Assimilation ran very deep. Each time, they emphasized over and over, albeit with slight differences, that we belonged to the German nation, at the center of which we formed a religious group, like the others. What was even more paradoxical was that in the majority of the cases, the religious element – which was the only difference – did not exist nor did it exert any influence over how they conducted their lives.6
None the less, it would be wrong to regard this thirst for cultural integration as mere opportunism: it could also express sincere and authentic convictions. Even as profoundly religious a Jew as Franz Rosenzweig wrote in 1923, shortly after the publication of his great theological work, Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption):
I believe that my return to Judaism (Verjüdung) made me a better and not a worse German… And I believe that Der Stern will one day be duly recognized and appreciated as a gift that the German mind owes to its Jewish enclave.7
Assimilation was successful to a certain degree, but it came up against an insurmountable social barrier. According to Moritz Goldstein’s famous lament of unfulfilled love, which he wrote in 1912 (‘Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnass’),
in vain we think of ourselves as Germans; others think of us as completely un-German [undeutsch]… But were we not raised on German legends? Does not the Germanic forest live within us, can we too not see its elves and its gnomes?8
Assimilation also came up against de facto exclusion from a series of areas: State administration, the armed forces, the magistrature, education – and after 1890 in particular, against growing anti-Semitism, which had its ideologues, activists and press. For all of these reasons, the Jewish communities in Central Europe did not truly integrate into the surrounding society. To use Max Weber’s classic definition, they shared several of the hallmarks of a pariah people: ‘a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization’, and characterized by endogamy on the one hand and by negative privileges, both political and social, on the other.9 Of course, their condition could not be compared to that of the castes in India, or of the Jewish ghettoes in the Middle Ages: economic security and (formal) equality of civic rights had been won through emancipation. But socially, the Jew continued to be a pariah and realized, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘how treacherous was the promise of equality which assimilation held out’.10
In Germany and in Central Europe, the university was the royal road to respectability and honour. As Friedrich Paulsen, the neo-Kantian philosopher, wrote, in Germany citizens with a higher education made up a type of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; not to hold a university degree was a ‘shortcoming’ that neither wealth nor prestigious birth could fully make up for.11 The logic of cultural assimilation and the desire to climb the ladder of prestige led the Jewish bourgeoisie to send 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
