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Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad.

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Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. By Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. ix + 194 pp.

Let us reverse for a moment Philip Roth's vision that America had turned fascist and that, as a consequence, Hitler had won the war. Imagine instead that he would have been overthrown by his fellow Germans before he had the chance to launch the war and the genocide against European Jewry. Just as Anne Frank might be writing romantic novels in Frankfurt, Salman Schocken might have continued to sell clothes in even more department stores designed by Erich Mendelsohn, and the Jewish team Hakoah Vienna might have won a few more Austrian football championships; thus the heroes of this book might have turned German society of the 1950s and 1960s into an exciting intellectual culture. Imagine Hannah Arendt succeeding Martin Heidegger on his Freiburg chair, Leo Strauss advising Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, George Mosse and Fritz Stern reclaiming Germany's leading role in the study of intellectual history. To be sure, one is well advised to refrain from pondering about the "what ifs" of history--but reading this book one is at least tempted to engage in such intellectual exercises.

Aschheim's...

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