This year’s Leo Baeck essay prize for recent PhDs in German-Jewish studies goes to Susanne Hillman for her piece ‘“A Few Human Beings Walking Hand in Hand”: Exposing Margarete Susman’s key role in the emerging Jewish-Christian dialogue in Zurich. The article examines the as yet unpublished correspondence of the prominent Weimar literary critic and philosopher with the former pastor and social activist Leonhard Ragaz, which sought to give meaning to Christian and Jewish destinies on the eve of the Shoah. The essay is featured in the 2014 Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.
On New Year’s Eve of 1933 a train carrying a single passenger crossed the border into Switzerland. The passenger was the German-Jewish poet, philosopher, and literary critic Margarete Susman (1872-1966). Reflecting on the reasons for her departure, Susman later recalled: “When I left … my true Heimat I did so above all as a German who could not bear this new Germany. The Jewish destiny was not apparent in its entire horror at the time.” Sixty-one years old at the time of emigration, Susman was granted asylum in Switzerland. Soon, she would find a spiritual home among the religious socialists that had begun coalescing around the figure of the Protestant theologian Leonhard Ragaz (1868-1945) almost three decades earlier. It is her involvement in this leftist religious movement with its emphasis on dialogue between members of different creeds that constitutes the core of this article.
Susanne Hillman received her Ph.D. in modern European history, with an emphasis in (Jewish) Germany, from UC San Diego. Her research has been published in a wide variety of academic journals including Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, German Studies Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Soundings, Journal of Women’s History, Celebrity Studies, etc. She teaches survey courses in world history and Western civilization and upper-division courses including the history of the Holocaust and modern Jewish history. Hillman recently completed an MA in British Literature at SDSU.
