Belgian troops to occupy the economically crucial Ruhr region – further
adding to the national humiliation and economic hardship.
Remarkably, there was a period of recovery at the end of the 1920s. The
government issued a new currency, the rentenmark (security mark), which,
though valued at 1 trillion papiermarks, was also valued at 4.2 rentenmarks
to the dollar. In addition, in 1925, the Locarno Treaty restored the diplomatic
status of Germany, thus allowing the country to obtain foreign loans more
easily. The same year, the Dawes Plan ordered French and Belgian troops out
of the Ruhr region, regulated reparations payments, reorganized the failing
German Reichsbank under Allied supervision, and allowed the Weimar gov-
ernment to use tax revenue to defer the cost of reparations payments.
Ultimately, however, recovery was temporary. The rentenmark and the
Dawes plan alleviated but did not solve economic problems, and the Great
Depression torpedoed the German economy amid a worldwide economic
collapse. By 1930, it was clear that the Weimar government was on the
verge of collapse.
Despite precipitous economic and political decline, German Jews in particu-
lar continued to be culturally and intellectually innovative and creative. Indeed,
the 1920s and even the early 1930s were a period of cultural renaissance for
German Jewry. The revival of Jewish culture stemmed from a combination of
four factors: a romantic reaction to secularism; a generational revolt against
the prewar faith in liberalism and progress; rising anti-Semitism, which belied
the belief in a German–Jewish symbiosis; and encounters with eastern
European Jews.
In particular, German-Jewish intellectuals challenged the preexisting par-
adigm of religious reformism wed to political liberalism, and produced new
expressions of Jewish identity. Hermann Cohen, the most renowned of
German–Jewish intellectuals prior to the war, rediscovered a sense of
Jewishness and spirituality during the 1920s. Leo Baeck, Cohen’s disciple and
the chief rabbi of German Jewry during the interwar years, recast the essence
of Judaism, moving it from the ethical monotheism that had predominated
prior to the war to include what his academic mentor Rudolf Otto described
as the “spiritual experience of holy fascination and fear.” In this vein, Baeck
distinguished between mystery and commandment. Mystery he defined as
that which is real; commandment as that which is yet to be realized. Thus, he
concluded, Jews experience the mystery of the world by observing the ethical
and moral commandments of the biblical prophets.
Even more innovative in this regard was Martin Buber. Through his own
critique of German idealism, combined with an encounter with
HasidicOstjudenwho migrated to Germany during the war, Buber shifted
the focus of Judaism from its legal tradition to the experience of being Jewish.
He redefined revelation at Sinai from the transmission of laws into a pure
encounter with God. This pure encounter, he suggested, became the model for
the ideal, I–Thou relationship between human beings, as opposed to the I–It
212 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45