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:

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?