In the fall of 1913, Franz Rosenzweig gave up his plan to embrace Christianity and decided to remain a Jew. There followed a year of intensive Jewish studies in Berlin. At the outbreak of the First World War, Rosenzweig, then twenty-seven, volunteered for the army and was sent with an anti-aircraft unit to the Balkan front. It was there that his thoughts on philosophy and faith, on Judaism and Christianity, and on man’s function in the world began to fuse into one monumental system. The soldier scribbled preliminary formulations on army postcards and sent them home or to his friends. These scattered formulations were to go into the writing of his great book, Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), a work which was to free modern Judaism from parochialism and apologetics on the one hand, and from grandiloquent claims on the other. But first Rosenzweig underwent an experience that proved to be of crucial impact in his life.
In May 1918, Rosenzweig was sent to an officers’ training center in Rembertow near Warsaw, in the part of Poland then occupied by German troops. Here he came in contact with the life of East European Jews.
At that time, to the bourgeois assimilationist, philistine German Jews, the Jews of Eastern Europe appeared proletarian, uncivilized, coarse-mannered, and religiously backward. Zionism had tried to bridge the gulf between the two groups; but Rosenzweig, a non-Zionist, had remained unaffected.
Rembertow came like a revelation. Under the rough and not always pleasing surface, Rosenzweig found the warmth and the vigor of a genuinely Jewish life such as he had never experienced; he found a people unconcerned with the externals of existence, fervently devoted to a life rooted in eternity. Rosenzweig’s mother, to whom the letters were addressed, viewed her son’s new-found love for Polish Jewry with a growing apprehension; in one of her letters she remarked ironically that her son might don a caftan and grow earlocks. But soon she herself realized that Franz remained a Western Jew, yet one of a new kind: his Judaism became all-inclusive, universal, and of a profound tolerance.
Soon after his return from Rembertow to the Balkan front, Rosenzweig began writing The Star of Redemption.
The portion of Rosenzweig’s Rembertow letters published here are taken from this writer’s presentation of Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, a Schocken Book to be issued by Farrar, Straus and Young on January 22. The translation from the German is by Francis Golffing.—Nahum N. Glatzer.
[Readers of Commentary interested in going further into Rosenzweig’s thought are referred to Dr. Glatzer’s forthcoming volume as well as to Will Herberg’s article, “Rosenzweig’s ‘Judaism of Personal Existence’“ (COMMENTARY, December 1950), and to Rosenzweig’s essays, “Toward a New Jewish Learning,” “The Holy,” and “On Being a Jewish Person,” which appeared in this department in February 1952, October 1949, and November 1945.-ED.]
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In May 1918, Franz Rosenzweig was sent by the German army to an officers’ training center in Rembertow near Warsaw, in that part of Poland occupied by German troops.
May 23, 1918, to his mother:
Rembertow is a beautiful park; I haven’t seen a village yet, just the barracks in which only Jews are housed; they all seem to depend on the gunnery school for their livelihood. So far I have seen only the younger generation. There were also a few Polish children among them. The Jewish boys are magnificent, and I felt something I rarely feel, pride in my race, in so much freshness and vivacity. Driving through the town, too, I was impressed by the masses of Jews. Their costume is really very attractive, and so is their language (vun vannen kummen zey=). I noticed that what, among us, is characteristic only of the upper stratum is here typical; I mean the extreme alertness, the ability to place each trivial detail in an interesting context. If you tease a toddler by telling him he’s crafty, he answers you with a whole diatribe on craftiness that might have come out of Shakespeare. I can well understand why the average German Jew no longer feels any kinship with these East European Jews: actually, he has very little such kinship left; he has become philistine, bourgeois; but I, and people like me, should still feel the kinship strongly.
Don’t forget to send me Cohen’s [Hermann Cohen] Logic by the pound (return covers!) or preferably by the half-pound, otherwise it’s too slow. Our officers seem to be nice. There are tub baths.
May 27, 1918, to his mother:
The nation is “stiff-necked,” but really “a unique nation on earth”; true, we in Germany are degenerate parvenus.
May 28, 1918, to his mother:
I visited Warsaw Saturday evening shortly before seven, Sunday from 3:00 P.M. on. It’s a very beautiful town, though I’ve seen very little of it yet; I spent most of my time in the Jewish quarter. It consists of rectangular streets with tenement houses, usually built around several square courtyards so that most of the apartments have rear views. I haven’t been inside one yet, but you can imagine from the type of construction what they must be like. The strange thing to me is that the people living in them are not regular proletarians but—Jews. I did not get an impression of abject poverty, such as I expected from descriptions, nor of filth; least of all on Saturday, when I saw many “extra uniforms.” I can’t help finding the costume very beautiful.
On Saturday I chanced into a Hasidic steebel [prayer room]: on Sunday I went into several bookstores and two heders [Hebrew elementary schools]. There were two classes in one of them, one for the older children and one for the younger. The contrast with the Mohammedan school in Usküb was very pronounced. First because there were only boys there. Also, among the Hasidim the purely masculine character was striking; all the more so because the meal came between minhah [afternoon prayer] and maariv [evening prayer], at dusk, the so-called sholeshsudes, “the third meal.” The “first” comes Friday evening, and Sabbath lunch is the “second.” It was only a token meal, whether because of the war or by custom I don’t know; the singing was the main thing; I have never heard anything like it. These people don’t need an organ, with their surging enthusiasm, the voices of children and old men blended. You’ll find one of the songs in one of the last issues of Ost und West; I’m sure there has been some reference to it in Der Jude.
Nor have I ever heard such praying. I don’t believe in all that talk about “decadence”; those who now find all this decadent would have seen nothing but decadence even a hundred and fifty years ago. An adjoining room, smaller, contains the library.
The important thing about the heder is that the children do not learn by rote without understanding the meaning, as in Usküb, where the Koran is committed to memory without any idea of its content, I was also struck by the comprehensiveness of the instruction within such a limited sphere. Unfortunately, thus far I can scarcely understand the Yiddish language; reading I find easy, and I try to speak it, but as yet with little success. There were two teachers and one heifer [assistant]. . . . I have also been to the tatshe shil [“German” synagogue], a large, magnificent synagogue of the assimilated Jews, with, over the portal, a Polish inscription to the Creator by Alexander II who donated the site. Very gorgeous, very assimilated, coiffured, and so cold!
Ludwig Haas, a Jewish assimilationist, and a member of the German Reichstag, was appointed by the German authorities to represent Polish Jewry to the German administration. In Warsaw F. R. also met his old friend Hermann Badt.
June 3, 1918, to his mother:
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Oddly enough it was with Badt that I first visited the Gentile part of Warsaw. Of all people!—Haas is personally delightful; he has the most beautiful gray eyes I ever saw, like two polished metal minors. And yet, and yet. . . . He outlined his views on Jews, Judaism, religious education, etc. in a thirty-minute parliamentary speech (quite excellent in its way)—we couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He is very intelligent for a politician, very honest as a person, but as a leader and representative of the Jews he has dreadfully little Jewishness. The idea of this man’s being allowed to play the part of destiny for the Polish Jews is a ghastly one. Later, when I was finally allowed to speak, I grew polemical, but still not enough. His Judaism consists in a sense of pride in belonging to this time-honored, and nowadays quite well-situated, “sociological stratum.” He regards himself as “an aristocrat.” Really the same point of view as yours and Father’s. Yet it became especially clear to me in Haas’s case that what is really good in the Western Jews does not pertain at all to aristocracy but to the homines novi. The little East European Jew is more of an “aristocrat” than such a Haas. Afterwards, to point this up, I told Badt about an incident that was witnessed, I believe, by Moltke1 in the 50’s in London. Empress Eugénie was paying a visit to Queen Victoria. A theatrical performance was being given in their honor; they entered the royal box, approached the railing, thanked the audience, and sat down—Victoria without looking around, Eugénie after she had made sure by a glance that there was a chair. Eugénie was probably more of a person than the tedious queen, but only Victoria was a descendant of kings. The East European Jew has his chair behind him and sits down on it without looking around; even the most intellectual of them are more naive than the least intellectual Western Jews, whose life-element is tennis, etc. The Western Jew always looks round before he dares to sit down.
German city children are essentially proletarians without tradition, without substance, and hence without imagination. Here the five-year-olds already live in a context of three thousand years.
June 4, 1918, to his mother:
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I remember, not only from S.M.E.’s [Samuel Meir Ehrenberg’s] autobiography, but also from many other sources, reading of the worthlessness of the heder. So I was particularly struck by its positive virtues. In its actual effect it corresponds much more to the ideal of an educational institution than any Western European school. The latter turns out fragmented human beings, disoriented and incapable of orientation, through the heder a nation constantly rejuvenates itself. Of course this has to do not only with the heder and Gymnasium, respectively, but with the whole context of which these are a part; there is after all only one true people, and it is really no people. The other peoples, which are indisputably peoples, are all just setting out on the road toward peoplehood. That is why outbreaks of war and the like are so important to them, since only during those brief periods do they really experience what it is like to be a people.—It is understandable that S. M. Ehrenberg should have disliked the heder: for men who were out to have their grandchildren baptized, I daresay it was not the right kind of school.
June 10, 1918, to his mother:
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I don’t seem to be able to get around to writing to Hans [Ehrenberg]; I’ve put all his letters in order, but I won’t be able to make it today either. But it isn’t because of Poland and other countries of his ancestors that I don’t write to him; the Poland that fails to connect us would be between us also in Heidelberg. The real Poland, as I judge from your letter, lies more between myself and my Jewish relatives. Only Jews get nervous when they see Jews. Christians turn spiteful but not nervous. Our craven chiming in with the chorus of obloquy against the Polish Jews is the most shameful of the many shameful things that make up Jewish life in Germany. At least, like the rest of our mean acts, it has done us no good; the great goal hasn’t been attained.
Franz’s mother took note of his enthusiasm for Polish Jews with apprehension. In her letters she spoke of his “fanaticism for the Jews.” She was afraid this experience might influence his postwar professional aims, and that he might, unlike other talented Jewish academicians, decide against becoming a Privatdozent, or junior lecturer, at a university.
July 3, 1918, to his mother:
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What do you fear on my account from “the Jews”= I think you would really be at a loss to say what damage my “fanatical, enthusiastic,” etc. disposition has done me. I think I have always managed my life very well. I think few sons have given as little cause for concern as I.—And yet few have been more surrounded by concern than I. The only abnormal thing in my life has been that I did not become a Privatdozent and I refrained precisely in order to avoid external complications. If X. finds the Zionist viewpoint impossible in the civil service, how much more would he find mine. A Zionist would be as possible in the civil service as a Prussian Pole, but I would find myself between two stools, and it is in order to avoid this that I shun a job in a state institution.
At the end of the officers’ training course in Rembertow, F. R. was given a furlough (beginning of July). On July 11 he contracted influenza and pneumonia. He was confined in the military hospital in Leipzig until August 1. Soon after this he returned to the Balkan front, where he remained until the German army’s collapse in that area.
August 18,1918, to Mawrik Kahn, a young fellow soldier who had been his neighbor in the Leipzig hospital:
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Personally or factually= “Or”=—When I was born (and even more so, prior to that) I was highly factual; when I die (and even more so thereafter) I hope to be highly personal. So, probably, I find myself between the two extremes today. For these are extremes. The world was created as a fact, and it must be redeemed into personality, personality down to the last barber’s apprentice, the last waiter, prostitute, and fraternity student (see Joel 3:1-2).2 Therefore each step, each action—consciously for the knowing, naively for the naive—is a step toward the personalization of the factual, the humanization of “things.” Also a road for each individual from his birth (which is very little “his”) to his (truly his) death. And because this is so, no other road is valid, no side road, nor the tempting path that by-passes things; the road to our personality must lead through all of factuality, through the whole object-world that has been given us with our birth, our body, our time, and our world.
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1 Count Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891), the famous chief of the Prussian General Staff.
2 ”And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. . . . And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids. . . .”
