German-Jewish Culture Research Articles

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture by Katja Garloff

Reviewed by: Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture by Katja Garloff Samuel J. Kessler Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture. By Katja Garloff. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pp. 214. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-1501704970. As Katja Garloff writes in her opening line, this book is about a particular figure of speech: “love.” More specifically, it is about how various sorts of love, denominated by their preceding adjectives (“unhappy love,” “interfaith love,” “romantic love,” “un/requited love,” and “revelatory love”), find expression in major works of German and German-Jewish literature over the past 250 years. Garloff’s main insight, and one that bears productive and fascinating analytic fruit, is that tracing the rhetoric of “love” can lead scholars toward a more nuanced understanding of the intricacies and difficulties of Jewish assimilation in modern German culture. The book, she writes, is about how noticing that the “obsession with love in German-Jewish thought and literature does not reflect naïveté about the political realities of emancipation but rather calls attention to its unfulfilled promises—and to the creative acts their fulfillment would require” (6). The “trope of love,” in other words, is not just about interpersonal interactions between Jews and Gentiles in the age of emancipation, but also addresses how art and creativity fulfill the role of cultural moderator when politics fails to achieve its most enlightened aims. Mixed Feelings is divided into two main parts—the first focused on works clustered around the turn of the nineteenth century and the second on works from the early twentieth century—with a conclusion that brings her thesis to the present day. In Part 1, “Romantic Love and the Beginnings of Jewish Emancipation,” Garloff examines the writings of five authors, pairing works by a Jew and a non-Jew in the opening chapters: Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779), and Dorthea Veit’s Florentin (1801) with Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799). A chapter is also devoted to the antisemitic stories of Achim von Arnim. Garloff describes her choices as focused on “the sociopolitical visions that become possible when Jewish emancipation is discussed in terms of love” (her emphasis, 21). For Mendelssohn and Lessing, she argues, love is about [End Page 166] coexistence, about carving out mutual but ultimately separate spheres within a single overarching polity. In the writings of Veit and Schlegel, whose personal love affair has immense symbolic resonance, love takes on an impervious individualization, a “romantic” quality that, in Garloff’s reading, “hinges upon the negation of Judaism, or its transformation into an unspeakable difference” (51). Finally, for Arnim, it is “ambiguity and ambivalence” that take center stage (76), with Arnim presenting various possible love affairs between Jews and non-Jews and then rejecting them because of a perceived inability of Jews (or their Jewishness) to truly be assimilated into German culture. Engaging with postcolonial theory, Garloff argues that “ambiguity, which expresses a psychical ambivalence about the process of modernization, ultimately enhances the political efficacy of antisemitism” (her emphasis, 91). In Part 2, “The Crisis of Jewish Emancipation and Assimilation,” Garloff traces the story of Jewish integration and religious/ethnic difference into the twentieth century, where it comes into conflict with homogenizing and racializing nationalist tendencies. In three chapters, Garloff examines the works of Ludwig Jacobowski, Max Nordau, Georg Hermann, Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Rosenzweig, and Else Lasker-Schüler, all of whom “seek to wrest love away from biologist thought and reinstate it as a model of sociopolitical integration” (98). Because of the many political trends with which Jews were engaged by the early twentieth century, across these chapters Garloff uses each writer as a cipher through which to address larger social concerns, such as race, nationalism (of which Zionism was the uniquely Jewish facet), and gender. Chapter 5, “Eros and Thanatos in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” is an excellent example of Garloff’s method at work. Concerning Freud, the dean of writing on human psycho-sexuality, she makes the remarkable observation that “Freud maintained a resonant silence about the subject of Jewish-Gentile sex and love” (130), and...

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture

John M. Efron . German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 343 pp. - Carsten Schapkow . Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation. Translated by Corey Twitchell . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 305 pp.

John M. Efron . German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 343 pp. - Carsten Schapkow . Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation. Translated by Corey Twitchell . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 305 pp.

Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture by Paul Reitter

Reviewed by: Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture by Paul Reitter Jennifer Marston William Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture By Paul Reitter. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 282 pp. In his preface to Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture, expert on German Jewish culture Paul Reitter provides an intriguing explanation of how he came to write a number of nonacademic (but intellectually oriented) review essays, noting that, among other reasons, the kinds of journalistic impulses he was studying for his dissertation on Karl Kraus motivated him to try his own hand at the genre. The project thus evolved from Reitter's deep interest in, passion for, and knowledge about journalistic writing on German Jewish culture, culminating in the present remarkable volume. Before they came together in this collection, many of Reitter's essays were published previously in some of the literary world's most respectable review venues, such as the Jewish Review of Books, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement. In these essays, Reitter thoughtfully tackles issues with implications that extend well beyond his immediate subject, for example, the nature of the biographical genre, the challenges involved in translation, and the parameters of Holocaust literature. In addition, he models the writing of balanced and fair book reviews (and at times, reviews of reviews) that do not shy away from pointed criticism when warranted. The volume's twenty-six essays are grouped logically into six parts: "Self-Reflections," "Legendary Lives," "Beyond the Canon," "Renderings," "Studying German Jewry," and "The End." The essay on Gershom Scholem in part 1 exemplifies the natural storytelling style that makes Reitter's writing such a compelling read, as he provides historical and biographical context (in this case by examining Scholem's diaries and memoir, sometimes including some of his own psychological speculation) before going into detail about the secondary literature [End Page 106] he is reviewing. His intimate knowledge of the subjects at hand allows Reitter to not simply review the books at a superficial level but to provide a thorough analysis of them as well. In this case, the work under review is Anthony David Skinner's translation of Scholem's diaries entitled Lamentations of Youth. Here, as in the other reviews in the volume, Reitter offers context, clarifications, and corrections (in this case regarding apparent mistranslations or questionable translating choices), while also lauding the strengths of the work. As many of the essays examine the biographies of famous German Jewish cultural icons, a recurring focal point of the volume is the contrast between the popular image or mythology and the reality of a person's life, and of the often vast differences between their public and private personae. Reitter's considerations of Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Stefan Zweig are especially strong in this respect. Meanwhile, the volume's title essay, "Bambi's Jewish Roots," bridges the gap between high and low culture with a thorough discussion of how Zionism provides the subtext for Felix Salten's original, pre-Disney version of Bambi, A Life in the Woods (1923), and presents evidence on how the scholarly treatments of this topic have missed the mark in certain ways. While Reitter comprehensively reviews secondary literature about the most prominent German Jewish male cultural figures of the early twentieth century—and the big ones are all covered, some in multiple essays: Freud, von Hoffmannsthal, Kafka, Kraus, Schnitzler, Weininger, Wittgenstein and more—one wishes to know more about how influential German Jewish women fit into the overall picture that Reitter paints of this time period. Besides an essay on Aris Fioretos's 2012 illustrated biography of Nelly Sachs (the title of which,Flight and Metamorphosis, is alluded to but unfortunately omitted in this version of the review essay), women are sideline figures at best in this volume. This is certainly less a sign of a deficiency in Reitter's own choices of material than it is a reflection of the relative lack of ongoing scholarly attention paid to such extraordinary women as Veza Canetti, Mascha Kaleko, Gertrud Kolmar, Else...

The emergence of scientific literature in Hebrew for children and youth in the nineteenth century: preliminary directions for research

One of the toughest challenges undertaken by German–Jewish Maskilim was to create a corpus of scientific texts in Hebrew. Most of the scientific texts written by them were aimed for both adult and juvenile audiences, signifying that no clear differentiation between corpuses for adults and for children had been made yet at the time. After a short blossoming of Hebrew scientific writing in the last third of the eighteenth century in German–Jewish culture, the first half of the nineteenth century saw a degeneration in Hebrew writing in Europe. Hebrew science literature flourished again from around the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in Eastern Europe, along with the growth in science literature for children and youth. This article is an initial exploration of this corpus, which has scarcely been examined. Three test cases are studied: a textbook, a didactic fictitious text, and a journalistic text. They present exclusive attributes of children’s literature, thereby demonstrating the process of crystallization of scientific literature in Hebrew for children and youth at that time.

Renewal in the Shadow of the Catastrophe: Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan in Germany

The essay discusses German Jewish cultural renewal in the aftermath of the World War II and the Holocaust. In order to do so, it offers a comparative study of three prize-reception speeches, given in West Germany after the Holocaust by notable Jewish figures. Although these speeches vary greatly, they all seek to perform German Jewishness shortly after the long and honorable tradition of German Jewry was brutally demolished by National Socialism. This article investigates how they thus partake in an attempt to renew German Jewish culture after the catastrophe of the Holocaust.

‘Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

‘Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik Gabriel S. Cooper Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955. By Jonathan Skolnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0804786072. Jonathan Skolnik’s masterful study reads German Jewish historical fiction as a popular genre of minority culture that sought to inscribe Jews into German culture and society. Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction written in German drew on the Sephardic-Jewish past and expressed a dynamic that philosopher Franz Rosenzweig dubbed “dissimilation”: an obverse movement to assimilation that affirmed a distinctive Jewish identity alongside new German identities. By reinventing Sephardic-Jewish history, Jewish writers asserted hope for integration and voiced concerns about assimilation, antisemitism, and persecution. Resonant Sephardic-Jewish themes—the vibrant Jewish culture of Islamic Spain, conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion—provided a rich source of Jewish self-understanding, through which minority cultural memory could be reinterpreted in new historical contexts. Skolnik’s book follows on the heels of recent scholarship on Jewish historical fiction by Maurice Samuels and Jonathan Hess, but it does not retread these authors’ paths. Instead, Skolnik offers valuable insights into a literature that served (among other functions) as a corrective to the project of modern, secular Jewish historiography (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Taking cues from historians Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, Skolnik addresses the interplay of history and memory in German Jewish culture, and this exchange’s effects on German Jewish identity construction. One of Skolnik’s significant contributions here is his demonstration of the idea that German Jewish historical fiction remained in dialogue with the majority culture, even as it asserted a unique German Jewish identity. The book’s first chapter examines the “first modern Jewish historical novel,” Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837). Spinoza reacted against the literary figure of Ahasuerus, an enduring representation of “Jewish history” for Europeans. Auerbach has Spinoza dream about a persecuted, unenlightened, dying Ahasuerus, signaling the triumph of secularization and rationalism embodied by the philosopher. However, the [End Page 664] novel also consciously confronts the challenge secularization posed to Judaism and Jewish identity. Auerbach situates his novel between the radical assimilationism of Karl Gutzkow and the Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, in which Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became embroiled. By identifying Spinoza as the precursor to Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment thought, Auerbach perpetuates an ideology of Jewish emancipation by claiming Spinoza for Jewish history. Spinoza thus strives to insert minority culture, which secularization threatens to marginalize, into the national narrative of German literary history. Historical fiction would serve thereafter as a model for Jewish writers concerned with Jews’ integration as Jews into German culture. In his second chapter, Skolnik interprets Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) both as a text that posits secular literature as a counterweight to the demythologizing tendencies of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and as a modern type of Jewish cultural memory. Skolnik’s compelling analysis of the “Haggadah” motif illustrates the critical role Heine envisioned for narrative in negotiating the divide between Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicism. In his “secularized Haggadah” modeled on Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott, Heine revives the Sephardic-Jewish thinker, Don Isaac Abarbanel, an ambivalent figure endowed with the cultural integration of that historical epoch, and the knowledge of how fleeting that achievement was. German Jewish writers of historical fiction learned from Heine to appropriate Abarbanel as a vehicle for expressing a range of attitudes toward the projects of (Jewish) integration and modernization. Chapter 3 treats five nineteenth-century historical novels addressed to a German Jewish public sphere, which had arisen from German Jews’ acculturation and their thriving print culture. Skolnik maintains that this minority literature sought to create a normative, stable Jewish identity compatible with the project of integration. Jewish historical fiction achieved this didactic aim through allusions to German “high” culture, often works by Goethe and Lessing. Skolnik also makes a cogent argument here for the inadequacy of existing theories of minority culture in analyzing German Jewish literature; rather than attempting to subvert the project of national identity—a strategy germane to other minority cultures—German Jewish...

A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser by Leah Garrett (review)

Reviewed by: A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser by Leah Garrett Stephen Thursby A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser Leah Garrett. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011. 147 pp. Garrett examines the influence of the German Tannhäuser legend on four artists: the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (“Der Tannhäuser,” 1836), the father of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl (Der Judenstaat, 1897), the Yiddish writer Isaac Leyb Peretz (Mesires-nefesh, 1904), and the notoriously antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner (Tannhäuser, 1845). Each artist chapter begins with biographical information before exploring the use of the legend. In her introduction, Garrett recounts Daniel Barenboim’s controversial but successful performance of excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the 2001 Israeli Music Festival in Jerusalem, leading the Berlin Staatskapelle. This apparent change in attitudes towards Wagner performances in Israel (after years of an unofficial ban) sets the stage for her focus on the use of the Tannhäuser legend by both German nationalists and Jewish culture builders. Garrett justifies her work because “this hidden story of Tannhäuser has never been told before in book form” (1). Chapter 1 concerns the 1515 version of the Tannhäuser ballad, the source for Heine’s rewrite. She traces the popularity of the legend with the German Romantics and observes that “whether or not the ballad has German origins,” it is most important that historians “sought to claim it as a foundation myth of medieval Germany” (10). Garrett discusses Heine as a writer supposedly “subversive to the ideals of Germanic culture” (11) in chapter 2. His Tannhäuser poem was written as a challenge to Prussian repression following revolutionary struggles of the 1820s and 1830s (12). She ties the poem to Heine’s personal crises while living in Paris, his obsessive relationship with the “uneducated and coarse” Mathilde (22), and his dabbling in the sensualist cult of St. Simonianism. He transplants the knight into modern Germany and expresses a “complicated melding of love and rage” for his native land (24). In chapter 3 Garrett analyzes Wagner’s opera [End Page 155] Tannhäuser and his fusing of the legend (based largely on Heine’s version) with the tale of a singing contest. She discusses Wagner’s antisemitism and scholarly views of its relationship to his music and critical reception. She labels Wagner’s opera a “love letter” to Germany and Heine’s poem a “bitter indictment” of it (48). Chapter 4 is devoted to Herzl and Der Judenstaat. As the Paris correspondent of the assimilationist Viennese paper the Neue Freie Presse, he attended nightly performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser while developing his ideas for the creation of a Jewish state. As with Heine and Peretz, Herzl’s attachment to his Jewish roots increased as antisemitism became more virulent in Europe (he covered the Dreyfus trial in Paris in 1894). He was particularly drawn to the spectacle of the opera, which “offered a tool to inspire the Jewish masses” to follow his Zionist plan (82). On the controversy over whether Herzl’s and Adolf Hitler’s love of Wagner’s music links Zionism with Nazism, she states that both movements were “rooted in nineteenth-century European Romanticism,” but emerged from different branches: nationalism influenced the former and Social Darwinism and racial antisemitism the latter (85–86). Herzl opened the Second Zionist Congress to the music of the Tannhäuser overture, which Garrett characterizes as an insider’s joke: “using the work of a German nationalist to inspire Jewish nationalism” (90). The final chapter traces the influence of Wagner’s Tannhäuser on Peretz’s Mesires-nefesh. Peretz transformed Tannhäuser into a “young Jewish man in premodern Israel” and Judaized the opera such that it became a “morality tale about how to live an ethical Jewish life” (96). His Tannhäuser (Chananiah) does not sing an immoral song but uses his knowledge of the Torah to show off, the temptress Venus is transformed into Chananiah’s doting mother and a teacher who imparted “egotistical knowledge” (109), and his Elizabeth (Miriam) sacrifices herself for Chananiah...

Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman (review)

Reviewed by: Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman Ellen Schrecker Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism. By Carol Sicherman. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2011. Pp. xiv + 381. Paper $28.00. ISBN 978-0983689980. When the author of this review interviewed Harry Marks, the subject of this biography by his daughter, she was mainly interested in his experiences during the McCarthy era. He had been called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Questioned in an executive session, Marks described his brief sojourn in the American Communist party, named a few names, and then discoursed at length about the evils of the Soviet system. Marks anticipated that HUAC would keep his testimony secret, as it did with many of its friendly witnesses, but this was not the case. But because the committee did not publicize the release of its transcript, few of Marks’s colleagues at the University of Connecticut, where he taught European history, knew about his brush with the Cold War Red Scare. Though distressed by the prospect, Marks had felt he had no choice but to answer the committee’s questions. By 1953, the academic establishment had made it clear that college and university teachers who refused to cooperate with the witch hunt would lose their jobs. In fact, the University of Connecticut had already dismissed a number of politically tainted individuals, including a highly regarded and tenured professor of physics. Marks retained his job, serving the university as a popular and widely respected faculty member until his retirement in 1978. What Carol Sicherman’s account of her father’s life reveals is that Marks’s appearance before HUAC was not his first encounter with political repression. He had lived for a while under the Nazis. An assimilated American Jew from a solid bourgeois background, he had grown up in New York City during the 1920s in the comfortable world of German Jewish professionals and businessmen. After graduating from Fieldston, a private school catering to that milieu, he went on to Harvard, where he found his intellectual vocation as a historian. Determined to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of the country about which he was about to write his dissertation, Marks took off for Germany—just at the moment when the Weimar Republic was about to collapse. Young and somewhat naïve, Marks was nonetheless a quick learner who soon [End Page 467] grasped the significance of what he was observing. He recorded his impressions of the early months of the Third Reich in a diary, as well as in the many letters he exchanged with correspondents in both Germany and the US. This trove of sources forms the core of the book. They not only offer yet another firsthand glimpse of the way in which the Nazis shattered the affluent and cultured world of German Jewry, but also help us understand why someone like Harry Marks would then gravitate to the communist orbit. Marks was both an outsider and an insider. Once he reached Berlin, his family and academic connections brought him into a circle of upper-middle-class assimilated Jews, not all that different from the folks back home. As his command of the language improved, Marks found himself ever more comfortable in this environment, one which prized the highest forms of German culture. Most of the men and women Marks associated with were on the left politically, sympathetic to the social democracy of the SPD, though not (with a few exceptions) to the more rigorous Marxism of the German Communist Party. What seems most striking about Marks’s experience, at least as Sicherman has portrayed it, is that, for all his Berlin friends’ enthusiasm for German culture, they remained a group apart. Though they saw themselves as preserving the finest elements of their nation’s intellectual and artistic heritage, they were actually developing a separate German Jewish culture—one that the rest of their countrymen did not share. Since Marks seems to have operated within an almost entirely Jewish world, he was in a good position to observe how the Nazis set about...

Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany’s premier museum devoted to Jewish history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the “politics of regret” and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a “politics of nostalgia.” The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind’s building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.

Off to America and Back Again, or Judah Touro and Other Products of the German Jewish Imagination

This article explores the function that visions of America played in nineteenth-century German Jewish culture. Particularly in the decades surrounding the granting of complete emancipation in the German Empire in 1871, Jewish life in the United States proved especially fascinating to German Jewish writers. Looking at a variety of travelogues and fictional texts produced by Jews for Jews in the German-speaking world during this period, this article illustrates how representations of American Jewish life could be used to mediate knowledge about the New World while underscoring the leading role that German Jewry reserved for itself at home.

Benjamin leitor de Proust

O presente artigo analisa a complexa e ramificada relação de intertextualidade existente entre a obra de Walter Benjamin e a de Marcel Proust, mostrando que essa afinidade eletiva está presente não só em ensaios que tratam diretamente de Proust, mas também na filosofia da linguagem de Benjamin e na teoria benjaminiana da tradução. Assim, Infância em Berlim por volta de 1900, de Benjamin, é visto como a translação do romance proustiano em direção à cultura judaico-alemã e A obra das passagens, como maneira de reverter a má relação da subjetividade com o tempo na sociedade industrial.

The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (review)

Reviewed by: The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe Jeffrey A. Grossman The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, by Paul Reitter. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 254 pp. $35.00. In the conclusion to The Anti-Journalist Paul Reitter points to a problem confronting anyone who writes on the difficult, sometimes exasperating, often brilliant figure of Karl Kraus: "For if important thinkers regularly rediscover Kraus, and if both the significance of his major themes and his skill at chronicling them have been vigorously underlined, he is not widely read today" (p. 178). In the nearly 200 pages that precede this remark, Reitter astutely demonstrates why students of both European modernism and German Jewish culture would do well to read and teach the work of Karl Kraus; he shows why the "anti-journalist" media critic is still relevant today and why his troubled relationship to Jewish issues helps illuminate both fin-de-siècle Europe and Jewish life there and in modern western culture, more generally. Both Kraus's criticism of language (Sprachkritik) and his complex relationship to Jewish issues pose a serious challenge to Kraus scholars—Reitter cites as preface to his analysis Gershom Scholem's admonition: "In dealing with Kraus's relation to Jewish issues, one can only commit errors, for which Kraus himself made sure there would be plenty of scope" (p. 26). Scholem's remark does more than underscore this challenge; it also suggests the stakes involved in Reitter's study, for Kraus's difficulty relates both to the larger question of German Jewish acculturation and the ways in which Kraus wove certain kinds of difficulty into his own sharp-edged analyses of society, language, culture, and the press. The fact that Reitter combines these two sides of Kraus is itself significant, for as he suggests in his introduction, one can approach Kraus without seriously exploring the question of Jewishness in his work—an approach, however, whose gaps Reitter's study throws into stark relief. A key question Reitter's study responds to is: how does Kraus's approach to language relate to his view of power? Reitter shows that Kraus criticized language abuse as a means for criticizing how the press conceals abuses of power. At the same time, Reitter addresses a second key question: how does one reconcile Kraus's use at times of antisemitic stereotypes with his repeated assertion, especially after 1910, of his own Jewishness? Reitter's response to these conflicts in Kraus is both complex and elegant: it combines a careful, lucid contextualizing of Kraus's work and the issues he responded to with a series of exacting readings of key essays by Kraus and others. In setting up this context, Reitter's introduction discusses how figures like Richard Wagner and Heinrich von Treitschke, among others, polemicized against the role of Jews in German culture. Reitter further explores in Chapter [End Page 181] 1 a troubled article on German-Jewish assimilation, "The German-Jewish Parnassus," by a young Jewish scholar named Moritz Goldstein. Appearing in 1912, the article triggered much controversy about the question of German Jewish creativity and psychic health. This debate forms a backdrop for Reitter's treatment of Kraus's own interventions on the subject. By focusing on the controversy around Goldstein, Reitter shows that influential German Jewish writers drew for their analyses of Jews in German culture, and journalism in particular, on terms and tropes disturbingly similar to those used by antisemites. But they did so in complex ways. By exploring these debates, Reitter seeks to generate a "new openness" for understanding Kraus's own capacity to align himself with such issues (p. 34). He also sets up the context for showing "how Kraus's style came to be signified within German-Jewish circles as a profoundly Jewish phenomenon," a point explored in depth in Chapter 4 (p. 34). Chapter 2, "Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question," explores Kraus's utterances on journalism, Jewish issues, Zionism, antisemitism and German culture, and culminates in an exacting reading of Kraus's oft-cited essay "Heine and the Consequences...

The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science (review)

Reviewed by: The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science Mitchell G. Ash, Head The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, by Amos Morris-Reich. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, Vol. 54. London: Routledge, 2008. 193 pp. $95.00. In this short but interestingly conceived volume, Amos Morris-Reich presents a systematic study of the role of the Jews and Jewish assimilation in the [End Page 193] thought of Franz Boas and Georg Simmel. The two thinkers are of obvious interest, because both were of Jewish background but themselves assimilated into German-Jewish culture, albeit in different ways, and because their thinking was formative for social and cultural anthropology (Boas) and theoretical sociology (Simmel), respectively. The volume's clearly stated thesis is that the concept of the Jews and Jewish assimilation played a central role in the thinking of both authors, and therefore in the intellectual construction of modern social science. That this thesis is correct seems obvious; new are the comparative approach and the way Morris-Reich goes about his analysis. Although Morris-Reich offers some biographical details, historical context takes second place here to a history of ideas approach. Here, the relevant linkages are to other thinkers (for example, to Kant, Moritz Lazarus, and Dil-they in the case of Simmel), more than to other formative influences, such as the social context of academic scholarship. This emphasis is appropriate, ironically, even from a social historical viewpoint, because the milieu in which both thinkers learned what scholarship is encouraged precisely such philosophical groundings and intellectualized self-conceptions. As Morris-Reich notes, however, his authors paid a price for taking such an approach; in their work, "the Jews" constitute a conceptual entity related to, but not necessarily identical with, actual Jews; nor did either author actually engage in extensive empirical research on Jews. In the first part of the book, Morris-Reich presents a carefully nuanced and illuminating analysis of Franz Boas's shift from physical to social and cultural anthropology (from "race" to "culture") after his move from Germany to the United States, and the impact of that shift on his thinking both about "race" and about "the Jews." Surprisingly, however, as Morris-Reich shows, Boas's representations of Jews did not actually result from his turn to society and culture, but "derived from the principles he developed for the study and representation of physical differences among populations" (p. 45). Geography was central among these principles; "the Jews" initially represented for Boas variations within an "Oriental type," who assimilated easily into the surrounding populations. It was precisely on the basis of such thinking, on this account, that Boas could later argue that the category of "race," understood as a fixed physical type, had no scientific standing; and it was on the basis of that claim, based in part on his views on "the Jews," that Boas became one of the leading anti-racist scholars in the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s. Especially interesting is Morris-Reich's additional discussion of the impact of Boas' later anti-racist cultural pluralism on studies of race and ethnicity in America (often carried out by assimilated Jews who had studied with Boas), and on discourse about "race" since 1945. Here Morris-Reich does not [End Page 194] neglect to add a brief section on the problems posed for anti-racist pluralist thinking by recent renewed discussion of "physical" (now, genetic) markers in ethnic populations (e.g., markers for heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs among so-called Ashkenasi Jews). Most important and innovative in the second part of the book is Morris-Reich's emphasis on the role of Jews and Jewish assimilation in Georg Simmel's general sociology, rather than on his often-cited essay "The Stranger" (1908). This approach helps him to establish that Simmel's Neo-Kantian style of thinking profoundly affected his conception of "the Jew." As he shows, in Simmel's writings "the Jew" appears as an abstract entity, a subset of broader categories like "the social," "societion" or "otherness," not as a group of actual human beings in all its diversity. Put ironically, we could say that Simmel's "Jew...

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture Joshua R. Jacobson The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture, by Tina Frühauf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 284 pp. $74.00 Tina Frühauf has given us a book that is as much about Jewish identity as it is about music. She presents the organ as a marker of Jewish identity: at first as a marker of assimilation in the context of nineteenth-century reformation, and later as a marker of dissimilation, as Jewish musicians sought to find a unique voice. The introduction of the organ into Jewish worship in Germany in 1810 stirred up a fierce controversy. In the opinion of most traditional Jews, the organ was treyf, totally unfit for Jewish worship. Since the fifteenth century the organ had been associated with Christian worship, and halakha forbade hukkat ha-goy—imitation of gentile practices. Furthermore, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the rabbinic authorities had declared that the entire nation was in a state of mourning, and music, especially instrumental music, was inappropriate. And playing any musical instrument on Shabbat or a holiday was considered forbidden work (or might lead to the forbidden work of repairing an instrument). But the reformers countered that beautifying the worship service was one of the exceptions to the halakhic ban. They also pointed to the precedent of the magrephah, (according to some interpretations) a hydraulic organ used in the Temple in ancient Israel many centuries before the organ was used in Christian worship. But the elephant in the room was the early reformers' plan to remove any aspects of Judaism that were dissonant with the lifestyle of their German Lutheran neighbors. They eliminated traditional nusah (prayer chant) and cantillation, [End Page 180] and completely did away with the role of the hazzan (cantor). The rabbi, like his counterpart in the church, led the services, and the music consisted of chorales sung by the choir and congregation, supported by the organ. For the emancipated Jews of Central Europe the organ came to symbolize the enlightenment and their assimilation into a refined culture and a society into which they so desperately longed to be admitted. Decades later, moderate reformers sought a middle ground in which the hazzan regained his position on the bimah alongside the organ and the choir. Now the organ was used to accompany the cantorial recitative, to perform preludes and postludes, music for meditation, as well as to accompany congregational singing. Salomon Sulzer, the great cantor of nineteenth-century Vienna, reversed his initial opposition to the organ and opined that the mighty instrument could be used to "lead, control, to cover dissonances" in congregational hymns. His younger colleague in Berlin, Louis Lewandowski, composed organ accompaniments to traditional recitatives that boxed their free rhythms into a rigid meter of four beats to the bar, and their exotic Eastern modality into German classical functional harmony. Again the organ was being used as an instrument in the battle to purge Jewish culture of its "otherness." It was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that organ music displayed signs of dissimilation. Whereas nineteenth-century synagogue organists were church musicians who moonlighted on Saturdays, now we find a cohort of trained Jewish organists. Whereas previously enlightened Jews were eager to discard their otherness, now the banner of nationalism was ascendant. In the wake of growing antisemitism and inspired by Zionist ideologies, many Jews embraced rather than hid their ethnic identity. Inspired by composers such as Bartok and Rimsky-Korsakov, Jewish musicians sought to find their own unique voice, one that would blend East and West in a more equitable balance. The prosperous Jews of early twentieth-century Germany built huge ornate synagogues, equipped with some of the most elaborate organs in the country. When it came to power in 1933 the Nazi party segregated Germany's Jews into an apartheid situation. Banned from attending or performing in public concerts, forbidden to play music by "real" German composers, many Jews turned inward and discovered or rediscovered their Jewish cultural heritage. The synagogue became the venue for concerts of music by Jewish composers, the organ was increasingly...

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (review)

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (review)

Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

Haskalah scientific knowledge in Hebrew garment

Scientific texts for Jewish children and youth were produced within the German-Jewish culture from the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century. The intention was to fill in the gap in the Judaic literature in Hebrew vis-à-vis the German-Christian literary and educational systems as part of modernization processes. Two case studies of German-Hebrew scientific translations (in natural history and astronomy) are described in an attempt to illustrate the strategies applied by the Jewish translators, which in their turn reflect the cultural constraints they faced and the creative ways they chose to deal with them, taking into account the models already available to the target system and the types of target audience the translated texts were intended for.

Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers

Reviewed by: Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers Rochelle Tobias Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers. By Katja Garloff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. xii + 252 pages. $49.95. Katja Garloff takes the title for her study from an essay with the same title by Adorno in which the philosopher defends the use of foreign words (Fremdwörter) in German. Adorno argues that foreign words introduce a dissonance into language that exposes, [End Page 591] in turn, the heterogeneity at the heart of any language, such that no language can ever be native to a people (26). The title could not be more fitting for this remarkable monograph in which Garloff demonstrates the displacement that postwar German Jewish writers inscribe into the German language. At once an historical and a literary project, the book investigates the ways in which Peter Weiss, Nelly Sachs, and Paul Celan responded to their reception in West Germany. That all three authors lived abroad throughout their writing careers contributes to, but is not essential for Garloff's argument. Even if Sachs, Weiss, and Celan had returned to their "native" lands, their relation to the German language would have been irrevocably altered by the Holocaust which made the German language an uneasy, if not impossible, home for a Jewish poet. Drawing equally on Postcolonial Studies and trauma theory, Garloff contends that all three writers "perform for an imagined German audience the violent rupture between the subject and its place of origin" (11). One of the many feats of this learned and highly readable study is the dialogue it creates between postcolonial theory and Holocaust Studies, which for too long have remained separate fields. In her theoretical introduction, Garloff indicates that postcolonial theory brought to the foreground the idea that the voices of postcolonial subjects call into question any national identity conceived as the outgrowth of a common origin. Diaspora experiences undermine all fixed narratives of the past and projections for the future. In this manner they subvert existing models, while at the same time creating new possibilities. While sympathetic to this position in general, Garloff cautions that German-Jewish literature after the Holocaust cannot be interpreted in such a positive light as the articulation of difference for two reasons that are related but not identical. First, German-Jewish writers cannot stand apart from the models or narratives they critique or, more precisely, disarticulate since these models entail their annihilation as Jews or the complete erasure of their difference. Secondly, they cannot generate "new" possibilities, such as fashioning alternative communities, since the Holocaust destroyed any future for German Jewry. (As Garloff notes, the Jews in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s came mostly from Eastern Europe via displaced persons camps and hence do not represent a continuation of prewar German-Jewish culture [112–13].) In the absence of either a past they can recuperate or a future they can imagine, German-Jewish writers are left in a double bind. On the one hand, they "attempt to transform their own displacement into a critical stance" (11); on the other, their efforts attest to "their inability, or unwillingness, to arrive at a position of strength and detachment" (11). To elucidate precisely this resistance to exile from a position of vulnerability and entanglement, Garloff examines the works of Weiss, Sachs, and Celan with attention to the contexts in which they wrote and published their texts. The first chapter explores essays by three diverse thinkers (Adorno, Günther Anders, and Jean Améry) that directly address the issue of exile for German Jews after the Holocaust. Although the chapter is divided into three equal sections, the section on Adorno occupies the thematic center, if for no other reason than because Adorno uses the word trauma and outlines what could be called traumatic temporality in his essay "Die Wunde Heine." As Garloff points out, the word trauma is a foreign word, the Greek for wound referred to in the title of the essay (33). The title additionally permits two interpretations: it could indicate either the wound that Heine has, as in "Die Wunde Heine," or the one that he is...