Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
Wise Survivors
By Amos Elon
Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times
by Steven E. Aschheim
Indiana University Press, 134 pp., $27.95
Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914–1982
edited and translated from the German by Anthony David Skinner
Harvard University Press, 547 pp., $35.00
Historians have long been fascinated by twentieth-century German Jews as articulate witnesses, artists, writers, political thinkers, liberal politicians, and advocates of an open society in an age of unprecedented turmoil and creativity. In his excellent new book, Stephen Aschheim, the Vigevani Professor of European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, examines collections of still little-known intimate private letters and diaries to provide a composite portrait of three well-known and controversial writers: Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem, Victor Klemperer, and Hannah Arendt. Shedding new and unexpected light on the drama of their lives, his book is not a biography but rather, as Noel Annan once described Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, a polemic, although it is a disguised polemic. Written in a tone of cautious understatement, Aschheim's book nevertheless calls into question some of the simplifications Jews and Germans resorted to 'in turbulent times.'
Review, 4136 words
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