The Ambivalent Author: Five German Writers and their Jewish Characters, 1848–1914 by Hannah Burdekin (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1095 is not wholly to be denied. Heine the Utopian does not tell the whole story: there is a depressive and despairing side to him, from the nihilism of the Traumbilder to the Job-like poems of the mattress grave, which is perhaps underestimated here. The implication that his intellectual life was without fundamental caesurae is at least disputable . For some reason, too, perhaps connected with the book's primary view of Heine as a rationalist optimist, the Jewish dimension receives slightly short shrift. However, these are mostly matters of interpretative emphasis which can be argued. On the whole this is a lively and impressive book, fluentlyand sometimes racily writ? ten, bustling the reader along, full of intriguing and instructive detail, and always conveying a sense that the author's own understanding of Heine and of the dynamics of his texts is very well substantiated. Perhaps this is not really an ideal book for beginners; but as a demonstration for those who know Heine moderately well of how far research has progressed, it is excellent. University of Sheffield Michael Perraudin The Ambivalent Author: Five German Writers and their Jewish Characters, 1848igi4 . By Hannah Burdekin. (British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature, 29) Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt a.M., New York, and Vienna: Peter Lang. 2002. 338 pp. ?56. ISBN 3-906767-05-1. German Studies in the UK and Ireland continue to demonstrate the productivity of renewed in-depth analysis of the differentways in which literature reproduced, reflected, or deconstructed the perception of Jews in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury society as part of the history of emerging anti-Semitism. Hannah Burdekin's monograph, based on her Oxford D.Phil. thesis, makes an important contribution to this key area of international German literature studies by analysing how the ambivalent stances of Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and Thomas Mann towards Jews in Germany and their literary representations of Jewish characters are based on German liberalism's understand? ing of Jewish emancipation as a symbolic 'contract', which granted equal rights to Jews while expecting 'pro found reforms ofthe Jews in order to encourage their com? plete assimilation' (p. 321) and censuring any difference in 'behaviour, identity or appearance' (p. 324) as a threat to the emerging German national identity. From the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Christian Wilhelm von Dohm) to early Modernism (Thomas Mann), 'German liberals and writers' are shown to combine a theoretical commitment to Jewish emancipation with a very limited knowledge of Jewish reality in central Europe and persistent attempts 'to mould the Jews to a par? ticular idealised image' (p. 324), which either deprived them of their identity as Jews or stigmatized them as the exotic or dangerous 'other' to be excluded from society. Burdekin comes to the conclusion that while the writers in question were not 'professed antisemite[s]' or 'writing tendentious literature in order to advance the goals of antisemitism', 'their portrayals and descriptions of Jews contain sufficientstereotyped , negative or degrading elements to suggest that the prejudices of the antisemites and the limitations of liberal-minded Germans in responding to the presence of the Jewish community in Germany were two sides of the same coin' (p. 323), and it is this critical assessment of German cultural history,based on highly perceptive textual analyses, that makes her monograph significant. Individual chapters combine the analysis of representative novels or novellas with brief summaries of their reception and the selective reading of biographical material (letters, diaries). In Gustav Freytag's seminal novel Soil und Haben (1855) the 'domination of nationalism over liberalism in liberal thought' (p. 32) combines bourgeois 1096 Reviews self-assertion with the exclusion of 'the nobility,the Jews,the Catholics and the Slavic peoples' as 'threats' to a concept of national identity based on the 'Burgertum' (p. 17). In Burdekin's interpretation, Raabe's distinction 'between the threatening and the non-threatening Jew' in texts as differentas Der Hungerpastor (1863) and Frau Salome (1875) shows a similar pattern, because the 'mixture of sympathy and aversion' is based on an anti-modernist 'criticism of the emancipation process' (p. 117). The distinction in Fontane's Unwiederbringlich (1891), Die...