Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship

Inka Sauter received her doctorate in history from the University of Leipzig in 2019 with a thesis on "Offenbarungsphilosophie und Geschichte. On the Jewish crisis of historicism". During her doctoral studies, she worked at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. She gained international research experience as a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual and religious philosophy of modernity, German-Jewish history of the 19th and 20th centuries as well as historical semantics and conceptual history. Inka Sauter is currently a research assistant at the Chair of Jewish Philosophy of Religion at Goethe University Frankfurt and is working on her habilitation entitled "Die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel".

Galit Noga-Banai is Professor of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After completing her doctorate on early Christian silver reliquaries (2003), she conducted research at the Museum of Late Antiquity and Byzantine Art in Berlin, among other places. Guest lectureships have taken her to Germany, for example to the Free University of Berlin (2005) and the University of Hamburg (2012). Her research focuses on late antique and medieval art, the relationship between Jewish and Christian pictorial traditions and the cultural interdependence of Jerusalem and Rome. Her most important publications include The Trophies of the Martyrs (2008), Scared Stimulus (2018) and A Medievalist's Gaze (2022).

Marco Bertolino is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he also teaches applied ethics and sports ethics. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy and hermeneutics at the same university, after study visits to Freiburg and the Hermann Cohen Archive in Zurich. In 2019, together with Prof'in Sitt , he organized a seminar on Rosenzweig and the Italian Baroque in the context of the German-Italian Cooperation in the Humanities and Social Sciences (DFG - Villa Vigoni).

His research focuses on Jewish philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bertolino is a founding member of the Hermann Cohen Society (board member), the International Rosenzweig Society (scientific committee) and the European Association for Jewish Studies.

The philosopher Dr. Ynon Wygoda has been working at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History in Jerusalem since 2021. He heads the research project "The Star and its Universe: Franz Rosenzweig between Past and Future", in which he is examining Rosenzweig's book "Star of Redemption" in cooperation with the Göttingen State and University Library.
Dr. Wygoda completed his doctorate in 2018 on the world of thought of Vladimir Jankélévitch and Franz Rosenzweig under Professor Moshe Halbertal at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a former fellow of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows and has taught at the universities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He has taught as a visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Rosenzweig Society.
Dr. Wygoda's research interests focus on the interface between modern Jewish philosophy and French and German thought.

Dominique Bourel Bourel (69) is a professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He completed his doctorate in the history of religion here in 1980 and habilitated in 1995. Among other things, he was Director of the "Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem", Professor at the "Institut Universitaire d'Etudes Juïves Elie Wiesel" in Paris and is a member of the "Centre Roland Mousnier" in Paris. Numerous guest professorships have taken him to Potsdam, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, among other places, for teaching and research stays.

In 2020, the visiting professorship was postponed due to Covid-19.

The visiting professorship was not filled in 2019.

Dr. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek is a Judaist and art historian and a distinguished expert in the presentation of Jewish history and art. From 1993 to 2011, she was chief curator at the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna. In addition, she was involved in numerous exhibitions at other museums and made a particular contribution to the training and further education of curators at Jewish museums. In guest professorships and teaching assignments, Heimann-Jelinek has repeatedly dealt academically with questions of the representation of Jewish art, history and identity. She is a board member of the Association of Jewish Museums and a board member of the Rothschild Foundation Europe.

Prof. Dr. Hanna Liss is Professor of Bible and Jewish Biblical Interpretation at the University of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. In her academic work, she focuses primarily on medieval Jewish Bible and commentary literature and medieval Bible codices in Western Europe. She is always keen to build bridges between the academic world and the wider public. In addition to numerous academic writings, she has published a textbook on the Tanakh and a five-volume annotated Torah for children and young people. Liss received her doctorate in 1995 with a thesis on the medieval Jewish theologian Eleazar of Worms. In 2002, she habilitated in Jewish Studies at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on the subject of Unheard Prophecy. Communicative structures of prophetic speech in the Book of Yesha'yahu. In 2002 she was Moosnick Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible & Jewish Studies at Lexington Theological Seminary, Kentucky, and one year later Harry Starr Research Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.

The philosopher and educationalist Prof. Dr. Micha Brumlik (4.11.1947 - 10.11.2025) was an important voice in interreligious dialog, and he has repeatedly intervened in the current debate on the integration of migrants. Born in Switzerland, he studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and philosophy and education at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. From 1981 to 2000, he held the Chair of Educational Science with a focus on social pedagogy at the University of Heidelberg and was Professor of Theories of Education and Upbringing at the Institute for General Educational Science at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 2000 to 2013. From 2000 to 2005, he also served as Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, the Research and Documentation Center for the History of the Holocaust at Goethe University Frankfurt. From 2013, he was Senior Professor at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin/Brandenburg.

The art and cultural historian and curator Doreet LeVitte-Harten studied art history and comparative religious studies in Jerusalem and then worked as a journalist and art critic for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and as a lecturer at the Bezalel Art Academy, Jerusalem, and at the Visual Center, Beer Sheva. Since 1980, she has curated exhibitions in Germany and Israel, most recently "About Stupidity, The Phenomena of Stupidity as Observed by Artists", Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2013) and "Conflicts, the Problems of Other People", Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014).

The visiting professorship was awarded to a musicologist for the first time in the 2014 summer semester. Prof. Dr. Philip Vilas Bohlmann held a seminar on "Nationalism in the Mirror of the Eurovision Song Contest" at the North Hessian university in addition to courses on modern Jewish music. Bohlman, born in 1952 in Wisconsin (USA), has been Professor of Music at the University of Chicago since 1999. He studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his doctorate in 1984. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1987, where he was appointed Mary Werkman Professor in the Humanities and Music in 1999 and Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities in 2007. From 2003 to 2006, he also held the Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. Philip Bohlman is Honorary Professor at the Hanover University of Music and Drama and held a visiting professorship at the University of Vienna (1995/96). He has also taught at the Universities of Berkeley, Yale, Newcastle, Freiburg and at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Bohlman's research interests include Jewish music and culture in the modern era, in particular the music of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe, music and cultural identity in the modern era as well as canon formation and nationalisms in music.

The historian and cultural scientist Prof. Dr. Frank Stern researches German-Jewish literature and film history in particular. Born in East Prussia in 1944, he is one of the most renowned experts on German-Jewish history. After studying German, history and political science in Berlin and Jerusalem and working at universities and in adult education, Stern received his doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 1989. In 1997 he took up a professorship in modern German and European history at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, and since 2004 he has been Professor of Visual Contemporary and Cultural History at the Faculty of History and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna. He has also held a large number of visiting professorships in Germany, Austria, the USA and Israel.

Liliane Weissberg, PhD
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of German and Comparative Literature

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

She is also a member of the Jewish Studies Program, the Art History Graduate Group, the English Graduate Group, the Program in Visual Studies, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and the Graduate Group in Religious Studies.

Weissberg's interests focus on late eighteenth-century to early twentieth-century German literature and philosophy. Much of her work has concentrated on German, European, and American Romanticism, but she has also written on the notion of representation in realism, on photography, and on literary and feminist theory. Among her more recent books are a critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997), the anthologies Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999), and Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001), Hannah Arendt, Charlie Chaplin und die verborgene jüdische Tradition (2009), the anthology Affinität wider Willen? Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School (2011) and the forthcoming Picture This! Writing with Photography (with Karen Beckman, 2012).

The visiting professorship was not filled in 2011.

Dr. Jakob Hessing
Writer and German scholar
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel

Jakob Hessing (also: Jaakov Hessing) is the son of Eastern Jewish parents and was born on March 5, 1944 in a hiding place in the subcamp of a German concentration camp in Lyssowce, Upper Silesia. After liberation by the Red Army, his family moved to Berlin, where he grew up. He attended elementary school and grammar school, from which he graduated in 1964. In the same year, Hessing emigrated to Israel. There he worked in a kibbutz for two years. From 1968, he studied history, English and German at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He completed his studies in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in English. From 1970 to 1978, he edited the German-language edition of the magazine "Ariel" on behalf of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. From 1991, he wrote reviews for the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung". In 1992, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the Technical University of Aachen with a thesis on the reception of Else Lasker-Schüler in post-war Germany. In the same year, he was offered a lectureship in Jerusalem, and since 1995 he has been Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has headed the German Studies Department since 2004.

Jakob Hessing writes novels and essays in German in addition to literary studies; from 1993 to 1999 he edited the "Jewish Almanac". He also translates from Hebrew into German.

Most important publications in German: Else Lasker-Schüler, Karlsruhe 1985; Der Fluch des Propheten, Rheda-Wiedenbrück 1989; Der Zensor ist tot, Weinheim [u.a.] 1990; Die Heimkehr einer jüdischen Emigrantin, Tübingen 1993; Mir soll's geschehen, Berlin 2005; Der Traum und der Tod, Göttingen 2005; Verlorene Gleichnisse. Heine, Kafka, Celan, Göttingen/Oakville, Connecticut 2011.

Dr. Harry Redner
Philosopher
at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia

Harry Redner was born on February 1, 1937 in Tlumacz near Stanislawow in Galicia (then Poland, now Ukraine). Together with his mother, he survived the Nazi occupation of Galicia in hiding. In 1946, they emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where he graduated from high school in 1954. Harry Redner received his academic education between 1955 and 1965, mainly in England and Australia, where he studied music - in particular composition with Felix Werder, Alexander Goehr and Luciano Berio - and philosophy (B.A. and M.A. at Melbourne University). After further postgraduate studies at Oxford University with Elizabeth Anscombe, he began his own university career as a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Adelaide University from 1965 to 1967. From 1967 until his retirement in 1996, he held various academic positions (Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, most recently as Professorial Fellow) in the Department of Politics at Monash University in Melbourne. Numerous visiting professorships have taken him to the United States (Yale University, Berkeley, Harvard), Israel (Haifa), France (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris) and Germany (Darmstadt). In 2009, he held the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship at the University of Kassel. His book Wie kann man moralisch leben: Geschichte und Gegenwart ethischer Kulturen (Stuttgart 2006), further translations are in preparation.

Dr. Karol Sauerland
Professor and Head of the Chair of German Studies
at the University of Thorn, Poland

Professor Dr. Karol Sauerland, born in Moscow in 1936 as the son of German emigrants, studied philosophy at the Humboldt University in East Berlin from 1955 to 1957 after completing his Abitur in Halle / Saale. After he had to abandon his studies for political reasons due to his commitment to the political upheaval in Poland, he initially worked for a while as an unskilled laborer in East Berlin, but then moved to Poland, where he soon took Polish citizenship. From 1958-63, he studied mathematics and German language and literature in Warsaw. He received his doctorate in 1970 with a thesis on Wilhelm Dilthey's concept of experience^[1] . In 1975, he habilitated at the University of Warsaw with a thesis on Adorno's aesthetics^[2].

Appointed as a university lecturer in the year of his habilitation (in Poland, the lectureship is considered a first professorship), Karol Sauerland headed the Department of German Literature at the Institute of German Studies at Warsaw University from 1977. From 1979 to 1986, he held the Chair of German Studies at Copernicus University in Toruñ (Thorn), which he soon lost again for political reasons after joining the Solidarność trade union movement in 1980 and soon being elected to its board at the University of Toruñ. It was not until 1989 that he was officially appointed professor by the President of the Polish Council of State, although a corresponding application for the award of the professorship had already been submitted by the faculty in 1982 and confirmed by the Senate, but blocked by the Polish Communist Party. Since then, he headed the Department of Literary Studies at his university until 2005.

Although Karol Sauerland was subjected to various forms of state harassment between 1983 and 1987 (house searches, interrogations, twenty-eight rejections of applications to travel abroad, etc.), he developed a broad philosophical and literary oeuvre with undiminished creativity and originality, as the list of his publications shows. Of his well over 200 publications, only his numerous articles on the perception of Judaism in literature and the more recent history of Judaism in Poland, as well as the book Poland and Jews between 1939 and 1968: Jedwabne and the Consequences^[3], are specifically mentioned here with regard to the institution of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorships.

Karol Sauerland's academic work has received wide recognition in Germany, which was reflected in his appointment to the Academic Advisory Board of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 1993 and the award of the Humboldt Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1995. He has also received numerous invitations to hold visiting professorships. In 1988 he taught at the ETH Zurich as a substitute for Adolf Muschg, and in the winter semester of 1988/89 he held a guest professorship at the University of Mainz, focusing on Poland. In 1994 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and a visiting professor at the Free University there, and in 1997 he was again a visiting professor at the University of Mainz. In the winter semester 2004/05 he taught for two semesters at the Fritz Bauer Institute at the University of Frankfurt am Main and in the winter semester 2005/06 at the University of Hamburg.

With Karol Sauerland, the University of Kassel is gaining an internationally renowned scholar whose research embodies to a special degree the spirit of remembrance of a definitively lost German-Jewish normality for which the institution of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorships symbolizes.

Moshe I. Zimmermann PhD
Professor of German History
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Moshe I. Zimmermann was born in Jerusalem in 1943. He studied political science and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his Ph.D. in 1977. After teaching at the Hebrew University and the University of Beer Sheba, he was first appointed Lecturer in History, then Senior Lecturer and finally Professor of German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986. Mr. Zimmermann has been a member of the Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem since 1986 and was a member of the German-Israeli Textbook Conference from 1980 to 1985. In 1983/84 he was a Guest professor at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg, in 1987 at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bielefeld, in 1987/88 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in 1995 at the Martin Luther University in Halle, in 1996 at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, in 1997 at the University of Saarbrücken, in 1998/99 at the University of Göttingen; in 1990 he received the Rudolf Küstermeier Prize of the German-Israeli Society for the promotion of understanding between Germans and Israelis.

His research covers an extraordinarily broad spectrum of topics in Jewish-German history. This extends to the eras between the beginnings of emancipation and the present day. This has resulted in numerous books and essays, beginning with his dissertation published in 1979, which analyzed in detail the emancipation of Jews in the Hanseatic city between 1830 and 1865 on the basis of a rich body of empirical material that was made accessible for the first time under the title HamburgPatriotism and German Nationalism. The study does not treat Jewish history in isolation, but as an integral aspect of overall history. If one wanted to personalize the problem tension, the development is condensed in two persons: in Gabriel Riesser, who saw the 'Jewish question' and its solution embedded in the bourgeois liberal striving for a nationally united constitutional state, and in Wilhelm Marr, one of the fathers of modern anti-Semitism in Germany, to whom Mr. Zimmermann dedicated a comprehensive biography in 1982 (Hebrew, 1986 English).

This was followed in 1997 by an extremely informative, critically summarizing and commenting research overview of Die deutschen Juden 1914 - 1945 in the series "Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte". The title alone reflects the self-image of the majority of Jews living in Germany: the Weimar Republic was regarded by them as the climax and conclusion of emancipation, anti-Semitism appeared to be the remnant of an era long since overcome, and even the year 1933 did not initially shake these convictions. In this book, too, Mr Zimmermann makes an urgent plea for Jewish history not to be "ghettoized", but to be understood in constant interaction with general events, giving due space to the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in the most diverse constellations.

Prof. Zimmermann has made significant contributions to the history of stereotypes in the field of remembrance and the politics of remembrance. In addition to works dedicated to the history of German-Israeli relations, Moshe Zimmermann has also published works dealing with problems of Israeli society. Of particular note here is a very instructive essay on the military, militarism and civil society in Israel (1997), which ends with a sceptical view of the future of the Israeli model as a non-militarized polity. Mr. Zimmermann also regularly appears in the press with commentaries on current issues of Israeli politics and German-Israeli relations, which he also published in German in a small volume in 2004: Goliath's Trap.

Carl S. Ehrlich PhD
Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies
at York University in Toronto, Ontario

Carl S. Ehrlich was born in 1956 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA; he studied at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and in Freiburg i. B. and Jerusalem, studied Jewish Studies, Biblical Archaeology and Oriental Studies, received a Master of Arts degree in "Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations" from Harvard University in 1984 and was awarded his doctorate there in 1991 with a thesis entitled From Defeat to Conquest: A History of the Philistines in Decline c. 1000-730 B.C.E.. He has been Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto since 1996.

Carl S. Ehrlich has published numerous works on biblical, religious-philosophical and Jewish-theological topics, most of which have been published in highly renowned journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, European Judaism, Trumah, Foi et vie, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, the New Interpreters' Dictionary of the Bible and the Oxford Companion to the Bible. His books include The Philistines in Transition: A History from ca. 1000-730 BCE (1996), Bibel und Judentum. Beiträge aus dem christlich-jüdischen Gespräch (2004)^[1] and Judaism (2005) as well as the editions: Saul in Story and Tradition (2006) and From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature (2009).

The fact that Carl S. Ehrlich's academic work has received the international recognition it deserves is evidenced by numerous prizes and research grants as well as invitations to guest professorships, of which only the German ones are mentioned here: from 2000-2001 he taught at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg and for one semester each at the Humboldt University in Berlin (1993) and at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal (1996).

In the person of Carl Ehrlich, the caesura in the succession of Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professors becomes manifest, for the Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professorship was originally established to invite scholars who had been driven into emigration in order to document our connection with their history of persecution and at the same time to give them the opportunity to present their research to students and colleagues in Germany, to present their research to students and colleagues in Germany, it is now also possible to invite personalities to the University of Kassel who are no longer directly affected by the persecution of the National Socialists, but whose research nevertheless stands in the tradition of German-Jewish history.

The person of Carl. S. Ehrlich shows that this turning point is not to be understood as a radical break, but as a transition in which continuity and a new beginning are combined. For the Kassel tradition of Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorships, he embodies both in at least two respects: firstly in biographical terms, because as the son of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professor of 1988, Leonard Ehrlich, he still belongs to the ranks of those whose lives would undoubtedly have taken a very different course without the historical catastrophe of National Socialism, but at the same time he is also the first Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professor who no longer had to experience persecution first-hand. However, he also embodies continuity and a new beginning in academic terms, because his academic work as a biblical archaeologist and Judaist is fed on the one hand by the spirit of the hermeneutic-critical examination of Jewish tradition that emerged in Germany in the 19th century under the name 'Wissenschaft des Judentums' (Jewish Studies), but on the other hand is also committed to the standards, topics and problems of modern Anglo-Saxon Jewish Studies.

At the University of Kassel, Prof. Carl S. Ehrlich gave a lecture entitled "On the Archaeology of the Holy Land" as part of the theology curriculum, but open to students of all disciplines; this lecture was accompanied by the seminar "Problems in the History of Biblical Israel". Prof. Carl S. Ehrlich also offered a general cultural history seminar entitled "Moses through the centuries", which dealt with the eventful history of the image of Moses from different eras and religions.

Dr. Michael Löwy
Directeur de recherche (^1ère classe)
Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris

Michael Löwy was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1938. His parents had emigrated from Vienna to Brazil in 1934 for economic and political reasons in Austro-fascist Austria, and their correct assessment of the danger of National Socialism expanding from Germany also played a decisive role. Other family members - such as the grandparents and the parents' siblings - also fled to Brazil after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, so that the whole family escaped the Shoah in Europe.

Michael Löwy grew up in Brazil, attended school in Sao Paulo and graduated with a master's degree in social sciences from the University of Sao Paulo. In 1961, he received a scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Paris. Under the supervision of Prof. Lucien Goldmann, he completed his doctorate in 1964 with the thesis La théorie de la revolution chez le jeune Marx. After the accidental death of his father, his mother moved to Israel to live with her elder son, where Michael Löwy also moved after completing his doctorate. Here he initially worked at the universities in Haifa and Jerusalem until he was offered a position as a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, which he held until 1968. An invitation from Prof. Peter Worsley enabled him to teach sociology at the University of Manchester for one academic year. Michael Löwy then returned to Paris, where he taught as an assistant to Nikos Poulantzas at the University of Paris VIII on the Vincennes campus. He was now able to work on his habilitation thesis on the political development of the young Lukács. This required research stays in Budapest, where he also met with the so-called "Budapest School" - Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, Mihály Vajda, György Márkus - who helped him to examine the archive material. He was also able to interview Ernst Bloch about his friendship with Georg Lukács in Tübingen in 1974. In 1975, he completed his habilitation thesis, which was published under the title Pour une sociologie des intellectuels révolutionaires. L'évolution politique des György Lukács 1909-1929.

Since 1977, Michael Löwy has been working on his own research projects at the Centre national de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where his research focus has increasingly shifted to the sociology of religion. The most important publication in this field is his book Erlösung und Utopie. Jüdischer Messianismus und libertäres Denken (1988; Engl. 1997)^[1], which made Michael Löwy internationally known. In it, he traces the emergence of religious and a-religious eschatologies and historical-philosophical utopias, working out their common origins in Jewish messianism and the differences between their perspectives on liberation. Other major works in this direction followed: together with Robert Sayre, the book Revolte et Melancolie: Le romantisme à contrecourant de la modernité (1992) and the research work The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), in which Michael Löwy traces the various roots of the theology of liberation in Latin America. Here, too, Michael Löwy works out the proximity between Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch on the one hand and Gustavo Gutierrez on the other.

It is precisely these references that have recently prompted him to take a closer look at Jewish-German culture in the early 20th century, in which the connection between Jewish messianism and the political-historical-philosophical visions drawn by Walter Benjamin in particular plays a fundamental role, as Michael Löwy explains in his book Walter Benjamin: avertissement d'incendie.Une lecture des thèses "sur le concept d'histoire" (2001). A German translation of this book is in preparation, and Michael Löwy based his main lecture in Kassel on it. Other topics of his seminars included Franz Kafka's Judaism: the religion of freedom and the Romantic currents in the work of Karl Marx.

The Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship at the University of Kassel will be continued beyond 2005, but now without being linked to the fate of an emigrant.

[1] Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia. Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Thought. Eine Wahrverwandtschaft, Berlin 1997.

Dr. Mihály Vajda
Professor of Philosophy at Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen
Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Mihály Vajda was born in Budapest in 1935. He was 9 years old when the German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944. While almost 400,000 Jews were rounded up throughout Hungary in the course of 1944, deported to Auschwitz and murdered there, the majority of Budapest Jews survived the Holocaust as they could no longer be deported due to the encirclement of Budapest by the Russians. Although they were also at the mercy of the arbitrariness and harassment of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, especially after they formed the government from October 1944, the Vajda family survived the last months of the war in Budapest along with several thousand other Jewish families, and they experienced the Russian invasion as a liberation without any restrictions.

Mihály Vajda joined the communist movement as a teenager and it took him a long time and many ostracisms and rejections before he finally abandoned this ideology. After completing eight years of general schooling, he entered a technical grammar school to study chemistry and contribute to the upkeep of his impoverished family as soon as possible. From there, however, he switched to studying Marxism and - when he began to have doubts, it was the year after Stalin's death - to philosophy. Here he found good philosophical teachers who were convinced Marxists but opposed the ideology of the state. From this perspective, the young Vajda also understood the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as an attempt at liberation towards true socialism. After its suppression, he only became more closely associated with the so-called "Budapest School" around Georg Lukács, which included Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér and György Márkus, among others. In 1958, he completed his studies in philosophy with a first degree. As a "revisionist", he was unable to obtain an academic position, so he became a teacher at a school in Budapest. It was only after the liberalizations of the 1960s that he was offered a research assistant position at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was thus able to concentrate on his planned dissertation on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which was published in 1968 under the title Science "in Parentheses". Just one year later, his second work on Husserl and Scheler, An der Grenze von Mythos und Ratio (1969), was also published.

In 1973, the members of the so-called Budapest School lost their jobs as ideological dissidents and were banned from publishing. The study on fascism written by Vajda in 1970 could no longer be published in Hungary, as it was read as a disguised criticism of the communist regime; it was published in English in 1976 and in French in 1979. Some of the members of the group left Hungary altogether; Mihály Vajda also took up the offer of a two-year guest professorship at the University of Bremen, during which time he was also invited to give a guest lecture in Kassel for the first time. Further guest lectureships followed at the New School for Social Research in New York, Trent University in Peterborough, Canada and the University of Siegen. In the 1980s, Mihály Vajda completely abandoned his ties to Marxism - he set out his reckoning with this ideology in his books Russian Socialism in Central Europe (1989, tr. 1992) and Free after Marx (1990). In 1989 he was officially rehabilitated in Hungary and appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen, where he was Director of the Institute of Philosophy from 1996 to 2000.

After years of searching, he found a new approach to Heidegger's existential philosophy in the 1990s through renewed phenomenological studies - studies on this were published in German under the title Die Krise der Kulturkritik (1996). Recently, Prof. Mihály Vajda has dealt more intensively with Judaism in Eastern Europe and the consequences of the Shoah, both historically and in terms of cultural history - he addressed this in his seminar "The role of the Jews in Central Europe up to their extermination". The lecture and another seminar took up topics from his latest book^[1].

[1] Mihály Vajda, The Crisis of Cultural Criticism, Vienna 1996.

Chaim Schatzker PhD
Emeritus Professor of History of Education
University of Haifa

Karl Schatzker was born in Lemberg (Lwow) in Poland in 1928. In 1931, his mother moved with him to Vienna, where he attended elementary school from 1934 to 1938 and briefly attended the Chajes-Realgymnasium. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, there seemed to be no possibility of escape as the family was not wealthy. In November 1939, his mother managed to join an illegal transport with him, which was supposed to take them on ships via Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania across the Black Sea to Palestine. However, the ships got stuck in the ice in Yugoslavia in winter, had to dock at Kladovo and were not given permission to continue their journey. More than a thousand refugees had to wait over a year on the ships and later at least the women and children had to wait for their fate in camps on land. A few days before the German troops invaded Yugoslavia, the 200 children were given permission to travel overland via Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon to Palestine, where the children's transport arrived at the end of April 1941. Those left behind in Kladovo - including Karl Schatzker's mother - were murdered by the invading Germans.

Without any relatives in Palestine, Chaim Schatzker was initially accommodated in a children's village, attended grammar school and was then drafted into military service during the War of Liberation. He then studied history and education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and completed his studies - having previously worked as a high school teacher and lecturer at the University of Haifa - with a PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1969.

Even during his time as a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his research focused on Holocaust studies and the issue of teaching the Holocaust in schools. In 1981, Chaim Schatzker was appointed to the Israeli delegation of the German-Israeli Textbook Commission. After further research visits and guest professorships in Duisburg and Heidelberg, he was appointed full professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Haifa in 1984 and became director of the Strochlitz Chair for Holocaust Studies there. In 1989 he became Head of the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. This was followed by visiting professorships in Heidelberg and Dresden. Prof. Chaim Schatzker retired in 1997, but remained on the advisory board of various German memorial sites as an Israeli member, for example for the concentration camp exhibition in Dachau.

The focus of Chaim Schatzker's research can be clearly seen in his main works, many of which have been published in German: On educational and social history in Germany, his book Jüdische Jugend im zweiten Kaiserreich 1870 - 1917 (1988) and the treatise "Die jüdische Jugendbewegung in Deutschland zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen" (1974) were published. On the Holocaust as a subject of political and historical education, he co-edited the text volume The Holocaust and its Significance (1984) with Yisrael Gutman and co-authored the bookJudentumund Israel in der politischen Bildung (2000) with Dieter Schmidt-Sinns. On the image of Jews in German history books, Chaim Schatzker published the studies Jüdische Geschichte in deutschen Geschichtsbüchern (1963), Die Juden in den deutschen Geschichtsbüchern (1981) and Juden, Judentum und Staat Israel in den Geschichtsbüchern der DDR (1994). His book Das Deutschlandbild in israelischen Geschichtsbüchern (1979) and his essay Der Holocaust im israelischen Geschichtsunterricht (1995) were published on the image of Germany in Israeli history textbooks.

At the University of Kassel, Prof. Chaim Schatzker offered a lecture on modern Jewish history as well as two seminars on Jewish youth in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries and on Jews, Judaism and Israel in the history books of the Federal Republic of Germany, which were attended by students with remarkable interest and active enthusiasm.

Ze'ev Levy PhD
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought
University of Haifa

Ze'ev Levy was born in Dresden in 1921. On his father's side, his family came from Hamburg, where they had come from Amsterdam at the beginning of the 19th century; on his mother's side, they had been from the Braunschweig region for several generations. One year after the National Socialists seized power, the family - the parents and two children - emigrated to Palestine in February 1934, where the paternal grandparents also followed them. The maternal grandfather died in the Theresienstadt camp. After finishing school in Tel-Aviv and working as a printer for six months, Ze'ev Levy joined the Cheftzi-bah kibbutz in 1939, where he worked in agriculture, mainly raising sheep and goats. But he was also interested in books and especially philosophical treatises, which he devoured with a passion. From 1946 to 1948, he was sent to Europe by the kibbutz movement as a shaliach (envoy) for youth education. At the end of 1961, he moved with his wife and children to the kibbutz Hama'apil, where he still lives today.

In 1963, Ze'ev Levy began leading philosophical seminars at the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz seminary in Giv'at Haviva. This task fascinated him so much that he - now 43 years old - decided to take up formal studies in philosophy. In 1969, he completed his philosophy studies at Tel Aviv University with a master's thesis on Franz Rosenzweig - Franz Rosenzweig: A Forerunner of Jewish Existentialism (Hebrew), the first work on Rosenzweig in Israel - and added postgraduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he completed in 1973 with a dissertationStructuralism- between Method and Theory .

From 1972 to 1974, Ze'ev Levy taught philosophy at Tel Aviv University and from 1973 until his retirement in 1989 - most recently as professor (full professor) - philosophy and Jewish thought at Haifa University. He also taught for two years at the University of Bar-Ilan in Ramat Gan and for five years at the academic section of the Kibbutz Teachers' Seminary in Oranim. In 1983 and 1990-1991 he was Guest professor at the University of Heidelberg and its affiliated College of Jewish Studies and in 1987 Visiting Professor at the State University of New York in Binghamton and at Queens College in New York.

Levy's areas of research include modern Jewish philosophy, with particular emphasis on Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Nachman, Krochmal, Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig and Lévinas, as well as hermeneutics and ethics from both a general and a Jewish perspective. His books, which are also available in English and German: Probleme moderner jüdischer Hermeneutik und Ethik (1997) and BaruchSpinoza: Seine Aufnahme durch die jüdischen Denker in Deutschland (2001), are also highly regarded in Germany and America. Ze'ev Levy has published 14 books in Hebrew, English and German and edited several academic books on the above-mentioned fields of research. Most recently, Ze'ev Levy and his son, the zoologist Nadav Levy, published the book Ethics, Emotions and Animals (2002), which deals in particular with questions of animal ethics.

Prof. Ze'ev Levy, who already gave a lecture at the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in 1986, had already been invited by us twice in the 1990s to hold the Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professorship, but he had to cancel both times due to the serious illness of his wife and her recent death. In April 2002, when Prof. Dr. Zygmunt Bauman, who had agreed to hold the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship for one month in the summer semester 2002, had to cancel his visit due to his wife's illness, we again asked Prof. Ze'ev Levy whether he would be prepared to come to Kassel for a shortened but condensed stay. To our great delight, this time he was able to agree without further ado - also encouraged by his children. During these four weeks, he offered two lectures with accompanying colloquia on Baruch Spinoza and his reception as well as on hermeneutics and ethics from a Jewish perspective.

Prof. Ze'ev Levy passed away on 16.3.2010.

Dr. Feliks Tych
Emeritus Professor at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences
Director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw

Feliks Tych was born in Warsaw in 1929, the ninth child in his family. Until the outbreak of war, he attended the Polish elementary school in Radomsko near the German border, where his father owned a small metal factory. The historic market square of this small town was destroyed from the air on the second day of the German invasion, and the next day the German troops moved in. One of the first ghettos of the Generalgouvernement for the occupied Polish territories was established here in December 1939. In the summer of 1942, there were increasing signs of an imminent "Aktion" against the inhabitants of the ghetto. As a precaution, his parents decided to have Feliks secretly flee to a Polish acquaintance who was prepared to take him to his married sister, who was living underground in Warsaw. The escape was successful and Feliks was passed on by his sister in Warsaw to a Polish secondary school teacher who took it upon herself to raise him as an orphaned nephew alongside her own two children using forged papers. Everyone involved in this rescue operation knew what would happen to them if they were found out. Feliks Tych survived the German occupation in his foster family, with whom he was able to stay in the post-war period, as his parents had been murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.

After finishing grammar school in 1948, Feliks Tych began studying history at the University of Warsaw, which he completed in 1952 with a master's thesis on the beginnings of the Polish labor movement. Due to the quality of his work, he was awarded a scholarship for further studies at Lomonosov University in Moscow. There, in 1955, he obtained a doctorate with a dissertation on the revolution from 1905 to 1907 in the Kingdom of Poland, which was published as a book in an expanded Polish version. On the basis of these qualifications, Felks Tych was given research assistant positions at both the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute of the History of the Labor Movement at the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party (PVA). In 1957, he founded the first Polish journal of social history, of which he was editor-in-chief for many years. In 1970 he was appointed associate professor and in 1982 full professor of history. During the waves of purges that began in 1968, which also had an anti-Semitic thrust, Feliks Tych and his wife Lucyna, née Berman, were forced out of their jobs as theater directors. From 1971 to 1987, Prof. Feliks Tych was entrusted with the task of heading the Department for Source Editions and Bibliography at the Central Historical Archive at the Central Committee of the PVA, where he edited the Archive of the Workers' Movement series from 1973. However, he retired prematurely in 1987 for political reasons and has since organized his historical research projects on a private basis.

After 1990, he held several guest professorships at various German universities. Prof. Tych received the Austrian Victor Adler State Prize in 1990 for his work on the social history of the workers' movement. His research increasingly focused on the historical reappraisal of the Holocaust and studies on the consequences for Eastern European countries - see his book in Polish: The Long Shadow of the Holocaust (1999). In 1996 he became director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which he rebuilt. Under his supervision, valuable collections have since been processed and edited, such as the Ringelblum archive from the Warsaw ghetto. Due to his many commitments, Prof. Dr. Feliks Tych was only able to accept the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship for two months in 2002. Despite this limited time, he succeeded impressively in his lectures in giving the students an insight into the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe, the extent of the Holocaust and the devastating moral and cultural consequences in Eastern European post-war societies, of which they had previously had no knowledge.

Gerda Elata-Alster PhD
Emeritus Professor of Literature
Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva

Gerda Thau was born in Vienna in 1930, the eldest of three siblings. She started school in Vienna. After the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938, her father emigrated to Holland to escape worse and brought the family back at the end of 1938. After several moves and changes of school, Gerda went to a Jewish school in The Hague. Even as a child, she learned to be at home in several languages at the same time: German, Dutch and Yiddish, which she spoke with her grandmother. After the occupation of Holland by German troops, the family had to change their place of residence several times and finally hid in Hilversum under a false identity, belonging to the Karaite sect. Miraculously, the whole family was spared persecution, deportation and murder. After the liberation, it turned out that their neighbors were well aware of this disguise, but did not tell the Germans.

After the Second World War, Gerda Thau graduated from the old lyceum in 1948 and, like her siblings, took private lessons in Hebrew. In 1952 she married Mordechai Alster and together they wanted to emigrate to Israel, but first her husband had to take over his father's business, so their three children were born in Holland. During this time, Gerda Alster also completed her studies in Semitic philology at the University of Amsterdam and worked for a time as a lecturer in Hebrew at several Dutch universities. It was only when her husband fell ill with cancer that they decided to travel to Israel in 1964. Mordechai Alster died there in 1965 and Gerda Alster remained in Israel permanently with her children. She was offered a position as a lecturer in general and Hebrew literature at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan. In 1973, she married Chaim Elata, who worked as a professor of engineering at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva and later became president of the university there. Gerda Elata-Alster received her PhD from Bar Ilan University in 1981 and subsequently held various positions as Senior Lecturer and Visiting Professor at several universities in England and the USA before being appointed Professor of Foreign Language Literature and Linguistics at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva in 1989.

Gerda Elata-Alster's research extends far beyond the narrower boundaries of linguistics and literary studies, fundamentally incorporating religious studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literary theory. A particular characteristic of their research method is the combination of hermeneutics with the art of interpretative retelling derived from the tradition of the Midrash.Her works bear witness to this: Vertical and Horizontal Readings of the Biblical Text (1988), The Deconstruction of Genre in the Book of Jonah (1989), Biblical Covenants as Performative Language (1993), From Black Hole to Miracle: Auschwitz as the Postmodern "Condition" (1996), and The Book Was Given to Be Questioned (2001).As far as literature in the narrower sense is concerned, her publications testify to an enormous range from Greek literature and tragedy, the subject of her dissertation, to the Italian Renaissance and today's Hebrew and contemporary European literature.

Prof. Gerda Gerda Elata-Alster, who already gave a lecture on Rosenzweig's writings from a psychoanalytical perspective at the first International Franz Rosenzweig Congress together with Prof. Benyamin Maoz, presented the political-cultural rift in modern Israeli society in her lecture - anticipating a planned book Talk of the Town: Jewish Attitudes to Civic Discourse^[1] - with recourse to literary models. In her seminars, which were also well attended, she dealt with Jewish traditions of interpreting biblical and literary texts as well as the literary treatment of the figure of Amalek, a biblical figure of memory of the enemy of Israel and of evil, whereby Gerda Elata-Alster also ventured into psychoanalytical questions and interpretations.

[1] Gerda Elata-Alster, Talk of the Town: Jewish Attitudes to Civic Discourse, (in preparation).

Kurt Rudolf Fischer PhD
Former Professor of Philosophy University of Pennsylvania at Millersvill,
Honorary professor at the University of Vienna

Kurt Rudolf Fischer was born in Vienna in 1922 and attended the Realgymnasium and the textile school there up to the penultimate grade. After the annexation of Austria by the German Reich, he initially fled to relatives in Brno, where he continued to attend textile school, but was soon overtaken by the German troops occupying Czechoslovakia. When all borders were already closed to Jewish refugees after the outbreak of the Second World War, his parents and he were granted permission to leave for Shanghai, the very last place of refuge that was still accepting refugees. In Shanghai, he eked out a living with all kinds of jobs - including as a translator, night watchman and boxer.

After the Second World War, he was able to study at St. John's University there. Penniless but with a good academic record, he was granted permission to enter the USA in 1949, where he continued his studies at the University of California in Berkeley, graduating first with a Master of Arts in German Studies (1952) and then with a PhD in Philosophy (1964). After several positions as Teaching Assistant, Lecturer in Philosophy at Berkeley and Assistant Professor at Harvard and Chicago, he was appointed Full Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Millersvill in 1967, where he was also Chairman of the Department of Philosophy for over ten years. Invitations to Vienna eventually led him to return to his native city, where he still teaches philosophy at the university as an Honorary Professor.

In the USA, he worked primarily on the European roots of American philosophy and traced the history of the development of analytical philosophy. With his monograph Franz Brentano's Philosophy of Evidence (1964), he introduced the discussion in the United States about the historical sources of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Alexius von Meinong's object theory. Both were school-forming students of Franz Brentano, who himself - although the most important and influential philosopher in Austria at the turn of the century - was only allowed to teach as a private lecturer at the University of Vienna for fifteen years as a punitive measure by the Emperor and the Catholic Church, before he then left Vienna in anger in 1895. In the USA, Kurt Rudolf Fischer also commented on the controversial debate opened by Walter Kaufmann about Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophical influence on the various movements that emerged in the 20th century. They were published in German under the title Nietzsche und das 20. Jahrhundert. Existentialism - National Socialism - Psychoanalysis - Vienna Circle (1986).

After Kurt Rudolf Fischer returned to his native city of Vienna and became an Honorary professor at the University of Vienna, he published a series of important works on Anglo-American philosophy and its Austrian sources - see the works: Philosophie aus Wien (1991), Aufsätze zur angloamerikanischen und österreichischen Philosophie (1999) and the edition Das goldene Zeitalter der österreichischen Philosophie (1995, 1999). Another topic of his research is National Socialism - in an edition published with Franz Wimmer: Dergeistige Anschluss. Philosophy and Politics at the University of Vienna (1993), published with Franz Wimmer, he opened up the first public debate on the University of Vienna during the National Socialist era.

Prof. Kurt Rudolf Fischer had already been invited to give guest lectures in Kassel in the past: Once in 1982 in connection with the guest professorship of his friend Paul Feyerabend and secondly in 1991 as one of the main speakers at the major congress held at the University of Kassel: The Viennese Turn of the Century^[1]. The courses offered by Prof. Kurt Rudolf Fischer during his Franz-Rosenzweig guest semester were all on the topics listed above: "Auschwitz as a philosophical problem", "The golden age of Austrian philosophy - from Franz Brentano to the Vienna Circle" and "Introduction to 20th century Anglo-American philosophy".

Prof. Kurt Rudolf Fischer PhD passed away on March 22, 2014 in Lancaster, PE, USA

[1] Jürgen Nautz, Richard Vahrenkamp (eds.), Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende. Einflüsse - Umwelt - Wirkungen, Vienna 1993, therein: Kurt Rudolf Fischer: "Zur Theorie des Wiener Fin de siècle", pp. 110-127.

Albert H. Friedlander PhD DD h. c. OBE
Rabbi at Westminster Synagogue
Dean of Leo Baeck College

Albert H. Friedlander was born in Berlin in 1927, where he spent the first twelve years of his childhood. After 1933, he and his siblings experienced their first hostilities at school and narrowly escaped worse persecution on several occasions. The Kristallnacht pogrom finally made his parents realize that they should force the family to emigrate. They succeeded in doing so at the beginning of 1939, first to Cuba and finally to the USA. Albert Friedlander completed his school education in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Thanks to his good intellectual and sporting achievements, he was awarded a scholarship to study religious studies, history and Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, while also working various part-time jobs.

Albert H. Friedlander graduated as a rabbi from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1952 and then became a rabbi in Fort Smith, a small town in Arkansas. He later moved to the positions of student rabbi at Columbia University and rabbi in East Hampton, N.Y., in order to work on his dissertation Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt, which earned him a PhD in 1956. After his marriage to Evelyn Philipp in 1961, Albert H. Friedlander accepted an appointment as a liberal rabbi in London in 1966, where he worked in the Westminster Synagogue from 1971 and also taught as a lecturer at Leo Baeck College, where he had been Dean since 1982.

Albert H. Friedlander's academic work can be divided into three main areas: He is without doubt the most important interpreter and also successor of Leo Baeck, the great leading figure of liberal Judaism in Germany. Leo Baeck shared in the suffering of the German Jews right through to the most difficult period of persecution: he survived in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Despite this time of suffering, Leo Baeck was one of the first to reopen the Christian-Jewish dialog in Germany after the war. Albert H. Friedlander's book Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt (1968; 2nd ed. 1991) and the six-volume edition of Leo Baeck's works have made the life and work of this important German-Jewish thinker permanently accessible. A second topic revolves around the historical and religio-philosophical reappraisal of the Shoah. Here, the books Out of the Whirlwind: The Literature of the Holocaust (1968, 1996), The End of the Night: Jewish and Christian Thinkers after the Shoah (1995)^[1] and, together with Elie Wiesel, The Six Days of Destruction (1988) are particularly noteworthy. Albert H. Friedlander is concerned with reflecting on and coming to terms with the experience of our recent history so that a Shoah can no longer be possible in Europe. Thirdly, Friedlander's efforts to promote Christian-Jewish dialog tie in with this. Since 1979, he has been active as a Jewish dialog partner at all church congresses in Germany, as well as in dialog with the Anglican Church in England. His books Ein Streifen Gold (1989; English 1991) and Riders Toward the Dawn: from Pessimism to Tempered Optimism (1993) are particularly noteworthy in this regard. For his commitment in the field of Christian-Jewish dialog, he was awarded the Order of Merit I Class of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Federal President and the Order of the Royal Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the Queen. In 1997, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and, among many other guest professorships, was twice Martin Buber Guest Professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main.

Albert H. Friedlander's lectures and seminars on the life and work of Leo Baeck, on the literary treatment of the Holocaust and on Christian-Jewish dialog made a deep and lasting impression on all participants. As a long-time friend of Rosenzweig research in Kassel since the first Franz Rosenzweig Congress in 1986, Rabbi Albert H. Friedlander spoke at the second International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in 2004, where he was thanked by the Lord Mayor of the City of Kassel. Three months later, Rabbi Albert H. Friedlander died of sudden heart failure on July 6, 2004, torn from the midst of his multifaceted work.

[1] Albert H. Friedlander, Das Ende der Nacht: Jüdische und christliche Denker nach der Shoah, Gütersloh 1995.

Rafael N. Rosenzweig
Economist and agronomist
Tel Aviv and Zurich

Rafael Rosenzweig was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1922, the son of Franz and Edith Rosenzweig. When he was growing up, his father was already suffering from total paralysis. But he experienced how famous scholars visited his father at his bedside and was allowed to be present when Martin Buber and his father worked together on the translation of the Scriptures. During these years, but also in the years after his father's death in 1929, he spent many months with his paternal grandmother in Kassel.

His mother belonged to the circle of German Jews who wanted to persevere in Germany even after the National Socialists came to power and the persecution of the Jews began, as they hoped - unfortunately wrongly - that the moral substance of German culture would not allow anything worse than the initial repression and discrimination. It was only after the Reich pogrom in November 1938 that she agreed to allow her son, who was still a minor at the time, to emigrate to Palestine. In 1939, she followed on the last ship carrying Jewish emigrants.

After graduating from high school, Rafael Rosenzweig joined the kibbutz movement and put all his energy into the agricultural development work of Kibbutz Schaar Hagolan. From 1944 to 1946 he was a soldier in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. After 1945, he returned to the destroyed German cities of Frankfurt am Main and Kassel for the first time and learned that many of his relatives and friends had been murdered.

In 1954 he was released from his kibbutz to study economics. He completed his studies with a diploma from the London School of Economics. In 1963 he was appointed head of the training department for experts in development aid at the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and in 1966 finally Senior Economic Advisor in the Office of the Agricultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Since his retirement in 1987, Rafael Rosenzweig has been able to devote more time to scientific work.

After his opening lecture "German and Jew. Franz Rosenzweig's Path to the Jewish People" at the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in 1986, the then Hessian Minister of State for Science and Art, Dr. Vera Rüdiger, supported by the then President of the University of Kassel, Prof. Dr. Franz Neumann, invited Rafael Rosenzweig to spend a semester in Kassel. However, Rafael Rosenzweig did not want to accept this invitation straight away, as he did not want to be invited merely as the son of his famous father, but because of his own work in economics, which he wanted to complete after his retirement.

Already in his very first scientific work as an economic advisor in the Israeli peace movement, Rafael Rosenzweig had worked out that a future for Israel was only conceivable in long-term cooperation with its Arab neighbors. Rafael Rosenzweig took up these early studies again after his retirement and expanded them academically, for example in the study The Economic Consequences of Zionism (1989) and now in his main work The Quest for Security (1996), which was published in time for the start of his Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship under the title The Quest for Security at the beginning of 1998.

At the invitation of the Department of Economics, Rafael Rosenzweig took up the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship in 1998 and presented the main features of his book The Quest for Security^[1] in the main lecture; he also offered a seminar on "Cooperation in Israel, with special emphasis on the kibbutz movement". In addition, in a course for students from all faculties, he discussed "The Consequences of the Persecution of the Jews for Germany" in order to address the consequences that the destruction of Judaism in Europe had for German culture and intellectual history in particular.

Rafael N. Rosenzweig died completely unexpectedly on December 2, 2001 in Forch near Zurich, torn from his work.

[1] Rafael N. Rosenzweig, Das Streben nach Sicherheit, Marburg 1998.

Dr. h. c. Emil L. Fackenheim PhD
em. Professor of Philosophy and Rabbi
Jerusalem

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim was born in Halle an der Saale in 1916. In 1935, he was still able to graduate from the city's grammar school. In order to set an example of resistance against the increasingly brutal marginalization of Jews in Germany, he decided to study for the rabbinate at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, which he was able to complete by being ordained as a rabbi. At the same time, he studied philosophy and Arabic studies at the University of Halle - as far as this was still possible for Jewish students at the time. During the Reich pogrom in November 1938, Emil Fackenheim was deported along with many others to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was interned until February 1939. Soon after his release, he managed to emigrate to Scotland, where he was initially able to resume his philosophy studies at the University of Aberdeen, but was then interned in Britain and Canada as a German citizen. It was not until 1942 that he was allowed to resume his studies in philosophy at the University of Toronto, enabling him to complete his PhD in 1945.

Having worked as a rabbi in Hamilton since 1943, Emil Fackenheim was appointed Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1948. He was appointed Professor of Philosophy there in 1961 - a professorship he held until his retirement in 1981. After two years as Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Emil Fackenheim moved to Jerusalem for good in 1983. Emil Fackenheim received several honors, and in 1992 the Festschrift Emil Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought was published for him in Toronto.

With Emil Fackenheim, the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Education/Humanities was able to appoint one of the most important Jewish philosophers of religion of the second half of the 20th century to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. Emil Fackenheim had already come to the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in his grandparents' home town in 1986 and gave a lecture on the links between his own thinking and Rosenzweig's existential philosophy from Jewish sources.

Emil Fackenheim's early philosophical works on medieval and classical German philosophy - such as his books Metaphysics and Historicity (1961) and The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought (1967) - are still among the most respected philosophical interpretations in their field today. Another major strand of his early studies is Jewish thought, such as his book Paths to Jewish Belief (1960). These are the two roots of his thinking, which Emil Fackenheim - intertwined with each other - has concentrated entirely on the philosophical and theological consideration of the historical incision of Auschwitz since 1967. Without facing up to the horrific events of Auschwitz, there can be no unbroken reconnection to the moral dimension of Western philosophy, but even the Jewish belief in a covenant with God is put to the ultimate test by the Shoah. This is by no means a rejection of these traditions, but rather their greatest challenge: to prove oneself morally and religiously in thinking against Auschwitz. This is also the theme of Emil Fackenheim's main works Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy (1973), To Mend the World (1982), The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust (1991).

All three courses that Emil Fackenheim offered in Kassel as Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professor revolved around this fundamental theme of thinking about Auschwitz. In "What is Judaism", he presented his book What is Judaism (1987), which has just been published in German translation.^[1] In "Jewish Thought in the 20th Century", he dealt with Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber and asked them to what extent their thinking was also able to provide answers to the events of Auschwitz. Finally, in the seminar "Foundations of Jewish Thought after the Holocaust", Emil Fackenheim dealt with topics from his main work To Mend the World.

At the second Kassel Franz Rosenzweig Congress in March 2004, Emil Fackenheim was to give one of the central plenary lectures. He died unexpectedly six months earlier on September 19, 2003, and instead of his lecture, a Fackenheim Memorial was held at the International Congress, which appears in the Congress proceedings^[2].

[1] Emil L. Fackenheim, What is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present, Berlin 1999.

[2] "Emil L. Fackenheim Memorial", in: Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (ed.), Franz Rosenzweig's "New Thought". International Congress Kassel 2004, 2 vols., Freiburg/Munich 2006, vol. p. 597-641.

Dr. Dr. h. c. Hans Keilson
Psychotherapist, psychoanalyst
and writer, Bussum

Hans Keilson was born in Bad Freienwalde/Oder in 1909. After leaving school, he first trained as a sports teacher and then studied medicine and music in Berlin, but was unable to work as a doctor in National Socialist Germany after passing his medical state examination. In 1933, Fischer Verlag published his first novel Das Leben geht weiter (Life Goes On), in which he tells the story of the economic downfall of a small merchant - his father. The book and many others were banned and burned shortly afterwards. In 1936, Hans Keilson and his wife emigrated to the Netherlands, where he worked in the social education sector. When the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans, he went into hiding and worked in cooperation with a Dutch resistance group in the medical, psychotherapeutic and educational care of hidden Jewish children and young people. After the Second World War, he continued this work. Together with others, he founded the organization "Le Ezrat HeJeled", which looked after Jewish orphans, the survivors of the Holocaust.

In 1947, he passed the Dutch medical examination and went on to train as a psychoanalyst. In 1959, his second novel The Death of the Adversary was published, in which he dealt with his own experiences during Nazi rule in Germany and the Netherlands. In 1967, he began extensive long-term research into the traumatization of Holocaust orphans at the University Children's Psychiatric Clinic. With the sensational and shocking results of his research work, Hans Keilson was awarded his doctorate in 1979 at the age of 70. His comprehensive book Sequential Traumatization in Children has since been translated into several languages and has become a standard work of trauma research. His research has provided insights into the emergence, course and intensification of severe traumatization in children during the developmental phase, which have since been taken into account and further developed by a number of international studies.

At the invitation of the Department of Psychoanalytical Psychology in the Faculty of Education/Human Sciences, Hans Keilson presented the results of his major research work as Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professor in a lecture entitled "Traumatization through man-made disasters and the concept of sequential traumatization". He also offered a seminar on "Prejudice and Hatred", in which he not only dealt with various aspects of the emergence of prejudice, its transmission in historical images and its political exploitation - not shying away from taboo subjects such as "left-wing anti-Semitism" - but also attempted to shed light on its roots psychoanalytically.

In cooperation with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy to history, political science, education and psychoanalysis, Hans Keilson held a lecture series and colloquium on the subject of "What was National Socialism? What does it mean to remember it?" in front of over one hundred and fifty participants, which had a lasting effect on the discussion among students and colleagues.

Impressive and moving, however, were also his public readings at the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, the Evangelical Forum and on the occasion of the opening of the Institute for Psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, in which Hans Keilson read mainly from his novel Der Tod des Widersachers and from his volume of poetry Sprachwurzellos .

His Kassel lectures were published in 1998 in the volume Wohin die Sprache nicht reicht. On his 90th birthday, the University of Kassel organized a symposium in his honour entitled "Gedenk und vergiß - im Abschaum der Geschichte". The collected literary works of the much-honored writer Hans Keilson have since been published in two volumes by S. Fischer Verlag^[1].

Prof. Dr. Hans Keilson died on 31. 5. 2011 in Hilversum

[1] Hans Keilson, Where language does not reach. Essays - Vorträge - Aufsätze 1936-1996. With an afterword by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Giessen 1998; Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (eds.), "Gedenk und vergiß - im Abschaum der Geschichte". Trauma and remembering. Hans Keilson zu Ehren, Tübingen: edition diskord 2001; Hans Keilson, Werke in zwei Bänden. I: Novels and Stories, II: Poems and Essays, Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer 2005.

Rivka Horwitz PhD
Emeritus Professor of Jewish Intellectual History
Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva

Rivka Horwitz, née Goldschmidt, was born in Bad Homburg in 1926; her father's family came from Kassel. To escape the harassment, the family emigrated to Palestine in the fall of 1933. After completing her schooling and military service, she studied Jewish philosophy, religious mysticism and the history of philosophy, first in Jerusalem and then in New York. In 1962, she completed her studies with a PhD in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania (Bryn Mawr) with a thesis on Franz Rosenzweig's philosophy of language.

After several appointments since 1965 as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at various universities in the United States and Israel, Rivka Horwitz has worked at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva since 1975 and has been Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of History since 1981. In 1982/83 she was a visiting scholar in the Department of Religion at Harvard University and in 1987/88 a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien at the University of Heidelberg.

Her field of work covers the entire tradition of Jewish thought in European intellectual history, but her special research focus is on Jewish philosophy and religion of the 19th and 20th centuries in the German-speaking world. Her research in this field enjoys a high international reputation. The main focus of her work is the history of Jewish thought and its renewal in the 19th century, as well as the topicality of the religious-philosophical works of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber.

These focal points were also the focus of the courses offered by Prof. Rivka Horwitz as Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professor in the Department of Religion in the Faculty of Education/Human Sciences. She dedicated her main lecture to "Rosenzweig's language thinking". Rivka Horwitz earned her PhD in 1962 with a thesis on Speech and Time in the Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig . After Else Freund's dissertation Die Existenzphilosophie Franz Rosenzweig, which was published in Breslau in 1933 but was withdrawn immediately after the National Socialists seized power, Rivka Horwitz's work was one of the first entries into the philosophical interpretation of Rosenzweig's works. Rivka Horwitz continued to research Franz Rosenzweig in the years that followed. At the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in Kassel in 1986, she gave a lecture on the topic "Why did Rosenzweig not allow himself to be baptized?" and a year later she published a selection of Rosenzweig's letters and diaries in Hebrew with a large introduction. All of this flowed into her interpretation of Rosenzweig's linguistic thinking, which she presented in Kassel.

In another seminar, "Are Buber's dialogical thinking and his Hasidic message still relevant?", she introduced her listeners to the basic motifs of Buber's religious philosophy. Here too, Rivka Horwitz was able to draw on many years of her own research. For the first time, she traced the exciting history of the creation of Martin Buber's main philosophical work Ich und Du (1923). Originally arising from a lecture on "Religion as Presence", which Rosenzweig had persuaded Buber to attend in 1921, the further development shows traces of the critical debates with Rosenzweig, through which their friendship and later collaboration was founded. It was fascinating to see how Rivka Horwitz succeeded in bringing these exciting intellectual-historical connections to life in their topicality.

In a third course, "Moses Mendelssohn: 'Jerusalem' and the correspondence with Lavater", Rivka Horwitz not only addressed Mendelssohn's initiation of the movement for the emancipation of Jews in Germany, but also the resistance that stood in the way of their emancipation from the very beginning. This was also the subject of a series of public lectures given by Prof. Rivka Horwitz in Kassel. Some of her Kassel lectures and essays have since been published in an anthology^[1].

Prof. Rivka Horwitz passed away on 4.1.2007.

[1] Rivka Horwitz, Multiple Faceted Judaism, Beer Sheva 2002.

Dr. med. Dr. phil. Benyamin Maoz
Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva

Benyamin Maoz was born in Kassel in 1929; he comes from the long-established and respected Mosbacher family from Kassel. After suffering many repressions and humiliations, the family emigrated to Palestine in 1937. After completing his schooling and military service, he first studied medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then transferred to the University of Amsterdam, where he graduated with a doctorate in 1959. From 1959 he initially worked as a general practitioner in the Kupat-Holim Kibbutz, then from 1970 in various clinics. After further training in social psychiatry, he was also awarded a doctorate in 1973. Since 1979 he has been Head of the Psychiatric Department of the Soroka Medical Center in Beer-Sheva. At the same time, he worked as a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University and has been Professor of Psychiatry at Ben Gurion University in Beer-Sheva since 1978. Invitations to guest professorships have taken him to the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and the University of Marburg (1989).

Benyamin Maoz is a social psychiatrist and psychotherapist; in this field he is an internationally recognized specialist in trauma and life crisis research. With Prof. Benyamin Maoz, the Department of Social Sciences has appointed a second scientist from Kassel to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. Benyamin Maoz had already returned to his native city of Kassel for the first time in 1986 for the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress and, together with Gerda Elata-Alster, gave a lecture on psychotherapeutic aspects of Franz Rosenzweig's thinking.

Although - similar to William W. Hallo, his childhood friend from his childhood days in Kassel - psychiatry is not represented as a subject in a medical faculty in Kassel, Benyamin Maoz saw it as a special challenge from the outset to teach in the "Social Therapy" specialization of the Department of Social Work due to his special interests in social psychiatry. In this respect, his subject-specific lectures "Psychiatric and psychosomatic illnesses from a systems theory perspective" and his seminar "Post-traumatic reactions in the first and second generation - unhappiness and war neuroses, terror and the Holocaust" were very popular with students. His main aim was to go beyond purely theoretical knowledge and provide students with guidance on social therapy skills in order to enable them to make their own decisions and take action.

Benyamin Maoz also accepted the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship because he wanted to realize something of the "new learning" in Rosenzweig's sense. Back in the 1920s, Franz Rosenzweig had invited doctors in particular to lectures and working groups on questions of "Jewish ethics" in the medical field at the Free Jewish Teaching House. Benyamin Maoz placed his seminar "Biblical figures in the light of a modern psychological analysis and problems of 'Jewish ethics'" in this tradition, using biblical texts and the ethics of Maimonides to discuss everyday life decisions in the family and professional sphere^[1].

His public lectures in the Philosophical Forumand at the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation were also an important part of his perception of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship, as Benyamin Maoz gave a vivid account of his family's life in Kassel before and during the Nazi era, life in the first years in Palestine or spoke from a medical perspective about the traumatic late effects of the survivors of the Shoa, the listeners suddenly and shockingly became aware of the monstrosity of the Nazi crimes committed just 50 to 60 years ago, which we must not cease to remember.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Benyamin Maoz died on 28. 8. 2014 in Tel Aviv.

[1] His numerous individual medical, psychotherapeutic and ethical publications in English and German, often resulting from joint colloquia and featuring several co-authors who cannot be referred to in detail here, also bear witness to this.

Dr. Dr. h. c. Jacob Goldberg
Emeritus Professor of Eastern European History
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Jacob Goldberg was born in Lodz in 1924. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was first forced to work in the ghetto in Lodz and then in a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp under terrible conditions in a munitions factory. After his liberation from the concentration camp, he returned to his home town of Lodz. He was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust. He began studying history at the University of Lodz and - after gaining his doctorate - became a university lecturer himself. When renewed anti-Semitism arose in Poland, he emigrated to Israel, where he has taught Eastern European history at the University of Jerusalem since 1968; since 1989 he has been director of the Center for the Study of the History and Culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe there.

Jacob Goldberg is undisputedly one of the best experts and most respected researchers in the history of Eastern European Jewry. His research has focused primarily on economic and social history and the situation of Jewish communities in Poland in the 17th and 18th centuries. In his numerous academic publications, he has worked out the legal, economic, cultural and religious situation of Eastern European Jewry and its enormous influence on the countries of Western Europe, which is still far too little known. He was honored with a prestigious prize for his work Jewish Privileges in the Polish Commonwealth and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Warsaw in 1992. He has been a visiting professor in the USA, England and Poland as well as in Cologne, Munich and Berlin.

At the invitation of the Department of History in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Jacob Goldberg presented "The Social and Cultural Development of Eastern European Jewry" in a large-scale lecture in the summer semester of 1993, which he developed in even greater detail in the subsequent seminar "The Jews in Poland-Lithuania" with descriptions of the living situation of the Jews in the Stetl under Polish-Lithuanian and Russian rule. In the meantime, a partial study from these Franz Rosenzweig guest lectures has been published: "Jewish Urban Population in Early Modern Eastern Central Europe".^[1] In his lectures, Jacob Goldberg visualized a world of which we in Western Europe have hardly taken note and which has not only sunk into history in the meantime, but whose traces were completely destroyed by the Germans under National Socialism. With the Eastern European Jews who were murdered by the Germans, the Yiddish culture with its great charisma, which at the same time represented such an incomparable link between German and Eastern European culture, also disappeared.

In a further seminar, Jacob Goldberg then examined the image of "German travelers to Eastern Europe" that had been spread in Western Europe since the 18th century and attempted to correct the distortions that had been handed down as a result. Among other things, he also spoke about Georg Forster, who himself, coming from Nassenhuben near Gdansk, had recorded the living conditions there after sailing around the world with James Cook and after his professorship in natural history in Kassel on his journey through Poland in 1784 and during his stay as Professor of Natural History at the University of Vilnius. Again, it was fascinating to hear Jacob Goldberg decipher these texts from a geographical and historical perspective.

Prof. Jacob Goldberg and his wife, the ethnographer Dr. Olga Goldberg, also gave a series of public lectures in Kassel on various dimensions of everyday life in the Eastern European shtetl, for example on Yiddish women's literature written in Hebrew from the 19th century until the destruction of Judaism in Eastern Europe, which is completely unknown to us.

Prof. Dr. Jacob Goldberg died on 15. 11. 2011 in Jerusalem.

[1] Jacob Goldberg, "Jüdische Stadtbevölkerung im frühneuzeitlichen Ostmitteleuropa", in: Berliner Jahrbuch für Osteuropäische Geschichte 1 (1996).

Dr. Zvi H. Rosen
em. Professor of Political Philosophy
Tel Aviv University

Zvi H. Rosen was born in Gdansk in 1925. Even as a child, he was subjected to rejection by his German classmates. In 1939, however, the actual persecution began in Gdansk, to which almost all of his family members fell victim. By a stroke of luck, he escaped the persecutors. After the Second World War, Zvi H. Rosen began studying philosophy and sociology in Poland - first in Wrocław, then in Warsaw. From 1953 to 1958, he was a lecturer in philosophy at the universities of Wrocław and Warsaw. In 1957, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Warsaw under Leszek Kolakowski. The renewed rise of anti-Semitism in Poland finally prompted him to emigrate to Israel. After several years as head of the Technical College in Tel Aviv, Zvi H. Rosen has been Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University since 1964 - from 1983 to 1988 he was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy.

His books and philosophical treatises, written in several languages - Polish, English, Hebrew, German - and translated into even more languages, mainly revolve around three subject areas: 1. the philosophical-historical research of the Young Hegelians - especially Moses Hess, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx; 2. studies on the political philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche; 3. the philosophical exploration of critical theory, especially studies on Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. All three of these fields of research are interlinked, whereby Zvi H. Rosen is particularly interested in working out the interrelationship between political and religious thought.

Even before his appointment to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship by the Department of Education/Human Sciences, Zvi H. Rosen already had thematic working connections, on the one hand through his philosophical-historical research on the Junghegelians and on the other through his studies on critical theory - a philosophical direction that was prominently represented by Ulrich Sonnemann at the University of Kassel.

It was therefore quite understandable that Zvi H. Rosen offered a seminar on "Moses Hess' Political and Social Philosophy" during his guest semester in the winter semester of 1992/93, in order to uncover the inner entanglement of socio-political and Jewish-religious thought, particularly in his early writings and late work, and also in the seminar "Max Horkheimer: Jewish Humanism and Critical Theory" to draw attention to the Jewish sources in Horkheimer's thought - some of which were kept under lock and key by Horkheimer himself, others withheld by his estate administrators. These studies have since been published in the monograph Max Horkheimer^[1].

In his main lecture followed by a colloquium, Zvi H. Rosen dealt with "Friedrich Nietzsche's Political World", a very exciting and controversially discussed interpretation that attempted to defend Nietzsche against his various falsifiers. This lecture will also be published as a book in the near future.

Furthermore, Zvi H. Rosen gave a series of public lectures - also during later visits in the following years - which also revolved around the inner connections between political and religious views among German and Jewish thinkers in the last two centuries.

[1] Zvi Rosen, Max Horkheimer, Munich 1995.

William W. Hallo PhD PhD h. c.
Emeritus Professor of Assyriology
Yale University - New Haven, Connecticut

William W. Hallo was born in Kassel in 1928. He came from a long-established Kassel family, his father Dr. Rudolf Hallo - initially Franz Rosenzweig's immediate successor in the management of the Free Jewish Teaching House - was Custos at the Kassel State Museum in the 1920s; traces of his fruitful work remain to this day. His mother, Dr. Gertrud Hallo, also came from a respected family of Kassel manufacturers. At the end of the 1930s, the family was able to emigrate to the United States via England, having previously been subjected to harassment and humiliation.

William W. Hallo studied Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago and the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden and received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1955. After several research positions and professorships at various universities in the USA, he has been Professor of Assyriology at Yale University in New Haven since 1976 and is also head of the Babylonia Collection of the Sterling Memorial Library, the largest collection of Sumerian and Babylonian texts. William W. Hallo is one of the most internationally renowned representatives of ancient Near Eastern studies; he has received several honorary guest invitations to major research institutions, is on the board of several professional societies and has been awarded an honorary doctorate in human letters. Ancient Near Eastern Studies not only owes him the first decipherment of several important texts from the earliest period of human written culture, but as a profound expert on the languages and cultures of Mesopotamia in the first four millennia BCE, he has also contributed significantly to an overall cultural-historical interpretation of human history.

Prof. William W. Hallo was the first scholar from Kassel to be appointed to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. He had returned to his native city of Kassel for the first time in 1986 to speak at the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress on the problems and experiences of translating Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption into English (1971). Nevertheless, it was not easy for him to accept the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship, because William W. Hallo did not really know what the students in Kassel expected of him as an Ancient Near Eastern scholar and what would therefore await him at a university that did not offer Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Out of respect for the work of Franz Rosenzweig, William W. Hallo accepted the invitation from the Department of Social Sciences to become a visiting professor of Ancient History. This challenge for both sides turned out to be a great event. William W. Hallo gave a three-hour lecture entitled "Origins - the ancient Near Eastern background to some of humanity's achievements" to a large, eagerly listening audience, focusing in particular on everyday life in the early cultures of Mesopotamia - the position of women, the school system, the financial system, as well as the calendar and mythology. The necessity of speaking to students who had only a rudimentary knowledge of general history from the time of the early advanced civilizations of Mesopotamia was a fruitful challenge for William W. Hallo to choose this form of presentation, which appealed to a broad audience, for the elaboration of his lecture in the large book Origins^[1] , which has since been published.

In another three-hour seminar, William W. Hallo dealt with "Die Schrift und ihre Übersetzungen: The Theory and Practice of Translation from its Origins to the Present Day", in which he also dealt particularly with the translation of Scripture undertaken by Buber and Rosenzweig, but was also able to bring vividly to bear his own rich experience of translations from Babylonian texts found in the Bible to the translation of Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption.

Prof. Dr. William W. Hallo passed away on March 30, 2015 in Hamden, CT, USA

[1] William W. Hallo, Origins. The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western Institutions, Leiden/New York/Cologne 1996.

Dr. Eveline Goodman-Thau
Professor of Jewish Studies
Halle-Wittenberg/Jerusalem

Eveline Thau was born in Vienna in 1934. In 1939, her family fled to Holland, where she survived the German occupation in hiding. After the war, she attended grammar school in Hilversum and began studying English literature and Jewish studies at the University of Amsterdam after graduating in 1953. She married in 1956 and emigrated to Israel. Only after her five children had grown up did she resume her studies in biblical studies, rabbinical texts and Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1976, Eveline Goodman-Thau taught her own seminars in Jewish exegesis and theology after Auschwitz. Since 1982, she has been a lecturer in Jewish philosophy and literature at the Martin Buber Institute in Jerusalem and has given numerous guest lectures in the USA and several European countries, and since 1987 also in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Eveline Goodman-Thau's academic work focuses on the study of the Bible and its rabbinic exegesis, the study of Jewish philosophy, the experience of Dutch Jewry (from 1966 to 1976 she was director of the Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry and compiled a lexicon on the Dutch "Righteous of the Nations"), and since 1989 she has been on the board of the European Society of Women for Theological Research.

At the invitation of the Protestant and Catholic Religion departments, Eveline Goodman-Thau was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel in 1990, making her the first woman to hold the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. Although she did not yet have a doctorate at the time of her appointment, her academic work in the field of biblical studies and Kabbalah and in particular her commitment to Christian-Jewish dialog and theological women's studies enabled her to overcome this formal bureaucratic hurdle.

Eveline Goodman-Thau offered the following seminars during the guest semester, which was postponed to the winter semester of 1990/91 for scheduling reasons, all of which focused on research into the Jewish heritage of European intellectual history and, fortunately, were all very well attended: "Problems of Jewish Identity in Germany", "Franz Kafka and Paul Celan - Tradition as Contradiction", "Franz Rosenzweig - Translator of the Bible".

The appointment to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship in 1990 proved to be almost fateful for Eveline Goodman-Thau and at the same time particularly fruitful for the continuation of the institution of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. Prof. Ulrich Sonnemann offered Eveline Goodman-Thau the opportunity to complete her doctorate with a thesis on the philosophy of religion, parts of which she had presented in a colloquium. To enable her to do this, the Otto Braun Fund granted Eveline Goodman-Thau scholarship funding for two further semesters of research at the University of Kassel. This in turn created the basis for planning and organizing three scientific symposia together with Eveline Goodman-Thau in the Interdisciplinary Working Group for Basic Philosophical Problems on the topics of "Kabbalah and Romanticism" (1991), "Light and Spirit - On the Metaphor of Light" (1992), "Messianism between Myth and Power" (1993), the results of which are available in two volumes.

In the fall of 1992, Eveline Goodman-Thau's dissertation Zeitbruch. Zur messianischen Grunderfahrung in der jüdischen Tradition ^[1], and in February 1993 the disputation could still be held at Ulrich Sonnemann's sickbed. A few weeks later, at the age of 81, Ulrich Sonnemann succumbed to his cancer, which had dragged on for over a year.

After her guest semesters in Kassel, Dr. Eveline Goodman-Thau received another call for a guest semester in Oldenburg and then a long-term guest professorship at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, from where she also continued the academic symposia "Jewish Thought in European Intellectual History" - still in close contact with Kassel. In 2000, Eveline Goodman-Thau completed her habilitation at the University of Kassel with the thesis Aufstand der Wasser. Jewish hermeneutics between tradition and modernity^[2] in philosophy of religion.

[1] Eveline Goodman-Thau, Zeitbruch. Zur messianischen Grunderfahrung in der jüdischen Tradition, Berlin 1995.

http://www.rosenzweig-gesellschaft.de/Gastprofessur.htm#_ftnref15[2] Eveline Goodman-Thau, Aufstand der Wasser. Jewish hermeneutics between tradition and modernity, Berlin 2002.

Dr. Joachim Israel
Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Philosophy of Science
Lund University

Joachim Israel was born in Karlsruhe in 1920; he emigrated to Sweden in 1938, where he initially worked as a farm worker for five years before studying philosophy, psychology and sociology at Stockholm University. He received his doctorate in 1952 and habilitated in sociology in 1956. He taught at Stockholm University until 1963, after which he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. In 1971, he was appointed to the University of Lund/Sweden, where he taught sociology and philosophy until his retirement in 1986. Visiting professorships have taken him to the USA, Norway, Israel, Australia and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Joachim Israel is one of the most internationally renowned theorists of philosophically based sociology; his books have been translated into many world languages. His books have been translated into many world languages and have appeared in large editions in German: Der Begriff Entfremdung (1972), Die sozialen Beziehungen (1977), Der Begriff Dialektik (1979), Sprache und Erkenntnis (1990) - to name just the most important. His works deal with central problems at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, social psychology and linguistics. The range of topics that Joachim Israel deals with is extraordinary and impressive, ranging from theoretical treatises on science to concrete empirical analyses; theory and practice refer to each other.

Joachim Israel already held a visiting professorship at the University of Kassel in 1981; since that time he has been involved in the supervision of two Kassel doctorates and has repeatedly come to Kassel for workshops and conferences, including the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress in 1986, so that he has had a large audience right from the start, being very familiar with the university.

However, Joachim Israel accepted the invitation of the Department of Social Sciences to the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship in 1989 above all as a challenge to be able to deal again with the writings of his philosophical teacher Martin Buber, whereby it was also important to him to emphasize Martin Buber as a co-founder of a cultural-scientific social theory at the beginning of our century and as a Zionist socialist - a side of Buber that is often ignored in the German Buber reception. The results of this seminar "Martin Buber - German and Jewish Philosopher" are now available in Swedish and German Martin Buber. Dialogue Philosophy in Theory and Practice ^[1].

In continuation of his basic theoretical studies, Joachim Israel gave a lecture on "Problems in the Philosophy of Language from an Epistemological Perspective", which was hotly debated in the subsequent colloquium - these remarks have also since been published as the book Sprache und Erkenntnis .^[2] In a further seminar, Joachim Israel devoted himself to "Motivational Psychology and Fundamental Questions of Action Theory".

For us colleagues, however, the free colloquia were the most impressive, in which Joachim Israel, in the spirit of dialogical learning, as Franz Rosenzweig had called for the Free Jewish Teaching House, Socratically linked us to mostly ethical-political everyday problems and involved us in a joint philosophical discussion.

Joachim Israel died in Halmstad/Sweden on May 15, 2001 after a short but serious illness from cancer at the age of 81.

http://www.rosenzweig-gesellschaft.de/Gastprofessur.htm#_ftnref11

[1] Joachim Israel, Martin Buber. Dialogfilosof och sionist, Stockholm 1992 - revised German version: Martin Buber - Dialogphilosophie in Theorie und Praxis, Berlin 1995-

[2] Joachim Israel, Sprache und Erkenntnis. Zur Tiefenstruktur der Alltagssprache, Frankfurt a. M. 1990.

[3] Joachim Israel, Handlung und Interaktion. Eine Einführung aus sozialpsychologischer Perspektive, ed. by Heinrich Dauber and Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Kasseler Philosophische Schriften 36), Kassel 2003.

Leonard H. Ehrlich PhD
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Leonard H. Ehrlich was born in Vienna in 1924 and emigrated to the United States in 1939 after the annexation of Austria. In the service of the US Army, he returned to German and Austrian soil towards the end of the war. After the war, he initially studied psychology in the USA, then switched to philosophy, studying with Karl Jaspers in Basel from 1948 to 1951 and finally completing his studies with a PhD at Yale University in 1956. Since 1956, Leonard H. Ehrlich has taught as Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Prof. Leonard H. Ehrlich is one of the most important representatives of existential philosophy in the Anglo-American-speaking world. He was co-founder and long-standing chairman of the International Karl Jaspers Society. Together with his wife Dr. Edith Ehrlich, also from Vienna, he has translated several of Jaspers' works into English. With his philosophical work on Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig, he has made an internationally respected name for himself. Another focus of his research is Judaic Studies, in which he is particularly interested in cultural-historical research into European Jewry and in making the consequences of its destruction visible.

The appointment of Leonard H. Ehrlich officially inaugurated the establishment of the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship. Not only the President of the University, but also many colleagues and students from all departments attended his welcome and inaugural lecture. Leonard H. Ehrlich was no stranger to Kassel, as he had helped open the International Franz Rosenzweig Congress a year and a half earlier with his lecture "Rosenzweig's Concept of Zeitigung from the Sources of Judaism".

Leonard H. Ehrlich's three-hour keynote lecture "The problem of Jewish existence in the face of modernity and the destruction of European Jewry" was a programmatic advance into the problem area that lies at the heart of the thematic concerns of the Franz Rosenzweig Guest Professorship. He attempted to penetrate the subject philosophically from the spirit of Franz Rosenzweig's thought on the one hand and, on the other, in relentless confrontation with the events and consequences of the destruction of European Jewry. It was disappointing for all of us that only a small group of just over a dozen students attended this powerful and fundamental lecture, but since this lecture has now been revised and published as a book under the title Fraglichkeit der jüdischen Existenz^[1], Leonard H. Ehrlich's impressive remarks are no longer limited to the initial audience in Kassel, but can now have a stimulating effect on the philosophical-theological discussion about the historical incision of Auschwitz and the consequences to be drawn from it.

In another three-hour seminar, "The Existential Philosophy of Karl Jaspers", Leonard H. Ehrlich had a similar experience to that of Peter Fuss a year earlier with his Hegel seminar. Leonard H. Ehrlich hoped to find more basic knowledge of Karl Jaspers' existential philosophy among the German students, but instead he found some extremely interested students, whom he first had to introduce to Jaspers' existential philosophy, as he had done at his home university.

His philosophical lectures triggered lasting and fruitful discussions among his colleagues in the Department of Education/Human Sciences and in the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and also attracted a great deal of attention in the press and on the radio. Leonard H. Ehrlich reported on his experiences as a Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professor in lectures and journal articles in the USA; the translation of one of these reports "Als jüdischer Gastprofessor in Kassel" also appeared in our university journal Prisma.

Prof. Leonard H. Ehrlich PHD passed away on June 8, 2011 in Hingham, MA, USA

[1] Leonard H. Ehrlich, Fraglichkeit der jüdischen Existenz. Philosophical Investigations into the Modern Fate of the Jews, Freiburg/Munich 1993.

Peter Fuss PhD
Professor of Philosophy
University of Missouri - St. Louis

Peter Fuss was born in Berlin in 1932; his parents were able to emigrate to the USA with him just in time in 1939. He grew up in New York, graduated from Harvard University with a PhD, taught as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of California in Riverside from 1961 to 1969 and has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in St. Louis since 1969.

With his guiding philosophical problem of thinking totality in a way other than through theories of totality, Peter Fuss draws on the traditions of classical German philosophy and critical theory, but combines these with American traditions of political and speculative thought. In a long-term research project, Peter Fuss is preparing a new, philosophically sound translation of G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit into English.

The Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship in 1987 was still entirely experimental and preliminary. As the decisions of the university's central committees were still pending, the Department of Education/Humanities quickly decided to make a vacant professorship available for the initial realization of the idea, and just as spontaneously, Prof. Peter Fuss agreed to come to Kassel for a two-month compact guest semester directly after his spring semester in St. Louis. There were already close contacts with Peter Fuss, the nephew of the social philosopher Ulrich Sonnemann, who teaches at our university; shortly before, PD Dr. Gottfried Heinemann had been in St. Louis for a guest semester.

The guest semester in Kassel was also an experiment for Peter Fuss. He hoped to be able to clarify problems of interpreting Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which he was translating into English with a working group, in a seminar with German students. He was astonished to discover that the German first-year students did not understand the texts any better than their fellow students in the United States.

But the most surprising experience for him was that only three students showed up for the seminar he offered on "On Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy", two university teachers and one student. Of course, this was mainly due to the fact that only a few students take an additional course in the middle of the summer semester. But it also reveals something of the extent of the destruction of Jewish heritage in schools and universities, because Hannah Arendt was still an unknown name for many of the students at the time. It was only one or two years later that interest in the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt emerged via feminist philosophy and then after the upheaval of political conditions in Central Europe, and it swept through German universities like a wave of fashion.

The third seminar, which dealt with "Philosophical Implications in H. Melville's Moby Dick", met with the greatest response from the students.

Despite these initial difficulties in attracting students for the additional guest lectures, all in all this preliminary phase was successful and very encouraging for us, because Peter Fuss had contributed productively and with commitment to the joint research project of the department "Education and the Future" with lectures and discussion contributions, as well as lecturing in the Philosophical Forum on "The Aporia of Plato's State", so that through this active presence of Prof. Peter Fuss, the application for the Franz Rosenzweig Visiting Professorship as a permanent institution found broad approval and support from the university committees.