This edition project undertaken by Anke Gilleir and Barbara Hahn (Vanderbilt University) for the first time makes available the oeuvre of German-Jewish philosopher and critic Margarete Susman in five volumes (ca 3000 pages). Susman was born in Hamburg in 1872 and died in 1966 in Zurich, where she had lived in exile since 1933. In her oeuvre, which consists of monographs, essays, lectures and reviews (many of which for the Frankfurter Zeitung), Susman touched upon an enormous span of topics, making her one of the most widely read thinkers of her time. Known to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, her essay “Das Hiob-Problem bei Kafka” (1929) was the first in-depth analysis of the work of Kafka, whose Jewishness, along with that of Baruch Spinoza, would become one of the leitmotifs of her work. Susman further addressed issues as varied as aesthetics, revolution, emancipation, utopianism, materialism, religion and war, while also engaging with contemporary critical thinkers such as Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Ernst Bloch, whose Geist der Utopie (1918) Susman was one of the first to review.

Susman regarded the advent of the First World War as the start of the breakdown of civilization which would eventually reach its apex with the Shoah. Despite this bleak outlook on the condition of modernity, however, her thought never failed to stress humanity’s inherent capacity for contingent progressive change. This conviction runs through Susman’s work, from her 1910 poetological study, Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik, in which she introduced the notion of the “lyrical I”, to Das Buch Hiob and das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes (1946).

The poet Paul Celan reached out to Susman at the end of her life, during a period in which the German-speaking world's selective short-term memory had momentarily pushed Susman's work into oblivion. Celan, traumatized and isolated, told her: “that which you have written and are still writing belongs to one of these unique encounters for which one lives (…) Sie sind für mich ein Mensch”. With this edition, we can now finally reacquaint ourselves with the rich and variegated oeuvre Celan as well admired so much.