Abigail Gillman is Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. She is affiliated with the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. This past year, she was a Visiting Scholar at Tel Aviv University, hosted by the Porter School for Cultural Studies. Gillman is the author of two books: Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (Penn State Press, 2009) and A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018).  Her most recent articles deal with Jewish Translation History; with the poetics of Aharon Appelfeld; and Parabolic Style in  Keret, Kafka, and Castel-Bloom. Her essay “Martin Buber’s Message to Postwar Germany” won the 2015 Egon Schwarz Prize for an Outstanding Essay in the Area of German Jewish Studies.

 

Abstract:

Bertha Pappenheim’s Dialogue with Martin Buber

Between 1916 and 1936, Bertha Pappenheim penned fifty letters to Martin Buber, housed in the Buber archive at Israel’s National Library. (Buber’s letters to Pappenheim did not survive the war.).  During those two decades, both figures played numerous, critical roles in German Jewish communal life. Buber edited Der Jude and many other volumes; wrote Ich und Du; and began teaching at the University;  Pappenheim worked as a social and political activist; led the Jüdischer Frauenbund; and directed the home for unwed mothers and their children, where she implemented her theories of social work and Jewish education. Both Buber and Pappenheim taught at the Lehrhaus, and both produced important translations, lectures, and literary essays. 

The correspondence, which ended with Pappenheim’s death in 1936, testifies to a multifaceted relationship and intellectual friendship.  They visited and collaborated; attended each other’s lectures at the Lehrhaus (and those of others); and read and responded to each other’s work. Buber sent her many of his books and articles (i.e. Drei Reden; Hassidic tales, translation of Psalms); she responded with gratitude and critique and occasionally some of her own writing.  Buber has been called Pappenheim’s closest male friend. He not only admired her, he was fond of her. Pappenheim was fond of Buber in person, but from a distance, she found him problematic (and told him so).  She clearly valued and enjoyed their many-sided friendship and their lively epistolary dialogue; she referred to their correspondence as “unser altmodischer Briefwechsel in der Luftlinie Isenburg – Heppenheim“ (15.6.1935).

Pappenheim’s letters to Buber have never been closely studied, and her relationship with Buber is usually ignored by Buber scholars and biographers.

Pappenheim regarded herself as Buber’s inferior, and she often wrote that his writings were too sophisticated for her (and for other women).  Yet these sentiments led her to critique him, to express her anger and cynicism, and to formulate her perspectives, opinions, and values. A refrain in the letters is her insistence that the most important Jewish principles,  were simple and accessible.  As late as 1935, she lamented  “warum man die Dinge nicht einfach sagt,“ insisting she was for „a stabilization of the gold standard for all.” Many letters revolve around the biblical value of “Nächstenliebe”; Buber sent her Hermann Cohen’s writings on Neighbor-love to which he wrote a preface, but she balked, insisting that she could not see things his way. (Der Nächste, 1935).

This paper will trace Pappenheim’s evolving ideas about Judaism, Torah, education (Erziehung), and gender, as she developed them in response to Buber’s thinking and writings.  It will consider if/how Pappenheim can help us to read Buber differently – above all, his ideas about gender- and if/how she influenced his thinking. Finally, I will argue that in this dialogue, we obtain a clear picture of Pappenheim as a Jewish religious thinker in her own right.