Goldstein, Margerete, 1885-

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), philosopher and theologian, belonged to the important personalities of the German Jewish intellectual life after the First World War. Franz Rosenzweig started the Freie Juedische Lehrhaus, where he tried to teach Jewish tradition and culture as part of real life experience and in this way bring it closer to assimilated German Jewry. He wrote several philosophical works and translated the Hebrew Bible with Martin Buber. The Franz Rosenzweig collection contains manuscripts of many of Franz Rosenzweig’s smaller works, some of his personal items, and correspondence with his parents and with more than fifty of his friends and colleagues. The collection contains other correspondence, and a great number of newspaper clippings, photographs, and some objects.

This collection details the life of the philosopher Julius Goldstein and his wife Margarete Neumann Goldstein. Among the topics present in these papers include German family life in the early twentieth century, the First World War and its aftermath in Germany, the political and economic changes during the Weimar Republic, German Jewish communities, and progressive Judaism. The collection is comprised largely of correspondence, diaries, and clippings, but also contains reports, publications, and personal papers.