COURAGE OF THE SPIRIT: 2012

http://youtu.be/fEEXB4KRA0w)

4e The Second Descent into the Gates of Hell- Welcome to Spielberg

Castle Spilberk

(For a visual tour, go to http://www.Špilberk.cz/?pg=zobraz&co=Špilberk-castle)

Spielberg here is not the name of a famous director—it is the German equivalent of the Czech Špilberk.

A tourist visiting Brno, the second largest city of the Czech Republic, will go to the City Museum, housed in Castle Špilberk(Spielberg). He or she will see an imposing white building, dating back to Moravian kings in the 13^th century and later rebuilt as a baroque fortress that withstood foreign armies during the Thirty Years War. At that time that it was first put to use as a holding tank for prisoners, first Protestant heretics, then sympathizers of the French Revolution, fighters for Italian freedom from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Polish dissidents in the mid-1800’s.It became the subject of a book by Italian poet and prisoner, Silvio Pellico, “Le Mieie Prigioni”( My Prison) and it earned the nickname “dungeon of the nations”. By the middle of the 19^th century, Kaiser Franz Josef I shut down the prison; one century later, the German conquerors would reestablish it as a prison for Czech patriots who had tried to resist the Nazis ( they would then be sent on to concentration camps such a Terezin-Theresienstadt) .

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Second Descent into the Gates of Hell- Escape to Czechoslovakia

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The Second Descent into the Gates of Hell- Escape to Czechoslovakia

Upon release from Brandenburg Prison, my father made straight for Vienna to ponder what clouds were appearing on the horizon and what steps to take next. By now, much of the faculty of the Berlin Hochschule were themselves in the process of finding routes of escape, so his dream of a return to Berlin was shattered. Fortunately, he had been able to finish his studies with his faculty by correspondence and earned his ordination in absentia.

Vienna in 1937 was not much less welcoming to Jews than Berlin. Austria had been under the dictatorship of Englebert Dolfuss in the 1930’s, who established his own

“AustroFascism” and,while banning both Nazi and Communist parties, allowed only his party to operate. He was assassinated by Austrian Nazis in an attempted putsch; in an ironic twist, Italy threatened to go to war against Germany to protect Austria’s independence!

My father was concerned by the possibility of an impending German invasion of Austria, and feared for his safety not only as a Jew but also as a political personage and a former prisoner. While his brother, Munio, received a visa for Switzerland, my father did not and Munio decided to stay with Willi rather than leave him to fend for himself. By December 1937, the two brothers, leaving behind all their possessions, fled by train to Brno, the capital of historic Moravia, Czechoslovakia. It was a short train ride of perhaps an hour and a half, and Brno was a major industrial and trade hub.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Scholar Takes Up the Disputation Against the Cult of "Basic Instincts"

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Courage of the Spirit-On the Cult of Naturalism

In the follow up to the first essay to appear in the Zurich newspaper, my father took up the cudgel against the neo-Romantic spirit of thought, the rebellion against the “reine Vernunft”, the Pure Reason of the 18^th and early 19^th century. The new Zeitgeist emphasized emotion , experience, or will against straight logic as opposed to the ideal or the intellectual, the realm of the mind ( as expressed by the term “ Geist”, translated here as “ Spirit”). While acknowledging the excesses of absolute rationality, he warns of the destructiveness inherent in the unrestrained adoration of the instinctual forces deep inside the human soul. The line led from Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” to the horror of Riefenstahl’s paean to the embodiment of power in “Triumph of the Will”. Not only six million Jews but tens of millions around the world would fall as victims to the unbridled power of human savagery let loose.

The solution is in the application of “Chochmah”, the wisdom approach of classic Jewish thought which seeks a fusion of these two dichotomies in human existence.

Jüdische Presszentralle Zürich ( Jewish Central Press of Zurich)

15 Oktober 1937 No. 962 of 15th October 1937, page 1-2 Mut zum Geist- Courage of the Spirit

By Dr. Wilhelm Weinberg, Vienna

2^nd Essay

The Cult of Naturalism

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The 1st Emergence from Hell –the Scholar Lays Intellectual Siege to the Zeitgeist

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The 1^st Emergence from Hell –the Scholar Lays Intellectual Siege to the Zeitgeist

My father had plenty of time, during his two years in prison, to further his intellectual insights into contemporary philosophy. Upon his release, he returned to Austria and pondered what the future had in store.

In the meantime, he penned his thoughts into a series of three articles on the position of Judaism as the “ nay-sayer” of civilization, especially in contrast to the most popular intellectual trends of his day: Economic determinism as expressed in Marxism; Genetic determinism as expressed in Nazi Racism; Cultural determinism as expressed in Fascism; and psychological determinism as expressed in the depth psychology schools of Freud and Jung. Finally, in the second and third essay, he attacks the enthronement of instinctual drives in neo-Romanticism as expressed by D.H. Lawrence and Nietsche and culminating in the nihilism inherent in National Socialism—Nazism.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

The First Descent into Hell-Continued -Letter to a Prisoner

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