Rosenzweig and War. A Question of "Point of View": Between Creation, Revelation, and Redemption

For anyone who knows The Star of Redemption by word of mouth or who has simply leafed through it without reading it cover to cover, it is impossible to forget the first pages on the fear of death and war. They are enthralling by themselves alone. But they are also gripping because they so strongly associate philosophy and its venerable history with the violence of war and steer us toward a "refus[al] to follow" "idealism" (Rosenzweig 2005, 27). Moreover, the writing of these pages is implicitly related to the experiences of its author in the trenches of World War I, which only adds to their literary size and scope.

And yet these resounding pages contrast with another passage in The Star, in the first book of the third part, entitled, "The Peoples of the World: Messianic Politics," though the extent of this contrast will have to be determined (348). When one is familiar with the genesis of Rosenzweig's work and his tormented intellectual path, one discerns in this paragraph a kind of reprise of his project for a book on war, though in a contorted way and with new implications. The project constitutes a decisive intermediary stage between Hegel und der Staat, his thesis from 1912, and The Star as it was drafted in 1918 (between these dates, in 1913, Rosenzweig renounced a Christian conversion to "remain a Jew") (Glatzer 1961, 28). Rosenzweig chose not to publish his book on war, on its reason and foundation—his Kriegsgrund, as he put it (1979, 334-35, 375, 395). Peace, according to him, would have rendered his "war opus" null and void—and this right while it was being drafted—a book that he had worked on since the first decade of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we do have several layers of this work, and no doubt even the essentials of its contents, in 11 texts, and in particular in three studies that preceded The Star. Drafted at the war's height, Rosenzweig had wanted to integrate them into the book on war, but they were then discarded and abandoned. These three texts—Vox Dei, Cannes et Gorlice, and Globus—outline a geopolitical philosophy of history. They are centeredon "a kind of natural philosophy of war," to which I will return (Rosenzweig 2002, 43).¹ What I intend to examine is the divergence, tension, and the possible difference between this geopolitics of history and the first pages of The Star, and thus on the consistency of Rosenzweig's comments on war.

The Cry

The first pages of The Star are well known, as I have said, so I will briefly recall their contents. They begin the work with these first words: Vom Tode, "From death," and thus take on the arc or "path" that continuously takes shape right up to the very last words of the book, Ins Leben, "into life." This is a clear indication that an architectonic concern is at work in the book's composition, and that the profound meaning of this opening cannot be reduced or relativized (something that has occasionally been the case with some young researchers who have taken up readings of The Star). The first pages are thus the opening of an "opus," and an opening on war, in a war, under fire. For example, one can simply read the passage where Rosenzweig writes that man, to escape the terrible fear of death that he feels in his gut, buries himself like a worm in the folds of the naked earth, in an attempt to elude the tentacles that menace him from all sides, hunkering down where and as he can, screaming out in refusal of this inexorable violence (9). No doubt, this fear was something that all the soldiers in the trenches experienced, amid the mud and the blood. In these few lines, Rosenzweig talks about a singular, universal death, yet the metaphor and the descriptive traits he makes use of, in all likelihood, are inspired by the mobile warfare that was...