Download In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, by Steven E. Aschheim PDF
By Steven E. Aschheim
The 19th- and twentieth-century dating among eu tradition, German heritage, and the Jewish adventure produced a few of the West's strongest and enduring highbrow creations-and, possibly in subtly paradoxical and interrelated methods, our century's darkest genocidal moments. In instances of challenge explores the flashpoints of this vexed courting, mapping the coordinates of a fancy triangular stumble upon of mammoth ancient import. In essays that diversity from the query of Nietzsche's legacy to the talk over Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's prepared Executioners, the prestigious historian Steven E. Aschheim offers this stumble upon as an ongoing discussion among evolving cultural identities. He touches on previous dimensions of this alternate (such because the politics of Weimar Germany) and on current dilemmas of greedy and representing it (such because the Israeli discourse at the Holocaust). His paintings necessarily strains the roots and ramifications of Nazism yet while brings into concentration historic conditions and modern concerns usually overshadowed or distorted via the Holocaust. those essays exhibit the ever present of Nazi genocide inside our personal tradition and remove darkness from the tasks of a few later thinkers and historians-from Hannah Arendt to George Mosse to Saul Friedlander-who have wrestled with its problematics and sought to seize its essence. From the extensively old to the private, from the politics of Weimar Germany to the event of growing to be up German Jewish in South Africa, the essays extend our figuring out of German Jewish historical past specifically, but in addition of old approaches more often than not.
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Additional info for In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews
Example text
Only when something irrevocable has happened can we even try to trace its history backward. ” 91 Like her comments on social science, this critique was closely linked to the Arendtian reaffirmation of action, and the redemptive capacity for new beginnings. For historians, she insisted, causality constituted a denial of their own subject-matter for “within the framework of preconceived categories, the crudest of which is causality, events in the sense of something irrevocably new can never Against Social Science 37 happen .
All sought anti-reductionist, humanizing, and redeeming possibilities rather than forms of hardness and domination. As Strauss put it: “Whatever the significance of modern natural science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. ” This common sensitivity and resistance to the reductive, reifying ingredients of social science characterized the (Jewish) Weimarians analyzed here, and prompted them to redirect their critique of liberal modernity in more “humanizing” ways and directions.
62 In their reading, bourgeois sociology becomes the very incarnation of this kind of instrumental reason, defined as a form of false consciousness. 63 It treated “society, potentially the self-determining subject, as if it were an object, and could be determined from outside . . ” 64 Indeed, it was in order to construct a kind of dialectical anti-positivist counter-sociology, which they dubbed “Critical Theory,” that their alternative Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923. While the Frankfurt School rejected positivistic sociology on the redemptive (albeit fragile) grounds of an as yet historically unrealized emancipatory dialectic, Leo Strauss dismissed it in favor of a resurrected premodern notion of enduring rationality and natural right.