Three weeks after World War II ended in Europe, Thomas Mann gave a public talk at the Library of Congress, in which he evaluated his own intellectual past and decried the unfortunate German tendency toward inwardness and intellectual self-absorption, which had helped pave the way for National Socialism since German intellectuals denigrated the value of political freedom in contrast to other West Europeans. One of the main themes of The Pen Confronts the Sword, which deals with five important German scholars, is the ways in which each had to reevaluate their own thinking as Germany descended from high civilization to barbarism.

The four main chapters of the book are self-contained and can be read as distinct treatments of the authors covered. Although Avihu Zakai repeatedly draws connections among the five authors, it would have been useful to have an introductory discussion on the larger topic of how “the pen confronts the sword” in other historical contexts. Hundreds of German intellectuals ended up fleeing the Nazi state, weaponizing their pens as part of various antifascist initiatives. This book does not tell us enough about how these five writers fit into that larger effort.

In his opening chapter on Thomas Mann, Zakai focuses on apocalyptic and eschatological themes in Mann's novel Dr. Faustus, which Mann began in 1942, when the Nazi empire was at its height, and published in 1947. Mann's retelling of the famous medieval story retains the original emphasis on temptation, pride, and loss of humanity while mirroring, through the figure of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, the pact with the devil that the Germans made with National Socialism. Zakai is an expert on the history of apocalyptic thinking, and his dissection of Leverkühn's satanic revelations and eventual doom are striking and illuminate Mann's exhaustive confrontation with the tortured history of Germany's descent into self-destruction in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

By contrast, Ernst Cassirer, born into a Jewish family in Breslau in 1874, did not have to reevaluate his politics when he went into exile. He had always been a staunch defender of enlightened rationalism and supported the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP)—slurred by its opponents as “the party of Jews and professors”—during the Weimar period. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Cassirer fled into exile in Sweden, then to the United States, eventually receiving a professorship at Columbia University in New York, where he died in 1945 just weeks before the war ended. Zakai concentrates on his last, posthumously published book, The Myth of the State (1946), and places this work within the context of Cassirer's struggle to make sense of how the Nazi state came into being. Zakai aptly sums up the development of Cassirer's thinking as one of disillusionment, as the philosopher transitioned from being an advocate for liberal progress to a much more pessimistic view of history in The Myth of the State. Cassirer came to view history as a series of traumatic, interminable crises, not along any recognizable path of progress but rather as a struggle between reason and myth. Like Mann, Cassirer located the origins of National Socialism in the unfortunate romantic turn in German nineteenth-century thought toward the remythologizing of the state, as exemplified best by Hegel. Cassirer here anticipated the postwar debates on the origins of totalitarianism and identified hero worship as a temptation that too many German intellectuals fell for as the Wilhelmine state grew powerful around the turn of the twentieth century.

Zakai depicts Cassirer as a believer in the Enlightenment, but one deeply chastened and shaken by the experience of exile and the destruction of German culture. Cassirer did not believe that human beings were fixed indefinitely by the culture they were born into, but rather had the ability to assimilate the richness of all cultural traditions. This explains Cassirer's own mix of Jewishness and proto-pagan cosmopolitanism as well as Cassirer's objections to the folkish elements in Martin Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time (1927), which Cassirer early on recognized as politically suspect. Unfortunately, Zakai skips rather quickly over the famous 1929 debate in Davos between Cassirer and Heidegger, which illuminated so clearly the former's tenacious hold on Enlightenment values, even in the midst of the coming shipwreck.

Erich Auerbach, born in Berlin in 1892, was the son of a prosperous Prussian merchant. He grew up calling himself a Prussian of the Jewish faith. A gifted philologist of Romance languages, his Jewishness initially hindered an academic career, but Auerbach made a name for himself with his work on Dante and eventually earned an academic post. Auerbach took a strikingly original and somewhat paradoxical stance, arguing that, imaginatively, the late medieval Italian poet initiated the modern form of the novel. On the basis of that pioneering work, Auerbach was given a chair in Romance philology in Marburg in 1929, a year before Heidegger left (unmentioned by Zakai, Auerbach disliked Heidegger immensely).

In 1935, Auerbach was released from the University of Marburg and fled into exile to Turkey, where he received an academic appointment with the help of Leo Spitzer, an influential Austrian literary critic. Here he wrote Mimesis, a grand work of literary history from the Old Testament to modern literature, published in 1946. A legend has grown up around this now famous book, encouraged by Auerbach himself, that the work emerged from Auerbach's head almost like Athena from the forehead of Zeus because the University of Istanbul did not have a good, up-to-date library and he had to rely on his own resources. This is probably not factual becuase there were many good private libraries in and around Istanbul and many well-stocked archives in monasteries, whose manuscripts of the church fathers Aurbach used copiously in Mimesis.

The chapter on Auerbach, cowritten with David Weinstein, offers the thesis—not particularly original but carried out with rigor and erudition—that the bookless scholar in exile was trying to reconstitute the entire tradition of Western humanism, which the Nazis were busy destroying. There remains a bit of a mystery about Auerbach's relationship with Judaism. He may have been ambivalent—one wonders, for example, why he turned down Martin Buber's request to write an introduction to the Hebrew edition of Mimesis. One can construct a narrative that Mimesis is a long, subterranean meditation on the Holocaust because it inextricably ties the Old Testament to modern European culture, but if so, Auberbach hid the traces carefully. Zakai gives us many good reasons to read Mimesis as a commentary on how the National Socialists tried to erase not only Jews but also Jewish thought from history, but the fact remains that, in exile in America at least, Auerbach did not talk much about the war. In the end, he left it up to each reader to decide what epiphenomenal messages were to be read into his writings.

The social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer together wrote a long essay called The Dialect of Enlightenment—circulated among friends in 1944 under the title Philosophical Fragments, and even in its published version (1947), it remains indeed a fragmentary work. Zakai rightly calls it the darkest of all the texts he considers. Much of it was written in 1942, at the height of the Nazi empire, and the book is profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of human progress. Leaving behind the Marxist hope for the social amelioration of their youth, Adorno and Horkheimer laid out a grim analysis of how the modern forces of industrial production had led to myriad forms of social domination and ultimately the counterrevolution of fascism. The European Enlightenment is exposed as a myth because the advance of reason does not lead to human liberation, rather the opposite: mass societies characterized by industrial administration of all of society. In other words, a new kind of barbarism. The liberal state turns out to be a chimera, and modern states are all fascistic in one way or another.

In 1949, Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt. The Dialectic was viewed as a period piece, but in the mid-1960s radical German students rediscovered it and used it to attack the Bonn Republic as proto-fascist. Horkheimer and Adorno had to plead with the students to read the work in its historical context, but it was too late. The student movement reminded them of the extreme positions, both right and left, taken by many students in the Weimar period.

Zakai goes over fairly familiar territory in his analysis of Dialect of Enlightenment. Undoubtedly, he is right to claim that Horkheimer and Adorno sided with the “black writers of the Enlightenment” (270) (like Nietzsche), but it is important to remember that they later distanced themselves from the pessimism of this period. Zakai is also correct in emphasizing the importance of their reflections on antisemitism and their revision of Marx's controversial claim about humanity having to free itself from Judaism. Not everyone will agree, however, that “only Horkheimer and Adorno offer a solution to the Jewish question as true heirs of Marx” (305). There may indeed be a mythological basis to faith in the Enlightenment and human progress, but as Zakai's engaging, learned, and in many ways profound discourse on these five writers attests, without that faith, the alternative for mankind is dark indeed.