Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer

Through an examination of the remarkable diaries and letters of three extraordinary and distinctive German-Jewish thinkers - Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer, Steven E. Aschheim illuminates what these intimate writings reveal about their evolving identities and world views, as they wrestled with the meaning of being both German and Jewish in Hitler's Third Reich. From the vantage point of how the personal and private self responded to the public experiences with which they were faced, their letters and diaries provide a striking composite portrait. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism and the spiritual traditions of Judaism; Arendt, a political and social philosopher; and Klemperer, a professor of literature and philology, were all highly articulate German-Jewish intellectuals, shrewd observers, and acute analysts of the pathologies and special contours of their times. From their intimate writings Aschheim constructs a revealing "history from within" that sheds new light on the thickness and drama of the twentieth-century European and Jewish experience.