The Shoah made many atheists.
The murder of millions, the systematic annihilation of European Jewry obviously explodes the possibility of a thought of guilt and atonement, sin and redemption.
Not only that, but also historical-philosophical theories, whose at least related idea is to establish a meaning in history, are reaching their limits.
Conversely, the “Frankfurt School”, which originated from Hegelian dialectics and Jewish messianism, turned this into an a priori: every attempt to ascribe something like a final meaning to the absolutely inexcusable, a function in the historical process, a purification on the way to Justice, every such attempt is already justification and mockery for the victims compared to the deaths of millions.
However persuasive and morally correct that may be, for a religious person the argument cannot be the ultimate answer.
On the contrary: those who have not lost their faith in the face of the horror will ask all the more urgently what their religion has to say about an event that fundamentally shakes any trust in a meaningful world course.
Margarete Susman was such a person.
"The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People" was first published in 1946, under the immediate impression of the catastrophe.
Since then it has been reissued several times, including now with an afterword by Frankfurt Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, an impressive sign of the enduring importance of this singular work.
One will not want to claim that it solves the questions
it arises - which book could do that?
– but it is a lasting document because of the strength with which it develops its problem, attempts answers that never cover up the immense wound.
Margarete Susman was already over seventy years old when she wrote her book.
Born in 1872 to a Jewish family in Hamburg, she was interested in philosophy and literature from an early age, studied with Georg Simmel, was in close contact with Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, was friends with Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, published essays and Books on philosophy, religion, women's rights.
She survived the Shoah in Switzerland and stayed there until her death in 1966, continuing to work and being visited by Gershom Scholem and Paul Celan.
A powerful, compelling image
In her religious thinking, Susman was shaped by her Jewish origins, but also by a Christian-oriented messianism in the sense of her friend Ernst Bloch.
Throughout her life she had not wanted to decide between Jewish and Christian tradition, but the murder of the Jews presented her with the double challenge of theodicy: how can the salvation plan of a good God be justified in the face of overwhelming evil in the real world?
As early as 1929 she had written an important essay: "The Job Problem with Franz Kafka", now, in 1946, the story of the Jew Job became the key to Jewish history par excellence: the lament, the revolt of a man, despite his godly life is punished by an incomprehensible god with every imaginable misfortune for something