Beyond Subversion: German Jewry and the Poetics of Middlebrow Culture

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt's celebration of the “conscious pariah” in her seminal writings of the 1940s, the field of German‐Jewish literary and cultural studies has concerned itself overwhelmingly with the subversive dimension of the German‐Jewish experience. Over the last several decades, figures as diverse as Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine and even Moses Mendelssohn have been rehabilitated as intellectuals who issued fundamental challenges to the homogenizing and assimilatory project of modernity. In this way, scholarship has often fashioned Jews not as modernity's passive victims but as its most prescient critics. For the vast majority of German Jews in the nineteenth century, nevertheless, German culture was not perceived as monolithic, and a self‐conscious celebration of subversion hardly proved to be the mantra governing their entry into the worlds beyond traditional Jewish culture. Looking at a set of fictional texts by Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, this essay lays out an alternative model for studying German‐Jewish culture, the poetics of acculturation and the complexity of minority identity in nineteenth‐century Germany