ABSTRACT
Her prose was derived from experience, with the evidence of a pure subjectivity identifying itself with the object. Whether on Kafka, Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, Dostoyevsky Nietzsche, or Goethe, her essays attend to suggestiveness rather than seek to provide mere information. The essays are in general philosophical, and one has to get used to her bold, deliberate, and occasionally irritating interpretations of facts. She is fond of conjuring a host of images to invoke a call to action; hers is a rhetorically and rhythmically structured prose with intentions that she did not even seek to hide. Revolving around herself as a center, what her writing attempted to do was the expansion of personal existence to a wider circle of influence. Like Bloch, Buber, Gurewitsch, Landauer, Lukács, Rosenzweig, and Leopold Ziegler, over the years she played a decisive part through the Frankfurter Zeitung in contribution to the development of the spirit of revolution. Susman was also associated, closely or briefly with well-known figures such as Simmel, Groethuysen, George, Wolfskehl, and (in her last years) Celan.
