Online lecture and discussion with Prof. Dr. Natan Sznaider, Tel Aviv (in German)
Link to the recording:
“It would also be bad for Europe if the cultural energies of the Jews left it.” These words were written by Walter Benjamin as a twenty-year-old in 1912 to his Zionist friend Ludwig Strauss, and they are also the central theme of this talk. It is about Jews and Europe, about an unrequited relationship that ended tragically.
Shortly before he attempted to flee from France to the United States to escape the Nazis, Benjamin wrote to his friend Stephan Lackner in Paris, “One wonders if history is not about to forge a witty synthesis of two Nietzschean concepts, that of the good European and that of the last man. This could result in the last European. We are all struggling not to become one.”
On October 21, 1940, Hannah Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. “Jews are dying in Europe and they are being buried like dogs.” Arendt also used these words to inform Scholem of the suicide of Walter Benjamin, who had taken his own life in Port Bou a month earlier. He was turned away by Spanish border officials who wanted to send him back to France. A few months later, in May 1941, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher reached New York by the same route by which Benjamin had previously failed.
Fifteen years later, in 1956, the Jewish writer and sociologist Albert Memmi left Tunisia for France. For him, as a Jew, there was no place left in independent Tunisia.
This lecture is about Jewish places and Jewish people such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Memmi, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Zweig, Moritz Goldstein, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Karl Marx, Bruno Schulz, but also all the unknowns who exemplify the “We and Europe”. It is about both the hope and the end of the European-Jewish relationship.
Natan Sznaider Natan Sznaider is a professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa in Israel. He researches and publishes on sociological theory, globalization and memory culture, and at the moment on the relationship of Jewish Enlightenment to sociology. Born in Mannheim, Germany, he now lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. His most recent publications include: Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era (2016, with Alejandro Baer), Gesellschaften in Israel: Eine Einführung in Zehn Bildern (2017), Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte (2019, as ed. with Christian Heilbronn and Doron Rabinovici), Politik des Mitgefühls. Die Vermarktung der Gefühle in der Demokratie (2021).