Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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its sons to the University, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century:
Just like the majority of German businessmen, Jews wanted to climb socially… They wanted their sons and sons-in-law to be more valued than they were. A career as an officer or as a high-ranking government official, which were the goals of a young Christian man, was closed to Jews … only university studies were open to him.12
As a result, in 1895 Jews comprised 10% of the student body in German universities, which was ten times the percentage of Jews in the overall population (1.05%).13 This massive presence of bourgeois Jewish youth in higher education quickly led to the formation of a new social category: the Jewish intelligentsia. Jewish intellectuals of German culture had, of course, existed since the late eighteenth century (Moses Mendelssohn), but it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that the phenomenon became so widespread as to constitute a new social fact. These Jewish intellectuals, déclassé, unstable and free of any precise social attachment, were a typical example of the sozialfreischwebende Intelligenz that Mannheim spoke of. Their condition was eminently contradictory: deeply assimilated yet largely marginalized; linked to German culture yet cosmopolitan; uprooted and at odds with their business and bourgeois milieu of origin; rejected by the traditional rural aristocracy yet excluded in career terms within their natural sphere of acceptance (the university). In a state of ideological availability, they were soon attracted to the two principal poles of German cultural life, which could be named after the famous characters from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain: ‘Settembrini’, the liberal, democratic and republican philanthropist, and ‘Naphta’, the conservative/revolutionary romantic.
For many young Jewish intellectuals, rationalism, progressive evolutionism, Aufklärung and neo-Kantian philosophy became the primary reference, in some cases combined with a Judaism that was diluted or reduced to monotheist ethics (Hermann Cohen). From this world-view several political options were available, ranging from moderate liberalism (the ideology of the Jewish bourgeoisie itself), to social democracy (Eduard Bernstein), Marxism (Max Adler, Otto Bauer and the Austrian Marxists) and even Communism (Paul Levi, Ruth Fischer, Paul Frölich, August Thalheimer).
Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, anti-capitalist romanticism was the dominant movement within the culture of Mitteleuropa. Sociologically speaking, it was inevitable that a significant portion of the new university-trained Jewish intelligentsia would be attracted by the romantic critique of industrial civilization: ‘Naphta!’ The intelligentsia eagerly discovered the nostalgic and anti-bourgeois Weltanschauung predominant in academia – notably in the Geisteswissenschaften (Humanities), where the majority of Jewish students enrolled. These students subsequently rejected their fathers’ business careers, revolted against their bourgeois family milieu and aspired intensely to an ‘intellectual life style’.14 This generational break, which many Jewish intellectuals speak of in their autobiographies, opposed the anti-bourgeois youth – passionately interested in Kultur, spirituality, religion and art – to their entrepreneurial parents – merchants or bankers, moderate liberals and good German patriots, indifferent to religious matters.15 In a recent autobiographical interview, Leo Löwenthal, the Frankfurt School sociologist of literature, summarized the feeling that was common among many intellectuals of his generation: ‘My family household, as it were, was the symbol of everything I did not want – shoddy liberalism, shoddy Aufklärung, and double standards.’16
Mannheim used the term Generationszusammenhang (generational bonding) to designate the concrete link deriving from participation in a common historical-social destiny.17 In fact, the generational break is not a biological fact: it is only under particular social conditions that a gap or even an abyss develops between generations. And it was a specific type of Generationszusammenhang that was found in the new Jewish intelligentsia, born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The group of intellectuals whom I shall examine in this work belonged to that generation, as their dates of birth fell during the last twenty years of the century: Martin Buber (1878), Franz Kafka (1883), Ernst Bloch (1885), Georg Lukács (1885), Franz Rosenzweig (1886), Walter Benjamin (1892), Ernst Toller (1893), Gershom Scholem (1897), Erich Fromm (1900), Leo Löwenthal (1900). It should be stressed, however, that the sociological analysis sketched in the preceding paragraphs can only delineate the chances that a certain number of Jewish intellectuals would be attracted to the anti-capitalist romantic pole of German culture; it does not enable us to explain each individual’s personal choice, which also involved psychologic and other variables. I need only mention the example of Scholem’s family: one of the sons (Reinhold) became a German Nationalist and remained so even after 1945; another (Werner) became a Communist deputy; and a third (Gershom) became a Zionist and historian of the cabbala. Obviously the social milieu could not possibly account for such diversity.
For the Jewish intellectual who belonged to the ‘romantic generation’ of the 1880s, who sometimes attended the informal German circles at which romantic anti-capitalist culture was being developed – such as the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg, frequented by Lukács and Bloch – one problem arose immediately. A return to the past, which was at the heart of the romantic orientation, drew upon German ancestry, medieval aristocracy or Protestant or Catholic Christianity – that is to say, upon national, social or cultural references from which he, as a Jew, was completely excluded. True, some Jewish thinkers (especially in the Stefan George Circle) were able to make the leap and to be transformed into German nationalists (Rudolf Borchardt), conservative German scholars (Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Wolfskehl) or Protestant theologians (Hans Ehrenberg). But these were fairly rare cases which involved a total and rather artificial negation of Jewish identity – the supreme example being the works of the Jewish anti-Semites (Otto Weininger, Theodor Lessing). As for the others, the majority of Jewish intellectuals of German cultural background, only two solutions were possible within the framework of neo-romanticism: either a return to their own historical roots, to their own culture, nationality or ancestral religion; or adherence to a universal romantic-revolutionary utopia. Not surprisingly, given the structural homology between these two paths, a number of Jewish thinkers close to anti-capitalist romanticism chose both simultaneously: on the one hand, a (re-)discovery of the Jewish religion – most notably, the restorative/utopian dimension of messianism; on the other hand, sympathy for, or identification with, revolutionary (especially libertarian) utopias loaded with nostalgia for the past.
Let us examine these two paths more closely. In the atmosphere permeated with neo-romantic religiosity, many Jewish intellectuals revolted against their parents’ assimilation and sought to save the Jewish religious culture of the past from oblivion. As a result, there was a process of de-secularization, partial dis-assimilation, cultural and religious anamnesis, and ‘reculturalization’,18 which certain circles or literary groups actively promoted: the Bar-Kochba Club in Prague (Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn, Max Brod); the circle around Rabbi Nobel in Frankfurt (Siegfried Krakauer, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Ernst Simon); the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Nahum Glatzer, Margarete Süssmann); Martin Buber’s magazine, Der Jude, among other examples. But ‘re-culturalization’ spread even further to embrace, in varying degrees, a large number of Jewish intellectuals influenced by neo-romanticism. It sometimes took on a national character (especially through Zionism), but the religious aspect predominated. Assimilation ran so deep in Mitteleuropa that it was extremely difficult to break with the German national-cultural identity. As religion was the sole legitimate specific for ‘German citizens of Israelite denomination’, it understandably became the primary means of expression for the movement of cultural anamnesis.
This was, however, a new type of religiosity, charged with German romantic spirituality, which was very different from the traditionalism ritualistically preserved within certain non-assimilated orthodox Jewish milieux. The paradox was that, through German neo-romanticism, these young Jewish intellectuals rediscovered their own religion: their path to the prophet Isaiah went by way of Novalis, Hölderlin or Schelling. In other words, assimilation and cultural integration were the preconditions and the points of departure for their dis-assimilation and re-culturalization. It was not by chance that Buber wrote on Jakob Böhme before he wrote his works on Hasidism;19 that Franz Rosenzweig almost converted to Protestantism before becoming