Salomo Friedlaender with his son Heinz Ludwig and his wife Marie Luise (Image has been AI-enhanced).
Who isn’t eager to learn more about a philosopher who relished describing himself as a synthesis of Chaplin and Kant? About the author of a work on Kant used in 1945 by U.S. military intelligence to train 500 German prisoners deemed hostile to the Nazis who would help with the postwar bureaucracy? About a writer who was forced into exile by the National Socialists, the same group that wanted to burn his books and imprisoned his sister, Anna, in Theresienstadt? About a thinker devoted to the peaceful and egalitarian impulses within Kant’s philosophy, though hardly any Kant scholars could pick that thinker out of a police lineup?
Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946) counts as a Cassandra of his time, warning anyone who would listen about despotism, racism, and fascism. He corrected Albert Einstein and wrote an exposé on the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. Friedlaender’s reward? Exile and oblivion. Meanwhile, Friedlaender’s contemporary and inverse Cassandra, Martin Heidegger, can claim a “titanic impact,” notwithstanding ongoing warnings from prominent philosophers and critics about Heidegger as a dangerous and “false prophet.” As Ronald Beiner writes, “Heidegger’s intellectual preeminence requires us to bracket some of the most questionable aspects of his thought and biography.” Gerald Bruns gives the situation a more Pontius Pilate-like turn: “We must imagine Heidegger’s action [endorsing Hitler, joining the Nazi party, and his anti-Semitism] spreading across the text of philosophy like a deep stain; and not only across the text but also across the hands that take it up for study.” As Lady Macbeth could attest, exclaiming “Out damned spot” won’t help the hands that cradle Heidegger; it’s an existential stain no soap or bleach will expunge.
In contrast to Heidegger, Friedlaender did not pursue an academic career after finishing his doctorate. Motivated by the Neo-Kantian movement, Friedlaender wrote enough to boast about his productivity. Detlef Thiel, current world expert on all things Friedlaender, reports that before World War I ended, Friedlaender had to his credit five philosophical books and around two hundred essays and reviews.
Friedlaender felt comfortable among pre-Weimar Berlin’s artists and intellectuals, counting as friends almost all the important Expressionists, as well as progressives like Kurt Hiller, a prominent figure in the German gay rights struggle. Thanks to his personal popularity, Friedlaender was able to make a living from writing and lectures, some of which attracted the attention of figures like Karl Kraus and Walter Benjamin, who cites Friedlaender in his own work. You might think of Friedlaender as a “red Kantian” avant la lettre, a thinker exploring the possible conditions for bringing philosophy to life. “Red Kantianism” is a phrase used to describe a late twentieth-century development that does not take for granted the opposition between, on the one hand, the aesthetic, and on the other, the material and historical world. At this point, few will be unsettled, if they sense my bending Friedlaender to fit inside the “red Kantian” box, because hardly anyone, including many Kant scholars, know Friedlaender as any color of Kantian.
Should you develop Friedlaender fever and begin racing through his writings, you might find yourself, on occasion, caught up in Friedlaender’s enthusiasm for Kant, as well as puzzled by the absence of Friedlaender in scholarly studies of Kant. If any adult could be accused of insatiability when it comes to all things Kant, it’s Friedlaender. It’s as if he wakes up each morning eager to breakfast on a bowl of Kant.
Still, Friedlaender is hardly a one-dimensional man. In a conversation with Alice Lagaay, Hartmut Geerken, an artist responsible for preserving Friedlaender’s legacy, calls Friedlaender’s literary pieces “provocative, sarcastic, devoid of taboos, unabashed, and full of impudent humor.” How could someone with Friedlaender’s sense of humor become an ardent Kantian?
Kant has accrued a reputation as being gainsboro, devoid of humor, despite tossing around inherently delightful words and phrases like “noumenon” and “Das Ding an sich.” The perception of Kant as akin to the Chef in The Menu contrasts with contemporary evidence that Kant tickled people’s fancy. This point is highlighted in William Egginton’s recent The Rigor of Angels, where the author calls Kant “a man-about-town,” his “charm” and repartee prized in the community. Not that Kant was killing it as a standup in Stuttgart, but people sought to snag Kant as a dinner guest. One of Kant’s famous students, Johann Herder, “marveled” at his teacher’s “wit.”
Kant’s comedic characteristics complement Friedlaender’s humor. In fact, Friedlaender’s collected writings (Lagaay predicts eventually some forty volumes) include “Humor as a Weltanschauung” (1935). Stefanie Grutsch’s study of Friedlaender’s humor highlights Friedlaender’s use of the word “Lachkräfte,” laughing powers, or an inner force for laughter.
Ironically, this forgotten writer/philosopher was born in Gołańcz (Poland), a town in the region of Posen, its name rooted in a participle meaning “one who is known.” Friedlaender’s mother, Ida, died when he was 20. His father was a Jewish doctor, and Friedlaender began studying medicine, but then switched to philosophy, finishing his dissertation (1902) on Schopenhauer and Kant at the University of Jena.
In 1909 he began publishing under the name Mynona, attracting public attention. He became known for a genre called grotesques. Joela Jacobs, professor of German at the University of Arizona, explains that “a literary grotesque is a short prose piece that upsets bourgeois sensibilities.”
As an agitator for peace and freedom governed by reason, Friedlaender made many uncomfortable. For instance, an editor threatened Friedlaender with time in a concentration camp if Friedlaender didn’t revise a piece Friedlaender had written, The Anti-Babylonian Tower. That interaction served as a catalyst for him to leave Germany in 1933.
Friedlaender died in poverty in Paris (1946) after Thomas Mann refused to help him emigrate to the United States. Even after Friedlaender’s death, those with clout frustrated efforts to expand Friedlaender’s audience. For example, after the war when writer and publicist Hermann Kasack aspired to publish Friedlaender’s magnum opus, The Magical I, the plan “failed due to the lack of understanding of a prominent reviewer: Hans-Georg Gadamer,” according to Thiel. A further irony for Friedlaender: Gadamer, a student of Heidegger, is known as a “theorist of understanding.”
Unpacking the causes of Gadamer’s seemingly careless reading must be left aside for now. Thanks to Geerken and Thiel, The Magical I is available, along with enough Friedlaender treasures for readers to determine for themselves whether Geerken is right to propose that Friedlaender may be “the only philosopher of the modern age to call for a positively revolutionary change in one’s manner of thinking.”
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
