However crazy you think the Germans are about the Jews, they run at best a distant second to how German-speaking Jews think of the Jews. I’m reading two amazing books on this topic: one is S.S. Prawer’s book on Heine, the other is Paul Reitter’s book on Karl Kraus. These are old-style intellectual histories, the kind where a single author and their texts give you the largest possible window on the larger culture and society of which they are a part. No one writes intellectual history like this anymore, which is a shame. (Prawer, by the way, you might know as the author of that excellent book on Marx’s literary references and culture. His Heine book, if you can believe […]