“Going together without coming together”: “Die Kreatur” (1926–1929) and Why We Should Read German Jewish Journals Differently
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Daniel Weidner
Abstract
Between 1926 and 1929, Martin Buber, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Joseph Wittig edited the journal Die Kreatur. Its contributors included prominent authors such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Simon, Franz Rosenzweig, Hugo Bergmann, Florens Christian Rang, and many other leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals of the early interwar period. Its very title, Die Kreatur, programmatically suggested a new anthropology while avoiding direct theological discourse and instead fostering dialogue both between secular and religious thought and between the three religions of its editors: Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Thus, by its very nature, the journal was typical of the complex intellectual discourses that marked the Weimar period and of the “dialogic” thought that Buber and others came to stand for. Reading Die Kreatur as a journal poses major methodological challenges and questions not a few presuppositions of current intellectual history, which tends to focus on individual (more or less canonical) authors and their “works.” Rather than picking out single texts and constructing individual “positions,” we would be better off trying to understand Die Kreatur in terms of its multivocal, heterogeneous and pluralistic features. This article claims that dialogic features are characteristic of periodicals in general and constitute their productive power: they allow new ideas to emerge and institute discourses which, while lacking systematic coherence, explore new approaches and attitudes that interconnect in less rigid ways. The article makes a case for new forms of reading and conceptualizing journals – forms that will furthermore help to understand the hybrid and often idiosyncratic nature of German-Jewish discourses during the interwar period.
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a lecture held on June 3, 2015 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of the “Walter Benjamin Lecture Series.”
© 2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Josef Horovitz und die Gründung des Instituts für Arabische und Islamische Studien an der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem: ein Orientalisches Seminar für Palästina
- Islam in Zion? Yosef Yo’el Rivlin’s Translation of the Qur’an and Its Place Within the New Hebrew Culture
- German Orientalism, Arabic Grammar and the Jewish Education System: The Origins and Effect of Martin Plessner’s “Theory of Arabic Grammar”
- A Man of Contention: Martin Plessner (1900–1973) and His Encounters with the Orient
- Other Contributions
- “Going together without coming together”: “Die Kreatur” (1926–1929) and Why We Should Read German Jewish Journals Differently
- A German Island in Israel: Lea Goldberg and Tuvia Rübner’s Republic of Letters
- The Correspondence between Lea Goldberg and Tuvia Rübner: Selected Letters
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Josef Horovitz und die Gründung des Instituts für Arabische und Islamische Studien an der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem: ein Orientalisches Seminar für Palästina
- Islam in Zion? Yosef Yo’el Rivlin’s Translation of the Qur’an and Its Place Within the New Hebrew Culture
- German Orientalism, Arabic Grammar and the Jewish Education System: The Origins and Effect of Martin Plessner’s “Theory of Arabic Grammar”
- A Man of Contention: Martin Plessner (1900–1973) and His Encounters with the Orient
- Other Contributions
- “Going together without coming together”: “Die Kreatur” (1926–1929) and Why We Should Read German Jewish Journals Differently
- A German Island in Israel: Lea Goldberg and Tuvia Rübner’s Republic of Letters
- The Correspondence between Lea Goldberg and Tuvia Rübner: Selected Letters
