Mysticism & Modernism: The World of Margarete Susman

This conference will investigate the relationship of mysticism and modernism in literary theory, theology, gender studies, hermeneutics, and art history, particularly as it relates to the theory and criticism of Margarete Susman, a German-Jewish under-recognized critic and scholar of religion whose wide-ranging theories bring together a stunningly wide array of disciplines and fields.

Margarete Susman has only recently gained the interest of the scholarly community that her oeuvre deserves. A five-volume edition of her collected writings has been published in 2022 (Wallstein Verlag). With our conference, we hope to contribute to a retrieval of this fascinating German-Jewish thinker. Although Susman was a respected poet and journalist in her lifetime, she received little recognition as a theorist. In Germany, she was barred from pursuing an academic degree, and as a writer in exile in Switzerland she supported herself mainly through her journalism. Susman’s reckoning with the identity of the Jewish people after the Holocaust constitutes an overlooked, but central contribution to writers’ discussions of a life after Auschwitz (see e.g. her book The Book of Job and the Fate of the Jewish People, 1945). 

Although this conference is centered around Margarete Susman, we are interested in expanding the debate around her through the investigation of other contemporary scholars, critics, novelists and poets (including, but not limited to, Stefan George, Georg Simmel, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Georg Lukács, Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno) to show how they rely on or depart from theology to make sense of modernity. We also aim to discuss how medieval and early modern mysticism influenced philosophy and literature of the 20th century.

The keynote speaker will be Professor Barbara Hahn, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University, Honorary Professor at the Free University of Berlin. Professor Hahn specializes in 18th to 21st century German and Jewish literature, as well as intellectual history. She is the editor of Grenzgänge zwischen Dichtung, Philosophie und Kulturkritik: Über Margarete Susman (2012, Wallstein) and of the first three volumes of a complete critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s work. A list of representative publications can be accessed here: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/german-russian-studies/bio/barbara-hahn/.

Deadline for Call for Papers has been extended to Nov. 15, 2024.

The contact to submit abstracts is Alex Beatty.