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“Going together without coming together”: “Die Kreatur” (1926–1929) and Why We Should Read German Jewish Journals Differently

Abstract Between 1926 and 1929, Martin Buber, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Joseph Wittig edited the journal Die Kreatur. Its contributors included prominent authors such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Simon, Franz Rosenzweig, Hugo Bergmann, Florens Christian Rang, and many other leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals of the early interwar period. Its very title, Die Kreatur, programmatically suggested a new anthropology while avoiding direct theological discourse and instead fostering dialogue both between secular and religious thought and between the three religions of its editors: Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Thus, by its very nature, the journal was typical of the complex intellectual discourses that marked the Weimar period and of the “dialogic” thought that Buber and others came to stand for. Reading Die Kreatur as a journal poses major methodological challenges and questions not a few presuppositions of current intellectual history, which tends to focus on individual (more or less canonical) authors and their “works.” Rather than picking out single texts and constructing individual “positions,” we would be better off trying to understand Die Kreatur in terms of its multivocal, heterogeneous and pluralistic features. This article claims that dialogic features are characteristic of periodicals in general and constitute their productive power: they allow new ideas to emerge and institute discourses which, while lacking systematic coherence, explore new approaches and attitudes that interconnect in less rigid ways. The article makes a case for new forms of reading and conceptualizing journals – forms that will furthermore help to understand the hybrid and often idiosyncratic nature of German-Jewish discourses during the interwar period.