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

Steven Aschheim begins his study on German Jewish intellectuals with Hannah Arendt’s observation that the German-speaking Jews were an “altogether unique phenomenon” which calls for urgent investigation. In this richly erudite book with its nearly 500 footnotes, Aschheim has contributed to just that imperative, and while much has been written on the Weimar German Jewish intellectuals, Aschheim has approached his subject in a manner which other studies could not attempt to do.

In the first of his three essays, he addresses the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, from Martin Buber to Arthur Ruppin, and their brand of bi-nationally oriented humanist Zionism; in the second, he deals with the role of the émigré historians, mostly in the U.S. (which might explain why Eric Hobsbawm, for example, was excluded) and their role in shaping a new brand of cultural history, and in the last chapter, he asks what might have made these intellectuals (Benjamin, Arendt, Scholem, Adorno, and others) so influential and “fascinating” to younger generations of Western intellectuals today. All three of Aschheim’s intellectual incursions, then, address the rich cultural and intellectual environment we associate with the Weimar Republic, itself the culmination of developments from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Jewish emancipation, democratic patriotism of 1848, and the socialist movement later on. The formation of these German-Jewish intellectuals, their habitus and world views, cannot be explained outside this legacy. And as Jews, they did not even have the chance to become enamored of Weimar’s other strains—antisemitism and völkisch nationalism.

Despite their humanist formation, then, Aschheim seems to flirt with the idea, amply contradicted by his own evidence and arguments, that the figures around the Brith Shalom in Palestine were inspired not by German/European liberalism and humanism, but by the negative experiences of European barbarities in World War I and experiences of ethno-nationalism throughout Europe. No doubt the harrowing experiences of the Great War were a catalytic element, but as the author himself points out, there were indeed workable models of ethno-national co-existence in Europe, from Switzerland and Belgium to the Danish minority in Schleswig and most of all, perhaps, Austro-Hungary with the multi-ethnic communities of Prague or Czernowitz. Austro-Marxism provided a model there, as well as the universalistic message of socialism that influenced many in Brith Shalom and German-Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin, Adorno) elsewhere. These German-Jewish notions are quite distinct, then, from Jabotinsky and his East European followers, and a debate such as Lenin’s discussion of the “Bund in the Party” would have been inconceivable in the West. Moreover, the different assimilationist and universalist habitus of Western Jewry was markedly different from that of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Amos Oz’s novels have portrayed that intellectual chasm very powerfully. The “crises of conscience” incurred by members of Brith Shalom in the wake of later developments in Palestine, which made a bi-national solution impossible, are hardly reconcilable with notions of Realpolitik that might have grown out of the negative experiences in Europe per se. In light of recent debates concerning a binational solution in Israel/Palestine, Aschheim makes clear that the ideas of Brith Shalom have not lost any of their power and logic.

In the second part, Aschheim shows how a small number of émigré historians have created a quite original form of German cultural history, and he contrasts that to the parallel development of a politically committed social history as it developed in West Germany around the same time, from the 1960’s onwards. The émigré cultural historians, a handful including George Mosse, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern, made it their life’s work to address the question of how Nazism became possible within the cultural traditions of Germany, and they were in a position to examine that subject unencumbered by the contemporary German context and its political discourses of guilt and denial, and without the dubious advantage...