Die Kreatur – Lesarten einer Zeitschrift
Naharaim. Zeitschrift für deutsch-jüdische Literatur und Kulturgeschichte
[Die Kreatur – Readings of a journal]

From 1926 to 1930, Lambert Schneider publishes the journal Die Kreatur. On the one hand, the journal is a typical cultural journal of the 1920s that reflects the ever-present atmosphere of crisis and departure in the Weimar Republic. It’s the place where “New Thinking” is conceived and postulated, especially in terms of a new understanding of humanity beyond naturalism and idealism. This endeavor does not follow any fixed program or clearly profiled concept of the creaturely; on first glance, the three volumes rather contain different essays on philosophy, anthropology, medicine, pedagogy, theology, on literary and cultural criticism and, more rarely, on politics—essays that also include various forms, from the small paper to the subjective observation, commentary, and open letter. This variety, in particular, is typical for journals of this time period as they become a field of experimentation for dynamic and complex discourses that begin to exceed the boundaries between disciplines and established fields of knowledge.

On the other hand, the journal was known among contemporaries for its three editors Martin Buber, Viktor von Weizsäcker, and Joseph Witting—since they belonged to three different denominations, the journal was not only a cooperation between a Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, but also a publication that programmatically focused on the “conversation.” Here, too, authors such as Franz Rosenzweig, Florens Christian Rang, Rudolf and Hans Ehrenberg, Leo Schestow, Nikolai Berdyaev, Walter Benjamin, Hans Trüb, Fritz Klatt, and others do not constitute a fixed group. Instead, they come from different social backgrounds that were otherwise distant from one another. A network, as we would call it today, which does not only stand out due to its open borders, but also and especially due to its contact points becoming productive: a place in which Jews speak about Christians and Christians speak about Jews, a place in which Martin Buber—the driving force behind the project and a gifted networker, as his correspondence shows time and time again—successfully presents controversial positions on education or philosophy next to one another in one single journal.

Thus, reading a journal such as the Kreatur is both a challenge and a promise. Every single issue, but also the journal as a whole, confronts its readers with a hermeneutical problem: How is one supposed to read a text that is not written by one single author and that is more many-voiced and more open than our retrospective, author-oriented perspective may suggest? How can we deal with the topicality that a magazine claims for itself given the fact that most contributions are essayistic drafts rather than elaborated theses? Is it possible to directly observe the circulation of knowledge by looking at these journals, especially those from such dynamic times as the 1920s? And what do they tell us about that concept which would now be called the ‘hybridization’ of knowledge, the blending and conflation of different discourses, of theology and politics, medicine and pedagogy?

These questions stood at the center of a small research project conducted by Gerald Hartung and Daniel Weidner in cooperation with Yfaat Weiss. The project also included a workshop that took place at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center in January 2017. Many thanks to Anna Pollmann for preparing said workshop. The lively discussions during the workshop—here, too, the ‘conversation’ was the primary mode of communication—resulted in a number of contributions that this volume summarizes into one thematic focus. Enrico Rosso analyzes the networks that brought forth the Kreatur, and he reflects on the methodical and theoretical implications of the concept of the network for intellectual history.  Galili Shahar unfolds the implications of talks about the creature  on the basis of a text by Joseph Wittig, and he shows that this happens to be a figure of thought with great poetic potential. Birgit Erdle reads two texts published in the same year, one by Werner Picht and one by Ernst Simon, and analyzes the hermeneutical and theoretical synergies of such constellations. Gustav Frank uses the example of Walter Benjamin to argue that a journal such as Die Kreatur always has to be viewed in the context of other journals and ultimately as part of a media landscape that forms a highly productive network of nets.