JULIUS H. SCHOEPS INTRODUCES HIS FATHER, Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909–80), as a “symbolic figure for German-Jewish existence in the twentieth century.” Typically understood, a symbolic figure is a person whose life represents more than just a fascinating collection of twists and turns. A symbolic figure transcends his narrow biography and becomes a placeholder for an idea, teaching us something about the evolution of the time and place in which he lived. To follow Schoeps's life, then, should be to trace an aspect of the twentieth century. While the claim seems warranted in this case, it begs the question: what was the idea this man represented?

Of Schoeps's eclectic and often unseasonable thought, developed over a period spanning from the rise of National Socialism to the aftermath of the student protest movement, the one aspect that remained constant throughout his life was the goal of Jewish-Christian cooperation. Every part of his work seems assimilable to this one great goal, and if anything can characterize his gadfly existence, it is this. He consistently sought out Christians to recognize Jews as allies in the struggle to conserve religious values against the threat of oversecularization in Western life. For this reason, he identified as a lifelong conservative. The specific tactics, lines of argumentation, and groups he courted changed. But each stage of twentieth-century German history within Schoeps's adult lifetime— the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship, and the Cold War-era Federal Republic—presented a different battleground for a seemingly lifelong struggle.

To be a conservative in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Schoeps came of age, was to yearn for a reform of the Weimar constitution that would place the German state back on the firm Christian foundations it had had during the “good old days” of the Wilhelmine Empire—before the troubles. Alarmed by the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia and the Social Democrats's plurality in the German parliament, he and his fellow conservatives convinced themselves that parliamentary democracy was taking Germany on a godless path destined to end in Moscow. It often goes unappreciated how many German Jewish communal leaders found themselves sympathizing with the conservative camp during this period. The stumbling block to a coalition was the anti-Judaism and antisemitism of Christian conservatives. From a young age, Schoeps sought to break through that impasse, to prove to Christians that the Jewish population could be allies in the fight against “materialism.