Paul R. Mendes-Flohr
Man kann keine Kultur mit der Politik machen,
aber man kann Politik mit der Kultur machen.
Theodor Heuss
The above epigraph, drawn from the writings of the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany, graces a wall of the Savigny Platz S-Bahn station in Berlin. It expresses an attitude distinctive of Central European intellectuals, especially in the years before the Second World War. It is an attitude that assumes the supremacy of Kultur, with its unique access to the realm of spirit (Geist) and humanity’s most elevated ideals and values, over politics. In Zionist circles this attitude was articulated perhaps most eloquently by Martin Buber (1878-1965), who recurrently called upon the movement to adopt a Kulturpolitik, a program to renew Jewish life and institutions by a reformation of Jewish aesthetic and cultural sensibilities.
Though often draped in the language of politics, this attitude reflects a profound ambivalence towards public affairs, a wariness about the wiles of government that reaches back to the German Aufklärung, when the likes of Kant declared that morality and politics were mutually exclusive,[1] a view later echoed by the poet Goethe when he exclaimed that “the man of action is always without conscience.”[2] This attitude was particularly characteristic of those the historian Fritz Ringer called the “German mandarins,” a self-conscious elite who regarded themselves by virtue of their education and culture as the bearers of the pristine and noble values of society.[3]
[1] Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Trans., Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003).
[2] The the locus classicus of this attitude is Friedrich Schiller’s epistolary essay, “On the Aesthetic Education of Man “(1793). Objecting to what he found to be the outrageous excesses of the French Revolution, Schiller came to the conclusion that “all improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling character [through] art.” Aesthetic Education, trans. E.M Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 55.
[3] Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1-13.
Paul R. Mendes-Flohr is a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specializes in 19th and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss.
Mendes-Flohr holds a doctorate from Brandeis University, which was supervised by Alexander Altmann, Nahum Glatzer, and Ben Halpern. Mendes-Flohr taught at the University of Chicago, where he is Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought. He is also Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.