## 1. Biography



Susman was born on October 14, 1872, in Hamburg, Germany to a
well-situated, Jewish, middle-class family. In 1882, the family moved
to Zurich, Switzerland, where Susman attended primary school and the
gymnasium. While her father was supportive of her as a poet, arranging
for a private publication of a volume of her poetry on the occasion of
her twentieth birthday, he staunchly opposed her wish to study. In
1894, after his death, the family returned to Germany to settle in
Hanover. In order to allow Susman to study, her older sister Paula
assumed sole responsibility for the care of their ailing mother. After
studying painting in Dusseldorf and Paris, Susman began to study
philosophy in Munich with Theodor Lipps. She subsequently moved to
Berlin, where she studied with Georg Simmel, becoming a regular
participant in his after-hours private discussion group. In 1906,
Susman married a fellow painter, Eduard von Bendemann. Though
initially willing to comply with his parents' request that, as a
condition of their marriage, she convert to Christianity, Susman
decided the day before her baptism that it was impossible for her to
abandon Judaism. Her parents-in-law accepted her decision. The same
year, Georg Simmel published his book *Religion* as part of
Martin Buber's series *Society: Series in
Social-Psychological Studies*, dedicating it to Susman and Gertrud
Kantorowicz.



From 1907 to 1932, she was a regular contributor to the
*Frankfurter Zeitung*. During this time, she reviewed new
publications in literature and philosophy, often with a particular
focus on the German-Jewish experience. From 1912 to 1915, she lived
with her family in Ruschlikon, near Zurich. The family returned
to Germany in 1915, first living in Frankfurt and then, beginning in
1919, living on a farm close to the Swiss border in Sackingen on
the Rhine. Although inspired by the vision of Gustav Landauer and the
life reform movement to move to the countryside to get away from the
postwar chaos in Frankfurt, the long hours of work on the farm left
Susman only with the nights for reading (Susman 1964: 96).



Susman's review of Franz Rosenzweig's *Star of
Redemption* (1921) in *Der Jude*, Weimar Germany's
premier Jewish literary journal, which was published by Buber from
1916-1928, was one of the earliest critical recognitions of the
significance of Rosenzweig's philosophically critical turn, or
what he called "new thinking". Rosenzweig credited Susman
with having understood his work like nobody else. In a letter to her,
responding to her review, he wrote:



> 
> 
> The following will confirm how profoundly you understood the book: the
> line that you chose as motto for your essay I wrote back in November
> 18 in completely clear awareness that it is the core and central
> proposition of the whole [book]. (collected in Rosenzweig 1979: volume
> 2.1, 752)
> 
> 
> 



From 1926 to 1935, Susman published her most important essays in the
bi-monthly journal *Der Morgen*, which, from 1925-1938,
was the leading intellectual forum of German Jewry. With the German
philosopher Arnold Metzger, Susman read, in 1927, another seminal book
that had just left the press and that in her view would compare
unfavorably to Rosenzweig's: Heidegger's *Being and
Time* (1927).



In 1928, the von Bendemanns divorced and Susman moved to Frankfurt
where she stayed until 1933. On New Year's Eve of 1933, she
found herself the only passenger on the night train from Amsterdam to
Zurich; she arrived in Zurich on the morning of the new year and
remained there until the end of her life, in 1966. In her
autobiography, she called this chapter of her life "emigration
home". Her last publication in Germany included an essay (1935a)
examining Adalbert Stifter's subliminal antisemitism in his
novella *Abdias* (1842). The essay also appeared as a postface
to the novella published in the Schocken small book series dedicated
to Jewish cultural resistance in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The other
essay with which she ended a decade of contributing to *Der
Morgen*, "On the Intellectual Contribution of Jews in the
German Region" ("Vom geistigen Anteil der Juden im
deutschen Raum", 1935b), was a brief survey of signature
contributions to German culture and philosophy from Moses Mendelssohn
to Franz Kafka. The essay concluded with the suggestion that Jewish
life might well have ended in Germany and would perhaps resume one day
in another corner of the world.



For Susman, the return to Zurich was more than a homecoming to the
city of the formative years of her late childhood and adolescence; it
was a return to a place that was becoming a temporary safe haven for
Europe's refuges, especially its German speaking emigrant
intelligentsia. Here, Susman found a new intellectual home in the
religious socialist circle of Leonhard Ragaz. Her work appeared in his
journal *Neue Wege* from 1935-1965. In Zurich, Susman
also became the center of a circle of young German and Swiss Jewish
intellectuals, acting as a mentor to and source of intellectual and
emotional support for many of its participants, notably the
philosophers Michael Landmann, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and Jacob
Taubes.



In 1946, she published *The Book of Job and the Destiny of the
Jewish People*. The book was among the first attempts to wrestle
with the predicament of how to continue life after Auschwitz. Susman
returns to the figure of Job, servant of God, as the paradigmatic
figure to reimagine Jewish life after the Shoah. While this book dealt
with the challenge to making sense of the Jewish experience,
*Interpretation of a Great Love: Goethe and Charlotte von
Stein* (*Deutung einer grossen Liebe: Goethe und Charlotte
Stein*, 1951) scrutinized the remains of the German state of mind
by revisiting the twists and turns of the legendary yet conflicted
love of Germany's famed cultural icon, Goethe. Examining the
profound but painful and ultimately doomed love affair of the most
revered German thinker and artist, Susman shed light on the darker
sides of the deep-running issues haunting German affective life.



*Deutung biblischer Gestalten* (*Interpretation of Biblical
Figures*, hereafter DBG), which featured essays from the 1930s and
1940s, came in 1955. Susman, who had gone blind in her final years,
dictated her last publication, her autobiography *Ich habe viele
Leben gelebt: Erinnerungen* (*I Have Lived Many Lives:
Memoirs*), published in 1964.


## 2. "Judaism and Culture"



In her first essay, "Judentum und Kultur" ("Judaism
and Culture", 1907, hereafter JuK), which was also her first
article to appear in *Frankfurter Zeitung*, Susman offers a
succinct argument for the Jewish tradition's critical
significance for rethinking modernity as well as philosophy more
generally. Critical of a reductionism that would cast Judaism as
simply a form of ethics, she argues that doing so would mean to
unthinkingly submit to the tripartition of all human endeavors into
esthetics, logics, and ethics. She suggests that, arbitrary and
ultimately unfeasible, this approach turns a blind eye to what might
well be the most fundamental dimension of all human endeavors, the
religious one. For Susman, the sphere of the religious constitutes the
focal point of all culture; all other forms of producing
value--the ethical, esthetic, and logical ones--gather
around it as that which grounds their purpose. Ethics, Susman notes,
contrary to widely shared views, has never been Judaism's single
purpose but the means to pursue its task in history (JuK 1).



Written in the wake of Simmel's *Religion* (1906), which
painted a vivid picture of the profound role religion continues to
play in modern culture and society, "Judentum und Kultur"
argues against the call for assimilation and for the enduring and
vital significance of Judaism's role in modern culture. In an
early gesture towards interfaith dialogue, the essay suggests, without
referencing Leo Baeck's argument in *The Essence of
Judaism* (1905), that Judaism is not a religion of dogmas, thereby
adding to Baeck's argument a striking and unexpected point.
Western culture, she notes, rests on Christian foundations that inform
modernity, inflecting its deepest longings and desires for redemption.
Taking off the "straightjacket" of Christian religion
would be tantamount to ripping apart the arteries and pulses of the
culture--in short, it would amount to a collapse of "our
whole culture". While Christianity, unlike Judaism, has become a
completely universalized religion that envisions human redemption in
purely universal terms, its history is also



> 
> 
> an answer the history of humanity offers to the question of whether
> Judaism is free of dogmas and contains a living core.
> 
> 
> 



For Christianity, she observes, "originated after all from
Judaism" (JuK 2). This insight constitutes a constant in
Susman's thought; it accounts for the way she views the deeper
affinities between Christianity and Judaism despite the fierce
antagonism that exists between them, which she at no point denies.



While this intuition resonates with Hermann Cohen's view
concerning the intimate embrace the two historical forces continue to
be engaged in, the particular way in which Susman sets religion
squarely beside ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as a fourth and
equally irreducible "orientation" of its own anticipates
the critical motif that informs Cohen's *Religion Out of the
Sources of Judaism* (1919).


## 3. The Lyrical I



Susman's first monograph, *Das Wesen der modernen deutschen
Lyrik* (*The Character of Modern German Poetry*, 1910)
examines the philosophical significance of modern poetry from Goethe
to George and Rilke. Tracking the trajectory of the emergence of
modern poetry as a distinct art form with its own artistic logics,
Susman's treatise presents a critical intervention against
Wilhelm Dilthey's conception of poetry as a reflection of the
poet's authentic experience, i.e., *Erlebnis* as
distinguished from *Erfahrung*, which is a product of
discursive reasoning. Taking her cue from Simmel's approach to
art, Susman attends to poetry's generative power. Poetry
generates its own forms artistically rather than deriving them from a
pre-existent order of life.



Rather than expressing authentic experience, poetry creates with its
distinct forms the conditions to create life forms through which
experience becomes possible in the first place. The "lyrical
I", which Susman introduces here, is thus not just a term of
literary theory but also has wider philosophical implications.



For Susman, the "lyrical I" is the particular form the
poet creates with poetry: "the 'lyrical I' [is] a
form [...] the poet creates from the given I" (1910: 16).
It is different from the poet's empirical I and not to be
confused with subjectivity. Distancing herself from the idea that
poets express their innermost, authentic selves, Susman highlights the
"purely formal character" of the lyrical I that is given
its symbolic articulation "completely independently of its
individual and general aspects" (1910: 18). According to Susman
the lyrical I is the "expression" or "form of an
I". Like the artwork it retains its formal character completely
independent from its individual or general content because it is
created rather than given. In other words, the poet does not find the
lyrical I in her- or himself but, like "the speaking and acting
figures of a drama, [the poet] first must create the lyrical I out of
what he finds in his given I" (1910: 18).



The lyrical I is the formative principle of poesis. Its constructive
rather than mimetic or merely reflective aspect suggests it has
epistemological consequences for how we conceive ourselves beyond
aesthetics:



> 
> 
> Among the forms art produces, the lyrical I is distinguished by being
> the only form (*Gestalt*) in an artwork whose contents project
> the whole scope and extent of the artwork and which alone defines its
> thrust, its world. (1910: 19)
> 
> 
> 



The lyrical I, in other words projects a world view or particular way
to see and experience the world as a whole. It is however not the
subjective representation of an "empirical I" but the
"objective form of the I" that the poem contrives (1910:
19). The lyrical I is, as it were, the esthetic expression of the
individual's unique and irreducible incommensurability in the
act of symbolic representation: "For every individual is
incommensurable in relation to every other" (1910: 21). The
project of expressing the singularity of the individual, Susman notes,
is delivered from the individual's incommensurability by way of
symbolic representation:



> 
> 
> For precisely the incommensurable of the individual [*des
> Individuellen*], which is the world's true infinity, is the
> content of the symbol. (1910: 21f.)
> 
> 
> 



Susman understands the symbol thus as a poetic means of expressing
diversity rather than uniform unity. The symbol allows for the
expression of the individual's incommensurability in a language
in which the word's fecundity produces the poetic experience.
Poetry is transformative because it uses language abstractly as well
as in a concrete manner. This unique combination is for Susman what
defines its symbolic use (1910: 23f.). The development of modern
poetry consists in this process of symbolizing the modern experience,
a process iterated in the articulations of the diversity of lyrical
I's it brings forth. As a result, poetry must be understood as
performing a philosophically critical task, a task that Susman
describes in terms that can be read as summarizing Simmel's
thought succinctly: "Form presents existence for us. To form
means to give the things their existence for us" (1910: 91).


## 4. *Of the Meaning of Love*



*Vom Sinn der Liebe* (*Of the Meaning of Love*, 1912)
marks Susman's debut as a philosopher. With this monograph,
Susman enters a field of inquiry hitherto exclusively reserved to men;
she responds to this challenge by making love the central subject of
her investigation. Articulating a metaphysical discourse of her own,
she highlights lacunae left by a philosophical discourse determined by
male sensitivities. In his essay "The Relative and the Absolute
in the Problem of the Sexes" (1911), Simmel had, just a year
earlier, analyzed the predicament of the discursive silencing of
women, going so far as to cast the understanding of women's
concerns as a sheer cognitive impossibility for the male world (Simmel
1911 [2001 and 1984]). A theory and metaphysics of love, he noted two
years later, in "The Problem of Fate" (1913), shortly
after the publication of Susman's monograph, was "just as
important as the theory of knowledge and the metaphysics of
art". There, Simmel had wondered where except in the one-sided
attempts by Plato and Schopenhauer philosophy had in earnest discussed
the question of what is love (Simmel 1913 [2001: 483 and 2007: 78]).
The dedication of Susman's book to Simmel's wife Gertrud
further highlights the philosophical affinity with Simmel and his
wife. By taking a subject traditionally deemed a women's issue
seriously and attending to it in a philosophically comprehensive
manner, Susman took charge of a subject that since Augustine had been
relegated to the domain of theology and since Kant had become a matter
of moral philosophy. Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche changed much
when they continued to theorize love from a purely male-defined
perspective.



Susman's book presents a critical intervention that shows that
love is not just a fundamental, formative force in human life but
deserves comprehensive theoretical attention. In making love the
subject of, and prism for, philosophical exploration, Susman
reimagines philosophical discourse as a more inclusive practice of
thinking which opens direct lines of inquiry into the exigencies and
existential sensibilities of the time. Inspired by the new forms of
philosophical investigations initiated by Simmel and Henri Bergson,
whose German translation of *Introduction to Metaphysics* by
Susman was published in 1909 by arrangement of Simmel, Susman argues
the exploration of the question of the status of women and gender must
be metaphysically central to, or constitutive of, a philosophy that
wishes to live up to the claim of inclusive universalism.



In Part 1, Susman highlights how love is not only a force that arises
from the individual but the power that produces the individual in the
first place.



> 
> 
> Love arises from life's great darkness as the longing for form,
> a longing that forces ever higher forms up to the human individual in
> which it experiences its victory over death, leading beyond life into
> eternity. (1912: 20)
> 
> 
> 



Embedded in the dynamics of the forces of life, love is a primordial
life force that precedes but also informs the process of
individuation. It defies conceptual grasp as its roots reach deeper
than the sphere of the mind. While love eludes the firm grasp of the
concept, it opens our eyes to the profound alterity of the other. Love
and alterity are intimately intertwined and produce aporetic tension:
How to reconcile alterity, construed as a condition for love, with the
desire for union? Susman describes the paradoxical nature of love this
way:



> 
> 
> Love is to suffer being Other [*Anderssein*] and to more
> profoundly suffer being One [*Einssein*]--and its eternal
> demand is to reconcile the being Other with the being One. (1912:
> 33)
> 
> 
> 



The very union of souls would destroy precisely the individuation that
makes each the love object of the other (1912: 45). Love



> 
> 
> can never grasp the essence of the Other because their essence cannot
> be experienced under the category of form. Where there is essence
> there is form no longer. (1912: 44)
> 
> 
> 



As a result, the You emerges as that which remains out of reach (1912:
51f.). Love can only approximately represent the Other through
symbolizations that reflect the Other's life and actions. The
incommensurability of the You, moreover, is what facilitates our
individuation. All of this implies that love is not in itself an
ultimate answer to anything, but it is the relationship that can
either confuse or clarify our relationship with everything. Even the
deepest kind of love cannot provide us with the ultimate meaning of
our lives, but love is what makes the meaning of our lives legible
(1912: 49). Susman's ideas presciently articulate critical
concerns that return in the work of Buber and Levinas. Buber's
*I and Thou* (1923) offers a strikingly similar description of
the deep paradoxical structure of the otherness of self and other
while Levinas's insistence on the unbridgeable difference
between myself and a structure of alterity constitutive for human
existence shares its metaphysical and phenomenological concerns with
Susman.



In Part 2 of the book, Susman plumbs the tragic dimension of love that
in modern life assumes a new form. No longer "the pure tragic of
an incursion of an absolute into life" that it had been taken to
be in the past, the tragedy of love in the modern world consists in
the fact that the very force of love for the singular drives object
and desire increasingly further apart (1912: 81):



> 
> 
> Only in infinity are the parallel ascending flames permitted to touch
> each other--there where they no longer feel each other. (1912:
> 82)
> 
> 
> 



While Tristan and Isolde, who together constitute the purest prototype
of the past's conception of love, are a reminder of love's
absolute and all-consuming power, the individuated, modern soul
suffers from the metaphysical loneliness that love so painfully
inflicts (1912: 83).



Besides this individuating aspect of love, there is love's
sexual aspect (*geschlechtliche Bestimmtheit*, 1912: 84), which
Susman explores in Part 3. An appreciation of the nexus between love
and sexuality is fundamental for a deeper understanding of the human
condition. The notion of *das Geschlechtliche* includes,
besides sexuality, with its sensual, affective, and animal aspects,
all that exists and drives us while remaining below the threshold of
consciousness: everything which exceeds the life of the conscious mind
and even that which extends to the depths of the conditions of life
and its reproductive arrangements:



> 
> 
> In the duality of its sexuality (*das Geschlecht*) the human
> being, to whom life serves, had to become subject to life. (1912:
> 87)
> 
> 
> 



Humanity's attempts at denial and suppression through askesis
have only highlighted the fundamental inseparability of
*Geschlecht* and love (1912: 93).



Part 4 examines how the difference of *Geschlecht* sets the
sexes apart in more ways than simply with regard to sexuality. As
Susman argues, this difference is rooted in the depths of the
"blind life's" interference with individual life
(1912: 105). The law of begetting and birthing structures the lives of
men and women in profoundly different ways. Man's relation to
objectivity and tendency to posit values above and beyond himself,
Susman suggests, is oriented to the outside, or what stands apart. Man
as a creating, constructing being is outside-oriented, while woman
returns to herself, taking the world back into herself. Motherhood and
her maternal dimension structure how woman relates to the world,
defining both genders in ways that complement each other. Susman,
herself a young mother who had given birth to her son Erwin in 1907,
highlights the limitations of both genders which set them apart from
one another. The world according to man, she argues, requires a
radical rethinking from woman's perspective. Unlike romantic
accounts of birth-giving and motherhood that celebrate human
reproduction as a higher transcendental goal while reinforcing
conventional patterns of gender roles, Susman's does not suggest
that woman has a more direct and immediate link to life and reality.
She has neither an ontological advantage over man, nor an ontological
disadvantage: the difference between men and women is just that:
alterity rather than one-sided inadequacy.



Women, then, have no less access to the metaphysical than men, though
the kind of access they have is distinct: it is different from and
complements, rather than falls short of, the access that men have.
Susman suggests that, for better or for worse, both sexes depend on
each other in every aspect of their existence. Their relationship is
thus based on a reciprocally complementary difference whose divisive
force makes the experience of love profoundly different for each.
While the act of love might unite them, birth not only forms the new
unit of a family but causes differences between woman and man to
proliferate.



As Susman notes, rather than an unproblematic dyad of mother and
child, the woman finds in pregnancy and birth "the Other, the
Alien, Life" (1912: 109). Rather than pure bliss, motherhood is
a difficult and conflicted experience: the woman finds her life
entangled with another being's life, but, once she gives birth,
this life is no longer hers but one she has to allow to be its own
(1912: 110). Susman argues a resolute departure from a
Christian-inflected discourse on birthing, motherhood, and family. Her
move to demythologize motherhood and expose the strange and
challenging experiences that come with it discards the theologically
committed register of sacredness and transcendence, replacing it with
a metaphysics of life that is pointedly immanent. Her disenchanted
approach to motherhood, which operates as a critique of traditional
notions of gender roles, resonates with Derrida's exposure of
the assumed wholesomeness and sanctity of the mother-child relation as
profoundly problematic (Derrida, *Circumfessions*).



While man's life, akin to a Promethean seeker and bringer of
light, involves creation and a kind of destruction that respects no
form, woman's life is, in keeping with her nature, embedded in
the world of matter and becoming; her destiny forms her as
life's immediate hold on her asserts its power. Man, on the
other hand, is, in keeping with his nature, intractable to the
processes of life (1912: 115). Contra the intellectuality of past
periods that consistently excluded women from producing culture (1912:
122), and in spite of seeming to position women beyond the cultural by
aligning them with the world of nature, matter, and becoming, Susman
reclaims for women a life of the mind of their own, one that does not
submit to and that is not assimilated by the male world. "In a
culture built by men but realized and maintained by women"
(1912: 125), the destiny of women cannot be to submit "as slave
where she is supposed to be helping mother" (1912: 124). For, in
a world where women are subject to men, they cannot realize the
mission of their particular calling (1912: 128).



It is in art, this part of the book concludes, that love is given the
clarity of expression to which life can only aspire. It is art's
power of symbolization that is able to give form to the reconciliation
of love and the "dark dynamics of matter to which we are
bound", a reconciliation completed through life itself (1912:
129):



> 
> 
> Where religion and philosophy have failed us, where they both have
> lost grasp of this dark, confused matter as something alien art alone
> has shown us a fluctuating, quivering image of a possible
> reconciliation and exaltation. (1912: 136)
> 
> 
> 



It is this image of love that guides us as we look for a way of
resolving the profound tension that informs our existence. Through
art's mediation, we can achieve what religion and philosophy
cannot: we can



> 
> 
> think that man and woman unite in an enhanced life in order to create
> a culture that can only come into being by both grasping themselves
> and each other and what can become of both together. (1912: 137)
> 
> 
> 



Achieving this, Susman argues, will involve renegotiating rather than
destroying what separates men and women. She articulates this vision
of humanity as one in which both women and men become more human; the
culture that emerges from this humanity will be "completely
doubly gendered (*zwiegeschlechtlich*)" (1912: 137).



Genuine love, Susman concludes, is only symbolized in the love of an
individual which points to the greater human destiny of love as the
bond that sustains humanity as a whole; love in this sense of the word
requires the full and undiminished participation of women in their
irreducible individuality. Susman's book thus argues that
philosophy can no longer afford to exclude women as philosophers from
its discourse because women bring to thought what men are not able to
address, demonstrating in the process how such inclusion contributes
to a genuine advance in philosophy. As feminist discourse becomes
established in the wake of World War I, Susman's approach to the
issue of the status of women continues to develop. The issue of the
relation between the genders remains one of the two focal points of
her critical agenda, the other one being the question of the place of
Jewish thought and tradition in modernity.


## 5. Spinoza and the Jewish Disposition vis-a-vis the World



Her first strictly philosophical essay, as Susman understood it, was
dedicated to Spinoza, who, in her view, was modern Judaism's
"only unique personality of truly creative magnitude" as
she had noted in "Judaism and Culture" in 1907 (JuK 2).
"Spinoza und das judische Weltgefuhl"
("Spinoza and the Jewish Disposition vis-a-vis the
World", 1913) appeared in the anthology *Vom Judentum*,
edited by the Jewish Student Association Bar Kochba in Prague. Susman
was the only contributing woman author.



For Susman, Spinoza represents the "type of the pure
metaphysician" (1913: 53) whose philosophical approach reflects
the basic disposition of Jewish tradition in metaphysically refined
terms. As she reconstructs Spinoza's central metaphysical
argument, she argues that we can only get to the heart of
Spinoza's thought if we recognize the deeper religious
disposition vis-a-vis the world (*Weltgefuhl*) that
guides his metaphysics (1913: 57). It is precisely this deeper
reaching disposition that informs Spinoza's thought and allows
it to move beyond a merely rationalist outlook. In Spinoza, the
metaphysical God gives way to the religious God at precisely the point
where the nexus of the world extends beyond the human mind. At this
point for the first time the world is truly connected to the human
being and their action. While the purely logical nexus of the world
does not allow for the transition to the living human soul, this
transition becomes possible for Spinoza because of the particular way
he conceives of immanence as the dynamics of God's internal
force of infinite self-love. This turn of the divine world against
itself eventually becomes active affect (1913: 58). This point of the
turning of the world against itself, Susman notes, is what we call
self-consciousness, which in turn coincides with God's
consciousness. The soul and its form of adequate knowledge rest on
God's self-affection extending to the dynamics of the
increasing, active affect that leads to the blissful joy that relates
solely to God and his law. This holy joy Spinoza calls the
intellectual love of God (1913: 59).



In Spinoza, Susman notes, love is the turning of life onto itself, and
as such God's acting on himself. This emphatic notion of love as
metaphysical concept is grounded in an idea Susman attributes to
Spinoza: that self-consciousness "is nothing else than the
knowledge of the soul in the light of eternity, the knowledge of its
essence in God". As a result, self-consciousness "can only
act (*wirken*) and thus become actual (*wirklich*) by
way of love" (1913: 59). As Susman observes, "one of the
two great forms of human love shines out here from Spinoza's
system" (1913: 59). This is the kind of love that does not
surrender like that of the mystics but is empowering and
self-enhancing (1913: 60). Rather than subjecting the soul to a
heteronomous rule, this form of love understands itself to be the only
freedom of the soul. In sharp distinction to the notion of freedom in
Kant and Fichte, Spinoza's is like Moses' legislation in
contrast to Prometheus' deed (1913: 60). Spinoza's notion
of freedom does not mean liberation from the law of the world but
rather to grasp in ever more conscious way its sway. The more we
understand our actions to be merely expression of the nature of things
the freer we are. We are not free to know what we wish but only to
grasp the nexus of things by way of thinking. Our free will does not
consist in arbitrariness but in grasping through our actions the
interconnection of the divine law (1913: 61). Since all processes in
nature occur in God, the form of inner consequence
(*Mussen*) replaces the ought (*Sollen*), i.e., a
form of an inner urge, or love, as the human being is oriented towards
the idea of things, i.e., is truly human. As Susman notes:



> 
> 
> To depend on God's law is nothing else but being determined by a
> comprehensive being, by a universal law that is at the same time
> immanent in me. (1913: 62)
> 
> 
> 



Susman goes on to distinguish two kinds of dispositions
vis-a-vis the world, the Jewish and the Indian, including its
Greek Dionysian and German mystical variations, in order to situate
Spinoza more pointedly in the Jewish tradition. While Jewish thought,
she argues, subordinates everything to the idea, Indo-Germanic thought
subordinates everything to the I. Both world views have the question
of redemption as their point of departure and both emerge from a
religious foundation. The one crystalizes early on into a sharp
dualism, the other into the first great philosophy of identity. While
the Indian disposition elevates the self and its quest for freedom to
the center of its striving, the Jewish, with God at its center,
privileges law, obligation, and faith as its fundamental values. For
Susman, however, law is mediated by love bound to a you.



> 
> 
> For all love arises originally from the dualist disposition
> vis-a-vis the world. The thought of mediation is
> humanity's proper thought of love. (1913: 67)
> 
> 
> 



Its redemptive force, as Susman notes, generates the Messianic idea
(1913: 67). With this excursus, Susman returns to Spinoza, whose
system of identity appears to exclude this kind of love. Nonetheless,
she argues, Spinoza is as different from the Indian disposition as it
is from Judaism. His notion of self-preservation is the very opposite
of self-interest; instead, it is "recognition of one's own
essence in and through God" (1913: 69). This form of
self-preservation is only realized by love of God: "For I am not
seeking myself in [this love of God] but God's law in
myself" (1913: 69). The identity of the world is thus produced
by love as the mediating force between the human being and God, the
dynamic moment of divine infinity that creates the true connection
between I and God (1913: 69f.).



Susman's essay is a pointed intervention in the lasting
controversy around the place of Spinoza in the history of philosophy
as well as in Judaism and suggestively argues for his thought's
enduring significance in highlighting the constitutive role love plays
in his system. Offering a provocative way of distinguishing two
opposed metaphysical dispositions, Susman challenges the dominant
narrative that yokes Western philosophy to a Greco-Christian legacy.
She highlights the specifically Jewish moment that informs an
alternative tradition of metaphysical thinking and argues for an inner
tension that pits two different religious worldviews against each
other, a tension she will go on to present in her work as a tension
constitutive of the modern world.


## 6. Homelessness, Exile, Hope, and Redemption



Susman's insistence on the underlying role of religion for
understanding metaphysics and the task of philosophical inquiry as
well as modern life more generally remains constant. Her analysis of
the modern condition recognizes the philosophical necessity of
understanding the religious dimension of the experience of modernity.
Informed by a post-secular sensibility, Susman views the religious
dimension as determinative of the grounds from which metaphysics
arises. For Susman, philosophy must therefore include the practice of
addressing the significance of its own theological-political
commitments.



For Susman, homelessness, alienation, exile, hope, and redemption are
more than terms that help us articulate the loss, failures, and the
aspirations that inform the modern experience. They also demonstrate
that we can only grasp the predicament of modern existence if we are
willing to scrutinize it by sourcing the critical potential that the
biblical tradition offers. Like Hermann Cohen, Buber, and Rosenzweig,
who likewise have recourse to the "sources of Judaism"
(Cohen 1919) in order to examine the predicament of modern existence,
Susman finds in the Jewish tradition a vital resource.



The primordial condition in which humans find themselves is
characterized by homelessness and suffering. Facing the infinitude of
the world as the finite beings that we are, we experience the world as
over against us and strange. The certainty of our future death reminds
us that we are something other than the world:



> 
> 
> And in this being other [*Anderssein*] we at the same time
> grasp our deepest particularity [*unser tiefstes Eigenes*].
> What we humans actually are we are by way of our homelessness in the
> world: through our death and through the knowledge of our impending
> death. Human life is per se existence in an alien world and as such
> suffering. ("Das Judentum als Weltreligion"
> ["Judaism: A World Religion"], 1932 [GF 105] [RPE 74])
> 
> 
> 



The need to face this condition "shared by all humans of all
times and places" is what gives rise to religion in general
(ibid.).



Ten years later, in the middle of WWII and facing the ravaging effects
of the Shoa, Susman notes that the Jewish plight only reflects in the
extreme what has become the universal human condition as that of
homelessness of the human being on earth, a life in exile; Jewish
existence intensifies this condition into an "exile in
exile", scattered among all other nations, "the only
people without a land, state, and power" ("Ezechiel der
Prophet der Umkehr", ["Ezekiel: The Prophet of
Return"] 1942, DBG 73f. [RPE 109 f.]). The diasporic existence
of the Jewish people has become a reminder that the modern human
condition has become quintessentially diasporic. As Susman observes in
"Das Hiob-Problem bei Franz Kafka" ("The Question of
Job in Franz Kafka", 1929: 45 [RPE 67]): "We are
absolutely and entirely in exile". Not only does the Jewish
people lack its own country, state, and political power, but its mode
of existence suggests the obsolescence of conventional political
wisdom, a vision that aligns with Landauer's and also has
recourse to the prophetic tradition. The stubborn and categorical
resistance to instrumental reasoning lodged in this thought suggests
that philosophy that turns a deaf ear to creaturely laments and human
suffering does not live up to its claims of universal truth.
Philosophical thinking that is attuned to suffering is, to
Susman's mind, on the other hand, receptive enough to address
the existential need for hope and redemption. Rather than authorizing
some cordoned-off philosophy of religion to cater to this need,
though, Susman alters philosophy's approach so that hope can be
recognized from within philosophy as a legitimate category crucial for
the emancipatory task of thought. But it is the recourse to prophecy,
Susman maintains, that has first created the notion of world history
in the proper sense as its vision attends to the undying dream of the
human heart to illuminate the whole of human history ("Die
Friedensbotschaft der Propheten", [DBG 134]). As Susman argues,
the promise of the prophets lies ahead of us:



> 
> 
> We have no need of new prophets [...] Every word of the prophets
> of old Israel goes straight to the truth of our time as if it had been
> spoken just now. ("Die messianische Idee als Friedensidee"
> ["The Messianic Idea as the Idea of Peace"] 1929 [GF
> 61])
> 
> 
> 



The messianic idea of world peace, this great vision of the prophets,
hints at the way religious thought informs the very core of
modernity's aspirations without rendering that core a mere
theological affair. The messianic vision of a united and peaceful
humanity situated in a pure futurity at the end of time may seem
unreasonable and ungrounded, but that is Susman's point:
"The messianic hope is hope without a foundation"
("Die Messianische Idee als Friedensidee", GF 59). Susman
suggests that, rather than being exclusively reason-based, the
Messianic idea of peace presents a genuinely universal form of
thinking because it takes its cue from a paradoxical structure that
envisions the universal as reflecting its own particularity in a way
that mirrors the paradox of human existence on Earth (GF 60):
"the overpowering law of God and the ultimate depths of the
human heart are nothing that is separated" ("Judentum als
Weltreligion", GF 121 [RPE 87]). While resonating with a
Kierkegaardian sense of paradox, Susman is here signaling closer
affiliation with the Jewish strand of dialogical thinking of Buber and
Rosenzweig. When universal thinking launches off from this starting
point, the impossible can become its liberating force. Working in a
different register, Susman conveys this thought of the impossible in
the following way:



> 
> 
> For it is part of the human beings that they are unable to stand on
> themselves, that they cannot be their own ground to stand on; they
> cannot determine their own above or below entirely according to
> themselves. Only in the stars above do they recognize the grounds
> under their feet, do they measure their above and below.
> ("Wandlungen der Frau", 1933 [hereafter WF] [GK 174])
> 
> 
> 


## 7. The Emancipation of Women and the Question of Gender Relations



While Susman's approach to gender and the status of women in
modern culture and society had initially been framed in *Of the
Meaning of Love* (1912), which was discussed in section 3, above,
her thinking on these subjects developed during WWI, the Weimar
Republic, and afterwards, in their wake, as the debate on gender and
women underwent radical changes. Starting with "Die Revolution
und die Frau" (1918 [NFF 117-128]), a number of essays reflect
her increasing attention to the political dimension of these concerns,
whose particular cultural implications she further explores in
*Frauen der Romantik* (*Women of the Romantic Period*,
1929) and *Deutung einer grossen Liebe: Goethe und Charlotte von
Stein* (*Interpretation of a Great Love: Goethe and Charlotte
von Stein*, 1951).



Susman mounts her critique of the muting of the female voice on an
analysis of the image of domesticated woman that male culture has
created and reinforced over the centuries. First formulated in *Of
the Meaning of Love*, Susman's analysis of the symbolical
representation of women as a form of domination is now brought into
sharper focus as a "struggle about language and image"
("Frauenproblem", 1926: 432). For Susman, the decisive
response to the crisis of the time consists in women taking back and
owning their own image: "The tough struggle between man's
image of the woman and of woman herself" is "the whole
problem of woman" (1926: 433). This work, which, according to
Susman, will ultimately determine the success of women's
movement, involves the renegotiation of the symbolic representation of
the role and place of women in culture and society.



*Frauen der Romantik* examines the lives of five German women,
tracking the untold story of the women's perspective of a
literary movement that claimed to be all about love but cast women as
ultimately uncreative but fortunate beneficiaries of male fantasy. A
perceptive critique of Romanticism's necrophiliac tendencies,
whose renewal Susman witnessed under the banner of the rise of
reactionary forces in Weimar Germany, the study also examined the
undercurrents of religious difference under whose sign the prominent
Jewish Romantics Dorothea von Schlegel (Moses Mendelssohn's
oldest daughter) and Rahel Varnhagen sought to find their own way,
albeit in an often palpably restricted fashion. Similarly, *Deutung
einer grossen Liebe* seeks to present a great albeit often
conflicted dialogue between Goethe and the woman who became his
guiding star, a relationship that was profoundly affected by the way
the feminine gender role determined the lives of the even most
creative and independent minds.



Susman views the rising up of women in the context of two other
revolutions: the proletarian and the sexual revolution:



> 
> 
> [T]his is the third revolution of our world: the woman who enters as
> independent human being with her own problems and own reality the
> hitherto exclusively male world. ("Machte im
> Weltgeschehen", hereafter MW, 654; see also
> "Auflosung und Werden in unserer Zeit" [Dissolution
> and Becoming in Our Age], 1928, hereafter AW, 342 and 348)
> 
> 
> 



In order to comprehend the full ramifications of women's
revolution, Susman points out, we need to understand it as part of the
profound sea change that these three revolutions bring about
together.



Susman sees this liberation as something of a Pyrrhic victory, one
that comes at the cost of the radical, destabilizing loss of all
traditionally-valued certainties (AW 347). She casts the situation
dryly:



> 
> 
> When finally almost overnight the doors opened to the desired world
> this took place in the most tremendous collapse. It turned out: man
> had no world at all to offer to woman; all his orders and laws had
> disintegrated. (WF 1933 [GK 161])
> 
> 
> 



It is not just that marriage and motherhood along with traditional
ideas of femininity had been dissolved, but that the question
"where is the world that a mother can offer her child?" no
longer had an answer (GK 165). As women experience cataclysmic
developments of these kinds more profoundly and more existentially
than men, it is up to women to be leaders during these processes of
cultural transition (GK 174). The task, as Susman understands it, is
not for women to cease being women, but, on the contrary, to take back
and appropriate "male existence in order to achieve full female
humanity" (GK 175). Woman, then, "must not only recognize,
understand, and love man--she must in order to grasp his life
really become man" (GK 175). In other words, woman, according to
Susman, has to fully own the world even though--and
because--it has been defined by man and has excluded her for
millennia. Only a full and radical appropriation of maleness, she
suggests, will render the transformation of woman into a new,
self-determined female possible, and this transformation has already
begun (GK 176). As she notes elsewhere:



> 
> 
> In the mind of the most modest and uneducated ordinary workingwoman
> still lives today a greater and deeper dream of life than in the most
> significant man of our world completely dedicated to matter of facts
> and work. (MW 654)
> 
> 
> 



World War 1 and the social and political revolutions that followed
brought about a fundamental change in inter-human relationships:
"the old forms of love are dead" (WF 1933 [GK 173]). The
time-honored conventions of binding the "world powers"
love and sex into culturally stable forms through the mediating power
of Eros have become obsolete and there are no non-anachronistic
conceptions of woman and gender relations to turn to. The contemporary
woman has become metaphysically homeless (WF 1933 [GK 163], "Das
Frauenproblem in der gegenwartigen Welt", 146 and 151 and
MW). For Susman, this is the most formidable challenge: women are
forced to imagine themselves anew in a world marked by radical change.
In this time of transition, they must create themselves by reimagining
love and sex through an engagement with Eros of an unprecedented form
(WF 1933 [GK 173]; "Das Frauenproblem", and MW). In 1933,
on the eve of the demise of the Weimar Republic, Susman writes that
the women's movement no longer exists in its original form,
having transformed into the common project shared by women and men
alike to bring about a human renewal. In a changed world this no
longer means submission to the design of a male vision: "Men
design the ways; women walk them. It is her way to walk the way
herself" (WF 1933 [GK 177]).


## 8. Interpretative Studies: *Gestalten und Kreise*



In 1954, Susman published a collection of essays she had written in
the period from 1921 to 1953. The anthology, titled *Gestalten und
Kreise* (*Figures and Circles*), features interpretative
studies on Jewish authors such as Moses Mendelssohn, Freud, Bergson,
Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Karl Wolfskehl. The volume also
included studies on other authors, such as Goethe and Nietzsche, as
well as essays on Chassidism, Women's Emancipation, and
Anarchism. The essays exemplify Susman's approach to doing
philosophy, or her way of working, philosophically, by means of
exploring the paradigmatic significance of historical constellations.
Her method is a kind of deep reading focusing on how authors and their
texts negotiate the challenges of the historical moment in which they
live and write, and which they have come to exemplify. The book as a
whole, Susman notes in her preface, is "an attempt to offer with
the demise of an old world an entry point to a new one" (GK
5).



Unlike Dilthey--Simmel's "antipode" (*Ich
habe viele Leben gelebt*, 1964: 65)--Susman stays close to
Simmel in interpreting individuals and intellectual movements in their
historical context. While Susman feels historical configurations
deserve our utmost appreciation, she does not take them to exude the
kind of normative validity that Dilthey's approach suggests they
do. For her, "the act of understanding is itself temporal,
historical"; the



> 
> 
> unity it creates is nothing more than the life of an ephemeral moment.
> And yet, all our truth and the entire relationship of our time to our
> eternity rests on this moment. (AW 352)
> 
> 
> 



Informed by an approach to death that resonates with
Rosenzweig's *Star of Redemption*, Simmel's
Lebensanschauung (*Views of Life* 1918), and Heidegger's
*Being and Time* (whose approach considering death initially
takes its cue from Simmel), Susman views human mortality as that which
informs human sense-making, which, as a project, is defined by its own
temporality (AW 352 and 336-38). Her approach dovetails here
with Rosenzweig, whose thought limns death as the marker of the
finitude that enables human existence's forward-looking
viewpoint "into life" (*Ins Leben*, the concluding
two words of Rosenzweig's *Star of Redemption*). This
forward-looking perspective oriented towards life that takes death as
life's point of departure rather than its end allows for an
understanding of temporality and meaning pointedly opposed to the
orientation towards death guiding Heidegger ("Franz
Rosenzweig", 1930 [GK 297-98]).



Susman first highlighted the significance and innovative impetus of
Rosenzweig's *Star of Redemption* in a review essay
entitled "Der Exodus aus der Philosophie" ("The
Exodus from Philosophy") that appeared only months after the
book's publication. A month later, in a review of the book
published in *Der Jude* (1922), she offered a more detailed
discussion, which led to Rosenzweig's enthusiastic response
 (quoted above in Section 1).
 Nine years later, in the wake of Rosenzweig's death, Susman
gave the first comprehensive account of Rosenzweig's
intellectual legacy ("Franz Rosenzweig", 1930). Over two
decades later, in *Gestalten und Kreise*, she revisited
Rosenzweig's life and thought as one of the great testimonies of
Jewish history (GK 311). For Susman, Rosenzweig's magnum opus is
an avowal or profession (*Bekenntnis*, GK 296); it is more than
mere knowledge (*Erkenntnis*). For Rosenzweig, the question of
philosophy is no longer "what is?" but is instead that of
the "whole, living and dying human" whose concern is:
"Where is a truth that can redeem me?" (GK 298). The
consternation this book produced was based, Susman observed, on the
radical turn in thinking caused by the thinker's return or
*teshuva* (*Umkehr*, GK 302). It is the particular and
creative combination of Jewish and German thought that gives rise to a
new thinking that reimagines the project of philosophy at the
interface of faith and knowledge as a task committed to attending to
the existential exigencies of life.



"Moses Mendelssohn and His Decision" first appeared in
1932; it appeared in revised form in 1946. Both dates indicate
historical watersheds bookending the beginning and end of Nazi
persecution and the demise of Jewish life in central Europe, along
with the end of the prolific period of German Jewish culture that had
begun with Mendelssohn,



> 
> 
> the beginning of the famous salons of the Romantic period--and
> hence the beginning of German intellectual sociability in general. (GK
> 269)
> 
> 
> 



More than his writing, Susman suggests, Mendelssohn's life
exemplified the decision to embrace German culture and the project of
Enlightenment in whose creation he played a crucial role. By embracing
modernity while solidly grounded in the Jewish tradition (whose first
modern representative he would become), he courageously set out to
justify his commitment to both as a choice. Mendelssohn's
decision to live as a modern individual who celebrates Judaism by
choice answered Lavater's challenge to explain how he could
remain Jewish and at the same time be a modern citizen of the world.
Mendelssohn's decision, however, put the burden on the
individual to justify adherence to Judaism in terms of an individual
choice rather than by belonging to the communal reality of a people.
In the wake of the Shoah, Mendelssohn may thus only appear as a figure
of a world that has come to its tragic end. However, Susman argues,
Mendelssohn's choice is a vision that points beyond what, in the
middle of the twentieth century, could only be seen as a cataclysmic
end. Challenging hindsight analyses that cast Mendelssohn's
trajectory as opportunistically reformist at best and a calamitous
betrayal of Jewish tradition at worst, Susman instead highlights how
Mendelssohn's predicament ultimately represents and adumbrates
the challenges each Jew continues to face today.



*Gestalten und Kreise* concludes with a lightly edited version
of "Das Hiob-Problem bei Franz Kafka" ("The Problem
of Job in Franz Kafka", 1929), the first Kafka interpretation
attending to the role of Jewish tradition in his writing.



> 
> 
> This is in what consists the so strange, so profoundly religiously
> harrowing of Kafka's world removed from God: this world is not
> seen from the perspective of the world, from life, it is seen from the
> perspective of God, the law, measured and judged according to it.
> [...] The presentation of his God-forsaken world, immersed into
> nothing in its whole painful and sinister truth is ultimately nothing
> else but the presentation of his messianic longing. (GK 364;
> translated RPE 69)
> 
> 
> 



Benjamin and Scholem's Kafka interpretations follow
Susman's discussion in often quasi-verbatim ways. The concluding
aphorism of Adorno's *Minima Moralia* (1951, itself
modelled on Adorno's reading of Kafka) bears a striking
resemblance to the epistemologically critical gesture that informs
Susman's Kafka interpretation.



While universal in outlook and range, *Gestalten und Kreise*
carries a distinctly Jewish note that underscores the
interconnectedness of philosophical and Jewish themes in
Susman's approach.



Embracing interpretation as sense-making, Susman practices an
explicitly receptive, dialogical form of doing philosophy and writing;
her writing, for instance, negotiates the relationship between the
universal and particular through its performative dimensions as it
proceeds. Making this receptivity a generative feature of her writing
and thinking, *Gestalten und Kreise* exemplifies this
particular mode of Susman's writing, which might well be
considered Susman's particular form of *ecriture
feminine*.


## 9. *The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People*



Susman's response to the murder of millions of Jews and the
annihilation of German and most of European Jewry belongs to the
earliest attempts to comprehend the abyss of the catastrophe often, at
least since the 1980s, referred to as the Holocaust or Shoah. *The
Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People*, published first
in 1946 and in a second edition in 1948, with a preface addressing the
foundation of the State of Israel, is a meditation on the disastrous
attempt at the extermination of the Jewish people. This catastrophic
event posed a radical challenge to the question of how to respond to
the project of philosophy. Along with the responses of Horkheimer,
Adorno, Buber (whose *Eclipse of God*, published 1952 is a
reply, as it were, to, Horkheimer's *Eclipse of Reason*,
published in 1947 and both intially given as lectures at Columbia
University), Levinas, and Sartre, Susman's intervention marks a
decisive turn in rethinking philosophy. As Susman notes in the
concluding pages of her book, the problem of the Shoah is not just a
concern for the Jews but is deeply connected to the problem of
humanity:



> 
> 
> From the viewpoint of man, there is no solution to the Jewish problem
> just as there is no solution to the human problem; the Jewish problem
> is inseparably linked to the human problem, it is the problem of being
> human itself as it is posed in its ultimate depth. (1946 [1948:
> 216])
> 
> 
> 



Working through the "Jewish problem" was not merely the
responsibility of the theologians, Susman's recourse to the Book
of Job suggests, but was equally the task of philosophy, whose
soundness could only be proven by the way it lived up to the task of
facing its most radical challenge. Though Susman's reading of
the historical situation humanity faced in the wake of Auschwitz has
recourse to the biblical Book of Job, the study is in fact a
metaphysical meditation. While it is true that Susman does not shy
away from the discourse of religion, the book's argument remains
staunchly non-theological. Susman actually follows the biblical text
in its resolute criticism of all theological discourse. In her essay
on Kafka from 1929, Susman had already treated Job's as the
paradigmatic experience for exploring the Jewish dimension of
Kafka's world. In this essay, she noted that



> 
> 
> Judaism's entire destiny of suffering in exile is prefigured in
> the destiny of Job who God has surrendered in his suffering to the
> Tempter. ("The Problem of Job in Kafka" 35; GK 352; RPE
> 58)
> 
> 
> 



Carefully navigating the exigencies of theology and philosophy, Susman
relies on the genre of the ancient wisdom literature instantiated by
the Book of Job to set her argument, an argument that grounds reason
in the task of addressing the experience of suffering and loss of
meaning, making the realization of this task the linchpin of
thought's veracity. The distinction between philosophy and
Jewish philosophy (with its attendant subordination of "Jewish
Philosophy", or articulation of the latter as a derivative
subdiscipline with no epistemological standing) is thus rejected as
the book's act of mourning the six million innocent victims of
the Shoah brings the metaphysical tensions such a distinction obscures
into the open. Operating between modern philosophy's turning a
blind eye on the question of God and theology's no less
problematic appropriation of the name of God, Susman follows the Book
of Job in its fundamental redefinition of the hermeneutic situation
through a reversal of Job's perspective. Job's relentless
questioning of God does not lead to an answer; it eventually leads,
instead, to a change on the part of our understanding of God, who,
assuming, in the eyes of Job, the role of querier, comes to pose the
questions Job is unable to answer. God reveals himself only by turning
the hermeneutic situation around and into a dialogical situation that
thwarts discursive certainty and shows itself to be irreducible to the
language which deploys philosophical or theological concepts. That is,
God is revealed in a dialogical experience whose truth is realized in
the moment of the human recognition of the limit of understanding.
Meaning itself is the result of this dialogical relationship, which
suggests our response to the latter is the ultimate task of human
existence.



If it is no longer possible to define God, then this is true for
Jewish people and non-Jewish people alike. The closure of this
possibility corresponds, for Susman, to a closure of the possibility
of defining humanity itself:



> 
> 
> [W]e have lost not just the image of the Jewish human being but also
> the image of the human being in general; the name human being is today
> no less legible than the name of God. (1946 [1948: 151])
> 
> 
> 



These losses and the unspeakable atrocities experienced during the
Shoah are entwined, and only an "unlimited, indelible
mourning", Susman tells us, can be the answer to what happened
in the ovens of the concentration camps (1946 [1948: 208]). Susman
was, in fact, one of the earliest thinkers to formulate the injunction
to never forget the atrocities committed by the German people. This
injunction to reset philosophy anew is later repeated by Adorno and
Fackenheim. Susman formulates it the following way:



> 
> 
> Nothing of all that has been experienced by Jewish people on German
> territory, from German hands, or guided by them must be forgotten;
> this is the stern legacy of the victims to the survivors. (1946 [1948:
> 208])
> 
> 
> 



Rather than yielding a fixation on the past that would lead only to a
form of victimization, Job's experience points the way to a
transformative turn, a change in comprehension ultimately irreducible
to religiosity. At the bottom of this change of mind is a new reliance
on one's own understanding of reason, the result of the
dialogical encounter with the unfathomable from which hope arises as a
messianic promise. It can arise precisely because messianic hope is
not bound to the past; it is dependent, instead, on the way we work
through it. Job is not given any explanation for his suffering by God;
it remains inexplicable, but he learns to recognize that the
unfathomable only determines him through how he responds to it. He
acknowledges that



> 
> 
> his part is not to grasp and understand [*das Begreifen*] but
> to live out of the unfathomable [*aus dem Unbegreiflichen*].
> (1946 [1948: 178])
> 
> 
> 



The challenge of the survivors of the Shoah is thus not only never to
forget but to create new life in the face of this past. The messianic
is not a speculative end of history but the vantage point here and now
that opens history up at any given point if we are prepared to reject
the conceptual blinkers of theological and teleological thinking. This
is what gives the messianic its empowering force. The argument here
has a remarkable affinity with ideas articulated in Walter
Benjamin's "On the Concept of History", a text
which, though written in 1939/1940, reached its first readers initially
hectographed in 1942 in a limited edition, and did not appear until
1950 in print in German.


## 10. Legacy



One of the first women distinguished as a philosopher and public
intellectual in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany as well as in
Switzerland (her home in early adolescence and her home again after
1933) and a prominent exponent of German Jewish intellectual life
during the time of the Jewish Renaissance, Susman played an important
role in the literary circles of Stefan George and Karl Wolfskehl. She
was also a close associate of Georg Simmel and facilitated his
reception after 1945 with her collaboration on the first edition of a
collection of his selected essays, titled *Brucke und
Tur*, and her monograph *Die geistige Gestalt Georg
Simmels* (*Georg Simmel's Intellectual Contour*). A
distinct voice among philosophers and intellectuals during the
Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Susman became a symbol of the endurance
of the legacy of German Jewish thought after 1945. Her thought both
anticipated and left a formative imprint on the writings of Buber,
Bloch, Benjamin, Scholem, Adorno, Jacob Taubes, Hermann Levin
Goldschmidt, and others.