Jews and the Ambivalences of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessment and Reassessment

Abstract

In June of 1879, Theodor Fontane notified the editor of the journal Die Gegenwart that he would be sending him an “antinobility and very philosemitic” essay entitled “Jewry and Berlin Society.”1 On the eve of the Berlin debate on antisemitism, Fontane’s essay contrasted the nobility’s role in the capital city’s social life with that of the Jews. The “run-of-the-mill nobility,” he claimed, left “much to be desired.” And though the Prussian nobility had “self-confidence and bearing,” it was “too poor, too provincial, too uncosmopolitan, and too ignorant of that which alone produces more refined manners: art and science.” Fontane saw the rise of the Jewish middle class (Burgertum) as “progress.” He reported that even among the richest Berlin Jews one had “the feeling they had just shaken off their status as pariahs,” but even so they were now “dominating society”: they had developed a “superiority” and had “cast off the narrow and provincial. Great interests are being negotiated, the vision has expanded to encompass the world. Manners are refined, purified, and improved, especially taste. The stock report is more compatible with cosmopolitan refinement [Weltbildung] than reports from the racetrack or the farmer’s market.” Berlin’s Jewish middle class had “everything, the best that we have. . . . The state may have lost because of this, but the world has gained.”2 In the end, Fontane decided not to publish his encomium on the prominent role of Berlin’s Jewish middle class.3 Perhaps he feared the subject was too touchy in the wake of the excitement caused by the Berlin debate on antisemitism, a key episode in the history of political ideas in the Kaiserreich.4 Or maybe he wanted