The Politics of Immortality in Rosenzweig, Barth and Goldberg

Highlighting the central importance of theological configurations of immortality and eternal life from 1914-1945, Mårten Björk explores the key writings of Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth, and Oskar Goldberg to situate their ideas in relation to the political turmoil of the period, including the rise of social Darwinism, nationalism and fascism.

The conversations happening between Christian and Jewish theologians and philosophers on the nature of immortality and eternal life during the period constitute what Björk calls a 'politics of immortality' that was able to confront the politics of the nation state successfully. The speculative question of eternal life became a way to address the meaning of 'a good life' in a period when millions of lives were lost to war, camps and prisons. This book shows how the discussion on immortality is related to central political concepts and ideas of the era, revealing how the question of immortality pursued by Rosenzweig, Barth, and Goldberg became a way to resist the reduction of life to race, blood, and soil.

By exposing the identification of life with material facts, and the break between life and death as insufficient, Björk makes important connections between political theology and philosophical posthumanism, situating the exact political consequences of theological and metaphysical theories of immortality and eternal life.