Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad.

Brenner, Michael

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. By Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ix + 194 pp.

Let us reverse for a moment Philip Roth's vision that America had turned fascist and that, as a consequence, Hitler had won the war. Imagine instead that he would have been overthrown by his fellow Germans before he had the chance to launch the war and the genocide against European Jewry. Just as Anne Frank might be writing romantic novels in Frankfurt, Salman Schocken might have continued to sell clothes in even more department stores designed by Erich Mendelsohn, and the Jewish team Hakoah Vienna might have won a few more Austrian football championships; thus the heroes of this book might have turned German society of the 1950s and 1960s into an exciting intellectual culture. Imagine Hannah Arendt succeeding Martin Heidegger on his Freiburg chair, Leo Strauss advising Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, George Mosse and Fritz Stern reclaiming Germany's leading role in the study of intellectual history. To be sure, one is well advised to refrain from pondering about the "what ifs" of history--but reading this book one is at least tempted to engage in such intellectual exercises.

Aschheim's Beyond the Border is, however, not at all an invitation for unhistorical speculation of what did not happen, but rather a sober analysis of what has happened. The three essays in this volume concentrate on three different aspects of the German-Jewish legacy. Each of them suggests that German Jews abroad opened particular paths within their respective academic societies. German-Jewish Zionists, many of them of Czech background, represented a more tolerant version of nationalism than prevalent in the Jewish society of Palestine and later Israel. German-Jewish emigre historians in the United States continued the prewar German tradition of intellectual history while their postwar German colleagues concentrated mostly on social history. Finally, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss became icons of contemporary Western intellectual and academic culture.

In "Bildung in Palestine" Aschheim follows a recent tendency in scholarship by granting special attention to the multicultural setting of interwar Prague, with its competing Czech, German, and Jewish identities. Prague Jews, such as Hans Kohn, Hugo Bergmann, and Robert Wehsch, were among the leading members of the Brit Shalom movement arguing for a binational solution in Palestine. They were joined by immigrants from Germany, such as Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, and Arthur Ruppin. Aschheim is absolutely right in distinguishing this mainly German-Jewish binationalist position (which is a moderate but still a nationalist conception) from later postnationalist visions.

Aschheim's conclusion that "these thinkers sought not to abolish nationalism but rather provide it with a more tolerant, gentle face" (43) may sound less spectacular than that of many other chroniclers of Brit Shalom, which recently has been interpreted as both a viable path to a binational state not taken or as a fatal road leading to destruction. Aschheim's modest assessment, however, may also be a more realistic one, as the goals he identifies with Brit Shalom were sufficiently admirable under the truly difficult circumstances. Here, as in his other two essays, Aschheim proves to be the sober historian searching the past rather than the sensationalist looking for clear-cut instructions for the future.

In this respect, he stands in the good tradition of the German emigre historians he describes in his next chapter. One of them, George Mosse, was, indeed, his own teacher. The other makers of German cultural history in his collection are Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, and Walter Laqueur. Aschheim juxtaposes their concentration on intellectual and cultural history with German historians, such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen, and Martin Broszat, who focused mainly on social history. Both depict Sonderweg theories of German history: While for the social historians the special path of German history was the collapse of liberal democracy, for the cultural historians it was antisemitism. In Aschheim's words, "divergent experiential, situational, and identificatory factors played an important role in the genesis, nature, and emphases of their work" (50). And to put it more bluntly he reminds us that the teachers of the most prominent German social historians, among them Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Theodor Schieder, had often been implicated in Ostpolitik or antisemitic Nazi research projects. Aschheim describes their pupils' motives as follows: "Retrospectively this brand of social history can be read as a kind of--subtle and not necessarily conscious--navigation exercise: formulating a necessarily critical narrative of the past while at the same time leaving questions of personal complicity and ideological and intellectual convictions relatively untouched" (52).

It is this second essay, which is the most provocative of the book. Although Aschheim stays away from any accusatory tone, his conclusions imply a critical note towards much of postwar German historiography. He is concerned with "the silence, disinclination, indifference, or inability of the younger historians to face their fathers and teachers and to ask pertinent questions, to delve into the untouched shadows of the past" (53-54). The intellectual and cultural history approach chosen by most emigre historians was ironically taboo in Germany, where "idealist and historicist traditions were often portrayed as complicit in National Socialism itself" (55). Instead, German historians chose a more "progressive" structural approach, which allowed them, as Aschheim argues, to escape questions of individual responsibility. It might have been interesting to follow this approach into the next generation of historians, whose work has sometimes taken an even more structuralist approach and turned the Holocaust into a self-propelling process in which antisemitic motives are, at best, secondary.

Even in recent works of German social historians, Aschheim contends, "these emigre cultural historians remain virtually invisible, their work and importance given short shrift. The regrettable nondialogue continues" (80). Although this is largely true, one might point to the very different reception these historians experienced in the broader German intellectual public. While George Mosse was largely ignored, Fritz Stern has been widely read and profoundly honored. It may be an interesting task for a follow-up essay to explore the differences (which Aschheim acknowledges) among the four emigre scholars even deeper. One may also add other figures, such as Georg Iggers, who has probably worked more systematically on modern German historiography than any historian in Germany has done in the last decades. Finally, it is interesting to note that these emigre historians, who did not consider themselves as authorities on Jewish history are often conceived as such by German readers. While they did not really influence the broader image of German history within Germany, they had a deeper impact on the image of German Jewish history. The reason for this may be found in the fact that they came from highly assimilated backgrounds and (with the exception of Laqueur) propagated a view popular in postwar Germany: that German Jews felt "at home in Germany" (Peter Gay), that they were "Jews beyond Judaism" (Mosse), that they had to pay "the burden of success" (Stern), but had hardly developed a Jewish culture of their own. In this respect these emigre historians reflect their own background which was, however, hardly representative for the whole of German Jewry.

The last essay provides an answer to the self-posed question: "Why do we love (hate) Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss?" Here Aschheim continues the work on figures, about whom he has contributed already numerous important essays. The answer to his question may be less original than the ideas of his middle essay but certainly not less elegantly and profoundly formulated. In contrast to thinkers like Buber and Cassirer who do not enjoy the same iconic status today, they were more textual and less bourgeois-liberal. Ironically, then, the German-Jewish legacy today is not tied any more to the liberal enlightened views with which they were once identified but rather with a spirit that was deeply connected with the forces leading to its demise.

Michael Brenner

Munich, Germany