Stéphane Mosès

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Stéphane Mosès , born as Stefan Moses, (born June 11, 1931 in Berlin ; † December 1, 2007 in Paris ) was an Israeli-French literary scholar of German origin.

Life

Stéphane Mosès came from the Jewish Moses family, who belonged to the literary bourgeoisie in Berlin: his maternal grandfather was the writer and publisher Heinrich Kurtzig . In 1937 the family had to flee from Nazi Germany, initially to Amsterdam for a year and then to Casablanca in 1938. In Morocco , Stéphane Mosès began school in a French school. When the Second World War broke out , he and all family members - mother, grandmother and brother - were declared hostile foreigners . In 1942, under the Vichy regime, he was interned in the Sidi-el-Ayachi camp in Morocco. After the end of the Second World War, Stéphane Mosès acquired French citizenship in 1949 and attended the École normal supérieure from 1950 onwards, financed with a scholarship . In 1954 he became a lecturer in German language and literature.

At the end of the 1950s, Jews in France became increasingly interested in the Jewish religious and cultural tradition. Under the influence of intellectuals such as the philosopher Léon Ashkénasi and his friend, biophysicist Henri Atlan (* 1931), Stéphane Mosès also showed a strong interest in it. He dealt with the German-Jewish philosophers Hermann Cohen , Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who had been almost forgotten by then . He dedicated his habilitation thesis to them .

In 1961, Stéphane Mosès became maître-assistant for German language and literature at the Sorbonne , but in the same year switched to teaching at the newly founded University of Nanterre . In the 1960s he directed the Gilbert-Bloch school. At that time, the school, also known as Êcole d'Orsay, developed into a center of cultural life within the Jewish community in France. There he met his wife, the painter Liliane Klapisch. The marriage has three children.

In 1969 - under the influence of the Six Day War - the family moved to Israel. In 1977, Stéphane Mosès founded the Chair of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . In 1987 Mosès became a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry . In 1990 he was the founding director of the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Cultural and Literary History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He headed the center until his retirement in 1996.

In 1997 Stéphane Mosès returned to Paris and continued his work there. In the last years of his life he was active in Germany. His last major public work was to direct the prestigious annual Étienne Gilson Conferences at the Catholic Institute in Paris in 2006 and 2007. He died in Paris in December 2007 and was buried in the Jerusalem Sanhedria Cemetery, a few meters from the tomb of Gershom Scholem and right next to the grave of Max Warschawski .

Services

Stéphane Mosès played a key role in bringing the German-Jewish literary tradition, which was broken off by National Socialism, into the interest of the public, especially the French public. With his work L'Ange de l'histoire he made the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig known in France. Through his studies he also introduced the French public to the philosophers Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem and the poets Franz Kafka and Paul Celan .

Honors

Publications

author
  • Une affinité littéraire. Le Titan de Jean-Paul et Le Docteur Faustus de Thomas Mann. Klincksieck, Paris 1972
  • Système et Révélation. La philosophie de Franz Rosenzweig. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1982
    • German edition: System and Revelation. The philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig . Preface by Emmanuel Levinas . Translated from the French by Rainer Rochlitz. Fink, Munich 1985
  • L'Ange de l'Histoire. Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1992
    • German edition: The angel of history. Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem . Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-633-54088-1
  • Exégèse d'une legend. Lectures De Kafka. Edition de l'Eclat, 2006, ISBN 2841621359
  • L'Éros et la Loi. Lectures bibliques . Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1999, ISBN 978-2020245890
    • German edition: Eros and Law. Ten readings of the Bible . Translated from the French by Susanne Sandherr and Birgit Schlachter. Fink, Munich 2004
    • Spanish edition: El Eros y la Ley . Katz editores, Buenos Aires / Madrid 2007 ISBN 9788496859012
  • Un Retour au Judaïsme. Together with Victor Malka. Seuil, Paris 2008, ISBN 2020820935
  • Snapshots / Instantanés . German and French. Edited by Sigrid Weigel . With translations from the French by Clemens Härle and Dirk Naguschewski. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3518421529
editor
  • Traces of writing. From Goethe to Celan. Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1987 ISBN 3610004029
  • Kafka and Judaism. Together with Karl Erich Grözinger . Jewish publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1987
  • Manes Sparhawk as a European. An ethic of resistance . Together with Joachim Schlör , Julius H. Schoeps . Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1996
  • Gershom Scholem. Literature and rhetoric. Together with Sigrid Weigel. Böhlau, Cologne 2000
translator
  • Franz Rosenzweig: The star of redemption. French title: L'Étoile de la rédemption , Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1982

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nicolas Weill: Stéphane Mosès . In: Le Monde , December 13, 2007, p. 23.
personal data
SURNAME Mosès, Stéphane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Moses, Stefan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli-French literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH December 1, 2007
Place of death Paris