Pen Confronts the Sword

Avihu Zakai is Professor Emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and the author of Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Phililogy: The Humanist Tradition in Peril.

"…Zakai's approach yields some insights into the remarkable intellectual history of the era." — CHOICE"This book provides a remarkable synopsis of four well-known, but disparate, responses to Nazism and links them as part of a humanist cultural war with dictatorship. By combining the readings of Mann, Cassirer, Auerbach, and Adorno/Horkheimer, we gain a comprehensive view of an ideal of Western culture composed from very different directions. This approach unlocks a reading of these classics of modern scholarship that is usually lost either in their specific reception by subdisciplines or in their isolated reading as brilliant works." — Gregory B. Moynahan, author of Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany: 1899–1919

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Age of Catastrophe: Exile and the Struggle for the Humanist Soul of EuropePart I. Apocalypse and Eschatology in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The "Secret Union of the German Spirit with the Demonic"Part II. Ernst Cassirer and The Myth of the State: Portrait of the Disillusioned PhilosopherPart III. Erich Auerbach’s Book of Books and the Rational Representation of Reality in Western Literature with David WeinsteinPart IV. Enlightenment and Its Enemies: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and the Dialectic of Dialectic of Enlightenment Conclusion: Exile, Trauma, and InterpretationBibliographyIndex