Rootless cosmopolitans: German-Jewish writers confront the Stalinist and National Socialist atrocities

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the Stalinist persecutions of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ on the Jewish involvement with leftist ideas. In inter-war Germany and Austria, Jewish intellectuals played a disproportionate role in promoting both cosmopolitanist and leftist ideals. While belonging mostly to the bourgeois spectrum, many harboured close sympathies with the young Soviet Union, whose imperative of Communist internationalism seemed to chime closely with their own cosmopolitanist sentiments. This dream was shattered in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 1950s in particular, when Jews were persecuted as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. The author studies the novels by three German-speaking Jewish writers, Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s The Break, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Manès Sperber’s Like a Tear in the Ocean, which were written in close proximity to the Stalinist crimes. She argues that these novels offer a unique insight into the seemingly impossible schism that leftist Jews faced in confronting the Stalinist crimes. In doing so, these novels enable us to trace the Jewish leftist predicament that both sustained the socialist–Communist project and ultimately called for its critical interrogation.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Jews
• Stalinism
• Holocaust
• German literature

Notes

1. See Philip Spencer, who reads Marx’s critique of Bruno Bauer as an expression of Kantian cosmopolitanism because of Marx’s insistence that Jews and Judaism should have the same political rights as all other individuals (in this volume). See also Fine, “Rereading Marx on the ‘Jewish Question.’”

2. Quoted in Grüner, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten, 42 (my translation).

3. See Claussen, “Versuch über den Antizionismus,” 15.

4. For these figures, see Grüner (note 2), 136 and 147, as well as Snyder, Bloodlands, 67.

5. For these figures, see Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 298–301.

6. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 288.

7. See Kwiet and Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand, 113f.

8. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 459.

9. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

10. Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 15ff.

11. See Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, 107.

12. Améry, At the Mind's Limits.

13. Nolte, “Zwischen Geschichtslegende und Revisionismus? Das Dritte Reich im Blickwinkel des Jahres 1980.”

14. Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” 45 (my translation)

15. Kehrig, “Zum Geleit,” 11 (my translation).

16. Snyder, Bloodlands.

17. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 2 and xii (all emphasis in the original).

18. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.

19. See Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient.

20. Rühle-Gerstel, Der Umbruch oder Hanna und die Freiheit (all translations mine).

21. This biographical sketch follows Anna Marková’s afterword, “Alice Rühle-Gerstel, eine deutsch-jüdische Intellektuelle aus Prag,” in Rühle-Gerstel, Der Umbruch (note 20), 417–41.

22. Kafka, Letters to Milena.

23. Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature.

24. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah.

25. See Gilman, Difference and Pathology.

26. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 224.

27. Weininger, Sex & Character.

28. Koestler, Darkness at Noon.

29. This subdued importance of Jewishness also marked Koestler’s attitudes. See Cesarani, Arthur Koestler, 398.

30. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 820.

31. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 48.

32. Koestler, “On Disbelieving Atrocities,” 90.

33. Sperber, Like A Tear in the Ocean.

34. See Arendt, Origins.