elective affinity between Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia, there is also a tension, if not a contradiction, between the Jewish (national-cultural) particularism of messianism and the universal (humanist/internationalist) nature of the emancipatory utopia. In the first group, the predominance of Jewish particularism tends to limit the universal revolutionary aspect of utopia, without causing it to disappear altogether; in the second group, the universality of utopia is the preponderant dimension, and messianism tends to be stripped of its Jewish specificity – without being entirely erased.
Why did this political and cultural phenomenon arise in Central Europe and not in another European Jewish community? And why at that precise moment in history? To answer these questions, and to understand the specific reception of anti-capitalist romanticism by Jewish intellectuals of German cultural origin, we need to examine from a sociological point of view their peculiarly contradictory situation within the social and cultural life of Central Europe.
Pariahs, Rebels and Romantics:A Sociological Analysis of the CentralEuropean Jewish Intelligentsia
As we noted at the outset, the term Mitteleuropa designates an area united by German culture: the area of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The specific situation of the Jewish community of the region (and of its intellectuals) cannot be understood without first examining the historical changes that took place in Mitteleuropa from the late nineteenth century onward. And the changes in the cultural and religious forms of life cannot be comprehended without relating them to changes in the economic and social structure. Rather than speak of ‘determination’ by the economy, we should speak, as did Mannheim, of Seinsgebundenheit, the culture’s attachment to (or dependence on) socio-economic reality.
In other words, the starting-point for analysing the figures of the German and Jewish intellectual world during this period has to be a basic social fact: the dizzying growth of capitalism and the rapid industrialization that took place in Germany, Austria and Hungary during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1914, Germany was transformed from a semi-feudal and backward country into one of the world’s principal industrial powers. Only one example is needed to illustrate this change: in 1860 Germany was behind France, and far behind England, in steel production (a typical sector of modern industry); in 1910 Germany produced more steel than France and England combined! Banking and industrial capital were concentrated, and powerful cartels were formed in the textile, coal, steel, chemical and electrical industries, among others.1 A similar process took place in Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, although to a lesser degree. The speed, brutality, intensity and overwhelming power of this industrialization drastically changed Central European societies, their class structures (flourishing bourgeoisies and ongoing formation of the proletariat), their political systems and their hierarchy of values.
In the face of the irresistible rise of capitalism and the invasive development of scientific and technical civilization, of large industrial production and the universe of commodities and market values, there was a cultural reaction – now desperate and tragic, now resigned – in various social milieux, but particularly in the traditional intelligentsia. This reaction could be described as romantic anti-capitalist.
Anti-capitalist romanticism – which, we repeat, must not be confused with Romanticism as a literary style – is a world-view characterized by a (more or less) radical critique of industrial/bourgeois civilization in the name of pre-capitalist social, cultural, ethical or religious values.2 In Central Europe, and especially in Germany, this Weltanschauung was, at the turn of the century, the dominant sensibility in cultural and academic life. The academic mandarinate, a traditionally influential and privileged social category, was one of its primary social foundations. Threatened by the new system that tended to reduce it to a marginal and powerless position, it reacted with horror to what it considered a soulless, standardized, superficial and materialistic society.3 One of the principal themes of this critique, recurring like an obsession among writers, poets, philosophers and historians, was the conflict between Kultur, a spiritual universe of ethical, religious or aesthetic values, and Zivilisation, the materialistic and vulgar world of economic and technical progress. If, to use Max Weber’s implacably lucid expression, capitalism is disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt), anti-capitalist romanticism must be considered first and foremost as a nostalgic and desperate attempt at re-enchantment of the world, one of whose main aspects was a return to religion, a rebirth of various forms of religious spirituality.
The romantic anti-capitalist world-view was present in an astonishing variety of cultural works and social movements of this period: novels by Thomas Mann and Theodor Storm; poems by Stefan George and Richard Beer-Hoffmann; the sociology of Tönnies, Simmel or Mannheim; the historical school of economics; the Kathedersozialismus of Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner or Lujo Brentano; the philosophy of Heidegger and Spengler, the Youth Movement and the Wandervogel, Symbolism and Expressionism. United in its rejection of capitalism in the name of nostalgia for the past, this cultural configuration was totally heterogeneous from a political point of view: reactionary ideologues (Moeller Van der Bruck, Julius Langbehn, Ludwig Klages) as well as revolutionary utopians (Bloch, Landauer) could be characterized as anti-capitalist romantics. It might be said that the main part of literary, artistic and social-scientific (in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften) production in Germany and Central Europe occurred in the magnetic field of this movement.
What consequences did these economic, social and cultural developments have for the Jewish communities of Mitteleuropa? The flourishing of capitalism created a favourable environment in which the Jewish bourgeoisie could blossom. The Jewish population left the ghettos and villages and quickly became urbanized: in 1867, seventy per cent of Prussian Jews lived in small villages; by 1927, the figure had dropped to fifteen per cent.4 The same phenomenon occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Jewish population was concentrated in Budapest, Prague and, above all, Vienna. (I can even cite my own family as an example: towards the end of the nineteenth century, my grandparents left their respective villages in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and settled in the capital of the Empire.) An upper and middle bourgeoisie formed in the cities and took a larger share of business, trade, industry and banking. As this ‘Jewish middle class’ grew richer, and as civil and political restrictions on it were lifted (between 1869 and 1871 in Germany), it set itself only one goal: to be socially and culturally assimilated into the German nation. A letter written in 1916 by the Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau (who was to become a minister in the Weimar Republic) typified this mentality:
I have – and I know – nothing but German blood, German ethnicity, and German people. If I were to be driven from my German land, I would continue to be German, and nothing would change that… My ancestors and I have been nourished of German soil and of the German mind … and we have had no thoughts that were not German or for Germany.5
This example, of course, represents virtually the outer line, but even for those who continued to think of themselves as Jewish, German culture was the only valid culture. All that remained from Judaism were some ritualistic hangovers (such as a trip to the synagogue on Yom Kippur) and biblical monotheism. The examplars of wisdom were no longer Moses or Solomon, but rather Lessing and Goethe, Schiller and Kant. Schiller in particular was truly venerated: his Complete Works were required in the library of every self-respecting German or Austrian Jew (when my parents left Vienna in 1935, they took their copy with them). In Germany, the most resolute assimilationist current was the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens [Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Denomination]. Describing this social milieu (to which his own family belonged), Gershom Scholem noted:
Education and readings were oriented exclusively to Germany, and in the majority of cases,
