Shlomo Friedlaender: Portrait of a Jewish Kantian

As Thomas Mann observed in The Magic Mountain, “Aman lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but, also consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and contemporaries.” And so it was with Salomo Friedlaender. His biography was also that of his fellow Jews who affirmed German Bildungskultur, particularly as expressed by Kant’s cosmopolitan humanism. Friedlaender’s Kant for Children was born of an anxiety that Germany was retreating from the ethical idealism informing Bildungskultur. Indicatively, as he argued, Kant’s concept of aReichstaat based on rational law was increasingly overshadowed by the notion of an ethnically exclusive nation-state (Volkstaat). Not insignificantly, Friedlaender published his cri de coeur under his Jewish personal name. He spoke expressly as a Jew. His voice was echoed by Ernst Cassirer in the so-called Davos debate of 1929 with Heidegger, and thereafter in Cassirer’s critique of the very concept of a nation state, The Myth of the State (1946).