Research Catalog

The Jews & Germany : from the "Judeo-German symbiosis" to the memory of Auschwitz

Title: The Jews & Germany : from the "Judeo-German symbiosis" to the memory of Auschwitz / by Enzo Traverso ; translated by Daniel Weissbort.
Author: Traverso, Enzo.
Publication: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [1995], ©1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DS135.G33 T6413 1995	Off-site

Description

xxiv, 215 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

The Jews and Germany debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and brought out the best in each other. Enzo Traverso argues that, to the contrary, the attainments of Jews in the German-speaking world were due to the Jews aspiring to be German, with little help from and often against the open hostility of Germans. As the Holocaust proved in murder and theft, German Jews could never be German enough.
Now the works of German Jews are being published and reprinted in Germany. It is a matter of enormous difference whether the German rediscovery of German Jews is another annexation of Jewish property or an act of rebuilding a link between traditions.
Traverso shows how tenuous the link was in the first place. He resumes the queries of German Jews who asked throughout the twentieth century what it meant to be both Jewish and German. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Kafka, and many more thinkers of genius found the problems unavoidable and full of paradoxes.
In returning to them Traverso not only demolishes a sugary myth but also reasserts the responsibility of history to recover memory, even if bitter and full of pain.

Series Statement

Texts and contexts ; v. 14

Uniform Title

Alternative Title

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Contents

1. The 'Judeo-German Symbiosis': Myth and Reality. A Long Quarrel. The Stages of a Negative Dialectic. Lights and Shades of Assimilation. The Rise of Anti-Semitism. Judeity and Germanity. A Crisis of Identity. The Tuning Point of Weimar. Judeo-German Symbiosis or Jewish Monologue? 'We Are Forced to Remain Strangers' -- 2. The Jew as Pariah. The Pariavolk in German Sociology: Max Weber. The 'Pride in Being a Pariah': Bernard Lazare. The 'Hidden Tradition': Hannah Arendt. The Pariah as Schlemihl. The Revolt of the Pariah: Hannah Arendt, Zionism, and Socialism. Judeity and Femininity: Rosa Luxemburg -- 3. Judeity as Heimatlosigkeit: Joseph Roth. 'Hotelpatriot'. Nostalgia for the Shtetl. Judaism and the Criticism of Modernity. 'Joseph the Red'. Exile or the Flight from History -- 4. The Jew as Parvenu. A Literary Archetype. From Bleichroder to Wendriner. A Patriotic Jew: Ernst Kantorowicz. Pan-Germanism and Zionism: Theodor Herzl.
An Admirer of 'Nordic Beauty': Walther Rathenau. A Tragic Epilogue -- 5. Auschwitz, History, and Historians. The Jewish Genocide and Others. Interpretations of the 'Final Solution'. The Aporias of Marxism. Archaism and Modernity -- 6. History and Memory. The 'Jewish Question' in Germany after Auschwitz. The GDR or Memory Manipulated. Adenauer or the Era of Forgetfulness. Disputed Memory. To Free Oneself from 'A Past Which Will Not Pass'? An Amnesic Reunification. Sham Memory.

ISBN

0803244266

LCCN

94023294

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries