Traurige Erlösung : Utopia and Disenchantment in 20th Century German-Jewish Thought

In my talk I will deal with authors belonging to the 20th Century German-Jewish cultural milieu. Focusing my attention on figures such as Scholem, Benjamin, Buber, and Bloch, I will try to concentrate on clarifying the relation between melancholy and utopianism. I am actually convicted that this link can help shedding light on the German-Jewish way of experiencing modernity and the interwar crisis. Indeed, such a generation of intellectuals was forced to face the very unstable economical, social, and political situation in the aftermath of the World-War I. Therefore they tried to respond developing highly critical reflexions very often loaded with utopian expectations. As I will try to show, in many cases we can interpret this recurring on Utopia as something somehow related with a return to the sources of Messianic Jewish tradition.