The Culture of Culture: Toward a German Variant of Performative Democracy

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Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the German literary critic, recalls in hisrecent memoirs that at age ten, when he set out from his small townin Poland, his teacher said with tears in her eyes, “Mein Sohn, Dufährst in das Land der Kultur.” Elias Canetti recalled in the first volumeof his memoir—The Tongue Set Free—how when he was age eight,his mother, recently widowed, found fulfillment at the Burgtheaterand left Manchester to take up residence in Vienna. Was it just themagic of the German language that transported these Jews and madeliterary overachievers of their children? A vision of metropolitan cultureand assimilation? Culture was “the way ‘in,’” as Louis Spitzerputs it in his book on marginality, Lives in Between.