The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and Its Discontent (review)

Abstract

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 633-634 Ritchie Robertson. The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 17491939 : Emancipation and Its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. ? + 534. In his new study, Ritchie Robertson provides an in-depth survey from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's The Jews (1749) to Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1939) of what he calls the Jewish presence in German literature. Through an analysis of scores of literary texts that thematize aspects of Jewish identity in some of the darlings of German-Jewish literature in addition to lesser-known works, Robertson discusses GermanJewish literary productivity as well as the depiction of Jews and Judaism in German and Austrian literature. The first chapters, "Enlightenment" and "Liberalism," follow a chronological path from Lessing and Mendelssohn to Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig with admirable breadth, whereas the subsequent chapters "AntiSemitism ," "Assimilation," and "Dissimilation," bring a more thematic focus to the study. Robertson mindfully avoids a teleological reading of German history that progresses from a prolonged fight over emancipation and antisemitic discourses to the Holocaust, such as Paul Lawrence Rose and Daniel Goldhagen would have constructed. Instead, he rightly emphasizes that antisemitism in Germany was much more discontinuous than has often been assumed (pp. 151-232). This insight, however, takes surprising forms at times. For example, Robertson reverses the ¡mage of the tolerant Gotthold Ephraim Lessing by postulating the existence of an exclusionary subtext at the heart of Nathan the Wise, while not only is Johann Gottfried Herder left untainted but Johann David Michaelis is turned from a foe into a more benign figure (p. 30). Robertson follows this engaging reading of the Enlightenment by describing a trajectory from assimilation to dissimilation. In contrast to previous scholars like Shulamit Volkov and others, Robertson suggests that the First World War inaugurated a new period in German-Jewish history (p. 378) that reflected the intensifying exclusionary antisemitic discourses of the time. The dating of this turning point may be unconvincing, and, furthermore, to postulate such a radical change in the first place also is problematic insofar as this approach reduces roughly a hundred years of modern German-Jewish creativity to questions of assimilation. The self-assertion of Jews and Judaism in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Abraham Geiger or Heinrich Graetz is overshadowed by a discussion of the assimilatory program of German-Jewry during this era. Equally problematic is the way in which Robertson applies himself to the task of delineating how Jews may have internalized anti-Jewish prejudices, 634THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW which he discusses under the heading of "Self-Hatred" (pp. 286-345). The concept of self-hatred is too reductive to adequately address the complicated range of negation, remodeling, and irony that is characteristic of many German-Jewish writers from Heine to Karl Krauss and Elias Canetti. While by and large Robertson is a careful reader of the literary text, as a cultural study his attempt at contributing to the elucidation of GermanJewish identity formation is not very impressive. Robertson's assertion that "culture is not fixed; it is continually reinvented, as we know from the plethora of books with 'Invention' or 'Inventing' in their titles" (p. 5) hardly provides sufficient ground to address this question. Occasionally, he seems to imply that simply analyzing German-Jewish literature would provide him with an understanding of German-Jewish culture. The absence of works like those of Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch, who have described in detail the contours of Jewish literary criticism, however, makes it obvious that Robertson is not very interested in describing the place of GermanJewish literature within the realm of German-Jewish culture. Nevertheless, as a study of representations of Jewish identities, Robertson 's work offers a weil-versed survey and provides, despite his disclaimer, a comprehensive view of the topic that leaves only the field of postwar German-Jewish literature untouched. A conclusion would have helped to bring the overall development of the Jewish presence during this period into clearer perspective. University of SouthamptonNils Roemer ...