version of nationalism than prevalent in the Jewish society of Palestine and later Israel. German Jewish émigré historians in the United States continued the prewar German tradition of intellectual history while their postwar German colleagues concentrated mostly on social history. Finally, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss became icons of contemporary Western intellectual and academic culture.

In "Bildung in Palestine" Aschheim follows a recent tendency in scholarship by granting special attention to the multicultural setting of interwar Prague, with its competing Czech, German, and Jewish identities. Prague Jews, such as Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Robert Weltsch, were among the leading members of the Brit Shalom movement arguing for a binational solution in Palestine. They were joined by immigrants from Germany, such as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, and Arthur Ruppin. Aschheim is absolutely right in distinguishing this mainly German-Jewish binationalist position (which is a moderate but still a nationalist conception) from later postnationalist visions.

Aschheim's conclusion that "these thinkers sought not to abolish nationalism but rather provide it with a more tolerant, gentle face"(43) may sound less spectacular than that of many other chroniclers of Brit Shalom, which recently has been interpreted as both a viable path to a binational state not taken or as a fatal road leading to destruction. Aschheim's modest assessment, however, may also be a more realistic one, as the goals he identifies with Brit Shalom were sufficiently admirable under the truly difficult circumstances. Here, as in his other two essays, Aschheim proves to be the sober historian searching the past rather than the sensationalist looking for clear-cut instructions for the future.

In this respect, he stands in the good tradition of the German émigré historians he describes in his next chapter. One of them, George Mosse, was, indeed, his own teacher. The other makers of German cultural history in his collection are Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, and Walter Laqueur. Aschheim juxtaposes their concentration on intellectual and cultural history with German historians, such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen, and Martin Broszat, who focused mainly on social history. Both depict Sonderweg theories of German history: While for the social historians the special path of German history was the collapse of liberal democracy, for the cultural historians it was antisemitism. In Aschheim's words, "divergent experiential, situational, and identificatory factors played an important role in the genesis, nature, and emphases of their work" (50). And to put...