Philosopher
Margarete Susman
1872–1966
German-Jewish philosopher, poet and essayist of the Simmel circle, writing on Jewish thought and on women in modern society, whose book on Job was an early response to the Shoah.
Margarete Susman was born in Hamburg in 1872 to a comfortable Jewish family that moved to Zurich in 1882. She studied with Georg Simmel in Berlin and joined his private discussion circle, alongside Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, and belonged to the earliest generation of German women philosophers. Her review of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption was among the first to recognise its importance.
Her essays on Rosenzweig and Kafka made her a leading voice in modern Jewish thought, and the position of women in modern society was her other central concern. On New Year’s Eve 1933 she took the night train to Zurich, where she lived until her death in 1966.
Key ideas
- The lyrical I
- Her first monograph, on modern German poetry, made the ‘lyrical I’ the defining trait of modern verse.
- The meaning of love
- Of the Meaning of Love examines sex, gender and love, and its approach to difference and otherness still draws attention.
- Job and the Shoah
- In The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People she argued, after the Shoah, that the question of meaning cannot be answered by explaining away loss and suffering as part of some grander scheme.
Key works
- The Character of Modern German Poetry (Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik), 1910
- Of the Meaning of Love (Vom Sinn der Liebe), 1912
- The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People (Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes), 1946
Sources
- Willi Goetschel, Margarete Susman, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy