Georg Hermann: Deutsch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und Journalist, 1871--1943

276 Pages·2004·8.08 MB·German

by  Godela Weiss-Sussex (editor)

Conditio Judaica 48
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

Georg Hermann
Deutsch-jüdischer
Schriftsteller und Journalist,
1871-1943
Herausgegeben von
Godela Weiss-Sussex
im Auftrag des Leo Baeck Instituts
London
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2004
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie;
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ISBN 3-484-65148-2 ISSN 0941-5866
© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2004
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Inhalt
Martin Swales
Introductory Remarks 1
Ritchie Robertson
Cultural Stereotypes and Social Anxiety in Georg Hermann's
Jettchen Gebert 5
Tiziane Schön
Nervenschwache Generationen - begabte Neurastheniker.
Georg Hermanns Der kleine Gast als Berliner Pendant zu
Arthur Schnitzlers Der Weg ins Freie 23
Ulrike Zitzlsperger
Berlin als soziales Umfeld im Werk Georg Hermanns 41
Gundel Mattenklott
Zeitstrukturen im Romanwerk Georg Hermanns: Die Kette 57
Laureen Nussbaum
A Sampling of Georg Hermann's »Letters about German Literature«,
published in HetAlgemeen Handelsblad 1921-1926 73
Godela Weiss-Sussex
Impressionismus als Weltanschauung. Die Kunstkritik Georg Hermanns .. 87
Gert Mattenklott
Der doppelte Spiegel. Georg Hermann über Juden in Deutschland
(vor 1933) 103
Kerstin Schoor
»Was sollen wir Juden tun?« Der Schriftsteller Georg Hermann
zur Situation und den Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Existenz
nach 1933 115
Arnold Paucker
Zur Geschichte von Georg Hermanns Nachlaß. Ein Geleitwort 133
VI Inhalt
Anhang
Georg Hermann: »Bist du es oder bist du's nicht?« 137
Georg Hermanns Novelle »Bist du es oder bist du's nicht?«
Anmerkungen zur Überlieferung und editorische Notiz 254
Autoren des Bandes 257
Abstracts 261
Personenregister 265
Danksagung 269
Martin Swales
Introductory Remarks
I begin by touching upon an issue to which I will return at the end of these brief
preliminary reflections on the work of Georg Hermann - with the notion of a
literary canon. The canon is a corpus of major works that are held to enshrine
some kind of manifest (literary, and, by extension human) value. The canon
often has, in terms of what one might call its catchment area, a dual aspect. One
has to do with the notion of a particular (often national) tradition within which
certain texts are held to enjoy a privileged status. (And they may, by that token,
even be taken to contribute to the definition of the national culture itself: Shake-
speare and Dickens have often been claimed to contribute something central to
the idea of >Englishness<). The second aspect of the canon's field of application
is meta-national in character and implies notions of >European<, even >World<
Literature. Now it can, of course, come about that a literary work belongs to one
aspect of the canon, but not to the other. Shakespeare is clearly at home in both
worlds; but, intriguingly, much of the German literary canon (particularly before
the 20th century) is confined to Germany alone. Prima facie, one might, then,
conclude that German classics do not travel particularly well.
In spite of the difficulties which they pose, literary canons are, in my view,
indispensable; but it behoves us all constantly to interrogate them, constantly
to wonder why certain texts achieve membership and others are kept securely
beyond the pale. The works of Georg Hermann are a case in point. At present
they are in the >beyond the pale< category. As I have already indicated, I shall
come back to the canonicity debate later. But all I want to register at this stage
is that, potentially, Georg Hermann has a great deal to offer us, more than his
current marginal status would suggest. Let me briefly summarize a number of
the claims that he has to make on our attention.
One is his Jewishness, which seems to me to inform his creative writing, his
journalism, criticism, and his manifest fondness for the visual arts (especially
Impressionist painting). Now at one level this means, of course, that Hermann
was aware of having a Jewish theme - namely assimilation. His novels tend,
for example, to concern themselves with the place of Jewish families in Ger-
man society. But I think there is more to his Jewishness than this; and that
>more< has to do with a particular kind of all-pervasive sensibility. Hermann
has a complex feel for the notion of community, and it derives arguably from the
(for obvious reasons) urgently felt Jewish awareness that community, its lan-
guages and sights and sounds, cannot simply be taken for granted. The bounda-
2 Martin Swales
ries and borderlines, and with them the territoriality of communality are con-
stantly in negotiation. Allegiances are made, un-made, re-made in the complex
cultural, linguistic, economic flow between Jew and Gentile. Above all else,
Hermann recognizes that the processes by which communities are created and
destroyed are essentially (or, more accurately, non-essentially) discursive. That
is to say: belonging or ostracization have less to do with race or genetic trans-
mission, less to do with biological dynasty (and destiny) than with the inscrip-
tion of identity through language and culture. At the heart of the monstrosity
that destroyed Hermann and so many like him (he died in Auschwitz) was the
manic desire so to essentialize the category of communal belonging that those
who were banished were deprived of the right to be. Within that kind of his-
torico-cultural framework, then, Hermann has much to say to us.
Moreover, because he himself was a lively journalist and letter-writer, he had
a sharply attuned ear for the discursive forms of his contemporary culture - for
the language of advertising for example. Hence, he is a marvellously quotational
novelist. That is to say: he is unfailingly alive to the many forms of linguistic
worldliness with which his characters come into daily contact. In so far as they
internalize the forms of speech that are all around them, his characters become
representative of the broader cultural climate of their age - not just (to borrow
and vary Trollope's title) >the way we live now<, but more particularly >the way
we speak now<. And this complex and energetic linguistic worldliness, so remi-
niscent, incidentally, of the work of Irmgard Keun or Gabriele Tergit, allows
Hermann's novels to offer an exciting literary mediation of and meditation on
metropolitan Berlin. He embraces both the nineteenth and the twentieth centu-
ries; and he manages time and time again to capture the hum and buzz of impli-
cation of Berlin life. He is not, of course, anywhere near as virtuosic a writer as
Döblin. But perhaps for that reason his Berlin has more light and shade. It cer-
tainly seems more habitable than Döblin's monstrous, bruising, battering locus
of modernity. Hermann captures currents and counter-currents; he renders the
omnipresent drive and energy, but also the capacity for pockets of almost vil-
lage-like intimacy in Berlin. Bohemian and bourgeois worlds exist side by side,
as do eroticism and technology, commodification and liberation of the self. Co-
location in time (>Zeitgenossenschañ<) goes hand in hand with co-location in
space (>Raumgenossenschaft<). And the space in question is not, of course, any
old space; it is necessarily and circumstantially Berlin.
In any consideration of Hermann's portraiture of Berlin it is pertinent to re-
member his attachment to the visual arts - and particularly to Impressionist
painting. This in itself may not sound particularly noteworthy or remarkable. But
there is one salient aspect that needs stressing; and it has to do with a respect for
surfaces and outward textures. And here I want briefly to anticipate an issue that
will form the conclusion to these remarks. German fiction has not always been
responsive to such abundant instances of outwardness. In a passage of splendid
polemic in his Life and Works of Goethe, George Henry Lewes - himself, of
course, one of the most impassioned defenders of things German to the world of
Introductory Remarks 3
English letters, a fact which makes the criticism all the more remarkable -
speaks of the German novel's penchant for »plunging into the depths«. Lewes
continues: »Of all the horrors known to the German of this school there is no
horror like that of the surface - it is more terrible to him than cold water.«* With
Hermann we find ourselves in the company of a writer who delights in surfaces.
One final observation about Hermann's oeuvre, and it again, by implication
at any rate, touches on his Jewishness: he is particularly acute and differenti-
ated in his portrayal of families, of their sense of continuity and of what may
be entailed in sustaining appropriately dynastic integrity in the seductive
worldliness of Berlin. In one sense, of course, such a thematic concern is in no
way the particular property of Jewish sensibilities. But two strands within
Hermann's treatment of the theme are particularly striking in their Jewish
reverberations. One is, to return to a point I have already made, the issue of
community. The family is, of course, a primary community; but there are oth-
ers, outside that particular nexus of blood relationship and weightily transmit-
ted signification: communities of class, profession, neighbourhood, education,
and so on. The upshot is a complex interplay of borders and boundary lines as
insiders are separated from outsiders. At every turn effort is required and ex-
pended to read the signs, to establish the tokens and forms of meaningfulness.
Expressive of this whole concern - and this is the second strand I wish to high-
light in Hermann's thematization of family - is the presence of a gently expan-
sive, unhurriedly chronicling narrative voice. It is a voice that is, on occasion,
mindful of notions of decline, of processes of erosion whereby forms of belief
lose their potency. At issue is not simply a process of overtly lamented secu-
larization. Hermann is often aware of the complex shifts whereby a religious
faith modulates into more secular forms of family tradition; in the process a
complex dialectic of narrative illumination and judgment is generated, where-
by various forms of faith comment on each other.
I want now to draw the threads of my argument together by asking the ques-
tion: where are we to situate Hermann within the canon of German literature?
One answer is as simple as it is brutal: nowhere. Clearly Hermann neither is,
nor can we by any stretch of the imagination claim that he ought to be, in-
stalled in the Pantheon of twentieth-century German literature alongside
Kafka, Thomas Mann, Broch, Hesse, Musil, Döblin, Grass. Yet to recite the
roll-call of famous names does perhaps - and this is, or ought to be, true when-
ever we rehearse any schedule of canonical figures - give us food for thought.
The matter I have in mind at this particular juncture is the following: unlike the
English or French novel, German prose fiction has rarely any kind of enliven-
ing relationship with forms of popular narrative. This is perhaps another way
of expressing that »fear of the surface« of which Lewes speaks. Put most sim-
ply: few great German novels are a rattling good yarn; few of them lend them-
* George Henry Lewes: The life and works of Goethe. Reprint, London: Dent 1949
(Everyman's Library; 269), p. 407.
4 Martin Swales
selves at all readily to film or television adaptation. Yet, as soon as we con-
sider the contribution made by Jewish writers, the picture looks remarkably
different - primarily because we find there a narrative readiness to draw, with a
measure of urgency and immediacy, on the staple diet of soap operas world-
wide: on stories of family life (the latter-day equivalent might be Dynasty) or of
community (in the mode of Neighbours, Coronation Street, Eastenders, Brook-
side). Perhaps it is not too fanciful, then, to suggest that, while Hermann may
never figure in the company of (for want of a better term) the >all-time greats<,
we can properly see his creativity rubbing shoulders with that of Jacobowski
( Werther, der Jude), Hauschner (Die Familie Lowositz), Brod {Jüdinneri), Des-
sauer (Großstadtjuden), Feuchtwanger (Erfolg), Wassermann (Die Juden von
Zirndorf), Natonek (Kinder einer Stadt), Gronemann (Tohuwabohu), Franzos
(Der Pojaz), Katz (Die Fischmanns).
Such writers make a weighty contribution to German letters. To say this is
not for a moment to diminish the Jewishness of their thematic concerns. But it
is to claim two things. First: rather than talking of >German-Jewish literature^
one could think in terms of the specific enrichment of German literature made
possible by the work of Jewish writers. Second: in the context of some of the
profundity and austere philosophical distinction of much of the canonical writ-
ing in German, it is welcome to have, enshrined in this tradition of Jewish writ-
ing, a body of work that stays happily in touch with popular forms of common-
or-garden realistic fiction, with the unashamed worldliness of soap opera. Her-
mann, as a characteristically assimilated Western Jew, had great need of Ger-
man culture. What we may now be beginning to realize is just how much it had
need of him.