Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- “Ein weites Feld”: Ein Wort zu deutsch-jüdischen Studien anläβlich der Verleihung des ersten Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies
- “An Open Field”: A Word about German Jewish Studies on the Occasion of the Presentation of the first Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies
- Laudatio for Abigail Gillman's Prize-Winning Nexus Essay: “Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany”
- Heinrich Heine in Modern German History, by an Eyewitness
- Jeffrey Sammons, Heine, and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections
- Heine's Disparate Legacies: A Response to Jeffrey Sammons
- My Debt to Heine and Sammons
- Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy, and the Challenge to Translators
- Edward Timms's “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy and the Challenge to Translators”: A Response
- Kraus the Mouse? Kafka's Late Reading of Die Fackel and the Vagaries of Literary History
- The Parable of the Rings: Sigmund Freud Reads Lessing
- The Poetics of the Polis: Remarks on the Latency of the Literary in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Public Space
- The Marrano in Modernity: The Case of Karl Gutzkow
- German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak
- Authenticity, Distance, and the East German Volksstück: Yiddish in Thomas Christoph Harlan's Ich Selbst und Kein Engel
Laudatio for Abigail Gillman's Prize-Winning Nexus Essay: “Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- “Ein weites Feld”: Ein Wort zu deutsch-jüdischen Studien anläβlich der Verleihung des ersten Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies
- “An Open Field”: A Word about German Jewish Studies on the Occasion of the Presentation of the first Egon Schwarz Prize for the Best Essay in German Jewish Studies
- Laudatio for Abigail Gillman's Prize-Winning Nexus Essay: “Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany”
- Heinrich Heine in Modern German History, by an Eyewitness
- Jeffrey Sammons, Heine, and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections
- Heine's Disparate Legacies: A Response to Jeffrey Sammons
- My Debt to Heine and Sammons
- Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy, and the Challenge to Translators
- Edward Timms's “Die letzten Tage der Menschheit as a German-Jewish Tragicomedy and the Challenge to Translators”: A Response
- Kraus the Mouse? Kafka's Late Reading of Die Fackel and the Vagaries of Literary History
- The Parable of the Rings: Sigmund Freud Reads Lessing
- The Poetics of the Polis: Remarks on the Latency of the Literary in Hannah Arendt's Concept of Public Space
- The Marrano in Modernity: The Case of Karl Gutzkow
- German Jews Dogged by Destiny: Werewolves and Other Were-Canids in the Works of Heinrich Heine and Curt Siodmak
- Authenticity, Distance, and the East German Volksstück: Yiddish in Thomas Christoph Harlan's Ich Selbst und Kein Engel
Summary
MARTIN BUBER, philosopher of dialogue and champion of the German- Jewish symbiosis, initially refused to return to Germany in a public capacity after the Holocaust. Yet in the 1950s Buber did return: accepting two important peace prizes and lecturing to university audiences across the country. For this he was roundly criticized by fellow Jews, yet welcomed by the Germans. Why did he change his mind? Buber's decision to return to German soil was not a publicity stunt, not an act of self-promotion, not callousness or stupidity, and not an attempt to confront the past. Rather, Abigail Gillman argues, Buber returned out of sheer philosophical conviction to fight for the future, to reach out to humanists, to encourage like-minded people to fight for human truth in the face of Cold War ideology, to visualize what they have in common, to learn to say “We.” As Abby writes: “Buber denied on many occasions that he was the bearer of a teaching or gospel (Lehre). He did not return to be in a conversation (im Gespräch sein), he went to Germany to be the conversation (ein Gespräch sein). To be the conversation is to carry out one's role as a divinely created being, spoken into existence; to carry the vox humanus across so many hostile borders, even across the abyss of the Holocaust.” In an elegant analysis of Buber's speeches, Abby traces the development of Buber's message to postwar Germany, uncovering and explicating an important and—until now—unrecognized dimension of Buber's postwar philosophy. This is German Jewish Studies scholarship at its best: Abby has broken new ground and laid the framework for future research, for a new type of “dialogue” in the Buberian sense, encouraging us through her own nuanced language and thought to conceptualize a new Zwischen, a new “Between,” in German Jewish Studies, and to think about a philosophical message that has broad implications for a world badly in need of saying “We” today.
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- Information
- Nexus 3Essays in German Jewish Studies, pp. 17 - 18Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2017