Franz Rosenzweig’s Writings on War: Politics, History, and the Globalization of the World

Abstract

The essay constitutes a contribution to Franz Rosenzweig’s intellectual biography, which continues to be too conditioned by Nahum N. Glatzer’s book Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (1953). It aims to establish a connection between Hegel and the State (1914) and The Star of Redemption (1921) by means of Rosenzweig’s Writings on War (1917) and against the usual division of Rosenzweig’s intellectual development into two irreconcilable blocks, which is based precisely on Glatzer’s account of his life. Thus, I call into question the separation between Rosenzweig as the German historian and Friedrich Meinecke’s disciple on the one hand, and Rosenzweig as the Jewish philosopher and practicing Jew on the other. To this end, the essay provides Rosenzweig’s geopolitical interpretation of the first world war as the beginning of a process of globalization. Taking as starting point Rosenzweig’s critique of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, this process is expounded as the Christian path towards redemption and it is compared to Carl Schmitt’s Großraum theory. Lastly, Rosenzweig’s solution to Marcion’s Gnosticism, namely his relational conception of Judaism and Christianity as mutually dependent redemptive agents, is briefly described.