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The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. By MICHAEL BRENNER. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Unspoken Bequest: The Contribution of German Jews to German Culture. By HUGO MUNSTERBERG. Olive Bridge, NY: Raymond Saroff, 1995.
Hitler's thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years, a shorter time than the Weimar Republic which preceded it. Yet a glance at the German history section of any American bookstore suggests an unending fascination with the Nazi dictatorship, and a relative lack of interest in the era that Peter Gay hopefully described as "already a legend" in his seminal study, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. This disparity offers a corrective to the historian Leopold von Ranke's view that "all ages stand in immediate relationship to God." Perhaps, but apparently, those ages which stand in immediate relationship to the Devil sell better.
The Jews represented one of the few groups that wholeheartedly supported the generally unloved Weimar Republic. For Jews, Weimar represented the culmination of a lengthy struggle for equal opportunity in all areas of German life. Although Jews had achieved political Emancipation throughout the German Empire (the Kaiserreich) in 1871, that putative equality was compromised in many areas. Placement and promotion in the civil service, the university, the public school system and the army were either stymied or slowed for professing Jews. The various German ministries displayed suspicious hostility toward the Jewish minority in a wide variety of social arenas, including even the right of baptized Jews to choose names of their own devising.' Furthermore, the domination of various coalitions of the right from 1879 onwards guaranteed that Jews would remain in opposition politically. Although the cultural flowers that would bloom during the Weimar Period were already growing before the war, the stifling atmosphere of Prussian Junkerdom kept these accomplishments in check.
Imperial Germany's collapse, the abdication of Wilhelm II, and the proclamation of the Republic on 9 November 1918 by Philipp Scheidemann of the Socialist Party, promised a new era. The two books reviewed here show how successfully German Jews took advantage of Weimar's promise and serve as worthy bookends to the historiographical question: what was the German-Jewish contribution to German culture-and did that contribution also extend into the realm of Judaic life?
Hugo Munsterberg's Unspoken Bequest is not...