"Through an examination of the diaries and letters of three extraordinary and distinctive German-Jewish intellectuals - Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Victor Klemperer - Steven E. Aschheim illuminates what the intimate writings of these thinkers reveal about their evolving identities and world views as they wrestled with the meaning of being both German and Jewish before, during, and after Hitler's Third Reich.

In recounting how their personal and private selves responded to the public experiences these writers faced, their letters and diaries provide a striking composite portrait. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism and the spiritual traditions of Judaism; Arendt, a political and social philosopher; and Klemperer, a professor of literature and philology, were all highly articulate German-Jewish intellectuals, shrewd observers, and acute analysts of the pathologies and special contours of their times.

From their intimate writings, Aschheim constructs a revealing "history from within" that sheds new light on the complexity and drama of the twentieth-century European and Jewish experience."--BOOK JACKET.