The Crisis of Enlightenment: Jewish Discourses on German Cultural Traditions in National Socialist Germany

This article explores the self-conceptions of German Jews in National Socialist Germany in the context of a critical rereading of 1930s receptions of the German and European Enlightenment. The transformation of the Jewish community and Jewish culture into a part of bourgeois society had taken place in the course of the German and European Enlightenment, from its beginnings to the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. The efforts of the Jewish minority to ‘emancipate’ itself from any form of heteronomy from around 1820—to become self-reliant and responsible citizens in thought and deed—had become a kind of symbol for the progressive reasoning of the Enlightenment. Consequently, given the aggressive antisemitic policies of the National Socialist state, the German-Jewish relationship to the Enlightenment in internal and public debates after 1933 must be viewed as key when exploring the externally damaged self-conceptions of large parts of the German-Jewish minority. For the writers and artists of Jewish descent examined in this article, the relationship to the Enlightenment—and to German and Jewish culture—was once more open to debate.