German Literature, Jewish Critics (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: German Literature, Jewish Critics Mark H. Gelber Stephen D. Dowden and Meike G. Werner, eds. German Literature, Jewish Critics. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002. Pp. xxxiv + 321. This volume contains the lectures, responses, panel discussions, and audience participation from a symposium held in 1997 at Brandeis University. Five years is a long time to wait for a conference volume, and thus the possible impact of and reaction to the proceedings may be vitiated to a degree. There are of course numerous possible reasons for such delays, as anyone familiar with publishing conference proceedings will attest. None, however, is stipulated by the editors in this case. The editors, who did not contribute papers of their own, nevertheless write a fine introduction, and their presentations of the responses and discussions, as well as their inclusion of a fair amount of very useful annotated information throughout, are highly appreciated. The conference did not really focus on the subject of this book's title, German literature and Jewish critics. That topic is extraordinarily extensive, spanning centuries and continents, languages and cultures. A possible point of departure for such an ambitious conference or volume would be Moritz Goldstein's well-known polemic of 1912, "Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnass," in which he claimed that whereas Jews already dominated and had a monopoly of sorts in German cultural life, in the press and in the theater especially, they were also on the verge of taking over German literary studies as well. The volume under review instead centers on the careers, identities, and writings of exile scholars who had a major impact on the development of German studies in the United States (and, to a lesser degree, Great Britain and elsewhere). Hinrich Seeba names many of them in his introductory lecture: Erich von Kahler, Leo Spitzer, Marianne Thalmann, Franz Mautner, Heinz Politzer, Walter Naumann, Erich Heller, Walter Sokel, Peter Heller, Hans Eichner, Egon Schwarz, Harry Zohn, Dorrit Cohn, Richard Alewyn, Wolfgang Paulsen, Oskar Seidlin, Hans M. Wolff, Henry Remak, Guy Stern. He lists these Jewish scholars but also includes non-Jewish exiles, for example, Karl Vietor, Bernhard Blume, and Victor Lange. The presentations of Egon Schwarz and Walter Sokel, as well as their participation in the discussions, give the volume a certain autobiographical authenticity, since the voices of this generation, which are being debated, also express themselves. This appears to me to be one [End Page 763] of the strengths but also one of the weaknesses of the volume, as I will explain. There are also presentations on scholars who fall outside of the purview of the American academy, for example, Barbara Hahn's paper on Margarete Susman, Bertha Badt-Strauss, and Hannah Arendt; Gesa Dane's talk on Käte Hamburger; Willi Goetschel's presentation on Hermann Levin Goldschmidt; and Ritchie Robertson's contribution on J. P. Stern, Siegbert Prawer, and George Steiner. The last contribution in the volume is Peter Demetz's nuanced and witty after-dinner talk on Marcel Reich-Reinicki. Although Demetz, who arrived in the United States after the war, cannot fairly be included with the exile scholars, he shares a good amount with them. His highly self-conscious participation in the discussions and his reluctance to dabble in generalities adds measurably to the proceedings, which suffer some because of a marked tendency to generalizations. At least one presentation is not related to this general topic of exile: Christoph Koenig's lecture on Ludwig Geiger. That lecture, which raises numerous difficult issues in the Jewish relationship to German culture, as does Amir Eshel's response to it, would fit better in a conference or volume truly devoted to "German literature, Jewish critics." In general, the presentations combine biographical and autobiographical material with cultural criticism of the academic profession in the field of German studies, and the volume provides many interesting insights and perspectives on the development of German studies in the United States over the last sixty years, underscoring especially the extent that the exile generation participated in the transformation of Germanistik in the United States to German studies and cultural studies. Light is also shed on the emergence of comparative literature as...