TheJournal of Jewish Thought and Philosopl?Y, Vol. Reprints available directly from the publisher.

Photocopying permitted by license only

4,pp. 227-243

1995

"Die Zauberjuden": Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Other GermanJewish Esoterics between the World Wars
Gary Smith Einstein Forum) Potsdam

Walter Benjamin first coined the term "Zauberjuden" in a playful poetic allusion to Scholem and company as "crafty Magic Jews." By the time Benjamin reemployed the term thirteen years later, reporting to Scholem from San Remo on Oskar Goldberg and entourage, the term seems to have lost all favorable connotation: "You will hesitate all the less," Benjamin writes, "when I confide in you that I have landed here in the main camp of the true Magic Jews."! The endurance of this term in Benjamin's and Scholem's private vocabulary-resonant more of the fairy tale's "Zauberlehrling" than Mann's "Zauberberg" (1924)- is not accidental; it serves as a figure of their own participation in what I term the Jewish-German rhetoric of esotericism between the World Wars. Despite Alfred Dablin's assertion in 1927 that Weimar signified, among other phenomena, "the epoch of a ne\v, thriving esotericism of a special breed,"2 this efflorescence of esoteric discourse remains a neglected theme in the studies of German-Jewish intellectual life in Weimar society.3 As a matter of fact, the modest interpenetration of philosophical and Kabbalistic topoi from the late-fifteenth to nineteenth centuries chronicled by scholars of Jewish mysticism intensified in the early-twentieth century as part of a general revolutionization of western Jewish intellectual culture.

1 Walter Benjamin, Brieje, 2 vols., ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966, p. 282 (November 9, 1921) & p. 637 (December 26,1934). 2 Alfred Dbblin, "Au~enseiter der Naturwissenschaft," Vossische Zeitung, No. 306 (Unterhaltungsblatt), 31 December 1927 [not included in Dbblin's collected writings]. 3 Despite the many merits of Moshe Idel's ambitious conspectus, "From Jewish Esotericism to European Philosophy: An Intellectual Profile of Kabbalah as a Cultural Factor," only cursory treatment is given to the intermingling of philosophical and Kabbalistic topoi and no reference is made to the early twentieth century. Cf. Moshe Ide!, Kabbalah: New Perspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, chap. 10.

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"Esotericism was in the air." As the late scholar Arnaldo Momigliano recalled in his book On Pagans, Jews, and Christians,4 "For someone like myself who in the late twenties and early thirties read German books and talked to German friends in Italy, it is less difficult to overhear in the prose of Scholem and Benjamin the echoes of those German RomanticsHamann, Humboldt, and von Baader-who were coming back into fashion. [ . . . ] Followers of Stefan George were multiplying among the younger generation of German Jews." Art historians have long recognized that untangling the traffic in esoteric ideas is crucial to constructing a history of modern art.s This contrasts distinctly, however, with the arbiters of German literary and philosophical history, who have typically confined treatment of esoteric elements to their influence on single thinkers (relevant figures I will not address include Ernst Bloch, Mynona, and Franz Rosenzweig). Even in France, a sceptical Anatole France admitted that "a certain familiarity with the occult sciences is necessary in order to comprehend a great number of works of contemporary literature."6 None of these observations about the esoteric symptoms of the Zeitgeist suffice, however, to diagnose what is above all a rhetoric of esotericism in the writings of such independent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Oskar Goldberg, Erich Unger, or Erich Gutkind. This rhetoric bears broad implications, furthermore, for issues such as how early twentieth-century German literary, philosophical, and social movements drew upon elements of Jewish esotericism; the formation of Jewish identity in the Weimar period, especially with regards to the de-secularization of the assimilated Jewish intellectual; and the discursive development of key themes and terms in both Walter Benjamin's and Gershom Scholem's work. In employing the term "esotericism" in its broadest conceivable sense, I am following both studies of the significance of esoteric literature on classical modernism and Schure's notion of "comparative esotericism," which characterizes common features of how disparate spiritual trends are informed by mythical images and religious traditions. Thus this encyclopaedic sense of "esotericism" not only encompasses "forms of Platonism, Gnosis, Kabbalah, and alchemy, but includes a profusion of contemporary trends

4 "Gershom Scholem's Autobiography," in: Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans) Jews, and Christians. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1987, pp. 258--60. \ See, for example, the admirable synopsis by Friedrich Teja Bach, "Zur Bedeutung der Esoterik in der klassischen Moderne." In F.T.B., Constantin Brancusi. Metamorphosen plastischer Form. Cologne: Dumont, 1987, pp. 141-45. It is also true of fin de siecle occultism that it was largely neglected by the foremost historians of ideas while intriguing many significant writers, including Baudelaire and Breton. Cf. Mircea Eliade, "The Occult in the Modern World," in: M. E., Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. Essays in Comparative Religion, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 47-68, here 51. 6 The passage continues: "Magic occupied a large place in the imagination of our poets and our novelists." France, Revue Illustrie, 15 February 1890, Quoted in: Eliade, "The Occult in the Modern World," ibid., p. 51, and in: Papus, Traiti ilimentaire de scienceocculte, (1926), p. 10.

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taking up these traditions, various forms of magic, hermeticism, spiritualism, occultism, and above all theosophy."7 Each of the figures I named above-Benjamin, Scholem, Goldberg, Unger, and Gutkind- is emblematic for a different feature of this commerce of ideas and expression. It was no accident, for example, that the expressionist Neue Club turned to two metaphysicians of myth, Oskar Goldberg and Erich Unger, during its decline following the poet Georg Heym's death.8 The career of Erich Gutkind is exemplary for the politics of esotericism; his sybillinic, theosophically-inspired SiderealBirth. Seraphic Wanderingfrom the Death 0/ the World to the Baptism 0/ the Act first brought him into contact with Wassily Kandinsky, who would soon afterward work out the principles of his influential tractate, On the Spiritual in Art.9 The small measure of fame Gutkind achieved in these years also helped make the project plausible which led to the forming of the utopian "Forte" or "Potsdam" Circle, [and I am quoting Scholem now], "that small group of men," such as Frederik van Eeden, Buber, Walther Rathenau, Theodor Diubler, [... ] Plarens Christian Rang and three or four others, [. . .] who would set up a community devoted to intellectual and spiritual activity [... ] to engage without any reservations in a creative exchange of ideas [. . . and] perhaps, to put it clearly but esoterically, to shake the world off its hinges."lo The terms and method of Gershom Scholem's prodigious scholarship bear the freight of his reading of the Romantic philosophers of language, his powerful dialogue with Walter Benjamin on questions of myth, language, silence, tradition, and history, his rejection of the rationalist ethos of Hermann Cohen, and his severe

7 Edouard Schure, "'Les Grands Inities. Esquisse de l'Histoire secrete des Religions"'. Paris, Perrin. 4th ed., 1899. German trans. by Marie Steiner-von-Sivers: 'Die Gro~en Eingeweihten Geheimlehrender Religionen'. Preface by Rudolf Steiner. Bern, Miinchen, Wien: Scherz/Otto W Barth. 16th ed., 1979. Consider Tiryakian's view that "esoteric" refers to those "religio-philosophic belief systems which underlie occult techniques and practices; that is, it refers to the more comprehensive cognitive mappings of nature and the cosmos, the epistemological and ontological reflections of ultimate reality, which mappings constitute a stock of knowledge that provides the ground for occult procedures." Edward A. Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," American Journal of Sociolog;y 78 (November 1972): 491-512; Cited by Mircea Eliade, "The Occult and the Modern World," op. cit, p. 48. The emphasis on theosophy and anthroposophy must be worked out with relation to Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and Rudolph Otto, while remaining aware that it complements Jewish mystical trends coming from the East. In addition, the thought of figures such as Berdachevsky, Bialik, and Agnon must be entered into the socio-cultural equation. 8 C Die Schriftendes neuen Clubs, ed. Richard Sheppard. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980, 1983. 9 Cf. Erich Gutkind. Siderische Geburt. Seraphische IJ:7anderung vom Tode der welt zur Taufe der Tat. 2nd ed. Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, [1914]. (1st ed. under the pseudonym "Volker," 1910). See also welteroberung durch Heldenliebe (1911, with Frederik van Eeden); "Bekenntnis," Zeit-Echo. Ein KriegsTagebuchder KUnstler, 1914-1915 (Munich, Berlin: Graphik, 1915); "Beyond Assimilation," The Menorah Journal 17, 1 (October 1929), pp. 60-66; The Absolute Collective.A PhilosophicalAttempt to Overcome Our Broken State. London, 1933; Purpose 9, 3 and 9, 4 (1937); The Body of God. hrst Steps Toward an AntiTheolog;y.The Col/ected Papers of Eric Gutkind, ed. Lucie B. Gutkind and Henry Le Roy Finch. Intra. Henry Le Roy Finch. New York: Horizon Press, 1969. 10 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1980, p. 81.

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scepticism of Martin Buber's valorization of an intersubjectively-shareable Erlebnis as both a key to accessing a past experience and a legitimate means of translating such traditions into a contemporary idiom. (The categorial quality of this shared rejection, by the way, is nowhere more clearly documented than in Scholem's mostly unpublished journal of their Seeshaupt discussions in 1916, where, amidst a series of rather callow quips about Buberians in general-such as "Have you had your Jewish Erlebnis today?"-Scholem notes that "Benjamin wanted to persuade me to bring the decisive dismissal of the Erlebnis vendors in my essay-Down with the Erlebnis/" they agreed.!1) The subtext of their exchanges about the priority of learning Hebrew; a discussion altogether misunderstood in the German critical literature, concerns not just Benjamin's mystical-metaphysical conception of language but the notion articulated by Rosenzweig of Hebrew as "the language that bears both God's revelation and prophetic promise of redemption," or, to quote Paul Mendes-Flohr, "the vessel bearing the Jewish soul."!2 These five figures-Benjamin, Gutkind, Scholem, Goldberg, and Ungerconstitute a disharmonious community, whose individual, seemingly eccentric projects, map out a dense matrix of plausible positions on the conceptual and methodolical issues I wish to investigate. The lineaments of their agreements and differences on these issues emerge in part through direct contacts: Scholem circulated at least five versions of a programmatic letter he wrote against the foundations of Goldberg's system and its assertion of the Jewish people's dormant metaphysical-magical powers. And yet as late as the 1960s, Scholem considered Goldberg's ideas to merit inclusion in the Enryclopaedia Judaica. Erich Gutkind, who felt himself to be influenced by Scholem in his radical reinterpretation of ritual and tradition in Judaism, also became briefly involved with the "Philosophische Gruppe," organized by Goldberg and his devotee Unger in Berlin, but ended all contact "after a contre-temps with Erich Unger."!3 Unger, though Oskar Goldberg's philosophical disciple, proved in many ways a more worthy opponent for Scholem than Goldberg, the salon Kabbalist, at least in terms of intelligibility and resourcefulness. Not only was it Unger who translated Goldberg's prose into a contemporary philosophical idiom in a pamphlet on the Problem der mythischen Realitdt [the Problem of Mythical Reality], but he composed a

11

Cf. Hans Puttnies and Gary Smith, Benjaminiana. Eine biograjischeRecherche. Gie~en: Anabas, 1991,

pp.58-59.
12 Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Hebrew as a Holy Tongue. Franz Rosenzweig and the Renewal of Hebrew," in: Lewis Glinert, ed., Hebrew in Ashkenaz. A Language in Exile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 229, 228. Mendes-Flohr quotes the Rosenzweig passage from his lectures on the Hebrew language delivered at the Jiidisches Lehrhaus in 1921, entitled "Unsere Sprache" and later published as ''Vom Geist der hebrmschen Sprache," Franz Rosenzweig. Der Mensch und sein w.irk. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III ("Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken), ed. Reinhold Mayer und Annemarie Mayer. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984, p. 721. 13 Henry Le Roy Finch, unpublished typescript.

Beqamin, Scholem, and Other German-JewishEsoterics 231

lengthy (72-page), recendy published reply to Scholem's pathbreaking 1928 Cardozo essay, which includes a scarcely-coded attack on Goldberg's views in the essay's closing lines.14(In his questioning of Scholem's transvaluation of the traditional notion of "antinomianism," Unger does in fact put his finger on a crucial question, which, as far as I know the literature, has not been raised in this form.) In the early 1920s, before both Benjamin and Scholem would unequivocally reject the philosophical results of Unger's discipleship to Goldberg (whose "impure aura" so repelled Benjamin that he found it impossible to even shake Goldberg's hand15), Benjamin invited Unger to join the inner circle of that quintessentially Benjaminian expression of Jewish sensibilities, the journal Angelus NOVUS.16 After the first issue, which was to feature contributions by Agnon, Scholem, Benjamin, Plorens Christian Rang, and others, Benjamin was planning to publish an essay by Erich Unger entided "Die Gewalt des Rahmens" [The Power of the Frame], in which he argues against the unboundedness of our conception that "the responsibility for what happens always becomes, must always become the burden of the future, the coming: the idea, that we always live in the middle of the day-has its precise counterpart in the thought of the ancients, and nothing is perhaps so urgent as to demonstrate the strength of the middle, to release the creative forces through the power of the frame."17This notion undeniably has its analogue in that conception of history which Stephane Moses recendy argued marks the crossroads of the conceptions of Benjamin, Scholem, and Rosenzweig, especially in the Jewish notion of the

14 Scholem's essay on Abraham Cardozo appeared in the special issue of Der Jude celebrating Buber's fiftieth birthday, and begins its penultimate paragraph with the lines: "So wurde, noch bevor die Machte der Weltgeschichte das Judentum im 19. Jahrhundert aufwiihlten, seine Wirklichkeit von innen her mit Zerfall bedroht. Schon damals drohte die "Wirklichkeit der Hebraer", der Raum des Judenturns, zu jener Chimare zu werden, als die sie seitdem immer wieder in gro~en Augenblicken der ji.idischen Geschichte zu zerflie~en droht, den unbereiten Pathos nicht anders als der unpathetischen Selbstversunkenheit des Geschwatzes." (p. 139). Scholem confirms the polemical intent in his annotation of Benjamin's Brieje, p. 481, note 6. Cf. Erich Unger, "Der Universalismus des Hebraerturns, Philosophie und Kabbalah. Dargestellt aus dem Gesichtspunkt der Goldbergsche Schrift 'Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer'. Eine Entgegnung auf G. Scholems 'Die Theologie des Sabbatianismus in Lichte Abraham Cardozos'" (ca. 1929), in: Erich Unger, Vom b'xpressionismus zum Mythos des Hebraertums. Schriften 1909 bis 1931, ed. Manfred Voigts. Wi.irzburg: Kbnigshausen & Neumann, 1992, pp. 97-143. [Hereafter: VOm Expressionismus] 15 I heard similar characterizations of Goldberg's physical repugnance several times from persons who occasionally attended the group's so-called "langweilige Abende" (boring evenings). 16 The particulars of Benjamin's plans for the journal as well as the history of its failure in the face of delinquent manuscripts not keeping pace with spiralling inflation are documented in the unpublished correspondence with his publisher Richard Wei~bach preserved in the Deutsehes Literaturarchiv in Marbach a.N. See also his precis of the journal's aims printed in GS II, pp. 241-46: ''Anki.indigung der Zeitschrift: Angelus Novus." 17 Either Unger did not complete the essay or it has been lost; the only allusion to his thinking on this notion of the "power" or "violence" of the "frame" is a letter to Kurt Breysig from February 7, 1915-thus six years prior to the scheduled (non)publication of the essay in Angelus Novus-published in the posthumous collection VOm Expressionismus, ibid., pp. 40-43, specifically p. 43.

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eternal present.18 Indeed, direct confirmation can be found in the line Scholem repeats in his journal as well as the marvelous, unpublished "95 Theses on Judaism and Zionism": "The eternal present is the concept of time in Judaism."19 Scholem's non-Lutherian theses, which he presented to Benjamin on the latter's 26th birthday "with a discussion deadline of 15 years," not only provide a map of their long-term dialogic project but help refute the widely-held notion of Scholem's philosophical apprenticeship to Benjamin. Theirs was an exchange between two Zauberer, two sorcerers, neither of whom succeeded in apprenticing the other.20 These biographical desiderata merely allude to what was a broad confluence of interests within an otherwise entirely incongruous group. If there was consensus among these figures at all, it could be found in their reservations about the project of the "Science of Judaism," the meliorist ethos of Hermann Cohen's attempt to vindicate Judaism as the prototypical "religion of reason," and the necessity of rethinking fundamental categories such as myth, tradition, prophecy, ritual, revelation, language, silence, and law; In the remainder of this paper, I shall provide the outlines of a map which will represent the intersection of this biographical and categorial terrain.

Oskar Goldberg's metaphysical magicians

When Scholem remarks that "the three most remarkable 'Jewish sects' that German Jewry produced" included the Warburg School, the Institute for Social Research, and the "metaphysical magicians around Oskar Goldberg," then he is intimating a programmatic association with projects he and Benjamin shared. Whereas the details of the Institute's relations to Benjamin are fairly well-known, and the scholarly nexus of Benjaminian and Warburgian

18

Cf. Stephane Moses, LAnge

de f'Histoire.

RoseniJVeig, Benjamin,

Scholem. Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1992.
19 "Der Zeitbegriff des Judentums ist ewige Gegenwart." In: "95 Thesen liber Judentum und Zionismus. teils aus alten teils aus ungeschriebenen Blichern, ausgezogen und aufgestellt durch Gerhard Scholem. angeschlagen am 15. Juli 1918 mit 15jahriger Diskussionsfrist." To be published in Gershom Scholem iJVischen den Disziplinen, ed. Michael Brocke, Peter Schafer, & Gary Smith. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. 20 I shall treat the specificity of Scholem's employment of 'magic' and its appropriateness as a category for rethinking both the relationship between Benjamin and Scholem as well as the pride of place usually given to categories such as the irrational and experience in explicating the trials of German-Jewish culture in those years. Gershom Scholem not only operates with an internal as opposed to an external notion of the natural place of magic; he thus asserts that the proper place of magic is in the "ascent of the soul" or the heavenly journey of the mystic. Furthermore, it seems that Scholem psychologizes the place of magic; his equation of Martin Buber with a magician (see my section on the Benjamin-Scholem relationship) is far more than a quip on the Erlebnismystiker. The title of this paper, however, also alludes to a programmatic recognition of the difficulty of achieving a clear demarcation of the boundary between magic and religion in the historical and logical discourse on religion, a difficulty of which all of the authors I address were clearly aware.

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concerns has hardly been seriously treated,21 our unfamiliarity today with the circle around Oskar Goldberg is no measure of its contribution to the discursive recharting of the margins of Jewish identity then and now: If we are familiar with Goldberg at all-and until very recendy there were only a handful of scholarly articles to consult, by Scholem, Moses, and few others22-then it is in the rather unflattering guise of Chaim Breisacher in Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, which I shall return to later. Benjamin's biographical imbrications with members of the Goldberg circle are intermittent, fascinating, and too minute to dwell upon here at length. Before adumbrating certain features of this association, however, I would like to briefly impart a sense of Goldberg's work. In his first book publication-a slim pamphlet in 1908 entided The Five Books if Moses, an Edifice if Numbers23-he sets forth a numerological system for reading the Pentateuch, whose significance, he claims in an unpublished letter, "is not only philological-historical but natural-scientific" insofar as "the numerological system could not have been constructed by conventional arithmetical means."24 From this point Goldberg infers "that the author or authors of the numerical combinations" could hardly have known as much, which thus demonstrates "the incidence of unconscious i.e. inborn and involuntarily arising psychic abilities."25 In Goldberg's magnum opus of 1924, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer,26 a book of profound if sometimes spurious distinction(s), he demonstrates this exceptional metaphysical character of the Hebrews and deciphers the decline of their ability to activate their magical powers in the stasis of ritual and

21 Besides their intermittent personal contacts, which were more significant in the case of Scholem than Benjamin, however, both Benjamin and Warburg transformed our thinking about the transmission of culture. 22 Stephane Moses drew attention to Goldberg quite early through his study "Thomas Mann et Oskar Goldberg: Un example de >Montage< dans Ie Doktor Faustus," in: Etudes Germaniques (paris), January-February 1976, pp. 8-24. The first significant monograph devoted to Goldberg has recendy been published by Manfred Voigts under the tide Oskar Goldberg. Der mythische Experimentalwissenschaftler. Ein verdrangtesKapitel judischer Geschichte. Berlin: Agora, 1992.
23

Die ftinf Bucher Mosis-ein

Zahlengebaude. Die Feststellung einer einheitlich durchgefiihrten Zahlenschrift.

Berlin: no pub!., 1908, 44 pp. 24 ALS, Oskar Goldberg to N.L. von Luschan, 30 August 1922, ALS, 14 pp. Staatsbibliothek Preul3ischer Kulturbesitz, Manuscript Department. 25 Goldberg's numerological speculations were fairly well-known in Berlin and reported on extensively in 1908 by the Viennese scholar Wolfgang Schultz in an article preserved in the Gershom Scholem archive at the Jewish National & University Library in Jerusalem. Cf. "Der gegenwartige Stand der Zahlenforschung," Memnon. Zeitschrift ftir Kanst- und Kalturgeschichte des a/ten Orients 1908, pp. 240---49. 26 Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer. Einleitung in das System des Pentateuch. [The Reality of the Hebrews. Introduction to the System of the Pentateuch.] Volume One. German text to the Hebrew edition [never published]. Berlin: Verlag David, 1925.

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order.27 (fhe association between myth, ritual, and the supernatural preoccupied Benjamin in 1921, in the context of his exploration of the mythical powers of marriage at the outset of his study of "Goethe's Elective Affinities."28) The breadth of implication for Goldberg's weltanschauung is vast; in the first chapter, for example, he is able to establish a singular concept of prophecy by asserting a number of striking cosmological and philosophical distinctions. The book opens with the same resounding conviction as Wittgenstein's first line of the Tractatus: "The world is all that is the case." In Goldberg's somewhat more convoluted, but equally apodictic prose, we read: "The world is the quintessence of everything that is," and furthermore, that it "consists of a finite and an infinite part." What follows are a series of truly dazzling distinctions (similarly) formulated as theses, most of which should not be rejected out of hand. Fundamental to the Goldbergian ontology is his discrimination between the finite) defined as that which is real, and the infinite) construed as that which is possible. Possibility is not merely a formal category, however, the possible is present: possibility, despite being beyond space and time, is just as real, as existent [. . .] as the so-called reality existing in space and time." The difference between reality and possibility then becomes that "while the former is manifest [I!ffinbar], [... ] the latter is latent." If the possible is present, then an important question becomes: what prevents possible worlds becoming actual ones? For Goldberg, the answer is the laws of causality, which quite literally block the totality of possibilities from being realized, from emerging from infinitude onto the surface of reality, and from consequently making the concept of time untenable. What is time? In Goldberg's words, it is defined as:
Nothing other than the form for the entrance of possibilities from infinity into finitude. Every moment of time corresponds to a moment of the world [... J which presents itself as a singular constellation i.e. possiblity.29

Infinity is a [discontinuous] condition, and not merely a form which can be found in the finite world; it is the "reservoir of lapses of time" and of both spirit and matter. "Space, time, and causality are not forms of intuition but the constitutive forms of finite reality." Moreover, for every concept, there exists a corresponding reality, intact, self-enclosed worlds whose "relation-

27 Just how implausible and yet familiar Benjamin found such conceptions can be adduced from a passage in his Elective Affinities essay (see next note): "Only the strict binding to a ritual, which may be called superstition only when, torn out of its context, it survives in rudimentary fashion, can promise to these human beings a stay against the nature in which we live. Charged, as only mythical nature is, with superhuman powers, it comes threateningly into play." [German text in GS I, 132: "Nur die strenge Bindung an ein Ritual, die Aberglaube einzig hei~en darf, wo sie ihrem Zusammenhange entrissen rudimentar iiberdauert, kann jeden Menschen Halt gegen die Natur versprechen. Geladen, wie nur mytthischen Natur es ist, tritt sie drohend ins Spiel.'l 28 "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," GJ I, 123-201. Forthcoming in a remarkable English version by Stanley Corngold, to be published in 1995 by Harvard University Press. 29 Cf. Oskar Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebrder, op. cit., pp. 2f.

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ship cannot be determined physically" but only spoken of as interstices, which are only penetrable transcendentally. Prophecy then becomes possible because in the sphere of infinite reality all possibilities are present which in the finite world can only emerge successively.Thus the grammar of Goldberg's conception of prophecy is strikingly analogous to the notion Scholem articulates of a revelation in which the oral tradition is inscribed from the beginning.3D Yet the task of prophecy on Goldberg's view becomes a toiling with infinity, ultimately through metaphysical methods and the mythical-magical capabilities of a people biologically-defined. By specifically grounding a notion of prophecy, Goldberg's elaborate mystical-philosophical view of worlds unbound gives us a metaphysical scaffolding for those very kinds of experience Benjamin criticized Kant for not allowing in that famous line "A philosophy cannot be true which does not allow for and cannot explicate the possibility of divination from coffee grounds."31 This very preoccupation with the possibility of prophecy represents a common concern within the disparate projects of all the thinkers I am discussing. As early as 1918, Scholem expresses frustration in his journal that: "It is the fault of the Jews that they have not developed their own view of the prophets up to now."32And Benjamin, in his late work, builds the prohibition of the Jews to investigate the future into his conception of history.33 The power of Unger's reflections as well as the confluence of speculation about myth and violence in Unger's political and theological thinking explains Benjamin's attraction to his ideas, despite the proximity of Goldberg's less intuitively plausible positions and Scholem's open antipathy for

30 Cf. Gershom Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism," The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971, pp.

282-303. 31 Scholem, JJ7alterBe'!Jamin. The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981, p. 59 (trans. emended). 32 The context is an unpublished note of July 23, 1918 on the Christian conception of prophecy: "Schon Grotius hat den beriihmten Vers, den man mit Unrecht durch falsche Ubersetzung zum Eckstein der christlichen Auffassung der Prophetie gemacht hat: Glaubt ihr nicht so bleibt ihr nicht, so iibersetzt: Wollet ihr denn nicht glauben, wenn ihr nicht beglaubigt werdet. Er mu~ also auch schon ein Haar in der Suppe gefunden haben. Vielleicht hei~t es auch als Schwur, und vielleicht kann <man> im zweiten Teil start [Teamehnu] lesen [Teemaheynu] <:> ihr werdet nicht verworfen werden. "Wahrlich, ihr k6nnt Vertrauen haben, denn (oder da~) ihr werdet nicht verworfen werden." Dann haben die Gojim das Nachsehen! Das pa~t auch in den Zusammenhang ganz hinein. Der jiidische Prophet hat und hat nun einmal keine christlichen Unordnungen gepredigt und die "Emunah" kann nicht mit Paulus verwechselt werden." Earlier, in the gloss on Agnon's story, he notes: "The comprehensibility of all revelation is a problem. Just how genuine prophecy embodies the orders of language, was not felt to be suspect in the skeptical generation preceding ours." 33 At stake here is moreover the entire post-Kantian notion of the Grenzbegriff, a crucial concept for Benjamin, Goldberg, and Unger. Benjamin was a studied thinker of extremes, as testified to by his reflections on the 'Grenzform' or 'Grenznatur' [GS I, 366, 263] in his magnum opus on the German mourning play, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [GS I, 203-430].

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the entire clique. The immediate impetus for Benjamin's interest was a pair of lectures Unger held on "Philosophy and Politics" in January 1921, in connection with his first book publication, a slim and densely-constructed brochure entitled Politik und Metaphysik.34 In the manuscript of the second of these lectures, Unger reflects upon the age-old abyss between the theory and practice of politics. Both theory and practice fail in traditional political philosophy: Practice, which only employs theory for purposive-rational ends, and theory, whose sole ambition is the characterization of a certain catastrophic, political reality without respect to actual political conditions or consequences. "Political philosophy," Unger writes, "stands between theory and practice and foregoes the fundamental law of every success: Only the most radical theoretical construction courses serviceably into praxis-[ and] praxis only becomes tangible for theory, when one unfurls the entire alternative of which it is one pole." The political philospher is always at a disadvantage with respect to the actual politics, which either makes use of or moves away from the use of the "de facto powers" [faktischen Gewalten] available to it. These kinds of passages make the remarkable fact less surprising that two of the very few footnotes to Benjamin's most important statement on myth and violence prior to his magisterial essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities-"The Critique of Violence"35-are in fact references to Erich Unger's critique of the idea of compromise in Politik und Metaphysik. This idea is central to Benjamin's critique of parliamentarism's repression of how it operates with violence. Compromise can only be affected through "the latent presence of violence" (Benjamin), or, as Benjamin quotes Unger, as a "product situated within the mentality of violence, no matter how it may disdain all open violence, because the effort toward compromise is motivated not internally but from outside, by the opposing effort, because no compromise, however freely accepted, is conceivable without a compulsive character."36A second footnote is also devoted to Unger, referring to the case of conflict between nations or classes, and the concealed "higher orders" threatening to regulate both.37 ("Higher orders" were also a point of speculation for the young Scholem; I assume that his antipathy for Goldberg deterred Scholem from considering this point of intersection of their projects.) Benjamin would in fact develop his own thoughts on the notion of this

34 The lecture "Philosophie und Politik" has meanwhile been published in Unger's Vom Expressionismus, ibid., pp. 61-75. The brochure Philosophie und Politik, originally published in 1921 by Verlag David in Berlin, has been recently reprinted by Manfred Voigts (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1989). 35 Cf. Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," Reflections. Essqys, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, pp. 277-303. 36 Ibid., p. 288. 37 Ibid., p. 290. This notion is worked out in Goldberg's Wirklichkeit der Hebraer, op. cit., pp. 5ff., passim.

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"higher order" in the programmatic text he wrote announcing the journal Angelus Novus. There Benjamin speaks of "religious orders,"38 alluding to Messianic expectations, whereas Unger and Goldberg are referring to the grounding of a metaphysical people [T/olk], which manifests its metaphysicalmagical capabilities.

Recontextualizing the Benjamin-Scholem relationship

The resistance in Germany to reading Benjamin as a Jewish thinker emerged in part from the restrictive concerns of the German student movement and in part from a general unfamiliarity, if not discomfort, with Benjamin's foregrounding of categories with non-secular potential. This phenomenon, although it has somewhat subsided, led until recently to an obstinate dismissiveness of Scholem's subtle and informed readings of Benjamin's early works. As Scholem's diaries reveal better than any other extant document, theirs was the exemplary symbiotic exchange, the search for a common idiom.39 Every diary is full of shared grammars and concerns: In a set of unpublished "Short Notes on Judaism" from the Winter of 1917/18, a text kept with his diaries whose substance Benjamin certainly kne"\v, we find Scholem's sometimes callow, sometimes virtuoso mind struggling with a vast scope of issues and ramifications. (It is here that Scholem initiates Buber into the circle of Zaube1juden) for, as he notes, "Experience and Magic are ultimately identical. Who does not, when thinking of Buber, imagine a magician?") Several lines following the remark on Buber just quoted we find some of Scholem's numerous meditations on language and silence: "The Jewish concept of the word (and which does not) includes silence." (This alludes to the rich tradition that conceives of silence as the word's hidden face, a viewGS II, p. 244. The excavation of influence has often impeded our readings of Benjamin's writings. It would be mistaken to read these diaries as a yet more detailed cartographic guide to sources and influences. Scholem and Benjamin were engaged in a common project at many levels, theirs was the struggle over a common idiom, an intellectual symbiotic compact. Thus I unequivocally reject the linear view unanimously expressed of the younger Scholem's philosophical apprenticeship or indebtedness to Benjamin, exemplified by the both false and innocuous assertion that Scholem's "own project of recovering the Jewish mystical tradition had received a decisive impetus from the young Benjamin's philosophies of language and history." Cf. John McCole, walter Benjamin's Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 11. Scholem's scholarly historical project-i.e. his philological agenda of recovery-certainly never received such impetus. More significant is the implication of an imbalance of influence between these two scholars. McCole follows Michael Jennings in claiming that "Scholem's own appreciation of (the Jewish mystical tradition) was still only dawning in the years before he left Germany for Palestine in 1923," concluding that "The direction of influence between Benjamin and Scholem more likely runs in the reverse direction: Scholem's own appreciation of the submerged traditions of Judaism owed a decisive impetus to Benjamin." (McCole, p. 66). The overdue publication of Scholem's early diaries from 1915-1923 and various sets of theses, propositions, and notes from this time will ultimately demonstrate the falseness of this view.
38
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point that significantly combines visual and auditory categories.) After a series of reflections on the differences between German and Jewish silences, Scholem records a number of unpolished intuitions on the imbrications of speech, silence, the symbol, and Torah. "Being silent in Hebrew I understand as the following: that in silence as well, the doctrine soars forth lfOrtschwing~. Torah is in pa~t silence, but not silence beyond the name. It is mute in the symbol, it speaks in the essence. [... ] "'Torah is to be found in every thing.' Precisely so with speech and silence." The language of Zionism must be metaphysically silent;40this incipient thought alludes to the principal hazard of admitting the holy language into secular life, a point which Scholem elaborated upon a decade later in the "Confession about our Language" he presented to Rosenzweig. Even the most cursory treatment of this terse and troubled statement, which has found at least a dozen commentators since Stephane Moses first brought it to our attention only eight years ago, reveals stark parallelisms to Benjamin's early philosophy of language. Here, too, the pitfalls of secularization are accompanied by false metaphysics. Scholem's strategy of address becomes one of disruption and hence quintessentially modern. "Pauses," he writes, "are necessary if speech is to be possible-and in their silence they speak." In these same pages, composed while Benjamin was entirely consumed by dissertatorial efforts and prior to his working on the Elective Affinities essay, Scholem records a series of remarkable thoughts on myth, ethical life, and justice, which presage the position Benjamin develops on the mythical basis of marriage as construed by Kant in that very essay. "The loftiest task of Judaism," Scholem observes, "is perhaps to structure life, in its absolute totality, into an ethical phenomenon. Until now mythwhich was the world-did so, and it has only yielded that narrow province which we call the moral [or sittiiche] world. Justice cannot govern in the world as long as people can relate their lives [... ] to mythical grounds."41 Given the efflorescence of writing on Walter Benjamin's thought, it is surprising how many of his crucial themes have not yet received consequential treatment. One such topic is the rhetoric of silence in Benjamin's magisterial essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities) a text replete with Jewish themes, appropriately masked, since the very category of concealment comprises one crux of the essay.The silence of Ottilie-whose beauty is only symbolic and scheinhtift-both conceals her nature and cues us to its nonnatural and nonmoral

40 "Das zionistische Leben mu~ ganz still sein. Es mu~ von einer Kraft gelenkt werden die mm eine metaphysisch stille Sprache gibt, und nur in Doppelpunkten dieses Lebens kann der Schrei vernommen werden." !Ms., unpag.] 41 "[ ] in seinen meisten Ausstrahlungen auf my this chen Grundlagcn bezichcn." Scholem continues: "Tradition must also not be allowed to be mythical and here is another unending task, [unendliche Aufgabe, the Kantian notion around which Benjamin originally planned to center his doctoral thesis] which a Judaism, spiritually renewed to its very core, would have to complete." [Ms., unpag.]

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essence.42 Goethe, according to Benjamin, is not passing judgement on the actions of Eduard and Ottilie but on their language. "For they go their way feeling but numb, seeing but mute. Deaf against God and mute against the world. Their failure to prove accountable is not through their actions but through their being. They fall silent." The absence of a moral dimension to Ottilie's decision to die also derives from her silence, the want of its expression in language. "Thus," Benjamin asserts, "through Ottilie's perfect silence, the morality of the death wish which fills her comes into question." [GS I, 176] Nearing the end, Ottilie's life takes place only in her diary: "her linguistically gifted being is to be sought more and more in these mute entries." [GS I, 177]

'Progress' and its pitfalls

One quintessentially Benjaminian topos, the problematization of progress, not only has established precursors in Jewish thinking losophy of history, but in the earliest writings of all four of the etjuden. Recall Thomas Mann's portrait of Goldberg as Chaim which begins:
He was a polyhistor, who the philosophy of culture, history of culture nothing word "progress"; [and] he

the idea of on the phiother ZaubBreisacher,

knew how to talk about anything and everything; he was concerned with but his views were anti-cultural, insofar as he gave out to see in the whole but a process of decline. The most contemptuous word on his lips was the had an annihilating way of pronouncing it'"

Just as Benjamin associated the notions of progress and catastrophe in that famous line from the ''Arcades Project": "The idea of progress must be founded in the idea of catastrophe," Erich Unger was also engaged in thinking these categories together, in his exploration of the threshold of politics and metaphysics: on the very first page of Politik und Metapf?ysik, his attempt to delineate the convergence of these two domains, Unger asserts the impossibility of "every uncatastrophic politics" without metaphysics. In the case of Gershom Scholem, his unpublished diaries reveal a preoccupation with the pitfalls of progress in the context of a severe critique of a rationalism of time shared by the Marburg School of neo-Kantians with Enlightenment thinkers. Scholem's notes reveal striking analogies between his linking of this notion to different conceptions of time, when he writes that:
The Messianic realm and the mechanical time placed the ignominious bastardly idea of progress in the heads of the Enlightenment thinkers. For once one becomes a rationalist [an Aujklarer], that is, overcomes the consequence through brutality, and holds to the dogma of the single time, then the

"Fur das Schickliche lie~en sie ihnen GefUhl, fUr das Sittliche haben sie es verloren." [GS I, 134] 4' Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German ComposerAdrian Leverkiihn as Told l?Ya Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 [Vintage Books edition, 1971], p. 279.
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perspective of Messianic time must become distorted to progress. That is the sole form, in which the rationalist can still grasp this fact of religion. Here resides the most fundamental errors of the Marburg School: the lawlike, deduced deformation of all things to the unending task in the interest [Sinn] of progress. This is the most pitiful interpretation which prophetism has had to bear.44

These notes were already recorded in 1918, during the period of Scholem and Benjamin's joint reading of Hermann Cohen's Religion if Reason from the Sources if Judaism, a collaborative effort which was clearly the gestative grounds for the formation of their views on this notion as well as that of myth. The figure whose writings most bluntly expressed this anti-progress mentality among Jewish esotericists, however, was the writer Erich Gutkind, who offered the fifteen-year younger Benjamin and his wife haven from the pressures of parental disagreement in his house outside Berlin, designed by Bruno Taut, in 1920, and who instructed Benjamin intermittently in Hebre\v, antiquarian anecdotes, and other utopian subjects. Erich Gutkind had fascinated strong personalities like Landauer, Buber, and Kandinsky, and his eccentric plans for a social-religious utopia-the Potsdam "Forte circle"won him an international following, until the first world war revealed irreconcilable political differences between its members. Gutkind's writings are characterized by elements that are poetic, mystical, and visionary. In his eclectic magnum opus, Sidereal Birth, he anticipates some of the century's more fashionable themes, including the (re)discovery of the body, "the primacy of language, the meaning of anti-religion and anti-politics, the overcoming of alienation," all of which he embeds in a rhapsodic, apodictic style. The following passage exemplifies both the originality of his style and argumentative strategy, especially vis-a-vis the idea of progress:
Not complacent living, but wandering and divine, unbounded soaring is now our elixir. The doctrine of ceaseless progress no longer wants to satisfy us, for we will recognize, that the World can no longer endlessly progress, but rather rushes to its peak, and if we do not wish to suffocate at the world's peak, something of unheard-of newness must be thrust upon us, which is more than all that has been before. No worldview can satisfy us any longer, only the end of the world, and that end can no longer terrify us, to the end we speak the lustful: You, You!'

Despite the rather unorthodox contemporary resonance of these lines, they evoke both a historico-philosophical and political outlook which motivated Benjamin to participate in plans to emigrate-with Gutkind and othersfrom Germany in the early 1920s. This project was in part peculiar, in part premonitory. Dozens of mostly unpublished letters between Gutkind and Plorens Christian Rang detail the considerations, which were intended to lead to the creation of a Hebrew-speaking, utopian Eretz Yisroel, not in

44 All passages from Scholem's diaries are quoted with the generous permission of his widow, Fania Scholem, as well as that of Suhrkamp Verlag, which plans to publish the edition of these texts being prepared by Karlfried Grunder and Friedrich Niew6hner. 45 Volker [i.e. Erich GutkindJ, Siderische Geburt, op. cit., p. 7.

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Palestine, however, but on the inexpensive island of Capri. The project's political motivation, at least, was explicitly shared by Benjamin-at one point Gutkind writes to Rang that "The question of our departure (as, by the way, it is for Walter) is now only one of technical details." The letters, moreover, testify to striking prescience on the part of Gutkind, who wrote to Rang in 1922, in the most unsettling lines of the entire exchange: "No, we are no longer willing to take part. Neither do I want that our bodies shrivel up and are contaminated by this ridiculously unworthy nourishment, nor do I wish that our souls so vainly, so senselessly, be trampled to death beneath the soldier's boots of the swastika mob."46 If there is one preeminently crucial theme at this nexus of Jewish oppositionalism, then it is the rethinking of the category of myth. The conceptual entanglements of this theme-even just in the writings of Benjamin, Scholem, and Unger-are simply too dense to present in the space allotted for this paper. But suffice it to say, that in the wake of Scholem's study of Hermann Cohen's Religion if Reason with Benjamin in Berne, his journals are saturated with ideas about myth, on the order of his thesis that "Myth binds the individual magically, Judaism historically." This thesis, as many of the others, demonstrates Scholem's profound preoccupation with the aporias of the Kabbalistic treatment of these categories: the power of magic to manipulate fate and thus both influence God and call God's absolute sovereignty into question is a tension acted out in Kabbalistic myth. Scholem, of course, develops an extremely positive notion of the category of myth in his seminal essay on "Kabbalah and Myth,"47whereas Benjamin's notion is deeply ambivalent, sometimes unequivocally negative, sometimes fraught with positive moments. His concept of myth certainly remains as much at stake in his philosophical grammar as other key terms such as symbol, allegory, appearance, and truth. As far as the occult and esoteric contexts in Benjamin's work are concerned, there is much to be explored beyond these specifically Jewishinspired contexts. There is the drastically underresearched resonance of the philosophies of language of Valery and Mallarme, both of whom were furthermore concerned to define the psychology of poetic effects. Recall Mallarme's profound conviction that "There must be something occult in the depths of all men, decidedly I believe there to be something reconditesignifying closed or hidden-that inhabits the crowd. . . ."48This assertion leads to opposed strategies of reading, either a dismissal of the incompre-

46 "Nein, wir magen nich mehr mittun. Weder mag ich, da~ unsere Karper welken und ausgewuchert werden mit dieser Hicherlichen wiirdelosen Ernahrung, noch mag ich, da~ unsere Seelen so nutzlos, so sinnlos, unter dem Soldatenstiefel des Hakenkreuzgesindels zertreten werden." Puttnies and Smith, Benjaminiana, op. cit., p. 71. 47 Cf. Gershom Scholem, "Kabbalah and Myth," On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 87-117. 48 Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvres compUtes. Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 383.

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hensible or a delight in the deferral of a revelation which may never arrive. Each thought becomes an "intimate gulf" to be reached by penetrating the "precious cloud floating above"; these and other abysses did not evoke fear but instead provided incentives for thinkers like Scholem or Benjamin.49 This is not to rule out a critical perspective of esoterisicm on the part of Benjamin. In his own study of the German Traluerspie~ Benjamin defines the price of esotericism as follows: "The weakness which esotericism invariably imparts to philosophy is nowhere more overwhelmingly apparent than in that particular way of looking at things which is the philosophical approach required of the adepts of all the theories of neo-Platonic paganism."50But in this very work Benjamin, who from the very beginning was engaged in a lifelong search for forms of representation, turns explicitly to the esoteric form of the tractatus. The problem inherent in the very notion of esoteric tradition-the tension between the esoteric and exoteric-is a very early preoccupation of Benjamin's, related to the semantics of revelation and concealment, the title of one of Bialik's seminal essays, and more significantly,connected with the crucial figures of his Elective Affinities essay: in one formulation, how to "penetrate the husk without destroying its secret."

Methodological conclusion
In conclusion, my principal concern in this unsentimental journey into modern German-Jewish esotericism was to consider its rhetoric as a sociocultural phenomenon on the threshold between ideas and mentalities51 and not merely as a component of the work of the five scholars I have referred to. Far more is at issue for these Zauberjuden than merely the establishment of membership in an "occult scene," itself a well-established phenomenon. 52 In setting my sights beyond the specificity of single issues or thinkers, however, towards the sum of an oppositional Jewish discourse, I hope to enable the writing of a subterranean and yet crucial chapter of Weimar Jewish history.

49 [Ibid., 834]. The logic of Mallarme's own progression towards the occult is tied with his relation to Baudelaire and the Fleur de MaL At the same time he broke with the Baudelairean sonnet, "he conceived the project of expressing in one long poem the mystery of a secret beauty, whereby he drew closest to his master." 50 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 35. 51 As Arnaldo Momigliano reminds us, sibyllinic form has always been especially atrtactive to Jewish scholars. "Prophetie und Geschichtsschreibung," in: Prophetie und Geschichtsschreibung.Ehrenpromotion Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Jiirgen Petersohn (Marburg: Universitatsbibliothek Marberg, 1986), p. 15. 52 Hence my difference with Manfred Voigts over the significance of the "Zauberjude" epithet (4.6), whose connotation is not entirely negative. Thus an allusion to Rudolf Olden's collection Die Propheten in deutscher Krise. Das WUnderbare oder die Verzauberten (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932] is in fact appropriate if we extend Leo Straul3's diagnosis "that esoteric attitudes and double meanings [are] integral to the art of writing in an age of persecution" to an age of crisis and pluralism--or just the crisis inherent in a wide range of attempts to regenerate.

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Benjamin's immense achievement, moreover, did not emerge ex nihilo. The choice of three relatively unknown and only seemingly marginal thinkers next to Benjamin and Scholem, moreover, is methodologically as well as biographically motivated. 53 The pitfalls of constructing historical narratives based on the lives of well-known figures-the "victors," to follow Benjamin-have meanwhile been conceded by theoreticians of history. The questions arising from the margins of the discourse between these five figures54 should reveal both an unwritten history and metaphysics of Jewish intellectual culture between the world wars and furthermore confirm the extent of a revitalized Judaism's debt to the spirit of esotericism during this period.55

53 To be sure, Scholem's project was more well-defined and focussed than those of the others. He was also successful in creating the satisfactory conditions for pursuing his studies, whereas none of the others held a permanent academic position and all were forced to escape from Germany once Hider seized power. 54 Exchanges with other thinkers bearing on this discourse will of course be taken into account. Two important examples are Scholem's oft-cited "Bekenntnis iiber unsere Sprache," dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig on the occasion of his fourtieth birthday, and Scholem's unpublished epistolary reaction to the publication of Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie. Cf. Gershom Scholem, "On Our Language. A Confession," History & Memory 2,2 (Winter 1990), 97-99. 55 This paper was written for a conference on "Walter Benjamin's Jewish Constellations," hosted in July 1992 at the Israel Academy of Sciences by the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature and Culture of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The author is also grateful to the University of Chicago Hillel and the Princeton University German Department for opportunities to present emended versions of the paper during the Spring of 1994.