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In the Shadow of Catastrophe

University of California Press

I

In the years approaching the First World War, the self-confidence and security of German Jewry were challenged by a new Jewish sensibility that can be described as at once radical, secular, and messianic in both tone and content. What this new Jewish ethos refused to accept was above all the optimism of an older generation of German Jews nurtured on the concept of Bildung as the German-Jewish mystique.1 The equally new political anti-Semitism and antiliberal spirit of the German upper classes made many of them call into question the political and cultural assumptions of the postemancipation epoch. Especially irksome was the belief that for German Jewry there was no contradiction between Deutschtum and Judentum ; that secularization and liberalism would permit the cultural integration of Jews (as Jews) into the national community.2 For German Jews of that earlier generation, the Bildungsideal of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller assured them of an indissoluble bond between Enlightenment, universal ethics, autonomous art, and monotheism (stripped of any particularist "Jewish" characteristics). The mission of the Jews could be interpreted, as did Leo Baeck in his 1905 Essence of Judaism , as the exemplary embodiment of the religion of morality for all humanity.3

The unproblematic understanding of Judaism as "the religion of Reason," as Hermann Cohen called it, was equally characteristic of secularnineteenth-century Jewish Socialist intellectuals like Rosa Luxemburg, whose universalism permitted no special pleading for Jewish suffering, and Eduard Bernstein, who took Marx and Kant as the gospel of a self-assured Socialist future.4 Not only the intellectual elite but other less well known writers on "the Jewish Question" echoed this overconfident appraisal. The words of the German-Jewish Socialist Ludwig Quessel, a pro-Zionist, in the Sozialistische Monatshefte of June 1914 provide a not atypical example: "With the beginning of the twentieth century organized political anti-Semitism in Germany has gradually died out, and I do not believe that it can be brought back to life."5 Even political Zionism was not immune from this late Wilhelmine Jewish attitude that only in retrospect appears to us as a fatal blindness. Zion, too, we must recall, was a distant political ideal, while German Zionists remained faithful to the values of the transitory national community until the utopia could be realized.6

It is not surprising, then, that for the young German-Jewish "generation of 1914" it is this modern Jewish type that emerges as the negative image of the assimilated German Jews.7 As Béla Balázs observed of Georg Lukács in a diary entry written in that crucial year: "Gyuri has discovered in himself the Jew! The search for ancestors. The Chassidic Baal Shem. Now he too has found his ancestors and his race. Only I am alone and forlorn." Lukács, he noted, believed that "there is emerging or re-emerging a Jewish type, the anti-rationalist or Jewish skeptic, one who is the antithesis of all that is commonly described as Jewish."8 This new Jewish spirit, a product of the "post-assimilatory Renaissance," can be described as a modern Jewish messianism: radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamored of apocalyptic visions — whether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense.9

One could of course also point to many parallels with the non-Jewish "generation of 1914" that Robert Wohl and others have written about, with its revolt against rationality and authority. We can also see the connection to the entire tradition of what Lukács referred to as pre-1914 European "romantic anti-capitalism," which ranged across such a wide "political" spectrum, providing the impetus for such diverse figures as Lukács, George Simmel, Max Weber, Paul Ernst, Hermann Hesse, Paul de Lagarde, and Möller van den Brück.10

The crucial component of the new Jewish sensibility, however, is a commitment to a different kind of modern Jewishness that stood under the sign of messianism. The messianic stance rejected traditional religiosity, the rational and secular Judaism of the German middle classes, and the personal Judaism of "renewal" represented by Martin Buber and the Bar Kochba circle. Nor did it participate in either the renaissance of Jewish orthodoxy during Weimar or the repudiation of assimilation characteristic of secular radicialism. Messianism demanded a complete repudiation of the world as it is, placing its hope in a future whose realization can only be brought about by the destruction of the old order. Apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian, and pessimistic, messianism captured a generation of Jewish intellectuals before the First World War. The messianic impulse appears in many forms in the Jewish generation of 1914, and this chapter is an attempt to characterize it as a modern form of Jewish thought—secular and theological—as a tradition that stands opposed to both secular rationalism and what has been called "normative Judaism."11

Lukács, who embodied the new Jewish "type" far more than he would ever later admit, clearly understood that messianism was a prepolitical vision of the world made whole. He was also attuned to an element that constantly surfaces in messianic visions of the apocalypse: death and destruction as the harbinger of that integral world. In the same diary entry Balázs recorded "Gyuri's great new philosophy, messianism. The homogenous world as the goal of salvation. Art is Lucifer's 'making things better.' Seeing the world as homogenous before the process of becoming so."12 This study focuses on the early writings of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin because they represent a particularly "pure type" of this thinking.13 There were others, of course, who embodied the new Jewish spirit, but only Bloch and Benjamin—initially without any mutual influence—brought, in varying degrees, a self-consciously Jewish and radical messianism to their political and intellectual concerns.

The messianic idea implied the radical rejection of any sort of quotidian politics combined with a characteristically apocalyptic attitude, which often incorporated an antipolitics in extremis. The new messianism turned on the double problem of redefining the "crisis of European culture" through a specific kind of Jewish radicalism and at the same time of redefining Jewish intellectual politics through a new attitude toward European culture. Yet, as a result of the abandonment of the Enlightenment, messianism was implicated in the subsequent political fate of its adherents, particularly after the First World War. How, to what extent, and with what consequences did messianism influence their political decisions and choices, especially in regard to the era ofwar and revolution that followed their first brush with Jewish messianism in the years around 1912, is the question posed by this chapter.

II

Modern Jewish messianism, encompassing a broad political and cultural spectrum, can be found among many Jewish thinkers before and after World War I. It was not identical with but part of a far more general trend toward...