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.