Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski's Werther the Jew and Its Readers

Abstract

Fictions of a German Jewish Public:Ludwig Jacobowski's Werther the Jew and Its Readers Jonathan M. Hess (bio) [The German Jew] has to work with one hand to participate in the construction of a national culture while brandishing a weapon in the other hand—against Germans. It is a tragic constellation. Only he who feels this conflict with full force and nevertheless still decides to fight, in spite of it all and without further ado—he alone has the right to call himself an assimilated Jew....For those who cannot bear the difficulty of this situation and do not want to be baptized, Zionism is the only solution. —Samuel Lublinski, "A Last Word on the Jewish Question" (1901)1 Ludwig Jacobowski's 1892 novel Werther the Jew has met the same fate as its author: both are largely forgotten today. To many of its contemporaries, however, Jacobowski's creative adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) seemed the epitome of what German-Jewish literature should be all about. Reprinted twice during Jacobowski's lifetime and five more [End Page 202] times after the 32-year-old author died of meningitis in 1900, Werther the Jew told a story of a Jewish university student's unrequited love for German culture that found more than its share of resonance. Translated into French, Yiddish, and four other languages, the novel remained in print in German for almost 40 years, thanks to a mass-market edition of 1910 and repeat printings in 1920 and 1930.2 As late as 1925, the weekly newspaper of German Jewry's major self-defense organization, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith), was still asking its readership to commemorate Jacobowski as a great German writer always ready to "put his life and his art" to work for his fellow Jews. As the Centralverein-Zeitung insisted, it was Werther the Jew—a novel available in all German libraries and translated into "all languages of culture"—that best exemplified Jacobowski's unflinching dedication to the cause of German Jewry. In terms of its art and humanity, this text surpassed all other literary works that depicted the Jews' struggle for emancipation and human dignity in the face of antisemitism.3 In 1907, the precursor to the Centralverein-Zeitung, the monthly journal Im deutschen Reich (In the German Empire), acclaimed Jacobowski and his novel in similarly heroic terms, reporting on an inspiring lecture on "Jacobowski and the Tragedy of the Jew" by the Hamburg rabbi Paul Rieger. Rieger, an active figure in the Centralverein who later became its first official historian, claimed that the genius of Werther the Jew lay in its ability to depict the individual struggles of its protagonist in such a way as to offer a "symbolic transfiguration of the modern sufferings" that all German Jews face in being both German and Jewish.4 As Im deutschen Reich reported, this lecture met with enthusiasm and lively applause, particularly after Rieger and Maximilian Horwitz, the president of the Centralverein, managed to silence the criticisms of a small group of unruly Zionist objectors. Contrary to the Zionists' contentions that Jacobowski was plagued by self-hatred and a Jewish inferiority complex, Rieger claimed for Jacobowski the final word in contemporary debates over Jewish identity: the author of Werther the Jew, indeed, bequeathed to the members of the Centralverein a brilliant example of how one could be a "genuine German" and a "loyal Jew" at once. An obituary for Jacobowski published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, German Jewry's most widely read newspaper, mourned the author of the "excellent novel" Werther the Jew in similar terms, as "one of our most gifted and capable younger poets," a "good Jew," and a "noble and gifted comrade."5 One on level, it should not be surprising that organs of mainstream liberal German Jewry so enthusiastically embraced Jacobowski and his [End Page 203] tale of a Jewish youth's love for German culture. The preface to the third and all subsequent editions of the novel made explicit that this was a text promoting assimilation, a "poetic treatment of...