In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews

Abstract

Aschheim, Steven E. In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.269 pp. $59.95 hardcover; $22.95 paperback. In Times of Crisis is a diverse collection of analytical, autobiographical and review essays that revisit some of the themes of Steven Aschheim's earlier work: the reception of Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt, German-Jewish intellectual history, and Holocaust historiography. For that reason, readers who are looking primarily for new directions in Aschheim's research will most likely be disappointed. However, for the scholar interested in re-exploring the landscape of twentieth-century and German-Jewish culture and history, the book can pro-vide a useful and stimulating starting point. The strength of Aschheim's project lies in its ability to engage with well-known discursive moments in modern European history and culture and reassess them in fresh, unexpected ways by posing new questions, establishing heretofore unseen connections, and reevaluating often unstated assumptions. One of the most effective methods of Aschheim's reexamination involves linking diverse and seemingly incompatible participants within a specific intellectual discourse and demonstrating both the junctures and the critical divergences in their respective ideologies, a practice that often yields unexpected conclusions. In his chapter on the discourses of degeneration in Nietzsche and Max Nordau, for example, he shows how writers from diametrically opposed ideological positions (Nordau's bourgeois positivism versus Nietzsche's radical modernism) shared common notions of normalcy and abnormalcy and employed similar, often violent, rhetorical strategies in their quest to define the degenerate. And in his chapter Post-Holocaust Jewish Mirrorings of Germany, Aschheim links Hannah Arendt's representations of the Holocaust to those of Daniel Goldhagen, portraying them essentially as radical mirror opposites of one another, as antithetical archetypal narratives of the National Socialist Catastrophe (137). The pivotal essay of the book is entitled German History and Jewry: Junctions, Boundaries and Interdependences. Although Aschheim qualifies it as a group of scattered reflections rather than a polished, fixed product (86), this brief, unsystematic thought experiment best exemplifies Aschheim's strategy of reassessment. Here he lays out his method of reconceptualizing Jewish-German history outside the master narrative of a normative national identity into which a Jewish marginality must emancipate, assimilate, integrate or simply be absorbed. …