An Unwritten Letter from Victor Klemperer to Hannah Arendt and Gerhard Scholem

Victor Klemperer, Hannah Arendt, and Gerhard Scholem were three formidable German Jewish intellectuals with radically different conceptions of German identity, liberalism, Marxism, Jewishness, and Zionism and who confronted the great crises of their times with greatly divergent understandings and responses. Aschheim imagines an unwritten confrontational, yet also confessional and ultimately conciliatory, letter that a dying Klemperer addresses to Arendt and Scholem, justifying his life path, analyzing their differences, and, surprisingly, arguing that all three figures had values and sensibilities in common.