'Bad Neighbours': a chapter from Wolfram Eilenberger's 'Time of the Magicians'

From Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians : Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy, Ernst Cassirer acts against an antisemitic neighbour via writing him a letter.

AS WE KNOW, it was not easy to make Cassirer lose his composure. His labors were completely unaffected by the challenges of the financial crisis of 1922–1923. He finished the first volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and immediately set about preparing for the second part, which would be devoted to mythical thought. Myths and their associated rituals and taboos have from ancient times provided a form of orientation through the world and a guide for action; indeed, they constitute the origin of symbolic formation as such. “You really don’t need to worry about me: not only am I bearing my solitude well, as ever, I am seeking it out, since it is the best and absolutely tried and tested salve for my nerves, which have recently been subject to a certain amount of stress,” he wrote on July 5, 1922, from the study of his Hamburg villa, where he was buried under tomes about religious history and ethnology, to his wife, who was staying, along with the children, with relatives in Vienna.

Yet the events of the previous month had left their impression on him. By then his children, particularly Anna, age fourteen, had already been subjected once or twice to “shouts from neighbors’ houses” on the way to school, but the recent occurrence had crossed another line. It was too much for even the imperturbable Ernst Cassirer:

Hamburg, 10 June 1922

Dear Sir, Yesterday afternoon you used my absence from home to approach my wife and father-in-law, engage in a conversation with them and in the end shout some insults across the canal. Such behaviors toward a lady to whom you have not even been introduced and toward a 76-year-old man speak for themselves: it would be otiose to add anything about the nature of such actions.

I have, as your neighbor, drawn clear and distinct boundaries between us—and I must most urgently ask you to make no further attempts to traverse those boundaries. Hitherto I have always successfully sought to avoid any dealings with people of your kind, and I must also urge other fathers from our neighborhood, in the interest of the upbringing of my children, to avoid any contact with your son.

What had happened? The day before, a neighbor named Hachmann, from the other side of the tributary of the Alster, whose garden abutted the Cassirers’ property, had responded furiously to a request from Frau Professor Cassirer, doubtless with the greatest politeness, as to whether the Hachmanns’ seven-year-old son might not wish to play a little more quietly, or indeed somewhere other than in his own garden, since the shrill and irritating noises he was producing disturbed the summer reading of Frau Cassirer and her father, who was staying with the family in Hamburg.

The retort, shouted as they sat in their sunlit garden, was vicious: “Do you think you don’t disturb us? The mere sight of you—you all belong in Palestine.”

Looking back from her American exile, Toni Cassirer recalled that dispute between neighbors as a crucial turning point: “From that day I began to free myself from Germany.”

The unabashed directness of Hachmann’s hatred was probably not the factor here, as much as Toni Cassirer’s keen sense that in those early critical years of the Weimar Republic an explosive mixture of anti-capitalism, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism was brewing, all the while finding more and more followers even in the circles of the cultured elite. Ernst Cassirer believed, as his letter makes clear, that he could escape the acts of impertinence associated with this shift in public mood, even as it increasingly made itself felt in everyday life, with clearly delineated boundaries between public and private, buttressed by impeccable bourgeois etiquette, and by what he saw as a scholarly retreat into his own social circles and his own four walls.

During that summer, nothing could have been further from his mind than the idea of bidding farewell to his German homeland, and particularly to Hamburg. After all, possibly for the first time he now felt acknowledged, fully and entirely accepted by his peers. This was not least because Cassirer had recently discovered his true thinking space. In his case it was not a lonely cabin on a hillside in the Black Forest, but the library of a private scholar of cultural science who had collected several tens of thousands of rare studies in intellectual and scientific history on his shelves, and organized them in a very idiosyncratic way. This was the library of Abraham (“Aby”) Moritz Warburg, the scion of one of the world’s most influential banking families, which Cassirer first entered in the winter of 1920 and which for the next ten years would be the site of inspiration for his work.