From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth by Scholem Gershom

Author:Scholem, Gershom [Scholem, Gershom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2012-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

VI. Jena (1917–1918)

My military period was short and stormy, and I do not wish to discuss it here. I rebelled against everything that went on there, and after a little more than two months I was discharged as a “psychopath” under the category “temporarily unfit for duty.” The doctors summoned my father to Allenstein, where I was in training, and told him that the domestic conflict was partly to blame for my state. My father and I met and there was a reconciliation which, to be sure, was based on the condition that I would no longer live at home. I decided to continue my studies at the University of Jena, where several of my Heidelberg acquaintances had transferred in the meantime and so that I would not feel entirely alone.

The winter semester of 1917/18 was a very intensive one. Benjamin and his wife Dora—they had meanwhile gone to Switzerland—invited me to join them there. The very intense correspondence we engaged in over the next months excessively heightened the expectations we had of each other. The university itself had little that particularly attracted me, but in nearby Halle my brother Werner was in jail, having gotten off at the court-martial with nine months’ imprisonment for lese majesty, and I was able to visit him there from time to time. Suspension proceedings had been started against him at the University of Halle, where he had been registered during his period of convalescence. At the behest of my brother I paid two calls on the rector, the well-known liberal philosopher Hans Vaihinger, author of Die Philosophie des Als Ob [The Philosophy of As If], in order to plead his cause, and as I recall, not without some success. When Vaihinger learned that I was also studying philosophy and was reading Kant’s Critique ofJudgment in Bruno Bauch’s tutorial, he had a friendly conversation with me about Kant. As the author of the most comprehensive commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, he was a great authority in this field. He did not say a word about the bitter conflict in which he was then engaged with Bauch, a conflict that led to the withdrawal of a nationalistic group from the Kant Society, of which Vaihinger was the founding president.

Higher mathematics was weak at Jena, and I preferred to study a few outstanding textbooks. The theologian Willy Staerk read selections from the Psalms to a very small number of students and did quite a good job. He had a sonorous voice, and in his mouth Hebrew sounded better than I have heard it pronounced by other theologians. My interest in the (philosophical?) foundations of mathematics was amply stimulated by Gottlob Frege’s lectures—he was just about to retire—and the reading of two of his publications. Frege surely was by far the most important thinker of the School of Humanities, a man who is world-famous to this day. At Jena he was merely an appendage, barely tolerated and hardly taken seriously by anyone. He was already in his late sixties, but I believe he was not even a full professor yet.

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