A Performance for Everyone? Othering and the Politics of Language in J.M.R. Lenz’s Die Soldaten (1776)

Abstract

While J.M.R. Lenz has historically been considered something of an outsider in the eighteenth-century German canon, his play Die Soldaten has attracted interest from contemporary scholars due to its open-ended dramatic structure and sharp-witted social satire. However, the use of language in Lenz’s representation of a Jewish character, Aaron, in Act 3 of Die Soldaten is a stumbling block for many modern readers. The exclusion of the Jewish character from the Gentile community is underscored by the use of linguistic markers of Yiddish in the play, which resonates with Lenz’s thinking about “Jewish” physiognomy and language in a note he wrote to Lavater in the summer of 1777. Die Soldaten is a prime example of a canonical text that marks a voice of difference as noisy, “foreign” and other, as well as being excessive and abject. By taking an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to Lenz’s Die Soldaten, we can bring the more uncomfortable facets of this text into focus, and interrogate our own problematic investments in the German canon since the Enlightenment.