The weimar republic

In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith. He thus became one of the pioneers of a Renaissance in German Jewry that occurred during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33). This short, dense biography by Paul Mendes-Flohr, an expert on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, who died in 2024, aged 83, also highlights Rosenzweig’s existentialism (which saw him break from the western philosophical tradition by elevating subjective experience over abstract theorising)

Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until I read November 1918 it hadn’t to me. Now I know that between May and June that year, as German forces moved to within artillery range of Paris, a million of Ludendorff’s troops, half-starved owing to the British blockade, went down with the virus. Meanwhile, the better nourished British army, regrouping for the battle of Amiens, had a mere 50,000 sick. On such things history can turn. Splendidly researched, and with a striking new thesis, Robert Gerwarth’s book warns against assuming that the way things turned out was inevitable. The