In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews

by Steven E. Aschheim

Overview

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century relationship between European culture, German history, and the Jewish experience produced some of the West’s most powerful and enduring intellectual creations—and, perhaps in subtly paradoxical and interrelated ways, our century’s darkest genocidal moments. In Times of Crisis explores the flashpoints of this vexed relationship, mapping the coordinates of a complex triangular encounter of immense historical import.
    In essays that range from the question of Nietzsche’s legacy to the controversy over Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the distinguished historian Steven E. Aschheim presents this encounter as an ongoing dialogue between two evolving cultural identities. He touches on past dimensions of this exchange (such as the politics of Weimar Germany) and on present dilemmas of grasping and representing it (such as the Israeli discourse on the Holocaust). His work inevitably traces the roots and ramifications of Nazism but at the same time brings into focus historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Holocaust.
    These essays reveal the ubiquitous charged inscriptions of Nazi genocide within our own culture and illuminate the projects of some later thinkers and historians—from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander—who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to capture its essence. From the broadly historical to the personal, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the experience of growing up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays expand our understanding of German Jewish history in particular, but also of historical processes in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299168636
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/01/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	576 KB

About the Author

Steven E. Aschheim is the Vigevani Chair of European Studies and professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness 1800–1923, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and of several other books, including Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.

Table of Contents

Untitled Preface Part I: The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau, and Degeneration 2. Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today: A Historian’s Perspective 3. Against Social Science: Jewish Intellectuals, the Critique of Liberal-Bourgeois Modernity, and the (Ambiguous) Legacy of Radical Weimar Theory 4. Nazism and the Holocaust in Contemporary Culture Part II: (Con)Fusions of Identity—Germans and Jews 5. Excursus: Growing Up German Jewish in South Africa 6. Assimilation and Its Impossible Discontents: The Case of Moritz Goldstein 7. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem 8. German History and German Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries, and Interdependencies 9. Archetypes and the German Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair Part III: Understanding Nazism and the Holocaust: Competing Models and Radical Paradigms 10. Nazism, Normalcy, and the German Sonderweg 11. Nazism, Culture, and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil 12. Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany: Hannah Arendt and Daniel Goldhagen Part IV: Historians, History, and the Holocaust 13. Reconceiving the Holocaust? Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners 14. George Mosse at 80: A Critical Laudatio 15. On Saul Friedlander Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

Explores the complex, triangular encounters of European culture, German history and Jewish experiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aschheim (history, Hebrew U.) traces the roots and ramifications of the Holocaust while bringing into focus the historical circumstances and contemporary issues often overshadowed or distorted by the Nazi horror. Focuses on the junctions where the most creative and lethal aspects of the relationship between Germans and Jews, its achievements and tensions, ambiguities, ironies and subtexts, are best exposed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"A beautifully written, remarkably coherent, and provocative collection of essays. It showcases the talents of one of the leading intellectual historians writing today."—Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

From the Publisher