Confrontations / Accommodations: German-Jewish Literary and Cultural Relations from Heine to Wassermann

296 Pages·2004·7.012 MB·German

by  Mark H. Gelber (editor)

Conditio Judaica 46
Studien und Quellen zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte
Herausgegeben von Hans Otto Horch
in Verbindung mit Alfred Bodenheimer, Mark H. Gelber und Jakob Hessing

Confrontations /
Accommodations
German-Jewish Literary
and Cultural Relations
from Heine to Wassermann
Edited by Mark H. Gelber
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2004
Cordially dedicated to
Jeffrey L. Sammons
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie;
detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar.
ISBN 3-484-65146-6 ISSN 0941-5866
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Contents
Introduction 1
Jocelyne Kolb
Lessing's Nathan, Heine's Lessing, and the Problem of
Buchstabentreue 7
Roger F. Cook
>Vaterlandsliebe< in Exile: Heinrich Heine and German-Jewish
National Identity 27
Mark H. Gelber
The Noble Sephardi and the Degenerate Ashkenazi
in German-Jewish and German-Anti-Semitic Consciousness:
Heine, Langbehn, Chamberlain 45
Joseph A. Kruse
Mutmaßungen und zweifelhafte Dokumente innerhalb der
Heine-Biographie. Ein Bericht aus dem Heine-Archiv,
Düsseldorf 57
Hiroshi Kiba
Die Goethe-Rezeption bei Heine und Börne. Unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung des deutschen Judentums 69
Dieter Lamping
»Soviel Franzose wie Deutscher«. Ludwig Börnes politischer und
literarischer Internationalismus 83
Mark Joel Webber
Preaching to (and by) the Converted: Jews in the Crossfire of the
Kölner Kirchenstreit 97
Vivian Liska
Mainstreaming the Margins: Rahel Varnhagen at the End of the
Twentieth Century 123
VI Contents
Hans Otto Horch
Heimat - Fremde - >Urheimat<. Zur Funktion jüdischer Nebenfiguren
in Berthold Auerbachs Dorfgeschichten 149
Hartmut Steinecke
»Nun auf die Juden!« Literarische Sittengemälde aus Westfalen 173
Bernhard Greiner
Esther - eine Figur des Theaters. Drei paradigmatische Aneignungen:
Grillparzer, Racine, Goethe 187
Abigail Ε. Gillman
Failed Bildung and the Aesthetics of Detachment: Schnitzler's
Der Weg ins Freie 209
Peter Demetz
Speculations about Prague Yiddish and its Disappearance:
From its Origins to Kafka and Brod 237
Ritchie Robertson
Schnitzler and Wassermann 249
Jocelyne Kolb
A Tribute to Jeffrey L. Sammons on the Occasion of his Retirement.... 263
Selected Bibliography of the Writings of Jeffrey L. Sammons 267
List of Contributors 281
Index 283
Introduction
The following essays, contributed by a very diverse group of international schol-
ars, represent an attempt to provide new perspectives and material on a wide
range of topics within the purview of German-Jewish literary and cultural rela-
tions in the period between the Enlightenment and the rise of Nazism in Central
Europe. As we move inexorably farther and farther away from this time, con-
temporary access to its complex web of literary and cultural relations and to its
internal confrontations and accommodations becomes ever more problematical.
It may be hoped that this volume as a whole will militate against any easy accep-
tance of generalizations and oversimplications, which sometimes characterize
public and even academic discourse about topics included here, as well as point
the way to new perspectives on this phase of German-Jewish literary and cultural
relations. Because German-Jewish relations from the 18th century until the early
20th century are regularly viewed from the vantage of the Shoa, and of a post-
Shoa world, and for other reasons related to a general remoteness and inaccessi-
bility of the material, a rather skewed and often facile version of German-Jewish
life and German-Jewish relations, usually emphasizing the inevitability and
irrefrangibility of anti-Semitism and the unavoidable exclusion or elimination of
Jews from Central European life and culture, has been widely disseminated. At
the same time, the literary and cultural achievements of Central European Jewry,
except possibly for its most spectacular success stories, have been largely forgot-
ten. Yet, even these success stories are often treated in a manner which divorces
them from their natural Germanic and German-Jewish contexts. As a matter of
fact, the Jewish presence in Central Europe and the Jewish impact on its life and
culture were pervasive and ubiquitous and extraordinarily variegated.
In this volume, the rhetoric and cultural dynamics of confrontation and ac-
commodation, in terms of both literary production, reception, identity formation,
and cultural survival, characterize a good portion of the essays. In several of the
contributions, confrontational images of the same writer, and sometimes of the
same text, emerge in the reception. For example, Jocelyne Kolb indicates in her
essay how different contextualizations of Heine have yielded diverse images of
this complex, yet seminal figure, while helping to explain the ongoing confronta-
tions and accommodations of different conceptions of Heine as a Jewish writer.
Dieter Lamping, in a related manner, analyzes principally the French and Ger-
man components of Ludwig Börne's complex identity, as it emerges from the
reception history, giving special attention to his literary and intellectual relation-
2 Introduction
ships with Byron, Jean Paul, and Goethe. In her discussion of the late 20th-cen-
tury reception of Rahel Varnhagen, Vivian Liska provides a wealth of convinc-
ing evidence to argue that conflicting images of Rahel Varnhagen are intimately
linked to different critical practices, especially in terms of efforts to mediate or
accommodate marginality or marginal figures, as opposed to the literary main-
stream. She places Rahel at the center of two conflicting paradigms of revalu-
ating the margins in recent literary studies. Hiroshi Kiba, in his essay, demon-
strates how Jewish issues inform and perhaps even impinge on the reception of
Goethe in the writings of Heine and Börne, as aesthetic and political perspec-
tives ultimately determine the contours of that reception.
Several of the essays in this volume focus on issues regarding the problem-
atical concepts of nation and nationality, on love of and estrangement from the
homeland, and on the conflicted vantage of the writer in exile, while taking
Jewish factors fully into account. For example, Roger Cook evaluates Heine's
complex relationship to German nationality, on one hand, and to the diaspora
and exile on the other. Hans Otto Horch, in his essay on Berthold Auerbach,
views the »Dorfgeschichte« as the locus of a transference of the existential
dilemma of German-Jewry in the tension between the foreign and the familiar
homeland, while he elaborates the dialectical relationship of »Ferne, Fremde
und Heimat« in Auerbach's writing, through close and subtle readings of the
individual tales. Hartmut Steinecke attempts to recover little-known particulars
of the Westphalian-Jewish relationship, and with his wide knowledge of the
Westphalian background, he recovers, by using this specific example, aspects of
the regional German-Jewish cultural process of accommodation. This perspec-
tive yields interesting results in the cases of Westphalian Jews, such as Salo-
mon Ludwig Steinheim and Jacob Loewenberg. However, the implications of
this study certainly extend beyond this one regional example. The essay in this
volume on »The Noble Sepahrdi and the Degenerate Ashkenazi in German-
Jewish and German-Anti-Semitic Consciousness« (Gelber) problematizes the
very notion of an indivisable Jewish nation, as the confrontation of the Ashke-
nazi and Sephardi comes to literary expression in the writings of German Jews,
like Heine, and in the writings of German anti-Semites, such as Julius Lang-
behn and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Perhaps the most surprising aspect in
this study is the manner in which the anti-Semitic corpus differentiated between
Jewish groups, regularly embracing an image of the noble Sephardi, while
rejecting peremptorily a thoroughly negative image of the Ashkenazi Jew it
had conscientiously developed. This essay, which points to models of cultural
appropriation and rejection strategies specific to identity formation, attempts to
understand the potential for identity construction inherent in the conflicting
varieties of cultural attention given to differentiations of this sort.
Some of the essays contained here focus on specific texts. Bernhard Greiner
demonstrates how different German and Jewish literary traditions, which
might be thought of as inherently confrontational (the German Fastnachtsspiel
and the Jewish Purimspiel), may find their way together in a process of literary
Introduction 3
accommodation, even, as shown here, in the literary conception of Goethe. In a
similar vein, Abigail Gilman analyzes the two opposing novelistic structures in
Schnitzler's landmark novel of modern Jewish fate, Der Weg ins Freie. In her
subtle and close reading of the novel, which also takes early drafts as well as
salient aspects of its reception into account, she identifies the two strands as
problematical examples of the Zeitroman and Bildungsroman, in their essence
encoded here as Jewish and German. The coded associations, motifs, and in-
teractions appear to her to be consistent with the devious strategies of minor
literature, as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, then, is an example of
a literary enactment of a pernicious, conflicted social condition, in which Jew-
ish and Christrian communities are unable to communicate with the other or to
learn from each other. In another essay on Schnitzler included in this volume
(Robertson), the complex relationship between him and Jacob Wassermann
takes center stage. By drawing heavily on material from Schnitzler's diaries,
Ritchie Robertson illuminates the manner in which Schnitzler defined and
measured himself as a writer, and as a Jewish writer, in relation to his very
successful counterpart. As it turns out, the mutual insecurities of these writers
figure largely in their ethical and literary judgements of each other.
Several of the contributions focus on more general cultural issues pertinent
to German-Jewish literary or cultural relations. Both Joseph Kruse and Peter
Demetz bring a personal note to their contributions. In an effort to shed light
on less well-known chapters in the biography of Heine, Kruse speculates on the
complex nature and on the potential literary and cultural significance of con-
troversial items acquired by the Heinrich Heine Institute during his tenure as
director, such as the Kietz portrait of Heine or the freemason book, inscribed
with his name. Demetz attempts to illuminate the development of Yiddish in
Prague and its abrupt displacement in face of the rise of a Prague Jewish litera-
ture in German heralded by the publication of collections of »Sippurim«. De-
spite the rapid and virtually total disappearance of Yiddish in Prague by the
end of the 19th century, Demetz searches for traces of it in the work of Kafka
and Brod. Mark Joel Webber sheds light on a mostly forgotten chapter of Jew-
ish-Christian relations, while arguing for the relevance of Jewish aspects in the
»Kölner Kirchenstreit« of the 1830s. This conflict is normally thought of as a
difficult struggle between Protestants and the Catholic Church in the Rhine-
land in wake of the new Prussian hegemony. A rather forgotten text, Joseph
Görres's Athanasius, which was exceedingly controversial after its publication
in 1838, stands at the center of this discussion. In Webber's careful analysis,
Görres and his writing are depicted as anti-Jewish to a degree, but, neverthe-
less, he distanced himself from more pernicious varieties of anti-Semitic ex-
pression common in the first half of the century. In this same context, the con-
troversial and inflammatory branding of Young Germany as a Jewish conspir-
acy and its writers as Jewish rabbel-rousers or worse is addressed.
* * *
4 Introduction
This collection of essays has been edited with the express intention of honoring
Jeffrey L. Sammons, Leavenworth Professor of German at Yale University, on
the occasion of his retirement. Jeffrey Sammons was born in Cleveland, Ohio
in 1936, and he received his higher education at Yale University (B.A. 1956,
Ph.D. 1962) and the University of Heidelberg. His mentors at Yale, especially
Hermann Weigand, and also his close departmental colleague for many years,
Peter Demetz, helped inspire the nature and partially determine the direction
and quality of Sammons's impressive scholarship for decades. Although he
taught for a short time at Brown University and has served as a Visiting
Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Rutgers Univer-
sity, he has been affiliated with Yale for almost his entire academic career.
He was Chairman of Yale University's Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures for many years, and also the departmental Director of Under-
graduate Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies. He has enjoyed a
close association with Yale's Summer Language Institute in different capaci-
ties, and he has also served as its Director. He has been quite visible as a
contributor to Yale University journals, like the Yale Review and the Yale Uni-
versity Library Gazette. He has received numerous prestigious fellowships,
including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Lewis-Farmington Fellowship
at Yale, a Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a
Morse Fellowship, among others.
Although Jeffrey Sammons's scholarly range extends far beyond the pa-
rameters of the field of German-Jewish studies in general, and well beyond the
time period demarcated in this volume, it is fair to say that the 19th century has
been his primary scholarly stomping grounds, and that he has demonstrated a
special and unflagging interest in aspects of German-Jewish literature and
culture. With the publication of his magisterial study, Heinrich Heine, The
Elusive Poet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), he estab-
lished himself as the foremost American scholar of this seminal, but exceed-
ingly complex figure in German literary history and in German-Jewish culture.
The challenge of mediating Heine in American academic life is fraught with
numerous difficulties, but Sammons's scholarship, diligence, and critical acumen
have contributed to making Heine and his world more accessible to American
scholars, students, and a broader readership in general. Jeffrey Sammons has
retained his status as the premier American scholar of Heine and his age for
more than thirty years now, owing to his publication of numerous additional
studies on Heine and Heine reception, including his authoritative Heine bio-
graphy, Heinrich Heine. A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), and his regular, comprehensive critical appraisals of Heine schol-
arship. These have contributed in decisive ways to determine the contours of
our image of Heine today, especially in the American and English language
literate world. Sammons's scholarly volumes on the 19th-century Young Ger-
man Novel, on Wilhelm Raabe, and on the German novel of America may also
be cited in this context as companion pieces, which have helped American and