The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. - book reviews

Judaism, Wntr, 1997 by Alan Levenson

Reviewed by ALAN LEVENSON

Hitler's thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years, a shorter time than the Weimar Republic which preceded it. Yet a glance at the German history section of any American bookstore suggests an unending fascination with the Nazi dictatorship, and a relative lack of interest in the era that Peter Gay hopefully described as "already a legend" in his seminal study, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. This disparity offers a corrective to the historian Leopold von Ranke's view that "all ages stand in immediate relationship to God." Perhaps, but apparently, those ages which stand in immediate relationship to the Devil sell better.

The Jews represented one of the few groups that wholeheartedly supported the generally unloved Weimar Republic. For Jews, Weimar represented the culmination of a lengthy straggle for equal opportunity in all areas of German life. Although Jews had achieved political Emancipation throughout the German Empire (the Kaiserreich) in 1871, that putative equality was compromised in many areas. Placement and promotion in the civil service, the university, the public school system and the army were either stymied or slowed for professing Jews. The various German ministries displayed suspicious hostility toward the Jewish minority in a wide variety of social arenas, including even the right of baptized Jews to choose names of their own devising.(1) Furthermore, the domination of various coalitions of the right from 1879 onwards guaranteed that Jews would remain in opposition politically. Although the cultural flowers that would bloom during the Weimar Period were already growing before the war, the stifling atmosphere of Prussian Junkerdom kept these accomplishments in check.

Imperial Germany's collapse, the abdication of Wilhelm II, and the proclamation of the Republic on 9 November 1918 by Philipp Scheidemann of the Socialist Party, promised a new era. The two books reviewed here show how successfully German Jews took advantage of Weimar's promise and serve as worthy bookends to the historiographical question: what was the German-Jewish contribution to German culture - and did that contribution also extend into the realm of Judaic life?

Hugo Munsterberg's Unspoken Bequest is not a scholarly exploration, but a tribute to the galaxy of German Jewish accomplishments from philosophy and religious thought to the hard and social sciences. While not limited to the Weimar period, a remarkable number of the subjects of his thumb-nail sketches made their signal contributions during the Republic. By lumping together without much comment the intensely varied Jewishness of his subjects, Munsterberg inadvertently highlights an old conundrum: what was it about Jewishness that made German Jews so productive? How, for instance, can the "Jewishness" of Karl Marx, baptized a youth and without Judaic knowledge; the "Jewishness" of the psychologist Erich Fromm, raised in a traditional home in Frankfurt-am-Main; and the "Jewishness" of the chemist Fritz Haber, who had himself baptized as a grown man in a very different climate than Marx, all be offered as a single historical factor? From John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility to Paul Mendes Flohr's Divided Passions, attempts have been made to find the Archimedian standpoint, but, as yet, no single solution satisfies.

Another curious and inadvertent feature of Munsterberg's work, is that his figures seem to operate in a vacuum. The interaction between these figures and the movements to which they contributed, Lassalle and Socialism, for instance, is lacking, and the interaction of these German Jews with similarly committed gentiles, certainly an appropriate theme given the nature of Munsterberg's work, is eerily absent. Gentiles appear in these pages mainly as sidekicks (Marx's Friedrich Engels) or admirers (Walther Rathenau's Harry Kessler). To cite the praises of Einstein by Alfred North Whitehead is fine: to discuss the revolution in physics in that period, to which Einstein was one of several stellar contributors, would have been far better testimony to a German Jewish symbiosis.

Finally, one may question the purpose of this filiopietistic work. The tone throughout is not only reverential but apologetic, yet it is hard to determine for whom the apologia is intended. Contemporary Germany is willing - perhaps over-eager - to claim past Jewish contributions. American Jewry chants Marx, Freud, and Einstein as one of its favorite mantras, and non-Jews do not dismiss Erich Mendelssohn's work as "Jewish architecture." While there is little need to defend the contributions of Jews to general culture, if we are looking for a defense of the Judaic quality of the German-Jewish experience, the reader is advised to turn to Michael Brenner's book.

Brenner's The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany should put to rest any notion of the lack of interest of German Jews in their own Judaism. In the area of popularizing the findings of the "Science of Judaism," and in the development of secular expressions of Jewishness in music, literature, and the plastic arts, even in bourgeois pursuits such as Jewish bibliophilism, Brenner shows that on both institutional and individual levels a modern, secular-tending German Jewish culture was very much alive and well. In the search for alternative models of Jewish authenticity, whether in the Oriental Jew of the past or of the Eastern European Jew of the interwar years, German Jews displayed their vaunted self-critical tendencies to the fullest. Carefully stating his views about the range of this "renaissance," Brenner tells us that just as American Jews seem to be bifurcating into the indifferent and the increasingly committed, so too the Jews of Weimar.