THE GERMAN-JEWISH DIALOGUE RECONSIDERED German Life and Civilization Jost Hermand General Editor Advisory Board Helen Fehervary Ohio State University Peter Uwe Hohendahl Cornell University Robert Holub University of California at Berkeley Klaus Scherpe Humboldt University, Berlin Frank Trommler University of Pennsylvania Vol. 20 PETER LANG New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern • Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Vienna • Paris THE GERMAN-JEWISH DIALOGUE RECONSIDERED + A SYMPOSIUM IN HONOR OF GEORGE L. MOSSE EDITED BY KLAUS L. BERGHAHN PETER LANG New York • Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern • Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Vienna • Paris Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The German-Jewish dialogue reconsidered: a symposium in honor of George L. Mosse/ edited by Klaus L. Berghahn. p. em. -(German life and civilization; vol. 20) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Jews-Germany-Civilization-Congresses. 2. Jews-Cultural assimilation-Germany-Congresses. 3. Holocaust, Jewish ( 1939-1945) Germany-Influences-Congresses. 4. Germany-Civilization-Jewish influences-Congresses. 5. Germany-Ethnic relations-Congresses. I. Mosse, George L. (George Lachmann). II. Berghahn, Klaus L. III. Series. OS 135.G33G4927 943' .004924-dc20 95-42678 ISBN 0-8204-3107-9 ISSN 0899-9899 Die Deutsche Bibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnahme The German-Jewish dialogue reconsidered: a symposium in honor of George L. Mosse/ edited by Klaus L. Berghahn. -New York; Washington, D.C./Baltimore; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Vienna; Paris: Lang. (German life and civilization; Vol. 20) ISBN 0-8204-3107-9 NE:GT The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources. © 1996 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in the United States of America. Acknowledgements THE 18TH BURDICK-VARY SYMPOSIUM took place in Madison on October 7-9, 1993. Like recent conferences of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, our symposium centered around the work of a pre-eminent scholar, this time on George L. Mosse' s. It probed the usefulness of his concepts of dialogue, friendship, tolerance, and Bildung in the relationship between Germans and Jews since the 18th century. This conference also gave us the opportunity to honor one of our great historians on his 75th birthday. Symposia need institutional, financial and collegial support, which I have had in abundance and for which I am very grateful. I would like to thank the University of Wisconsin, which supported this conference with a generous grant from the Anonymous Fund, the Burdick-Vary Trust of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the German Department, the Department of History, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Goethe Institute Chicago. The publication of this volume was made possible by the generous support of the Department of German, the Department of History, and the Center for Jewish Studies. I am grateful for the support, advice and encouragement I have received from my colleagues in the Institute. I would like to thank Alan Ng for copy-editing the proofs and preparing the camera ready copy. And finally, I would like to express my special thanks to George L. Mosse, my mentor and friend, to whom this volume is dedicated. Madison, February 1996 Klaus L. Berghahn v This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 Tolerance and Emancipation Klaus L. Berghahn On Friendship: The Beginnings of a Christian-Jewish Dialogue in the 18th Century 5 David Sorkin The Internal Dialogue: Judaism and Enlightenment in Moses Mendelssohn's Thought 25 Dagmar Barnouw Enlightenment, Identity, Transformation: Salomon Maimon and Rahel Varnhagen 39 Bildung and Acculturation Liliane Weissberg Bodies in Pain: Reflections on the Berlin Jewish Salons 59 Shulamit Volkov The Ambivalence of Bildung: Jews and Other Germans 81 Egon Schwarz Germans and Jews in Viennese Culture 99 German-Jewish Culture at the Beginning of the 20th Century Stephane Moses On the Correspondence between Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy 109 Vll viii Contents Steven Aschheim German Jews Beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic 125 Sterling Fishman The Assassination of Kurt Eisner: A Study of Identity in the German-Jewish Dialogue 141 Marcus Bullock The Restoration of Patience in the Labor of History 155 After the Destruction of Jewish Culture in Germany David Biale Gershom Scholem between German and Jewish Nationalism 177 Anson Rabinbach Negative Identities: Germans and Jews in the Correspondence of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt 189 Sander Gilman Negative Symbiosis: The Re-emergence of Jewish Culture in Germany after the Fall of the Wall 207 Epilogue lost Hermand German Jews Beyond Judaism: The Gerhard/Israel/George L. Mosse Case 233 Notes 247 Introduction WAS THERE a German-Jewish dialogue? This seemingly innocent question, which kept generations of historians busy, was silenced by the Holocaust. After the Germans under Hitler had first excluded the German Jews from cultural life, then expelled them from their soil, and finally exterminated them, there could be no more talk of a German-Jewish dialogue. Since the Holocaust, it is out of the question to take comfortable refuge in a distant past, when Mendelssohn and Lessing started a German-Jewish dialogue, and one cannot celebrate a one-sided reconciliation by staging Lessing's Nathan the Wise, as was done in West and East Germany after 1945. Neither historicism nor nostalgia can help us to come to terms with our recent experience. What we can try to do is to build bridges across this abyss, which can reconnect us with the past-if we, at the same time, are aware of the abyss. This project should, therefore, not be seen as an attempt to idealize the past or to harmonize it with the present, but as a plea for a new dialogue between Germans and Jews about their common past. THEODOR W. ADORNO and Max Horkheimer, in their book The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), were the first to contradict any conciliatory approach to this question. "Dialectic of Enlightenment," in the context of German Jewish relations, meant a complete failure of Jewish emancipation and/or assimilation. For them, the roots of this failure can already be detected in the contradictions of the Enlightenment: the quest for tolerance and its limited success, the promise of emancipation and its protracted failure, the demand for social equality and its practical negation. These were the limits of the noble intentions and promises of the German Enlightenment. For Hannah Arendt, who was born in Germany and studied there (under Heidegger and Jaspers), the German-Jewish experience and the failure of Jewish emancipation became the bifocal perspective of her political philosophy. Time and again she stressed the fact that circumstances in Germany forced the Jews either to assimilate or to become pariahs-and not even that would save them in the end. Culturally the Jews had been excellent German Bildungsbiirger, but politically they were invisible. As