Heinrich Heine’s body of work presents seeming disparities between poetry and prose, Romantic lyricism and bitter polemics, love and hate, manifesting the complexity of the author and his vision. Another fundamental yet elusive dimension of Heine’s work involves his Jewish background. Hannah Arendt provocatively described Heine as “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew,” in part because he recognized their implicit conflict. His ambivalent attitude toward Jews and Judaism and German-Jewish identity is difficult to separate from his contentiousness and humor. Heine has not been taken seriously enough in part because of a disinclination to approach him as a thinker, including what the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk called Heine’s “satirical, polemical... holy nonseriousness.” At stake is a ‘politics of literature’ in the sense of how literature is evaluated or categorized. Our task is to locate Heine’s original voice and his historical and contemporary significance.

This study addresses Heine’s work largely in relation to his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers. Heine’s belated dialogue with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe involved their shared opposition to Christianity, nationalism, and Romanticism as a literary movement, as well as their love poetry reflecting the connection between their lives and their work. Heine’s engagement with German philosophy and his “Jewish” pantheism, associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, anticipated Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept “God is dead.” Heine’s Ludwig Börne. A Memorial defined the late liberal, converted Jew Ludwig Börne as a Christian or Jewish, ascetic, moralistic “Nazarene,’ in contrast to Heine and Goethe as pagan, sensual, art- loving “Hellenes.” At stake in part was Heine’s modern resistance as a Jew to others’ interpretations of what is a Jew.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relation to Heine constitutes a particularly important consideration. The philosopher’s early infatuation with and later rejection of the composer Richard Wagner, announced in Nietzsche’s publication and revision of his Birth of Tragedy, can be understood as a turn back to Heine as an unacknowledged and humorous source for several of Wagner’s ideas. Nietzsche’s Dionysian outlook was anticipated by Heine’s iconoclastic response to German Hellenist interpretations of classical antiquity, although Heine combined his embrace of Dionysus with an ostensible late “conversion” to Judaism. Through his entertainingly thought- provoking art, Heine offers perhaps the definitive non-systematic thinker of profound ambivalence, internal conflicts, and radical juxtapositions of ideas, a unique ‘Jewish Dionysus.’

Ignaz Goldziher and the Rise of Islamwissenschaft as a `Science of Religion'

by

David Moshfegh

Doctor of Philosophy in History

Professor Martin Jay, Chair

This study discusses the rise of Islamwissenschaft as a `science of religion' in the reformist scholarship of the Jewish Orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher. The `science of religion' tradition in nineteenth-century European scholarship was a historicist discourse that approached religious traditions critically and with the tools of critical scholarship. But, it did so not to debunk their sacred claims, but to argue that their religious meaning was present not in their traditionalist and transcendental demarcation of themselves but in their teleological development as they moved towards the definition and realization of `religion' itself. All religions had something of religion in them and there was religious progress in human history towards `religion' as such. Hence, comparative religious history--History as such--was made a medium for gauging the character of the progress and purification involved in the ultimate fulfillment of `religion', the relative capacity of different religions for such progress and critical reformist prescriptions that functioned as the completion of this process itself. The `science of religion' began as a liberal Protestant theological historicism, but its bid to project and idealize Christianity as `religion' found, over the course of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of competitive historicist rivals. There developed a humanist historicism, out of this stream of thought, that projected the self-conscious divinity of humanity as the end of History and so a `religion of man'. Soon, Protestant historicism was further flanked by a Jewish historicism that worked towards the reformist idealization of Judaism' as the ultimate universal faith of humanity. The fundamental thesis of this study is that the emergence Islamwissenschaft in Goldziher's scholarship represented another such competitive instantiation of the `science of religion'. Emerging from the reformist Jewish tradition of scholarship, Goldziher shifted his project of the critical historicization and idealization of Judaism as `religion' to Islam. Islamwissenschaft was a bid to project Islam as `religion', which Goldziher embraced on the basis of a universalist belief in purified monotheism as the telos of History, which viewed both the Jewish and Islamic heritage as capable of idealization to this end. Admittedly, the emergence and development of Islamwissenschaft have not generally been understood in this fashion. Rather, the discipline has often been seen as having propagated essentialist theologocentric conceptions of Islam and Islamic history that reduced everything in it to a totalizing `Islam'. Or, it has been viewed as also another vector of the Philological Orientalism of the nineteenth century and its invidious essentialist distinction between Semites and Aryans, `Islam' being then made the paradigmatic `Semitic' religion. In this study, I will show that Goldziher's scholarship and his founding of Islamwissenschaft were meant in fact precisely to counter such essentialist understandings of Islam and Islamic history. The critical historicization and idealization of Islam meant showing that Islamic law had in fact never functioned as a positive law but rather as a reified ideal used for ideological purposes of rationalization. One had, through critical historicization, to recover sociopolitical and cultural developments in their own right, if Islam was to achieve its full religious role: one had to overcome Islam as `ideology' for Islam to become `religion'. As for the claim that Islamwissenschaft represented a reiteration of invidious nineteenth-century racial distinctions, I demonstrate that the singular result of Goldziher's reformist reading of the Islamic heritage was to replace the Semitic/Aryan dichotomy as the fundamental framework of Orientalist scholarship with a universalist historicist one between the Medieval and Modern. It was on the basis of this division that Goldziher engaged `dialectically' with the Islamic modernism of his time: the traditionalist consciousness that viewed Islam in terms of a transcendental unity and origin, he argued, had to be displaced in favor of the critical historicist examination of Islam's development, if its providential destiny was to be realized. It is, however, also on this basis that I emphasize Goldziher's scholarship must be viewed within the broader Islamicist context of his time and not read out of it. For, the same reformist, modernist thinking that, in Goldziher, envisaged reform as the ownmost potential of the Islamic heritage and an inherently internal process radically opposed to any European imperialist intervention, could in the hands of other scholarly colleagues be turned to the purposes of colonial politics.

This dissertation traces the development of German national life from the disintegration of the Weimar Republic in 1933 to the end of the foundational period of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963. Charting the alliances between previously hostile groups formed in emigration in response to National Socialism, I offer a way of understanding the ideological strength of reconstruction and nation-building after Hitler. The study covers four principal areas of activity: law and politics, humanistic culture, higher education, and religion. It takes as representative case studies the careers of young Weimar-era leaders who fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s and returned to help build the infrastructure of the Federal Republic after 1945. Extensive use is made of their personal papers and other archival material from the institutions with which they were affiliated. Examining the legal, cultural, intellectual, and theological response to the failure of Germany's first democracy, I challenge arguments that have privileged economic success as the driving cause of postwar democratization in West Germany. Instead, the dissertation points to the indispensability of social and ideological reconciliation as preconditions for development.

A Selective Affinity presents an intellectual history of what I call Kontingenzsinn—a “sense of contingency”—in postwar West Germany, using the early development of Niklas Luhmann’s (1927-1998) sociological systems theory as a case study for examining its significance and dynamics. Before 1945 the term Kontingenz virtually never appeared in German, even in academic discourse. Between 1960 and 2008, however, the frequency with which it appeared in published books increased roughly six-fold. Kontingenz, a concept from modal logic meaning roughly “that which can be otherwise,” or “that which is neither necessary nor impossible, became one of the most vital concepts of modern German intellectual life. Although the specific word Kontingenz was of particular symbolic significance, I emphasize not only its explicit appearance, but also the more diffuse field of meaning that it invokes—hence my use of the neologism “Kontingenzsinn.”

The individual most responsible for this development, I argue, was the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, (1920-1996), the other major protagonist of A Selective Affinity. Blumenberg’s argument concerning the role of the Christian theological concept of the “contingency of the world” in the origins of the modern world became one of the most influential narratives of modernity among German intellectuals of Luhmann’s generation. A central axis of the dissertation describes and explains the substance of this affinity between Blumenberg and Luhmann, which centered on their shared understanding of Kontingenzsinn.

A Selective Affinity also argues that Kontingenzsinn in West Germany drew on the “selective affinity” of a wide range of elements dispersed across disciplines, intellectual traditions and continents, from cybernetics to scholastic theology. By giving attention to the specific affinity and historical trajectory of these elements, I aim to reveal the “work” the concept did for Luhmann and others intellectuals of his generation. To this end, I distinguish two different “dimensions” of Kontingenzsinn, namely, a “vertical” dimension that refers to the problem of the “grounds of existence” and the “horizontal” dimension of “other possibilities.” Whereas the former belongs to the history of “ontotheological metaphysics,” embodied in the question “why is there something rather than nothing?,” the latter expresses the idea that something could be “otherwise.” The horizontal dimension has closer affinities to the technical concepts of possibility, complexity, and selectivity that found expression within cybernetics and information theory.

The keystone of Luhmann’s theory of society as a self-organizing social system, the “horizontal” dimension of Kontingenzsinn helped him eliminate the traces of the “vertical” dimension from the concept of rationality. Instead of the “old European metaphysics” of reason, which demanded explanations and justifications, Luhmann redefined rationality as a systems concept. Far from antithetical to contingency, as reason had been for most of the European tradition, this concept of rationality embraced contingency.

My contention, however, is that Luhmann employed the specific term “Kontingenz” precisely because it also evoked the semantics, history, and pathos of the “vertical” dimension. The selective affinity of modern Kontingenzsinn was rooted in a fundamental ambivalence. Both of its dimensions, I argue, had been originally entwined in the metaphysical system of seventeenth century philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), above all in his Theodicy of 1710, which famously argued that the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds, despite the appearance of evil and suffering. But his argument ultimately rested upon a proto-cybernetic and theory of complexity that first brought to light the “horizontal” dimension of Kontingenzsinn. I use Leibniz’s Theodicy as a symbolic anchor to help explain not only the “selective affinity” of the various elements of Kontingenzsinn, from cybernetics and decision theory to legal science and phenomenology, but also the rhetorical appeal of Kontingenz to Luhmann and his generation. Kontingenzsinn both engaged and tamed the existential absurdity, guilt, and responsibility they encountered while coming of age against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust. Although occasionally mobilized to reject demands to master the past, it simultaneously condensed into a symbol for reckoning with German history and identity as a species of a more universal modernity.

Focusing on learned men and women from traditional Jewish societies in Germany, between 1770 and 1870, my dissertation examines the emergence of an intellectual practice critical to the process of becoming modern: reading for pleasure. Unlike the written word that is its stimulus and object, the experience of reading in general is thought to be transitory and accessible only to individuals. But for Jewish intellectuals who were becoming modern by elaborating new selves outside the confines of traditional culture, pleasure reading, like writing, played a central role in their formations as modern individuals. Pleasure reading and the habit of sharing impressions of that reading in written correspondences, diaries, and memoirs, which were then re-read with equal pleasure, amounted to a revolution of traditional Jewish culture. In their discoveries of pleasure reading, Jewish men and women followed their feelings and imagination inside new interior spaces of individuality carved out by themselves. My dissertation traces this process by pursuing the discoveries of pleasure reading by three connected figures: the salonnière Henriette Herz (1764-1847), the founder of the critical study of Judaic literature Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), and the great historian of the Jews Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891).

This dissertation argues that ideas and experiences of friendship were central to the thinking of German radical conservatives in the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI years to the emergence, beginning in the 1970s, of the New Right.

I approach this issue by examining the role of friendship in the circle around the writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998). Like many in his generation, Jünger's youthful alienation from a "cold" bourgeois society was felt via a contrast to the intimacy of personal friendship. A WWI soldier, Jünger penned memoirs of the trenches that revealed similar desires for mutual understanding, glorifying wartime comradeship as a bond deeper than words and a return to the "tacit accord" that supposedly marked traditional communities. After 1933, Jünger turned from a right-wing opponent of democracy into a voice of "spiritual resistance" to the Nazi regime. For Jünger and other non-Nazi Germans, friendship was a crucial space of candid communication and nonconformity to the norms of the Third Reich. Jünger's writings from these years also issued coded signals to sympathetic readers to keep alive conservative values for a post-Nazi future. After WWII, Jünger became one of Germany's most controversial figures, a critic of modernity who was at the center of a friendship network that joined the veterans and heirs of Weimar's radical right into a counterculture opposed to what they believed was the decadence of German life. In Jünger's later works, he portrayed friendship as the last true site of community, an idea that shaped the elitist attitudes of new members of the German right.

I use published texts and letters alongside new archival material to make two broad contributions. First, by investigating friendship among twentieth-century German radical conservatives, I bring to light the important work that friendship has done for those facing quintessentially modern problems like alienation and social fragmentation. I argue that the work of friendship for figures like Ernst Jünger has primarily been the provision of needs for affirmation, communication, and mutual understanding. Recognizing these needs helps us see that anxieties about being understood, longings for fellowship, and concerns for the quality of interpersonal relationships have often underlain radical conservatism's explicit ideas about, say, the virtues of "organic" community or the perils of democratic leveling. I show how these needs and anxieties were closely bound up with the radical conservative critique of modernity, including its elitism, ultra-nationalism, and disdain for mass society and mass culture. It is through friendship, I argue, that German radical conservatives have understood the shortcomings of modern life and envisioned ways to overcome or cope with modernity.

My second contribution is methodological. The study of friendship, I argue, can uncover emotional needs and intimate states of mind that are otherwise difficult for the historian to bring to light. Examining friendship among twentieth-century radical conservatives provides fundamental insights into motives, helping us understand why certain emotional demands were felt at certain moments in German history, and how these emotions in turn drove the decision for particular ideological positions. Asking these questions of the German radical right offers a fresh angle on a group usually dealt with through a reductive focus on cultural pathologies and formal ideology. Taking Ernst Jünger and his many friends and interlocutors as a case study, I provide a rich biographical historicization of German radical conservative thinking as it developed over multiple stages throughout the twentieth century. Stressing recurring needs for communication and mutual understanding, I locate new motives for radical conservative ideas.

At the end of the twentieth century, the gradual triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over “really existing socialism” brought to many West Germans not relief but melancholy. Facing what they interpreted as the dissipation of radical social and political alternatives, academics and public intellectuals pronounced the death of ideology, of history, and of utopian ambitions. This dissertation asks how West Germans nevertheless found ways to challenge this resignation by giving voice to new, radical hopes for Germany’s future.

For their broad popularity and sustained impact, this study traces the grassroots efforts of three groups. First, it follows the Berlin History Workshop, a collection of amateur and professional historians, as they attempted to liberate the process of researching and writing history from the rigid confines German universities. This group sought, instead, to bring the historian’s craft into Berlin’s local neighborhoods in order to enable ordinary Germans to narrate their own histories. Second, this dissertation analyzes the Green Party, which practiced localized plebiscitary policy making in an effort to endow German citizens with greater political agency. The Greens brought this political practice to numerous cultural projects in an effort to democratize German society by democratizing the cultural encounters of its citizens. Third, this project investigates a loosely-connected group of artists who echoed the investments of the historians and politicians by creating art installations with ordinary objects in ordinary spaces that prompted passersby to reevaluate their relationships to the topography of their daily lives.

This dissertation argues that, through these groups, everyday Germans adopted a set of cultural practices in the 1980s and ‘90s that not only critiqued established institutions but also crafted new institutions in their place. Their critical practices followed three conventions. First, they championed radical grassroots democracy by giving citizens opportunities to create socially-significant cultural products like museums and monuments. Second, they decentralized the creative process, locating it in the spaces of everyday life in order to make it widely accessible. Finally, they borrowed from the environmental movement the concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. These practices put culture to work in realizing a more democratic, more socially-integrated Germany. In doing so, they permitted their practitioners to reclaim utopian hope from the dustbin of historical ideas.

These three case studies span Germany’s academic, political, and aesthetic terrain. As such, together they offer evidence that efforts to battle twentieth-century apathy signaled a broad shift in German cultural sensibilities, not an isolated phenomenon. The first three chapters of the dissertation treat each of these groups individually as they began to advocate for new, more democratic geographies of cultural engagement, or “alternative public spheres,” in the early 1980s. Their focus on Germany’s cultural environment made them particularly receptive to the idea of sustainability popularized after the convening of the World Commission on Environment and Development in the middle of the decade. The next three chapters trace their pursuit of sustainability in culture. A sustainable culture, they came to realize, had to regard its projects as part of an ongoing process rather than as static goals: theirs was a renewable, future-oriented cultural movement in the present, or a “sustainable utopia.” Faced with radical changes to the international political landscape and the rapid expansion of their constituencies to include sixteen million East Germans alongside more pedestrian concerns like funding difficulties and interpersonal conflicts, these groups weathered the last decade of the twentieth century with varying success. The study concludes by underscoring the irony that the most durable component of their cultural programs in the wake of German political reunification was their push for cultural decentralization.

This dissertation reconstructs the intellectual and political reception of Critical Theory, as first developed in Germany by the "Frankfurt School" at the Institute of Social Research and subsequently reformulated by Jürgen Habermas, in the Netherlands from the mid to late twentieth century. Although some studies have acknowledged the role played by Critical Theory in reshaping particular academic disciplines in the Netherlands, while others have mentioned the popularity of figures such as Herbert Marcuse during the upheavals of the 1960s, this study shows how Critical Theory was appropriated more widely to challenge the technocratic directions taken by the project of vernieuwing (renewal or modernization) after World War II. During the sweeping transformations of Dutch society in the postwar period, the demands for greater democratization--of the universities, of the political parties under the system of "pillarization," and of society more broadly--were frequently made using the intellectual resources of Critical Theory. In turn, the development of a progressive, "posttraditional" society in the Netherlands, which appeared to reach its apex in the 1970s, suggested to a number of intellectuals that Habermas's more sanguine "theory of communicative action" best conceptualized the democratic achievements of modern society and the continuing prospects for the "rationalization of the lifeworld," through which injustices and social pathologies could be exposed to the scrutiny of critical reason. Critical Theory, then, had an "actuality" that went well beyond academia and had continuing "relevance"--another meaning of the Dutch actualiteit or German Aktualität--for understanding the past and future rationalization of society.

There was, moreover, another sense in which Dutch thinkers interpreted the actuality of Critical Theory. In the transnational process of reception, ideas and theories are inevitably shaped by the contexts in which they are taken up. This study begins with the Dutch social democrat Andries Sternheim, who worked at the Institute's office in Geneva in the 1930s, and shows how tensions arose over the more speculative philosophical premises of Kritische Theorie, as formulated in director Max Horkheimer's key 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory." These tensions prefigured the later emphases and inflections given to Critical Theory by its intellectual supporters (and detractors) in the Netherlands and reflected, I argue, a "discourse of actuality" with which Habermas's thought had greater resonance. Although some Dutch intellectuals gravitated towards the earlier arguments of Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which identified the roots of modern pathologies of social domination in the widespread expansion of "enlightened thought" into forms of "instrumental reason," these claims were seen by many as overly pessimistic and speculative, particularly in comparison to Habermas's thought. Habermas argued that Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the "dialectic of enlightenment" had obscured a different form of rationality, made possible only by the rationalization of the lifeworld, namely "communicative rationality," which had its basis not in the arguably metaphysical, "emphatic" concept of reason to which Horkheimer and Adorno appealed, but rather in the immanent practices of everyday, intersubjective communication. Although Habermas insisted that the telos of mutual understanding, toward which non-strategic communicative practices were oriented, remained a counterfactual ideal, many of his adherents went beyond Habermas in ascribing an empirical actuality to the idea of communicative rationality. Furthermore, even as Habermas's theory was challenged in the course of the "modernism/postmodernism" debates of the 1980s, Dutch scholars frequently interpreted "poststructuralist" thought in ways that broadened the concept of rationality, rather than pitting one side against the other, as the leading German and French antagonists often did.

By putting the ideas of Critical Theory into historical and comparative relief, this reception history goes beyond strictly philosophical studies of the relative validity of the Frankfurt School and Habermas's competing forms of thought. The Dutch example offers a particularly revealing view into the "actuality" of what Habermas called "the unfinished project of modernity," as well as its potential limitations. In concluding, however, I follow other scholars of early Critical Theory in arguing that Adorno's thought in particular may have its own pressing actuality, even as its philosophical premises are considered outdated in the wake of the "linguistic turn." Against the historical developments of the last decades of the twentieth century--not least in the Netherlands--we might yet have something to learn from Adorno's thought, even in its most apocalyptic and utopian exaggerations.

This dissertation charts the ways in which the non-West came to be thought of as part of the modern world in the late British Empire, how that project became politically unfeasible during decolonization, and how colonial social anthropology was brought to bear on Britain itself in the 1950s. I show how in late colonial era social anthropologists began to combine participant-observer fieldwork, and totalistic analysis of a locality, with the understanding of the world's cultures in interaction with each other, rather than in terms of their comparative difference. This colonial anthropology of modernity emerged within a complex matrix of institutional geographies. The branch of that project instigated by Max Gluckman involved circulations not only between metropole and colony, but crucially within the specific regional situation found in South Africa. Through these circulations Gluckman was led to develop new tools for the understanding of the social as globally modern, which were further developed by his colleagues at Manchester, and which became highly influential on new understandings of a global modernity. These tools were imported from the colonial situation to bring a vibrant and productive anthropological dimension to the study of British society in the 1950s: a project which was instigated, funded, and shaped by the demands of social democracy and the construction of a welfare state. However the participant-observation of late colonial modernity, and in particular the processes of decolonization, became impossible under the demands of an emergent security apparatus. Social anthropology's methods were not intrinsically primitivist, but they were dependent on the circulation of anthropologists and their ability to live in fieldsites for extended periods of time, forging intimate links with their subjects. This made the anthropology of modernity both unacceptable and highly vulnerable in the era of impending decolonization, and allowed the discipline's subject matter to be conditioned by political coercion, in particular through restriction of movement. Thus we can see the complex ways in which political circumstances shaped, constrained and channeled the understanding of global modernities at the end of the British Empire.