"Kierkegaard is a Jew!"
Jewish Readings of Sören Kierkegaard in the 20th Century in Philosophy, Theology and Literature
Dissertation project by Joanna Nowotny
Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Doc.CH
It may come as a surprise to learn that from around 1900 onwards, Jewish poets and thinkers began to engage intensively and consciously with the person and work of the 'Christian writer' Sören Kierkegaard. In the German-speaking world, it culminated relatively early in euphoric-identificatory statements that claimed Kierkegaard as Judaism or the "Jewish world feeling": "[N]owhere is the "core of the Jewish world feeling [...] formulated so clearly, so experienced" as in Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling", remarks Max Brod in Heidentum - Christentum - Judentum (1921), his "Confession Book". "Kierkegaard is a Jew!" the seventeen-year-old Gershom Scholem exclaims enthusiastically in a diary entry. Such an interpretation of Kierkegaard by Jewish intellectuals - admittedly exaggerated here - is remarkable. It raises the question of the extent to which Kierkegaard's work, which was booming in German-speaking Europe for the first time after 1900 anyway, offered possibilities for interpretation and appropriation, especially for a Jewish reception. How is Kierkegaard's thought made fruitful theologically, politically and literarily in this context, how is it mobilised or even instrumentalised within Jewish identity discourses? Which aspects of his work play a special role? What gesture underlies the various Kierkegaard appropriations and what function do they fulfil? These questions, which have hardly been asked in research so far, are addressed in the dissertation project.
The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first major chapter is devoted to the theoretical-philosophical reception; Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Hugo Bergmann, Lev Shestov and Scholem are central. It is structured as a dialogue in that the respective Kierkegaard reception of the individual thinkers is opened up through discussions, correspondence - such as the dialogue between Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock - and academic replications. This dialogical approach to the material takes into account the fact that Kierkegaard became interesting in an intellectual network and that a 'Jewish' reception was thus only constituted through its discursive negotiation. The individual interpretations of Kierkegaard stand in the field of tension of identity discourses: Kierkegaard was on the one hand connectable for Jews from the narrower and wider environment of Jewish renewal efforts in German-speaking Central Europe, but on the other hand also problematic as a Christian.
One subchapter is devoted to the implicitly productive reception of Kierkegaard in the dialogical philosophies of Buber and Rosenzweig; Kierkegaard becomes relevant there above all as a thinker of self-development on the basis of the relationship to God. From there, the second major part of the dissertation takes on the hitherto little researched literary reception of Kierkegaard, which also proceeds mostly implicitly and productively reshapes what is read (or heard). The focus is on three very different writers of the so-called 'Prague Circle', who in turn discussed Kierkegaard in correspondence and interacted with the field of discourse that was dealt with in the section on theoretical reception: Max Brod, who processed Kierkegaard in roughly equal parts in theoretical treatises and literary texts, Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel. The literary analyses of individual texts illustrate the many points of contact that Kierkegaard was able to offer his readership in Jewish modernity.