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Recasting the “Other”: Readings in German- Jewish Interwar Culture and its Aftermath

Probably against Gershom Scholem’s intention, his verdict as to the non-existence of a “German-Jewish dialogue” spurred significant scholarly interest in the history of Jewish presence in the German-speaking world (Scholem 1967). In 1964, three years after the Eichmann trial – which had itself actuated a need, especially on the part of Germans, to recall a German-Jewish past from before the Shoah – Scholem dismissed the idea that relations between German Jews and Germans were reciprocal. He stated these views in a letter of response to an invitation to contribute to a Festschrift for Margarete Susman; this text was later published and thus can be considered an open letter. The initiators of the Festschrift had conceived it as a testimony to what Martin Buber, in a 1939 essay, had termed “German-Jewish symbiosis.” (Buber 1993) Scholem was implicitly critical of this idea, deeming it “currently popular.” Yet for all their differences, Scholem’s and Buber’s evaluations of German-Jewish cultural history – evaluations which would inform scholarly discourse in the following decades – share a feature that was not only mutual but also common to most of German culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Buber, like Scholem, in the latter’s critique of a harmonious representation of the German-Jewish relationship based on the principle of equality, demarcates the “German” and the “Jewish” as two distinct “ethnic elements,” (Buber 1993, 630) thereby perpetuating a gesture that accompanied emancipation from its beginning. Such a dual, if not dichotomous, view of the “German” and the “Jewish” reverberates in discussions of German-Jewish cultural history, most explicitly in the use of contrasting pairs; such pairs have included insiders versus outsiders, native versus stranger, center versus margins, major (literature) versus minor, self versus other – this last one being recently replaced by “Gegenüber,” (Heuser 2011) i.e., counterpart. In line with this, Todd Herzog’s renowned discussion of the concept of “hybridity” shows that use of the term “hybrid,” instead of overcoming the dual structure reflected in these contrastive pairs, not only expands that duality but in fact reproduces nineteenthand early-twentieth-century racial