Autumm Semester 2022

Lecture Series 2022

This year's lecture series marks the 150th birthday of Margarete Susman (1872–1966), a ‘German-Jewish’ religious philosopher and poet, religious socialist and feminist avant la lettre, who spent many years of her life in Zurich, to reflect on the interrelated, critical view of Jewish and Christian intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century on their present.
Susman maintained a wide network of relationships with thinkers and writers such as Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Karl Wolfskehl. In this lecture series, we will focus on the networks of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers and activists in which she participated, and the concept of redemption that preoccupied them and shaped their discourse – understood in the broadest sense, not only religiously, but also politically and aesthetically.
The discourses on the improvement and redemption of a damaged present transcended the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity. One should not imagine a static coexistence of two clearly distinguishable camps, but rather numerous variations of overlaps and interstices, tense alliances and ambivalent interpretations that deserve to be examined more closely and contextualised.
Dates, times and venues can be found in the programme.

Download Programme Autumn Semester 2022 (PDF, 121 KB)