Event details

This conference will investigate the relationship of mysticism and modernism in literary theory, theology, gender studies, hermeneutics, and art history, particularly as it relates to the theory and criticism of Margarete Susman, a German-Jewish under-recognized critic and scholar of religion whose wide-ranging theories bring together a stunningly wide array of disciplines and fields.

Margarete Susman has only recently gained the interest of the scholarly community that her oeuvre deserves. A five-volume edition of her collected writings has been published in 2022. With our conference, we hope to contribute to a retrieval of this fascinating German-Jewish thinker who has been overlooked for way too long. Although Susman was a respected poet and journalist in her lifetime, she received little recognition during and after her career, especially for her theoretical writing. As a Jewish woman, she was forced to flee to Switzerland and barred from pursuing an academic degree in Germany, and as a writer in exile she supported herself mainly through her journalism. Susman’s reckoning with the identity of the Jewish people after the Holocaust constitutes a widely overlooked, but central contribution to writers’ discussions of a life after Auschwitz (see e.g. her book The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People, 1945). A focal point of our conference will be the entanglement of (literary) culture with the sphere of religion to produce ethical and esthetic value. In her opinion, ethics is not Judaism’s single purpose, but the central tool to pursue its task in history (as she writes in “Judaism and Culture,” 1907).

The keynote speaker will be Professor Barbara Hahn, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University, Honorary Professor at the Free University of Berlin. Professor Hahn specializes in 18th to 21st century German and Jewish literature, as well as intellectual history. She is the editor of Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturkritik: Über Margarete Susman (2012, Wallstein) and of the first three volumes of a complete critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s work. A list of representative publications.