To brush against the grain: the holocaust and German‐Jewish culture in exile

Abstract

This article analyses the specific contribution of the German‐Jewish exiles to the interpretation of the Holocaust during and immediately after the Second World War. Focusing on the political philosophies of Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, it underlines their immediate reaction to an event practically ignored by the great majority of Western observers during the 1940s and 1950s. This silence was grounded on many elements, among which were the persistence of anti‐Semitism and the fact that the singularity of the Jewish genocide was hidden by the general violence of the war. As ‘free‐floating’ intellectuals (following the classical definition by Karl Mannheim), the exiles escaped the constraints of national contexts and broke the silence. Their ‘epistemological privilege’ was a product of their social and cultural position as outsiders.