ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualizes Hannah Arendts approach to historical reflection in light of the historical ethos of German Jewish intellectuals. It argues that Arendts strategies of historical representation shared profound affinities with the urgent and engaged historical thinking of her GermanJewish contemporaries, the literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin and the philosopher of symbolic forms Ernst Cassirer. Willi Goetschel credits Spinoza with inspiring the GermanJewish poet, essayist and philosopher Heinrich Heines counter-history of German philosophy. The pathos and promise of GermanJewish historical thought exemplified by Mendelssohn, Geiger and Heine, remained an influential structure of feeling for twentieth-century GermanJewish historical theorists such as Arendt, Benjamin and Cassirer. Mindful of the artistic lan of the great historians, Cassirer argues that ideally history intuits a great realistic drama without teleology, with all the tensions and conflicts, greatness and misery, hopes and illusions, energies and passions that are perennial to humanity.
