A brilliant and engaging biography of one of the great modern Jewish thinkers.
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was one of the central figures of the Jewish cultural and intellectual renaissance in Weimar Germany. His masterwork, The Star of Redemption (1921), is a classic of existential thought and Jewish philosophy, and his considerable legacy also includes his collaboration with Martin Buber on a key translation of the Hebrew Bible into German and the establishment of an education center in Frankfurt that brought together the most important young German-Jewish intellectuals of its time.
Rosenzweig’s personal biography is no less fascinating than his ideas and accomplishments. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rosenzweig’s unpublished personal correspondence, Paul Mendes-Flohr skillfully weaves together the threads of Rosenzweig’s life to give us a moving portrait of this towering figure—from his near-conversion to Christianity to his tragic diagnosis with ALS. Mendes-Flohr also closely explores Rosenzweig’s relationship with Margrit Huessy, who was a vital intellectual partner for Rosenzweig, as well as a muse and lover. He worked out many of his ideas about love both in conversation and consort with her, and Mendes-Flohr shows the importance of intimacy—both romantic and platonic—in the development of Rosenzweig’s thought.
Love Is Strong as Death provides a unique and insightful look at one of the most important modern Jewish thinkers.
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“Beautifully rendered. . . Rosenzweig wrote in his diary: 'You believe you are philosophizing but you are only writing your own biography.' In Mendes-Flohr’s telling, the line becomes an imperative. Philosophy without a biography turns inhuman; biography without a philosophy becomes inert. Rosenzweig’s life—triangulated by love, narrowed by illness, expanded by the labor of translation as a form of spiritual respiration—suggests that thinking can be answerable again to what breaks and binds a person: the shock of being mortal, the summons of another voice.”
" - The Wall Street Journal
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“A vivid picture.”
" - The Spectator
