Memoirs: Hans Jonas

by Hans Jonas, Christian Wiese (Editor), Christian Wiese (Noted by), Krishna Winston (Translator)

Overview

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but the Nazi regime forced him to leave Germany for London in 1933. He later emigrated to Palestine and eventually enlisted in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitler. Following the Israeli War of Independence, he emigrated to the United States and took a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich.   

This memoir, a diverse collection of previously unpublished materials—diaries, letters, interviews, and public statements—has been organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas’s life and philosophy. Because Jonas’s life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish émigré intellectuals in New York. Since Memoirs was first published in 2008, interest in the work of Hans Jonas has grown among American academics in recent years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684580460
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2021
Series:	The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry
Edition description:	Revised edition
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research from 1955 to 1976.  He was born and educated in Germany where he studied under  Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Bultmann. He left Germany in 1933 and lived in Palestine and England before coming to North America. He influenced ethical philosophy—especially bioethics—and the study of gnosticism. 


Christian Wiese holds the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He coeditor of American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? and the author of The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, also published by Brandeis University Press.  


Christian Wiese holds the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He coeditor of American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? and the author of The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, also published by Brandeis University Press.  

Krishna Winston, professor and chair of the German Studies Department in the Wesleyan University, is the principal English-language translator for the works of the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, she also translated Peter Handke’s Don Juan.

Table of Contents

Foreword Rachel Salamander vii

Introductory Remarks Lore Jonas xv

I Experiences and Encounters

1 Youth in Monchengladbach during Wartime 3

2 Dreams of Glory: The Road to Zionism 22

3 Between Philosophy and Zion: Freiburg - Berlin - Wolfenbüttel 39

4 Marburg: Under the Spell of Heidegger and Gnosticism 59

5 Emigration, Refuge, and Friends in Jerusalem 73

6 Love in Times of War 95

7 A "Bellum Judaicum" in the Truest Sense of the Word 110

8 Travels through a Germany in Ruins 131

9 From Israel to the New World: Launching an Academic Career 149

10 Friendships and Encounters in New York 170

II Philosophy and History

11 Taking Leave of Heidegger 187

12 On the Value and Dignity of Life: Philosophy of the Organic and Ethics of Responsibility 194

13 "All this is mere stammering": Auschwitz and God's Impotence 214

14 Didactic Letters to Lore Jonas, 1944-45, translated Ammon Allred 220

Afterword by Christian Wiese: "But for me the world was never a hostile place" 246

Chronology 255

Notes 261

Bibliography 293

Index of Names 309

Illustrations follow page 142

Editorial Reviews

"We may be catching up with Jonas. With the growing realization that he was struggling with issues that have become our most urgent problems today, nothing would be more timely than a rediscovery of the richness, insight, humaneness, and relevance of this remarkable philosopher and human being."—The Review of Politics


"Wonderfully engaging."—Commonweal

From the Publisher