The German-Jewish Dialogue at its Limits: The Case of Hermann Broch and Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff

Abstract

The 1945–1949 correspondence between the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch (1886–1951) and his much younger friend Volkmar von Zuehlsdorff (born 1912) provides us with a revealing ‘moving picture’ of the burning moral, political and existential issues that confronted thinking people in the wake of the collapse of National Socialism and the attempt to create a new post-war democratic German order. Broch and Zuehlsdorff variously debated the question of German guilt and responsibility; the extent of internal opposition to Hitler; the uniqueness (or otherwise) of Nazi crimes; the prospects for German democratization and the dangers of Nazi recrudescence; the nature of Allied behaviour and retribution; the conduct and disposition of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs); the dilemma of returning to Germany — both spent the war years in the USA — and the meaning and implications of exile. Beyond these particular questions, the correspondence wrestled with the complexities of ‘coming to terms’ with a compromised national past (and outlined some of the early available strategies for alternatively confronting or evading it). Above all it is permeated by a tension over the possibilities and limits of mutual empathy in the face of atrocity and a tussle over Jewish and German claims to victimization. For the historian, the Broch-Zuehlsdorff exchange constitutes a compelling, almost prescient, study in the embryonic construction of divergent, and always passionately charged, post-Nazi ‘German’ and ‘Jewish’ stances, perceptions and memories.¹

‘Did I express myself so clumsily or is there simply no understanding between man and man, and thus not even between us two?’

Hermann Broch to Volkman von Zuehlsdorff