Enclosed and Communicative Identity in Franz Rosenzweig’s and Eugen Rosenstock’s Interwar Works

This essay argues that the key to understanding Franz Rosenzweig’s complex oscillation between enclosed and dialogical models of identity lies in his sustained intellectual dialogue with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Through a close reading of their 1916 correspondence and the works each produced in its wake, the essay shows that Rosenzweig’s philosophy of identity in The Star of Redemption was decisively shaped by Rosenstock’s emerging dialogical and linguistic insights, just as Rosenstock’s postwar writings were deeply informed by Rosenzweig’s conception of inherited, generational identity. Their exchange reveals a mutually formative conversation in which each thinker both appropriated and resisted elements of the other’s position. Rosenzweig retained a tension between enclosed and communicative identity, while Rosenstock sought to universalize and open the inherited Jewish model he found in Rosenzweig, purging it of its non-dialogical edges. By tracing this reciprocal influence across anthropology, theology, and theories of truth, the essay demonstrates that Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock’s interwar debate constitutes not a one-sided influence but a shared intellectual project. Their struggle to balance historical rootedness with openness to others offers a valuable conceptual resource for contemporary discussions of nationalism, multiculturalism, and the status of truth in polarized societies.