Prof. Dr. Amir Engel

Website: https://www.theologie.hu-berlin.de/de/professuren/stellen/cjv

Research Interests:

Jewish Christian Relations; Jewish-German Intellectual History; Twentieth Century Thought and literature

Biography

Amir Engel is a professor at the German department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently also a visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at Hebrew University and completed his Ph.D. in the German studies department at Stanford University. He specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' German, Jewish, and Christian cultural and intellectual history. His scholarship concerns the relation between aesthetics, modern Western spirituality, and politics. His first book Gershom Scholem: an Intellectual Biography came out in 2017. He also published essays about Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Martin Buber, Jacob Taubes, Salomon Maimon, and others. His second book manuscript, temporarily titled The Politics of Spirituality: Jewish Mysticism, Christian Spirit, and the German Nation will be published next year.

Project Abstract

Weimar Time: A Jewish-Christian Twentieth Century History

Albert Einstein, Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth, and Martin Heidegger are among the most influential intellectuals of Weimar Germany. All four shaped our understanding of time by offering new models to consider its meaning beyond quantity and measurement. This research project aims to understand the "Weimar Era" from the perspective of the debate about time, seeing it as an argument about the fundamentals of human existence. This debate, I suggest, powerfully represents the splintering of modern scientific consciousness as well as the changes, desires, and anxieties of the Weimar period. It also captures the ongoing tension between Christian and Jewish traditions in Germany in the first part of the twentieth century. The scholarly literature depicts Weimar as an era of tumultuous cultural and political oppositions. The current project aims to contribute another vital dimension to the literature by describing the debate about the meaning of time. It suggests seeing this debate as a flashpoint, around which intellectuals of the Weimar period expressed their competing visions.

Martin Heidegger published his ground breaking work on existential philosophy, Sein und Zeit 1927. Central to his philosophy was the attempt to interpret human existence from the essential dimension of temporality. More or less at the same time, Karl Barth gave a series of lectures, the Göttingen Dogmatics (1924-26), which also dedicates special attention to the relation between the trinity, which coexists through eternity, and creation, which is temporal. The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig published Der Stern der Erlösung in 1921. Like Barth, Rosenzweig also describes the relation between the eternal time of God and the complexity of lived temporality. Unlike Barth, however, Rosenzweig allots a unique role to the eternal people (the Jewish people) living an eternal reality within the confines of temporal history. Albert Einstein predicted the discovery of a fourth dimension - a space-time continuum - in one of his Annus Mirabilis papers of 1905. But the theory and the man, reached unprecedented fame in the 1920s in Germany. It is difficult to overemphasize the impact these four thinkers had. They helped form what we call time today. In addition to shaping our notion of time, I argue that their work time provides a unique perspective on the lived experience of "Weimar."

The description of Weimar as a debate about time aims to represent how competing spiritual, moral, and political worldviews coexisted. No less importantly, however, it shows how this era was fundamentally shaped by a Christian-Jewish discussion. As we can glean from the description above, the Christian-Jewish relations were essential for understanding Weimar. These relations are played out in Franz Rosenzweig’s and Karl Brath’s works but also, in an entirely different way, in the works of the lapsed catholic Martin Heidegger and the intensely secular Jew Albert Einstein. This project shows how time represents being in Weimar as a German and Christian Jewish experience on the cusp of the catastrophe.