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

Preface

ix Preface This work explores flashpoints of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience. Here was a complex triangular encounter that proved to be of immense historical import. Out of this confrontation emerged some of the West’s most powerful and paradigmatic intellectual creations and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, the century’s darkest genocidal moments.1 Ultimately wrapped up with the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust—an overwhelming datum that often tends to distort our portrait of the preceding years—it raises political, ethical, and interpretive issues that still reverberate powerfully in post-Auschwitz culture. This collection touches upon past dimensions of the meeting and present dilemmas of grasping and representing it. It concentrates upon the junctions —those multiple sites of sensitive contact—where its most creative and lethal dimensions, its achievements and tensions, ambiguities, nobility and meanness, ironies, and hidden subtexts are best uncovered. In the essays contained here, I seek to portray the contexts and dynamics of these interconnections and the ideas and biases of some of the personalities caught up in this taut nexus. I seek also to illuminate the ubiquitous, charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and the projects of some later thinkers and historians who—in various and highly contested ways—have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its animating essence. These then are the themes that give this collection its rationale and unity. The essays included here were written for a variety of academic venues and public occasions. Chapters 3, 4, and 7 have not been previously published, and Chapter 2 has heretofore appeared only in Hebrew, in Historia 5 (2000). Although the others have been published before—the sources and permissions are given at the beginning of each chapter’s notes—I have been persuaded to put them together not only because many of them appeared in journals not always easily accessible but because they are bound by a continuity of method, issues, and con- x Preface cerns. At the same time, they also reflect a certain change and development and, one hopes, a responsiveness to emerging problems and controversies . Placing these essays together may, therefore, be useful in providing a perspective over time on such continuity and change. I would hope that any repetition that may occur—and an attempt has been made to cut this to a minimum—will be compensated for by the variety of issues raised and perspectives offered in the course of this work. Over the years I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and advice of countless friends and colleagues. I have gratefully acknowledged such help in the notes and hope that I have not inadvertently omitted anyone. I must, however, also acknowledge the support of Raphy Kadushin, acquisitions editor of the University of Wisconsin Press, who showed immediate interest in the book, and thank Hannah Nyala for her skillful and sympathetic editing of the work. Juliet Skuldt has guided In Times of Crisis to publication with remarkable warmth, good spirit, and competence . John Landau, acute as always, suggested the title of the book. It is quite obvious to me that if these essays have any merit at all it is due to the warmth and boisterous support of my ever-growing family, to whom this volume is dedicated. It is also dedicated to the loving memory of my mother who passed away in June 2000. Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank Saul Friedlander and Anson Rabinbach, both of whom read In Times of Crisis in manuscript form. They were embarrassingly generous in their encouragement. ...