“A Germ So Tiny”: Margarete Susman’s Messianism of Small Steps

Zur vollkommenen Güte und Liebe zwischen Mensch und Mensch ist der Weg genau so weit wie zur messianischen Erlösung.

—Margarete Susman

During the Second World War, the Jewish German poet, philosopher, and literary critic Margarete Susman (1872–1966) gave a lecture at a gathering of religious socialists in Zurich. The topic was the biblical prophet Ezekiel and the fate of the Jewish people. In this lecture Susman reflected on the significance of time.

Time has been entrusted by God to the human being. The door of the past has not shut irrevocably; it may be opened from the direction of the future [von der Zukunft her]. God gives the key into man’s hand; man has to receive and grasp it. For God does not want the death of the sinner, but his life. Life, however, is not stagnation but transformation. The human being is able to change, he can become a new human being.

(1960, 72)

In stressing the human capacity for change, Susman was thinking of teshuvah, literally “return,” a Jewish religious concept connoting atonement for one’s sins and the resolve to begin anew (Luz 2009). In her view, teshuvah was not only a possibility but an existential necessity for its ultimate goal: the establishment of the messianic kingdom of peace on earth. What was needed for genuine teshuvah was a first step on the road to peace—a modest, yet concrete and hence profoundly real step. Such steps did not involve the earth-shaking decisions and deeds of a Nietzschean Übermensch (Overman) but instead consisted “in the blessing of a friendly glance, in a deed of simple love, brotherly patience, in a kind gesture, in a germ so tiny that we do not recognize it as a return yet” (Susman 1960, 92, emphasis added).

Susman wrote these lines at a time of intense anguish and hardship. Elderly, divorced, perennially ill, and almost penniless, she lived as a barely tolerated émigrée in Switzerland, frantically trying to secure her sister’s escape from Germany. Albeit only from a distance, she was forced to witness the crumbling of the European social order and the genocidal assault on the Jewish people. We need not wonder that these events brought her close to suicidal despair. Paradoxically, it was precisely this despair that made her focus on teshuvah grounded in hope.

The connection between despair and hope is by no means self-evident. Hope, by definition, is always oriented toward the future. In the words of Alan Mittleman, “[t]o hope requires the possibility of change; that there be alternatives to one’s present circumstances. If there is nothing but eternal sameness, eternal Hell, even eternal return, there is no ground for hope” (2009, 2). How is hope possible on the brink of the abyss? This is the question at the heart of Susman’s messianic philosophy, a philosophy that rejects Nietzsche’s idea of an eternal return and his insistence on amor fati (love of fate) and instead demands that we live each moment with a view toward eternity.¹

In this essay I examine Margarete Susman’s messianism of small steps as it evolved over the course of more than three decades. In Manfred Schlösser’s words, the messianic idea constituted the “basic principle” of her thought (1964, 55). In its mature form, it was both a philosophy and an ethos in the tradition of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism as imparted to her by her teacher rabbi Caesar Seligmann, and involved an explicit rejection of Nietzsche’s will to power. Susman had come to her knowledge of Judaism rather late. As a typical member of the assimilated and secularized Jewish bourgeoisie she grew up largely ignorant of her ancestral heritage. She was already twenty-two years old when she finally began to study Judaism under the guidance of rabbi Seligmann. Like other reformers, Seligmann embraced a messianic view of history and postulated Israel’s mission as a “light unto the nations.” There can be little doubt that it was this instruction that laid the foundation for...