In memory of Leo Baeck, and other Jewish thinkers "in dark times": Once more, "after Auschwitz, Jerusalem"

Judaism

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 2002, Pages

  Fackenheim, Emil L ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b NONE

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EID: 60950265933     PISSN: 00225762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (26)

1. The November lecture appears in English in Judaism, 197.50 (Winter 2001): 53-59..
2. This was done unsurpassably by Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris; Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (London: Penguin 1998, 2000). Kershaw needed no fewer than fifty years for perspective on World War II, on both the Hubris and Nemesis yet was still close enough to events not to treat them as "ancient," revived only with an artificial, almost melodramatic effort Thus his work is Wissenschaft, yet reads like a huge tragedy, or rather, many of them. Surely the most striking case is his account of the Holocaust, in the Hubris-volume, as no mere private whim on Hitler's part but essential to the Nazi Weltanschauung, somehow containing it all; in the Nemesis-volume, early, as "Marks of a Genocidal Mentality" (ch.3) later, in terrible, if logical, fulfillment of the "prophecy" (ch.10)
3. Germans reading the book can now relate to-if not understand-the "Rausch" of their grandparents; Raul Hilberg, the first and still most intrepid witness, need fear no more that historians will ignore or belittle the Holocaust. Consult also Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: Random House, 1998), ch. 14. The chapter is between a survivor of the Holocaust and Claude Lanzmann, author of the film Shoah, who argues that, beyond his film, no answer can be given.
4. Buber's essay is already contained in: Frank Talmage, Disputation and Dialogue: Readings in the Jewish-Christian Encounter, edited by Frank Ephraim Talmage (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1975).
5. See my article in Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig(Freiburg: Alber, 1988), also, especially, those by Shlomo Avineri and Otto Poeggeler.
6. Martin Buber, WerkeI (München: Koesel Verlag; Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1962), p. 170.
7. Martin Buber, Werke I, p. 520.
8. Once I also visited Reinhold Niebuhr. I got my rabbinic diploma from Baeck before I fled Germany in 1939, and joined the CCAR in Canada as soon as I could, but fellow Reform Rabbis, as well as most Christians, still believed in progress. (This in the age of Hitler!) Niebuhr seemed to be the only one to whom I could show the first essay I had written.
9. Karl Loewith, Heidegger, Denker in Dürftiger Zeit (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Rupprecht, 1960)
10. At least one has listened to my advice, see Michael Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
11. Strauss' last book is Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Yet in its middle is a chapter on "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections."
12. Not even in Auschwitz was evil inevitable. Dr. Ella Lingens, a prisoner, recalled at the Frankfurt trial that there was one island of peace at the [Auschwitz] Babice subcamp, because of an officer named Flacke. "How he did it I do not know," she testified. His camp was clean and the food also." The Frankfurt judge, who had heard endless protestations that orders had to be obeyed was amazed: "Do you wish to say," he asked, "that everybody could decide for himself to be either good or evil at Auschwitz?" "That is exactly what I wish to say," she answered. (Toronto Globe & Mail, October 2, 1981).
13. Gerhard Weinberg's Germany, Hitler and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) keeps informing the reader that in World War II Vichy France would fight anyone but Germans.
14. On the one hand, for East Germans Marxism has "overcome" Nazism and with it the Holocaust. On the other, in an attempt to distinguish Heidegger from such as "Rosenberg, Krieck or Goebbels." Jean-Francois Lyotard has added the word unertraeglich, "insufferable" to Heidegger's own Angst, "anxiety" [Sein und Zeit, p. 384]
15. (Heidegger und die juden (Wien: Passagen, 1988, p.76).
16. Much more authentically, Otto Poeggeler has described Heidegger as mourning Albert Leo Schlageter (who had died alone, killed by the French for resisting their post-Great War occupation of the Ruhr) as "suffering the hardest death." Heidegger's own post-war comments, scandalously, are still being kept secret, except for one: "agriculture now is technological industry, in principle the same as blockade and starvation of peoples, production of corpses in gas chambers, annihilation camps and manufacture of nuclear bombs," a statement that Lyotard himself-unlike a fellow-French Heideggerian, calls "scandalously inadequate" yet "in principle justified" (p. 98).
17. (See Poeggeler in Heidegger und die Praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1988), pp. 62 ff.
18. Of the six million Jews who died a "much harder death"-i.e., without purpose-Primo Levi writes much, but Heidegger absolutely nothing. Lyotard's rescue attempt ends as follows: Woran es ihm fehlt, was er verfehlt, und dessen Fehlen ihm fehlt "He lacks, misses, and the missing of which he lacks"(p. 110). Like much in Heidegger himself, it is simply Quatsch, "nonsense," profound though it sounds, i.e., the lack of ordinary morality.
19. In English the book was misnamed Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier, 1961), p.82.
20. In 1996 I wrote that the three twentieth-century greatest Jewish philosophers were all near its beginning: in 1916 Hermann Cohen, its outstanding anti-Zionist, praised the German state while his Zionist opponent, Martin Buber, took a low view of any state; and soon Franz Rosenzweig, a past soldier qua German, was qua Jew beyond any state: none guessed that soon the most precious possession of a Jew would be a valid passport. Emil Fackenheim and Raphael Jospe, ed., Jewish Philosophy and the Academy (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1996), p. 223.
21. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.: 1986; London: Abacus, 1986).
22. See Fred P. Frieberg, Musik im NS Staat (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), p. 352.
23. In 1942 Hans Georg Goemer, Musikdirektor of Berlin Propstei, wrote that it was impossible to sing "about the glorification of the Jewish Yahwe of vengeance, while world Judaism prepares the mobilization of all humanity, for annihilating the Aryan race" (p. 353).
24. I am writing to Halle's Oberbuergermeister for a picture, for my memoirs.
25. Martin Buber, At the Turning (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1952)
26. In a forthcoming review of S. R. Haynes and J. K. Roth, eds., The Death of God Movement and the Holocaust (Westport: Greenwood, 1999) I ask why Richard Rubenstein-who says that, never a "God-is-dead-theologian," he merely asserted this was "the time of 'God is dead'"-did not stay with Buber's "eclipse," the crucial difference being that one can still stay with the Jewish "God of history" if one can hope for the "eclipse" to end. I was happy to contribute to his Festschrift myself; but it would have been better to have a different title than What Kind of God?. [The review was not published; editorial opinion was that I did not tell enough about what was in the book but, since the God-is-dead movement has long been overwhelmed by the Holocaust, I did not think summarizing it was worth it.]