Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Pursuit of Unhappiness
- 1 The Confinement of Tragedy: Between Urfaust and Woyzeck
- 2 Goethe’s Faust as the Tragedy of Modernity
- 3 Before or Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften and the Tragedy of Entsagung
- 4 Hölderlin und das Tragische
- 5 Nietzsche, Büchner, and the Blues
- 6 Freud und die Tragödie
- 7 The Death of Tragedy: Walter Benjamin’s Interruption of Nietzsche’s Theory of Tragedy
- 8 Rosenzweig’s Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish History
- 9 Requiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of Stalingrad
- 10 The Strange Absence of Tragedy in Heidegger’s Thought
- 11 The Tragic Dimension in Postwar German Painting
- 12 Vestiges of the Tragic
- 13 Atrocity and Agency: W. G. Sebald’s Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Tragedy
- 14 “Stark and Sometimes Sublime”: Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Tragedy
- 15 The German Tragic: Pied Pipers, Heroes, and Saints
- Afterword: Searching for a Standpoint of Redemption
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
8 - Rosenzweig’s Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Pursuit of Unhappiness
- 1 The Confinement of Tragedy: Between Urfaust and Woyzeck
- 2 Goethe’s Faust as the Tragedy of Modernity
- 3 Before or Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften and the Tragedy of Entsagung
- 4 Hölderlin und das Tragische
- 5 Nietzsche, Büchner, and the Blues
- 6 Freud und die Tragödie
- 7 The Death of Tragedy: Walter Benjamin’s Interruption of Nietzsche’s Theory of Tragedy
- 8 Rosenzweig’s Tragedy and the Spectacles of Strauss: The Question of German-Jewish History
- 9 Requiem for the Reich: Tragic Programming after the Fall of Stalingrad
- 10 The Strange Absence of Tragedy in Heidegger’s Thought
- 11 The Tragic Dimension in Postwar German Painting
- 12 Vestiges of the Tragic
- 13 Atrocity and Agency: W. G. Sebald’s Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Tragedy
- 14 “Stark and Sometimes Sublime”: Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Tragedy
- 15 The German Tragic: Pied Pipers, Heroes, and Saints
- Afterword: Searching for a Standpoint of Redemption
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Is there not something oppressive about raising, once again, the question of how to understand German-Jewish history (if, in fact, one assumes that non-Jewish and Jewish Germans actually participated in the same history)? According to Gershom Scholem, the answer would have to be yes. In the context of speaking about German-Jewish dialogue, he states the following:
I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever, i.e., as a historical phenomenon. It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him. Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200 years. This dialogue died at its very start and never took place… . To whom, then, did the Jews speak in that much-talked-about German-Jewish dialogue? They spoke to themselves.
If the initial ignorance of the non-Jewish Germans is matched only by the retrospective ignorance of contemporary Jewry, is it not time to consign this question to the dustbin of history? History, Marx reminds us, happens the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
One sees an additional wrinkle in this question: Ought German-Jewish history—if there is one, and if it is worth revisiting—to be characterized as “tragic”? With this, we are confronted by another voice sympathetic to Scholem. “After Auschwitz,” Adorno writes (in 1966), “our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victim’s fate. And these feelings do have an objective side after events that make a mockery of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence.” After Adorno, can we still ascribe the adjective “tragic” to events which—far from admitting of any catharsis—either push our own thoughts toward numbing ignorance or persist in a perverse, barely-conscious afterlife haunting the way we interpret our lives in the here and now?
Can we not say, at the very least, that ceaseless dwelling on such a question ends up trivializing the significance of past events by transforming them into ideology?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought , pp. 195 - 215Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014