Oskar Goldberg

Oskar Goldberg (5 November 1885 – 13 August 1953) was a German-Jewish philosopher, religious thinker, and medical doctor.

"In her autobiographical memoir, Margarete Susman, one of the most notable Jewish thinkers of the Weimar period, ranked Goldberg's book alongside [Martin] Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) as the 'two great metaphysical expositions of the world and human existence published in the German language in the interwar period.'"In other sources, Heidegger has been referred to as "The great...indeed the only Nazi philosopher." Given that Goldberg was (however eccentrically) a religious Jewish revivalist and given that many of his fixations and interpretations were intimately similar to Heidegger’s at several important points, what Sussman’s characterization makes Goldberg, in that case, poses an interesting if vertiginous question to some who are familiar with the relevant sources.

Obscure but enduring scholarly interest in this figure derives from the strangeness of Goldberg's intimacy with the lexicon of conceptual images and key terms appearing in his theories that were later deployed in propaganda-techniques formational to the Nazi worldview. A recent work, published in 2017, resurrects an image of Oskar Goldberg as a misguided and untimely but otherwise sympathetic 'vitalist'--which he very well may have been relative to the tone of discussion in his own time.

Hindsight paints him in a somewhat different hue.

Previously, Goldberg's afterlife in the citations of later thinkers had remained largely dormant--mostly confined to the memoirs of the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem, who considered Goldberg to be an emissary of the devil. This, apart from occasional sketches whose interest in the subject disclose the way that they were drawn from the odd incongruity of this figure as Scholem conjures him up in these short portraits, composed Goldberg’s posthumous legacy in the literature until recent debates surrounding Israel’s complicity with the Trump and Putin brought him back into the zone of more sustained historical reflection.