The war seemed to have destroyed all false hopes. From the very beginning, Jews felt joined with other Germans in the war efforts and uplifted by the promise of total brotherhood, as announced by Kaiser Wilhelm II in the streets of Berlin. But later on, as the war became a rather hopeless trench war, little remained of this sense of togetherness. The Jews felt the atmospheric change in the return of antisemitism. Individuals experienced it directly in their various army units and the community as a whole was finally shocked and irritated by the decision to collect “Jewish Statistics,” measuring their presumably real part in defending the Fatherland, , in October 1916. Later on, Jews were overwhelmed, together with others, by more threatening dangers. After briefly telling the life-story of Albert Ballin, the great ship-owner from Hamburg, a “Kaiser-Jew,” and the way he experienced the lost war, the end of the empire, and the approaching revolution, the chapter moves on to tell of the great hopes entertained by other, less prosperous Jews, who experienced the end of the old order and the imminent establishment of a new republic in a far more positive light.

Waseem Yaqoob examines how four prominent German political philosophers responded to the ‘crisis of historicism’ by re-thinking the relation between ethics, politics and history. The trigger for the crisis was Germany’s defeat in World War I, when the presumed convergence of the monarchical nation state with ethical fulfilment and historical destiny dissolved in defeat and political upheaval. Among the first to respond was Friedrich Meinecke, whose earlier confidence in that convergence was replaced by an awareness of historical contingency, and of the difficulty of aligning ethics with reason of state. Notoriously harder line was Carl Schmitt, for whom an appreciation of contingency in a ‘world of enemies’ entailed the assertion of sovereignty at the expense of ethics. With the collapse of Nazism and advent of the Cold War, Reinhart Koselleck renewed Schmitt’s critique of moralising historical philosophy (identified with the Enlightenment), before turning to ‘conceptual history’ to suggest that the state would best adapt to the accelerating temporality of modernity by avoiding all normative choices. By contrast, Hannah Arendt would seek in the contingency of history the space to make such choices, and the opportunity to revive the ancient ideal of active citizenship. In conclusion, Yaqoob sets German post-Historicist thinking off against the anti-historical tendency of Anglo-American political philosophy associated with John Rawls, suggesting that the former may offer a more sophisticated historical ‘realism’ than that current among Rawls’ critics.