A derivative and unfocused account of "the problems posed by
Judeo-German culture as a whole" from the Enlightenment to German
reunification. Traverso, an Italian-born archivist at the
Bibliotheque de documentation internationale contemporaine in
Nanterre, originally published this book in France in 1992. It is a
work best described as intellectual journalism, a genre that hovers
between journalism and scholarship and that is almost nonexistent
in the US. Alas, in this promising case the union fails: The book
is too awkwardly written to pass as good journalism and
insufficiently original to pass as a serious contribution to
scholarship. The author's primary intent is to refute the notion of
"Judeo-German symbiosis," the theory that an authentic mutual
interchange took place between Germans and German Jews such as
Mendelssohn, Heine, Schnitzler, and Kafka. Traverso contends that
the famous symbiosis never took place, that the supposed dialogue
was a Jewish monologue within German culture. Few would argue the
contrary. His assertion, then, serves as a framing device for his
presentation of the important literature on the topic of German
Jews and German anti-Semitism. He offers short profiles of major
figures (Theodor Herzl, Bernard Lazare, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah
Arendt, Joseph Roth) and discussions of important moments in the
history of German anti-Semitism, including the recent
Historikerstreit (quarrel of the historians), in which some
conservative intellectuals argued that Nazi genocide was a response
to communist barbarism and hence neither so unique nor so morally
repugnant as to require continuing German shame. He also considers
what German reunification has meant for the Jewish question. This
volume would be a good introduction to its subject were it not for
tangled prose that obscures the author's points. Traverso's book,
rich in information and potentially good journalism, snatches
defeat from the jaws of victory. Its thesis is a paper tiger, and
it relies exclusively on well-known published sources. (Kirkus
Reviews)
"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. Enzo Traverso was born in Italy in 1957. He currently
works at the Bibliotheque de documentation internationale
contemporaine in Nanterre, where he is in charge of the German
section of documentary research. He is also the author of "The
Marxists and the Jewish Question: History of a Debate, 1843-1943."
General
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