Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times
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Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times
152eBook
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Overview
About the Author:
Steven E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies and teaches in the Department of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923; The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990; and Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253108692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 152 |
| File size: | 185 KB |
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Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer
Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times
By Steven E. Aschheim
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2001 Steven E. AscheimAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33891-4
CHAPTER 1
Gershom Scholem
And the Creation of Jewish Self-Certitude
Gershom Scholem, we need hardly be reminded, was arguably the greatest scholar and thinker of matters Jewish in the twentieth century. It was through his easy mastery of vast fields of knowledge, his ability to present the esoteric byways of Jewish history in a thoroughly accessible, modern — indeed, radical — idiom that he excited so many readers whose worlds were entirely removed from that of Jewish mysticism. We are learning today, from a generation of his own pupils, that many of his particular insights in the field of Kabbalah — an academic discipline that he virtually invented — are in need of extensive revision. This will not, I believe, affect his stature as a great intellectual. Scholem created and was moved by a master vision. He possessed an intuitive grasp of, and profoundly identified with, the theological and metaphysical ground of things. He constructed what we still admired in the days before postmodernism: a sweeping dialectical "philosophy of history," replete with an overarching theory of language; a conception of commentary as a vital force in the active shaping of a dynamic tradition; and a grand narrative plotting the structure, conflicts, and evolving meanings of Jewish existence — yet one steeped always in the minutiae of philological scholarship.
Scholem's works are by now relatively familiar — the secondary literature around his work is already extensive and impressive (Robert Alter's Necessary Angels, which originated within the forum of the Efroymson Lectures, stands out in this context). In matters Judaic, moreover, I am not qualified to be either Scholem's expositor or his assessor. What I want to do here, rather, is to trace the construction of his distinctive person and the making of his (quite extraordinary) German-Jewish sensibility by documenting "from within," as it were, the ways in which he fashioned his self; rationalized his life-choices; and understood, and forcefully responded to, the formative events, issues, movements, and personalities of his times.
Scholem — like Arendt and Klemperer — was born into an acculturated family in 1898, during the period of the second German Empire. Although Scholem's Judaism and Zionism soon took on a highly idiosyncratic stamp, they are initially comprehensible only within the context of what Kurt Blumenfeld famously called "post-assimilationism." Scholem belonged to a generation of culturally "assimilated" German Jews who were far removed from Jewish sources. Their Zionism combined an urgent awareness of their origins with a consciousness of the diminution, even the total lack, of their own Jewish substance and the passionate search for it. They rejected their elders' dominantly political and philanthropic form of Zionist identification and their rather unreflective faith in the easy compatibility of Deutschtum and Judentum. These younger nationalists formulated a more radical notion of Zionism as existential imperative, as personal transformation bound to the creation of an authentic cultural Jewish totality. They read, listened to, and were enraptured by Martin Buber's musings on Jewish primordiality and renewal. They shared an explicitly "post-assimilationist" perception and impulse: while the psycho-cultural and ideational dimensions of their "German" identity were all too clear (and, in their view, problematic), it was the still rather inaccessible but nevertheless — what they took to be — primary Jewish self that had to be re-acquired, rediscovered. As Scholem's closest friend, Walter Benjamin, once put it: "I am learning Jewish [Ich lerne Jude] because I have finally grasped that I am one."
The intensity of Scholem's commitments, the passion of his engagements, cannot be understood outside this generationally distinctive setting. For it was this context that allowed Scholem to exercise options not available only a decade or so earlier. But, of course, Scholem possessed genius. This exceptional man, the life and the work, cannot be reduced simplistically to the circumstances. The historian, disinclined to proffer speculative explanations or to indulge in dubious post-facto psychoanalysis, can only provide the relevant background. "To show a great individual shaping an identity, embedded in history and society yet drawing on the resources of a distinctive self," Michael Beddow correctly points out, "is an ambition biographers often profess but rarely achieve." The question of the deeper forces that ultimately rendered Scholem the peculiarly powerful and original persona that he became lies outside the confines of this essay.
The recent publication of Scholem's youthful diaries — begun at the ripe age of fifteen or sixteen — and his lifelong correspondence (including letters to and from his mother) does, however, provide us with a splendid moving picture of the unfolding of Scholem's inner world. The diaries demonstrate a remarkably precocious, inquiring intellect, a highly charged eros channeled into a passionate mind. I say "channeled" advisedly, for these adolescent documents are almost entirely absent of reports of either sexual urges or romantic encounters. Such omissions are even accompanied by an ideological gloss. In a wartime letter to Aharon Heller, reporting on what he describes as the horrible effects of sexual impurity on people (to which he had been privy in the German military), Scholem forcefully urged a kind of holy Jewish regenerative ascetism in sexual relations. "If we try to attain national health [Volksgesundheit] in the sense that the Germans are trying to become a healthy Volk, then we are lost, for here every access to the holy is blocked by obscenity." Moreover, in keeping with the attitudes of these Männerbund times, the diaries are sprinkled with numerous negative allusions to women and their intellectual ineptitude.
Scholem's chronicles do, however, reveal other kinds of fantasies — nationalist, religious, and messianic. His early mental world was not amorous but determinedly ideological and intellectual, even eschatological. The diaries refer to, and analyze, Goethe, Humboldt, Hölderlin, Rilke, Stefan George, Gustav Landauer, Karl Marx, Felix Mauthner, Kierkegaard, Jakob Böhme, and other, some more minor, masters. They demonstrate the not so surprising fact that this vehement critic of Deutschtum (Germanism) and assimilation was schooled in, and for his own subsequent work powerfully drew upon, the sources and categories of German classical, romantic, and avant-garde culture. They document the formative presence of, and the early admiration for, Martin Buber. But just as crucially, they also chronicle the emergent powerful critique of, and distancing from, that thinker. The diaries record the growing, disquietingly overdetermined distaste for Buber and his romantic-expressionistic cult of experience (Erlebnis), as well as the beginnings of Scholem's lifelong emphasis upon learning and direct, critical immersion in the sources. In connected fashion, they record the development of his famous friendship with Walter Benjamin. (Because of the relatively familiar history of these relationships, I have chosen not to focus on them here.)
Scholem's journals contain remarkably mature meta-reflections on the relationship between freedom and history; musings on the philosophy of language (its task was to examine "language as the revelation of truth"); and ruminations that fused Scholem's emerging fascination with mysticism with his early immersion in mathematics: "Mysticism is ... yes what is mysticism? Better, what is not mysticism? ... Mystic is speech about the divine. Thus the plain paradox. It is not mysticism when one speaks to the One without the necessary awe. Mysticism is the experience (Erlebnis) of awe. There is no more abyss-like thing on earth than awe, and no one knows how to say anything meaningful about it. The mystic has sensed awe — who can conceive and represent this? The philosopher intuits something that is or will be, the mystic something that is not and will not be; he senses the simply impossible (only the mystic knows that God is not), he senses awe. The Holy. Mathematics is awe before thought. It is thus the crown of the human race: awe and thought, what can be more?"
Many of the familiar shaping Scholemian categories, anarchist and Nietzschean, that gave form to his later analyses are already present in the adolescent writings: the fascination with transgression and danger ("Whoever desires to find himself must descend into the abyss and seek himself in danger"); notions of paradox, dialectical polarity, and antinomianism; the concern with the messianic; and the hidden connections between nihilism and redemption.
The young Scholem's travel diary of August 1914 with its reflections on mountain heights — on solitude, ecstasy, revelation — is stunning in its audacity. Indeed, it reads like a religiously tinted gloss on Zarathustra. There is something strange and paradoxical here; for despite Scholem's later, lifelong protestations of extreme distaste for Nietzsche, the philosopher is a formative figure in the diaries, an inspirational crucible in the formation of his radical and visionary sensibility (perhaps Scholem's protestations were one with his overall, esoteric predilection for camouflaging his own intentions and persona). Reading Zarathustra in 1915, Scholem waxed enthusiastic: "Read Zarathustra again — one can absolutely and in no way exhaust it. ... one always finds sentences that surprise and strike one in one's own innermost being. ... One is constantly astounded by the power of its images and the force of its language. ... It is indubitably a holy book, if one understands 'holy' correctly. Nietzsche has of course declined the holy. And yet it is so. It is a holy book because it speaks of man, because it speaks of the overcoming of man, because it is a revolutionary book. I love it."
Indeed, in the young Scholem's mind, Also sprach Zarathustra became the living, inspired model for his own path: "Whatever one may think of the ideas presented in it, in fact this is a new Bible. Yes, it is written in such a way that it is an ideal for me. This is it. To write a Jews' Zarathustra (Judenzarathustra)." Four years later and almost as tellingly, Scholem wrote in a letter to Aharon Heller: "I am sometimes beginning to believe that the only person who, in these times, has said anything substantial about ethics is Friedrich Nietzsche." Yet Scholem was already disingenuous about his immersion in Nietzsche. In the same letter he went on to tell Heller that of Nietzsche's works, "until now I admittedly knew very little and surely precisely the worst [Zarathustra]." This not only elided Scholem's various diaristic adulations of Also sprach Zarathustra but failed entirely, as he did in later years, to mention that as early as 1914 he had read a great deal of Nietzsche: the Antichrist, the various writings on Richard Wagner, and the Untimely Meditations — all of which he then compared unfavorably to Zarathustra. Moreover, Scholem not only read many of the philosopher's works, he also devoured early on the famous Nietzsche-Overbeck correspondence which, as he emphasized in a letter to Werner Kraft, he had read in one night.
We must return to Scholem's remarkable document of intoxication and revelation in the mountains, for it is here that the vision of serving his people unfolds. It is replete not only with Nietzschean tones but also ringing religious and apocalyptic rhetoric. Thus spake the young Scholem: "Thy lonely child of man, why do you stand here. ... will not the spirits and elements rise indignantly upon you, for you disturb and eavesdrop upon them in struggle? No, I will not weaken! For the storms' will brought me here. Now you are chaos, but eternal will brings forth renewal. Only in danger is God to be found."
George Mosse has recently depicted Scholem, his life, person, and work, as an embodiment of the tradition of Bildung that characterized German Jewry's uniquely productive cultural and intellectual heritage and provided it with its peculiar humanizing face. In this work I, too, want to argue that, for all their differences, it was this peculiar dedication to learning, the passion for knowledge and insight, that characterized Scholem, Arendt, and Klemperer. Still, Scholem's penchant for the demonic, his early and enduring intuition of what he called the "abyss," his fascination with the nihilistic impulse, his vehement critique of liberal-bourgeois rationalism, were, quite obviously, not a product of the quiet, ordering classicism of the German (or even Jewish) Enlightenment but cut directly from the cloth of fin-de-siècle "irrationalism" (and then spiced with a peculiar Jewish twist). "Reason," so reads one diary entry, "is a desire, but no reality. It is the longing of the dumb. ... Everyone can be reasonable, but the Messiah is something special, he is unreasonable." It was in the categories of Lebensphilosophie that the early Scholem shaped and channeled his idiosyncratic religio-nationalist affirmations. This went together with a sometimes violently formulated rejection of bourgeois rationalism. Thus he railed about his father and friends, atheists schooled in "science" and Haeckel's monism: "Beat them dead, this band of lice, deader, deadest, strangle them around the throat."
Indeed, Bildung — that middle-class, gradualist, meliorist, inward doctrine of self-cultivation and bourgeois respectability — is attacked head-on. In Nietzschean tones of wrath Scholem declares in his diary: "To my People (Volk). It is the voice of a summons. Woe to those ... that bring Bildung to their Volk and ruin and kill their brothers. ... Woe to the Volk that seeks rebirth through Bildung. ... For they rob my people of their creative powers. ... No peace with the Gebildeten, saith my Lord. ... You people and nations who want to remain healthy, keep far away from the palaces of culture. Your ways are not our ways and a holy war shall be kindled against you. For this is your death-illness, you from the House of Israel, that you have too much Bildung and adopted too many of the evil ways of your lands. Become what you were, that is, become natural, for that alone is your cure and salvation." It was in this spirit that the early Scholem, addressing the Jung-Juda youth movement, still praised Buber, "because in Judaism, previously the classic religion of rationalism and logic-chopping, he discovered the irrational, emotion and yearning, which is the mother of renewal."
If much of the later Scholem is already, more or less embryonically, present here, it is also clear that some parts of it should be regarded as expressions of adolescent Sturm und Drang. While the diaries, to a surprising extent, are indeed testament to the child as father to the man, I do not mean to suggest that nothing in the diary is exempt from the immature growing pains of youth, from developmental exaggerations. This applies especially and obviously to Scholem's by now famous youthful messianic vision as recorded in the diary on May 22, 1915: "Which of us young Jews, I wonder, has not had the same royal dream and seen himself as Jesus and Messiah of the downtrodden?" It is noteworthy that this was formulated in relation to, though went pointedly beyond, the prophet of Jewish renewal, Martin Buber: "But he was not the redeemer. ... He simply wanted to prepare the way for the masters after him; he sacrificed himself for these others, his blood-relatives [Blutsgenossen], whom he did not know. ... He was not the redeemer." If Buber was not the redeemer, then, clearly, Scholem was. (Scholem's vision paralleled other tendencies current in German culture at the time. Like almost all radical intellectuals of the day, he knew well the charismatic pretensions surrounding Stefan George and his circle. Interestingly, his casting of Buber as the herald and himself — Scholem — as the fulfillment of the vision, replicated perfectly the way in which George was cast as the realization of the Nietzschean dream.)
The actual vision — from which we can here quote only sparingly — marvelously conjoins the prophetic with the learned, the world of knowledge with the messianic: "The young man goes alone through the world and looks around him, where the soul of his Volk awaits him. For he has a deep belief that the soul of Juda goes astray among the peoples and waits for him who would dare to free him from banishment and separation from the body of his people [Volkskörper]. And he knows in his depths that he is the one chosen to seek and find his people's soul. ... The way of the innocent is the way of redemption. And the dreamer — whose name is already recognized as the awaited one: Scholem, the perfect one — prepares himself for his work and begins forcefully to forge the weapons of knowledge."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer by Steven E. Aschheim. Copyright © 2001 Steven E. Ascheim. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Gershom Scholem and the Creation of Jewish Self-Certitude
2. Hannah Arendt and the Complexities of Jewish Selfhood
3. Victor Klemperer and the Shock of Multiple Identities
Notes
Index