Nihilism, Modernity and the “Jewish Spirit”: Margarete Susman’s Transvaluation of a Fin-de-Siècle Trope

Margarete Susman’s reflections on that evocative metaphor known as the “Jewish spirit” begin with the disconcerting identification of Jewishness with nihilism and modernity. This troubling association underlies the anti-Jewish tirades of numerous fin-de-siècle thinkers such as Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Marr. Despite the term’s overridingly negative connotations, Susman grapples with the “Jewish spirit” in her essays from the 1930s for the constructive purpose of articulating her unique vision of German Jewry’s cultural and intellectual legacy. Her reworking of this metaphor represents a unique form of Jewish self-affirmation that differs from both the Zionist and liberal responses to antisemitism. She does not seek to turn the “Jewish spirit” into a resource for collective self-identification, but to undo the very logic that posits this figure as an antithesis of the “German spirit.” In the process of rethinking Jewishness, Susman destabilizes the völkisch conception of Germanness. Not only does her account of the “Jewish spirit” subvert a prevalent antisemitic fantasy, but it also forms a pointed polemic against the identity politics of cultural Zionism. Responding to the reductive essentialism she attributes to both the German völkisch and Jewish-national ideals of collective identity, Susman’s notion of the “Jewish spirit” constitutes a poetically and politically imaginative attempt to interweave German Jewry’s particularistic heritage into the larger story of European modernity.