The Pity of it All: Beautifully Written, Heartbreaking History
The Pity of it All
Amos Elon
Picador Publishing
reviewed by Allan Gould
Sometimes just a title gives one a hint of the beauty and power of the style and subject of a book: The Pity of it All is the great Israeli historian Amos Elon's superlative work of five years ago, now in a reasonably-priced paperback. Its sub-title lays out its goal: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch. With his much earlier Israelis: Founders and Son, Elon showed that he could write and analyze with the best, but rarely has any book of history moved me to tears so often. Shaped like a great novel, the book opens with the teenaged Moses Mendelssohn entering Berlin in 1743 on foot, through the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass; 400 pages and two centuries later, another future German-Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, escapes by train from the Nazi-run city. In between, one meets an amazing array of Jewish men and women who molded German culture and history in an unforgettable flow of remarkable, world-changing history and eventual devastation.
It is so easy to name drop: to list Heine and Kafka in literature, Ehrlich, Einstein and Freud in the sciences, Mahler, Weill, Schoenberg and Mendelssohn's own grandson Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in music. The fine author cannot but admit in his introduction that "[g]iven the Jews' late entry into European civilization, the wealth and variety of their contribution to the arts and sciences was startling." But only a few paragraphs earlier, Elon also notes that, with less than 1% of the population by the eve of the Nazi takeover, it is just as stunning to note the vast enmity which the now-influential Jewish community had attracted. The astonishingly influential Franz Kafka (surely the Einstein of literature in terms of his impact on his field) noted, both Jews and Germans have a lot in common. They are ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others. Both are pariahs.
Of course, the Jews of Germany, even when numbering but a few thousand in the late 18th century, were much like their co-religionists across Europe at various times over the years: an economic resource to be tapped when needed and evicted when not. But the eventual rise of Hitlerwhich hangs like a dark shadow over every page of this extraordinary book of historyunderlines the pity of the title: Mendelssohn translates the Bible into German and becomes the patron saint to his people; the Jews begin to assimilate, even convert in great numbersincluding the parents of Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine himself (whose popularity as arguably Germany's greatest poet was impossible for even the Nazis to uproot, so they described his most famous poem about the Lorelei as a folk song by an unknown author); the rise of a new kind of scientific Jew-hatred which even the great Mendelssohn sensed before his death; the name changes (Itziks changed their name to Hitzig, Cohens to Kahn, Levis to Lau); the Jews become Germany's greatest art collectors, film makers, music conductors, performers and composers. One is shaken, but somehow not surprised, to discover that Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine were actually distant cousins.
Inevitably, ironies abound like one's tears: Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of Reform Judaism, loved his German culture so deeply that he wrote, Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion; but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest. Of course, irony is one thing, agony quite another: Geiger's son Ludwig, the leading scholar of Goethe in his beloved German homeland, objected to helping Russian Jews settle in Palestine, insisting that he felt no greater sympathy for them than for famished German day laborers. (Has there ever been a more horrific irony in history than the fact that it was a German-Jewish chemist, Fritz Haber, an associate of Einstein, who perfected the poison gas used during World War I, and, later, developed the killing gas used in the death camps, Zyklon B?)
The Pity of it All is not all about pain, as it is joyous to read that a Jew drafted the Weimar Constitution, and that Weimar Germany became the centre of a Hebrew revival (!) in the 1920s. But anyone with a drop of feeling for the Jewish people might find him/herself putting down this book countless times in horror, such as when the countless suicides of Jews who cannot cope with the rise of Nazi hatred in their beloved native landspread across the nation. How beloved was that country to its Jews over their two centuries of glory? Erich Maria Remarque, author of what is probably the greatest anti-war novel of all time and, naturally, banned and burned by the Nazis was asked, in his American exile, whether he missed Germany. "Why should I?" he answered. "I'm not Jewish."
This is a history book for the ages, and one which I highly recommend to all.
Allan Gould is an author and journalist who has long studied with Kolel and supported it. He is teaching his fourth course for Kolel in Toronto, in the fall of 2007, on Modern Jewish Literature. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
