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1. Mediating Between Worlds
In a number of contributions to the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung between 1906 and 1916, the German-Jewish philosopher Margarete Susman (1872-1966) reflected upon three different matters of state that arose as political challenges in the process of modernization in Germany around the turn of the century. Two of these, the relation between state and community and that between citizenship and culture, are directly related to the position of the Jews in the German Empire. Remarkably, Susman does not address the precarious situation of the Jews as an issue that needs an urgent social solution - as, for instance, Theodor Herzl did in his numerous writings. Instead, she confronts the problem of minority discourse and state power with an almost Schillerian belief in the humanist force of culture as the "Bildung" of the spirit and thus as the foundation of any longterm ethical and political construction. Against the background of the tensions caused by radical forces of modernization such as democratization and total war, Susman perpetuates the faith in the power of art and literature to remain unaffected by these forces, while she at the same time mobilizes an idealist concept of culture as a force that can address these tensions. The cross-fertilization of culture and civilization makes Margarete Susman, who has nearly disappeared from the canvas of cultural memory, an interesting figure in the gallery of German intellectual history.
Susman's mobilization of the spirit for the sake of a humane modernity without renouncing the spirit's autonomous purity casts her first and foremost as a "mediator," both in a general and a specific way. As a rule Susman refuses to separate politics from culture, believing that the latter is an inalienable condition of social progress or successful liberal politics. The specific implementation of this belief consists in conveying to a broad reading public the philosophical or artistic legacy of thinkers whom she regards as the embodiment of this high ideal of culture. "Mediation" as a form of commenting or translating does not belong to the class of memorable acts commonly recognized in cultural historiography. Yet in view of the intellectual paralysis vis-à-vis socio-historical reality that prevailed in German high culture around the turn of the century, Susman nonetheless appears as a remarkable, even...