Panelists’ Commentary

Summary

RITCHIE ROBERTSON (OXFORD UNIVERSITY): We have heard two very rich papers and I think I shall respond to the title rather than to people themselves, in a somewhat tangential way. A Tradition in Ruins: it seems to me there are several traditions involved here and I think it is worth distinguishing in a very schematic way at least two traditions in the Weimar Republic in relation to which I think one could locate at least Susman, Arendt, and Hamburger. If I confine myself to three out of four writers, I hope that will be sufficient.

First, I want to be very schematic here and simply remind you of what you know. There was a tradition of conservative humanism to which one could assign Ernst Cassirer, for example, and Jakob Wassermann, and of which Thomas Mann was the exemplary figure. I will call this tradition the later stage of Jewish assimilation or of the German- Jewish symbiosis, a term, as you were reminded this morning, which thanks to Michael Brenner and others has again become respectable. This tradition looks back to the aesthetic humanism of the late eighteenth century, especially to Lessing — think of Thomas Mann’s essay on Lessing and of Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment, in which he tries very hard to choose Lessing as the typical figure of the Enlightenment and to make Voltaire into a kind of French Lessing.

On the other hand there is a more radical modernist and religious tradition of which key figures include Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. For this tradition crucial experiences were first the rediscovery of Judaism by Martin Buber, and however rude Scholem and Benjamin were about Buber in their correspondence, with no doubt he is the important and enabling figure for them and their generation. Another important experience was the messianic activism of the immediate postwar period. And this tradition looks back not so much to the Enlightenment as to Romanticism and the Baroque. I am thinking here especially of Benjamin. And where the aesthetic humanism of Cassirer emphasized the symbol, the radical tradition emphasized more allegory.