Bambi’s Jewish Roots: And Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture 9781441166852, 9781501315107, 9781441198068

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Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

Paul Reitter

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Paul Reitter, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reitter, Paul. Bambi’s Jewish roots and other essays on German-Jewish culture/Paul Reitter. pages cm Summary: “An illuminating account of the life and demise of German Jewry”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-6685-2 (hardback) 1. Jews–Germany–History–1800–1933. 2. Jews–Germany–Intellectual life–19th century. 3. Jews–Germany–Intellectual life–20th century. 4. German literature–Jewish authors–History and criticism. 5. Jews in literature. 6. Antisemitism–Germany–History. 7. Germany–Ethnic relations. I. Title. DS134.25.R45 2015 305.892’4043–dc23 2014045910 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6685-2 ePub: 978-1-4411-9334-6 ePDF: 978-1-4411-9806-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Preface  vii

PART ONE Self-Reflections  1   1 The Story of a Friendship Gone Bad: Heinrich Heine on Ludwig Börne  3   2 Irrational Man: Gershom Sholem’s Decisive Years  11   3 The Text Life of Dreams: Arthur Schnitzler’s Nighttime Diaries  28 PART TWO Legendary Lives  35   4   5   6   7

Misreading Kafka  37 The Wittgensteins and the Perils of Family Biography  50 Dust-to-Dust Song: Nelly Sachs’s Life  66 Sadness in the Mountains: Freud and the Upside of Transience  71   8 The Middle Way of Erich Fromm  77 PART THREE  Beyond the Canon  85   9 Bambi’s Jewish Roots  87 10 Appraising the Collector: The Life and Work of Stefan Zweig  97 11 Fear and Self-Loathing in Fin de Siècle Vienna: Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character  113

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PART FOUR Renderings  119 12 That Other Metamorphosis: Translating Kafka  121 13 The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and the Task of the Retranslator  134 14 The Poetics and Politics of Hugo von Hofmannsthal  144 PART FIVE Studying German Jewry  155 15 Kafka’s Identity Politics  157 16 Whose Jewish: Theorizing German-Jewish Culture  166 17 Rabbis Making Role Models: German-Jewish Middlebrow Literature  170 18 Schnitzler’s Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go?  176 19 Rereading Freud’s Moses (Again)  185 20 Erich Auerbach’s Exile and the Motion of Mimesis  202 PART SIX  The End  215 21 22 23 24 25

Hitler’s Viennese Waltz  217 The Führer Furor  225 Holocaust Imponderables  234 Racism: Coded as Culture?  242 Gender Unbender: Pierre Bourdieu and the Enigmatic Durability of Bad Values  249 26 The Paradoxes of Holocaust Literature: A Guide for the Darkly Perplexed  257 Acknowledgments  265 Bibliography  267 Index  273

PREFACE

Back when I was a graduate student in German studies—this was in 1999, to be precise—I got it into my head that I should give nonacademic essay writing a try. It wasn’t that dissertating had left me craving a more personal form of expression: If you’ve grown weary of essays that blend exposition and memoir, you needn’t worry—the word “I” occurs more often in what you’re reading now than it does in any other section of this book. But neither was I thinking selflessly. Indeed, my foray into public letters was in part propelled by less than lofty motivations. What can I say? It seemed like a good career move. It’s true that spending time on nonacademic work is sometimes looked at askance—or worse—in the academy. It’s also true that with the economy racing along, the job market in the humanities was better around 1999 than it had been in a while, and, accordingly, the desperation level among graduate students was relatively low. But university presses weren’t sharing the wealth; book series in my field were being shut down, and the tone of the talk about publishing a first book was grim. Grim enough, in fact, for leaders in literary studies to weigh in, enjoining young scholars to help their tenure prospects by pulling back on the opacity that had felt like a requirement during the reign of “theory,” which was just then ending. As odd as it may sound, nonacademic essay writing came across, in this context, as a pursuit that might boost my chances of making it as an academic. It might undo some of the stylistic damage that working on a dissertation had caused.

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But not all of my motivations flowed so directly from the spring of self-interest. The topic of my dissertation mattered, too. I was trying to understand the development of a radical form of journalism, as well as the journalistic and cultural contexts from which that form emerged, and I thought that trying my hand at something related to my material, however distantly, might be instructive. Unlike people working on, say, the epic novel or fascist culture, I could do that while staying my vocational course, more or less. Why not give it a shot? Most important, though, was that I felt the same visceral pull I did with scholarship. Like a lot of people in the humanities, I was a devoted reader of intellectual journalism. It was far from being a bluster-free zone, to be sure, but the talent it attracted—Arthur Danto, Daniel Mendelsohn, Francine Prose, Anthony Grafton, etc.—made for a wonderfully vibrant forum. To my delight, I saw that the general topics on which I was trying to cultivate some expertise, German-Jewish culture and German modernism, had a place in the exchange. So perhaps I could be part of the conversation, perhaps I could contribute there. The problem, of course, was how to begin. Could you submit a review essay “on spec?” How might you get an assignment from an editor when you basically had no publications to your name? With these questions on my mind, I literally walked into that crucial thing: a lucky break. I arrived at a party thrown by my friend Amy Leonard to find her late father John Leonard, one of the great intellectual journalists of the twentieth century, standing alone. Smooth as only a graduate student in German studies can be, I started to blurt out my designs before we had finished shaking hands. Red-faced, sweating,

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breathing hard, and talking fast, I proceeded to ask him for advice. He responded by wondering whether there were any specific projects I wanted to pursue. When I finally reached the end of my list, he, having listened graciously once again, encouraged me to go forward with one of the first ideas I had mentioned: a review essay on a book about Hitler’s years in Vienna. He would be happy, he said, to look at what I came up with. Did he really mean it? He did—and thus the oldest piece in this collection, “Hitler’s Viennese Waltz,” published in The Nation in August of 1999, came to be. By some measures, fifteen years is a long time. Certainly much has changed in the humanities during the last decade and a half. Using the tools of cognitive science to study literature; the emergence of digital humanities; public humanities as an National Endowment for the Humanities grant category—in 1999, these were things of the future. For the most part, however, the substance of humanities scholarship moves forward slowly. A book that was important when it came out, even if that was fifteen years ago, should still be worth reading, and thus reading about, today, especially if the discussion of the book tries to situate it in meaningful contexts of debate and engage its author in critical conversation, which is what I have tried to do in the more occasional pieces in this volume. Other essays address new translations of evergreen primary works—Heine’s Ludwig Börne, Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s writings, Gershom Scholem’s Diaries, etc.—and here I attempt in perhaps a more direct way to say something significant about the topics around which this volume is organized: German-Jewish culture and a series of issues that are sadly relevant to it: Hitler, the

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Holocaust, the history of racism, the psychic effects of discrimination, and so on. The same goes for the essays that are commentaries on such noteworthy matters as the phenomenon of Stefan Zweig hatred, Freud’s theory of anti-Semitism, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, and, not least, the echoes of Zionism in Felix Salten’s novel Bambi.

Part ONE

Self-Reflections

1 The Story of a Friendship Gone Bad: Heinrich Heine on Ludwig Börne

“But isn’t it beautifully formulated?” This, apparently, is what Heinrich Heine said when a friend tried to warn him of the scandalous character of his book Ludwig Börne: A memorial (1840). In a way, his response was perfectly appropriate. For one of the goals of Ludwig Börne is to emphasize that Heine is a much better writer than Börne (1786–1837), a critic with whom Heine had a lot in common, and with whom he had, as a result, often been associated. Indeed, the book begins with a discussion of how essential it is for authors of prose to be skilled in the medium through which Heine became famous: poetry. Here Heine declares that prose writers who aren’t at the same time poets will lack rhythm and grace. And Börne, he stresses, was no poet. If Heine’s theory seems dubious, his book nonetheless makes a strong case for the higher quality of his style. After all, it is widely considered to be his best-written work. No less an authority than Thomas Mann, who

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managed to cultivate a melodic style without being a poet, found in Ludwig Börne the “most brilliant German prose before Nietzsche.” But Heine’s insouciant tone amid predictions of controversy would also prove to be seriously out of place. For this was no ordinary mess. Ludwig Börne caused one of the great public relations disasters in literary history. During its first year in circulation, the book elicited almost no support and a welter of disapproval. Over 300 negative commentaries appeared, many of them expressing outrage. Friedrich Engels, for instance, called Ludwig Börne “the most execrable thing ever written in German.” Meanwhile, attempts at damage control turned out to be difficult. A popular target among conservative critics, Heine had generally been able to count on a network of allies to help him defend himself. But with Ludwig Börne he seems to have gone too far for most of them. Nor would the book sit well with future generations of sympathetic readers. On top of all this, the Börne Memorial almost cost Heine his life. The husband of Jeanette Wohl, Börne’s former companion and the object of much abuse in Ludwig Börne (her face is likened to a piece of matzo), quickly engaged Heine in a verbal battle. This dragged on for some time, and grew to involve an array of notable figures, such as Gabriel Riesser, the pro-Börne champion of Jewish emancipation, and Richard Wagner, who entered the fray on Heine’s behalf. Although Heine apologized to Wohl through a third party, her husband, Salomon Strauss, eventually challenged him to a duel. Strauss proposed swords. But Heine insisted on pistols, and on September 7, 1841, a shot from Strauss’s grazed his hip. So what went wrong? According to quite a few commentators, including Matthew Arnold, Heine was the most important European

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author of his era. How did the best-written work of this most important author flop badly and even dangerously? The problems with Ludwig Börne begin with the book’s original title, which Heine didn’t formulate himself. His normally shrewd publisher—who had also been Börne’s publisher—made an unwise change at the last minute, releasing the book under the title Heine über Börne. This phrase means not only “Heine on Börne,” but also “Heine over Börne.” Thus, the very packaging of the work came across as a crass act of selfaggrandizement. Then there is Heine’s mode of invective, which Robert Holub, in Monatshefte 73 (1981), has aptly called the “total polemic.” It entailed, as the phrase suggests, drawing links between an adversary’s various shortcomings while leaving nothing off-limits. Heine had generated scandals with this technique before, the most notorious of them being the “Platen affair,” about a decade previously. When the poet August Platen von Hallermünde made an anti-Semitic remark at his expense, Heine responded by mocking Platen’s homosexuality and connecting it to what he portrayed as Platen’s sterile formalism. The consensus was that Heine had crossed the line—that it was Platen who emerged from the exchange as the victim. Whereas Platen wasn’t a particularly sympathetic figure and had the ability to fight back, Börne had a large, devoted following and was a defenseless target. Moreover, Heine is at least as unsparing of Börne as he was of Platen. The book literally goes after Börne where he lived. During his last years, Börne cohabitated with Wohl and her husband Strauss; in various ways, Ludwig Börne suggests that sexual deficiencies must be responsible, not only for such an odd situation, but also for Börne’s failures as a writer, and, in turn, his animus

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toward Heine. The most famous gibe in the book extends this pattern of disparagement: And it was particularly in connection with me that the dearly departed yielded to such private feelings, and all his assaults were in the end nothing other than the petty envy that the little drum master feels toward the big drum major: he envied me the great feather plume that rejoices so jauntily in the air, my richly embroidered uniform on which there is more silver than he, the little drum major could pay for with his whole fortune, the dexterity with which I balance the big baton, the glances of love that the young wenches throw at me and that I perhaps return with some coquetry. There seems to have been some truth to Heine’s blustering. One of Börne’s letters to Wohl does, indeed, indicate that he envied Heine. Ten years older than Heine, Börne was jealous of Heine’s youth and his ability to stay youthful. But Börne’s “assaults” were also sincere expressions of disappointment, disappointment over a potential alliance that never materialized. Until the 1830s, when Börne and Heine lived in exile in Paris, the two authors appear to have been on fairly good terms. And why not? After all, they had been making common cause. When they met in Frankfurt in 1827, they were part of a community of progressive, selfconsciously post-Classicist, post-Romantic German authors. Both opposed the repressive measures that were instituted in most German principalities following Napoleon’s defeat and under Metternich’s influence. Both excelled at campaigning for political reform through witty cultural criticism. And if both Börne and Heine were sometimes

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sweepingly derisive in their criticisms of Jews and Judaism, both felt that having a Jewish heritage, and thus an outsider’s perspective, facilitated the development of a special humanism. Indeed, on this crucial point they sound very much alike. Heine: I love Germany and the Germans; but I love no less the inhabitants of the rest of this earth, whose number is forty times greater—and it is surely love which gives a man his true value. I am therefore— thank God—worth forty times more than those who cannot pull themselves out of the swamp of national egotism and who love none but Germany and the Germans. Börne: Yes, because I was born a servant, I love freedom more than you [Germans]. Yes, because I tasted slavery, I understand freedom better than you. Yes, because I had no fatherland at birth, I wish for a fatherland more than you, and because my birthplace wasn’t bigger than the Judengasse and because the ghetto gate marked for me the beginning of a foreign country, a single city is no longer enough for me as a fatherland. Nor is a territory or a province. Only an entire magnificent fatherland will satisfy me, as far as its language is spoken. There is, however, a notable difference between the two quotations. Börne is calling for a unified German state, Heine for cosmopolitanism. This disparity would prove to be significant. Heine was extremely wary of German nationalism, and when he relocated to Paris in 1831, the “fatherland” rhetoric of the republican circles in which Börne was moving seems to have put him off. For that reason—among quite a

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few others—he remained aloof. His aloofness frustrated Börne. In his highly successful Letters from Paris (1831–34), Börne censures Heine for lacking political commitment and, more generally, ethical substance. According to the Letters, Heine will never be more than a gifted poet: when he tries to be more than that, when he tries to help shape serious events, he looks like “a boy chasing butterflies on the battlefield.” Despite Heine’s claims to the contrary, it is possible to read Ludwig Börne as a response to that accusation. Not only does Heine explicitly attempt to deconstruct Börne’s assumptions about poetic talent and ethical character, but in much of the book he also goes on to explain Heine’s behavior during the early 1830s, grounded in one of Heine’s central ideas: the dichotomy of Nazarenes and Hellenes. These, according to Heine, are the two basic human types. Nazarenes are spiritualist and ascetic; Hellenes are sensualist and joyful. With his plodding prose, ugly female companion, and ethos of revolutionary sacrifice, Börne can only belong to the former category. Heine, the brilliant stylist and lover of beauty, is a Hellene. For a while, a friendship of sorts was possible between Börne the Nazarene and Heine the Hellene. But the July Revolution of 1830 drove them in opposite directions, making Börne and a reenergized culture of German republicanism even more intensely Nazarene and Heine more Hellene. Perhaps this conceit could have yielded an effective defense. In Ludwig Börne it doesn’t, and not simply because of Heine’s “total polemic” strategy. For one thing, Heine often strikes an unprepossessingly haughty tone. He repeatedly complains of how bad the room smelled at convocations of German republicans in Paris, which tended to consist largely of “rough types.” In the same

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moment of superciliousness, Heine remarks: “It was perhaps meant metaphorically when Börne declared that if a king were to shake his hand he would purify his hand afterward with fire; but I mean it quite literally when I say that were the people to shake my hand, I would wash it afterward.” A further problem is that many of Heine’s assertions have an outlandish character, but don’t really come across as satire and aren’t funny. Even more self-subverting is the way in which Heine unsettles his own fundamental distinction. Having implied that republican gatherings and public oratory don’t accord with his Hellene disposition, Heine confides that he longed to be a compelling orator and envied Börne’s skill at public speaking. And this is only one example of where and how the differences between their sensibilities break down. As Jeffrey L. Sammons puts it, in the introduction to his excellent, scrupulously annotated, complete (for the first time) translation of Ludwig Börne, we find a “strange twinning of their personalities under the surface of what looked like conclusive estrangement.” Given that soon after writing his aestheticist Börne Memorial Heine entered his most radical phase, in which he produced his greatest political poetry, it could be that the waffling in the text registers the ambivalence with which he moved in that direction. Heine was generally able to channel his ambivalence into engaging shifts of perspective, into ironic distancing. In Ludwig Börne we see what occurs when this channeling fails: perplexing contradictions. But Ludwig Börne is an interesting work for other reasons as well. For all its unpopularity, it has served, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger has emphasized, as a template in German literary feuding, which has so often turned on the issue of whether influential authors have political obligations. Anthony Phelan’s study Reading Heinrich Heine

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makes even stronger claims. The chief aim of Phelan’s book is to show how on the levels of form and content, Heine’s writings successfully negotiated a newly commercialized public sphere, and also other large “problems of modernity.” Hence the feel-good last line of Phelan’s final chapter: “Walter Benjamin could hardly have asked for more.” That chapter deals with Heine’s late poetry, which many commentators have praised, even ones otherwise hostile to Heine. More arresting, then, is Phelan’s high regard for Ludwig Börne. He writes: “The work which most fully theorizes and practices the suspension of the personal in order to maintain the political freedom of the aesthetic is the memoir Ludwig Börne—a work which on the face of it appears to flaunt personality and provoke resentments.” If this reversal feels a bit too neat, Phelan, to his credit, manages to make it seem plausible as well by offering an erudite and careful analysis of Heine’s text, as he does of many of Heine’s major writings. The generic-sounding phrase Reading Heinrich Heine turns out to be an apt title.

2 Irrational Man: Gershom Sholem’s Decisive Years

Certain scenes in the early life of Gershom Scholem have been deemed “pivotal”—decisive moments at which the young man turned away from the bourgeois confines of his German-Jewish milieu and embarked on what would become a lifetime devoted to the study of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. There was his first reading, at the age of fifteen, of the Talmud in the original, as well as his first meeting with Walter Benjamin two years later, in July 1915. In his memoirs, Scholem also describes his sojourn as a mathematics student in Switzerland, where, resigning himself to a vitamin deficiency in exchange for book money, he dined only on fried eggs and fried potatoes for weeks on end. Scholem himself liked to recount these stories, though a favorite among Scholem scholars gets a few terse sentences in his memoir and no mention in his diaries, aside from a rather cryptic entry in which he reveals only that he “‘experienced’ something.” On February 16, 1917, a registered letter arrived for him at his Berlin apartment.

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The sender was his father—which was odd, considering that Scholem was living with his parents at the time, and that both father and son were in town. In fact, they had eaten lunch together just the day before. Gershom—or Gerhard, as he was then called—had aired his antiwar views; his father had condemned them. Such talk was more than Arthur Scholem, a patriotic German citizen, was prepared to tolerate, and he used the postal service to get word of his resolve to his nineteen-year-old son. His letter told Gerhard: You have two weeks to move out. Not only was Gerhard kicked out, but he was also cut off. The reasons why went beyond Gerhard’s war politics and his “arrogant” willingness to express them at the dining table. Gerhard had been lazy, according to his father, shamelessly so. Despite having “two strong arms,” all he wanted to do was read, and he was happy to “live off of handouts.” He even had the temerity to call his “playing around” with books “work.” It was all too much, too much for a father who, as the owner of a small print shop, had logged long hours throughout his adult life. One hundred marks would be put into Gerhard’s account; after that, he would get nichts, at least until the war was over. Then his behavior would be reassessed. If Arthur Scholem thought that his measures would make his son change his ways, he was being unduly optimistic. Resisting paternal authority was, after all, a family tradition. Arthur had clashed with his own father, to the point of pulling out of his father’s printing business and starting a rival firm. One of Gerhard’s older brothers was a socialist, and he was similarly unwelcome in their parents’ bourgeois home. Furthermore, Arthur must have known that the outrages of Gerhard’s lack of patriotism and his hyper-bookish lifestyle stemmed

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from something long established, which was the worst offense of all: the Ur-outrage of Gerhard’s Zionism. Born in 1863 to a moderately observant Jewish family, Arthur Scholem had come of age in the era of German-Jewish emancipation; he embraced his status as a fully enfranchised German citizen, as did most German Jews of his generation. They wanted to be Germans “of the Jewish faith,” as a common phrase had it. In practice, being “of the Jewish faith” often meant having a secular attachment to a familial tradition. Like Kafka’s father, however, Arthur enjoyed ridiculing what was left in his house of ritual life; he would light his cigar with the Sabbath candle while reciting a mock Hebrew prayer: “Blessed art Thou who created the fruit of tobacco.” He also had an affinity for the culture of German nationalism and prohibited the use of Yiddish expressions in his home. The Scholem household celebrated Christmas “not as Jews but as Germans,” complete with a rendition of “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” for the servants. As an adult, Gershom Scholem admitted that he never could get his head around his father’s style of assimilation. When he was a teenager he turned against it, becoming, as he put it then, a Zionist, and he quickly developed into an unconventional one. Although Scholem was at first enamored of such canonical figures as Theodor Herzl, the Austrian journalist who made “political Zionism” into an organized movement, it wasn’t really politics that interested him. Scholem didn’t share Herzl’s fears about Jewish safety in Europe. And, in turn, he didn’t see Zionism in terms of Jewish statehood. Along with political Zionists, young Scholem proclaimed Jews of his father’s ilk to be living a lie. But the lie of their existence had less to do with European antiSemitism than with the assumption that Jews could live as Europeans.

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Jews were different because of their Wesensbestimmung—a profoundly foreign “determining essence.” That’s what Scholem’s intuition told him. It also told him that denying this essence had left both Jews and their spiritual tradition so compromised that vital forces in Judaism had been lost. With his burgeoning Jewish self-consciousness, Scholem felt him­ self to be different. Writing in his diaries as a teenager, he declared, “I don’t belong among these people, these German Jews,” adding that “an abyss as wide as the sky separates me” from them, “whether their name is Cohn, Scholem, Huth, Hirsch, or something else.” As Scholem conceived of it, Zionism was a means of transcending the damage “these people” had done; it was a “quest for the regeneration of Judaism.” So Scholem rebelled against his parents, violating their code by embracing Zionism as nothing less than a redemptive venture. Scholem had a phrase for such efforts: he called them “redemption through sin.” Indeed, during his teenage years Scholem flirted with seeing himself as a redeemer figure. A 1915 diary entry allows, without irony, “I no longer believe, as I once did, that I am the Messiah.” Another entry from that year reads, “The path of the simple people is the path of redemption. The dreamer’s name indicated that he was the one they awaited: Scholem, the one who is whole.” This sense of being chosen didn’t exactly enhance Scholem’s ability to work with other people, and he soon became a heretic not only in relation to his parents’ social set but also among the young Jewish rebels with whom he kept company. Yet if Scholem’s disagreements with fellow Zionists had something to do with his egotism, there were also real differences of principle. Most German Zionists supported the First World War,

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for example; their position even had an orthodox status. Several of the leading Zionist newspapers and spokesmen offered pro-war statements, which stressed that fighting for Germany was the Jewish thing to do. The point, at least in part, was to refute the stereotype that Zionism seemed to reinforce: that wherever Jews happened to dwell, they gave their loyalty primarily to their own dispersed “nation.” But Zionist expressions of solidarity with the German war effort weren’t merely strategic. For all their talk about the futility and hazards of their parents’ assimilationism, German Zionists remained, in quite a few cases, strongly attached to living in Germany. As late as 1935, the movement’s leaders would criticize other ranking Zionists for having left the country during the first two years of Nazi rule. Scholem, by contrast, had determined early on that he had to go. He had decided that since Germans and Jews were fundamentally different, the only life for him was in Palestine. Thus Scholem deemed the war a distraction. As he remarked in 1915, Jews wouldn’t get to Zion by walking among “the corpses of Western European strangers.” Zionists who claimed otherwise were, in Scholem’s view, engaging in the kind of self-distortion that he hoped Zionism would have helped them overcome. Scholem was constantly on the lookout for what he saw as Zionist betrayal, for ways in which Zionists made use of non-Jewish ideas and ideologies. He campaigned against these “impurities” in Zionist organizations, authoring oppositional pamphlets whose critique of pro-war enthusiasms got him expelled from high school in 1915, a year before he was supposed to graduate. And his youthful diaries abound with broodings about the insufficient Jewishness of the Zionists closest to him—namely, those “cultural Zionists” who sought spiritual renewal in the “experience” of Jewish

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culture. Here, Scholem’s chief target is Martin Buber, the leader of the cultural Zionist movement in Germany (and initially an object of admiration in the diaries), who “philosophizes about religion instead of bringing religion into philosophy” in the pretentious brand of German philosophical language Scholem called “Buberdeutsch.” Even more than his father’s Germanophilia, such Zionist assimilationism infuriated Scholem, who accuses Buber of “absolute anti-Jewishness.” In 1937, at the age of thirty-nine, Scholem would reflect on his life up to that point, calling the years 1916 through 1918 “the most decisive period.” It isn’t hard to see why. Scholarly success came later, to be sure; and in 1918, Scholem, by his own admission, didn’t know very much about the Kabbalah, the mystical material on which his success was based. But it was during the last years of the war—which happen to have been Scholem’s busiest time as a diarist—that he took the steps that would lead to his becoming a “Kabbalist,” as he would later describe himself. Moreover, it was then that he began to devise the conceits of the great counternarratives of Jewish history, which he would put forth in such masterpieces as the essay “Redemption through Sin” (1937) and the books Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (1957). Much of Scholem’s mature work builds on ideas and intuitions he had before his twenty-third birthday. Zionism was Scholem’s path into Jewish mysticism, and it wasn’t only that recovering the wilder, nonrational side of Judaism seemed like a promising way to revitalize Jewish culture. From the start, Scholem’s particular investment in the Kabbalah developed within the context of a Zionist critique of German-Jewish history writing. The most authoritative interpretation of Jewish history at the time

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was a nineteenth-century creation; its authors were German Jews who cultivated an approach known as the “science of Judaism,” which applied to the study of Judaism the methods of modern scholarship. As a youth, Scholem applauded their massive erudition, which clearly helped shape his own standards of learning, but he soon grew suspicious of the story these historians told. Assimilationism, Scholem felt, had deformed it. By the end of the First World War, Scholem was connecting the tendency of these historians to emphasize the rationalist character of Judaism with what he would later term the problem of GermanJewish “apologetics.” He surmised that the “science historians” wanted to make Judaism seem safe and familiar to the non-Jewish world. Why else would these nonsectarian scholars dismiss the Kabbalah as unimportant and largely un-Jewish quackery even though they hadn’t studied it thoroughly? For them, Judaism was a religion of reason whose progress toward ever-greater rationalism was culminating in its dissolution. They believed, as one of them wrote, that their task consisted in giving Judaism a “decent burial.” Scholem found such thinking dubiously deracinating, insufficiently dialectical, and ultimately suicidal. In 1920, he outlined an essay that would lay bare “the suicide of Judaism” in the science of Judaism. And long before he was equipped to realize his goal, he resolved to write a different sort of story, a story that would make a case for both the centrality and the complexity of Judaism’s nonrational elements. A voracious as well as an eclectic reader, Scholem had an array of sources of inspiration. He wasn’t always comfortable with having nonJewish influences, but what his recently published diaries reveal—often arrestingly—is the force of certain key affinities that he would later try

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to disavow. Take the case of European modernism. Given Scholem’s interest in productive deviations from tradition and the search for hidden, unsettling truths, it stands to reason that a development such as cubism would have appealed to him. And sure enough, a 1917 diary entry announces, “The Messiah will be a cubist.” The same goes for Scholem’s relation to Nietzsche. One of the leitmotifs in Major Trends is the dialectic of rational and irrational tendencies within the Kabbalah, and although Scholem once stated that Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra always left him cold, one can find diary passages in which he praises the book, tries to emulate its style, and expresses a desire to “write a Zarathustra for the Jews.” Scholem didn’t take up residence on a mountaintop, but, as a student in Berlin, Jena, and Bern, he spent countless solitary hours— indeed, much of his youth—in poorly heated apartments, translating sacred texts and becoming familiar with millennia of commentary on them, while at the same time embracing what he saw as “the danger” of “the unknown and unexplained.” He also rebelled against authorities—familial, Zionist, scholarly—whose teachings sounded to him hollow, generally without thinking about the price he would have to pay. And he often soldiered on in the face of ridicule. He came away from the Hebrew reading sessions he led with the sense that the participants—most of whom were female, this being wartime—were laughing at him behind his back. Yet he seems not to have cared. If his devotion made him a curiosity, so be it. But Scholem wasn’t always able to sustain Zarathustra-like equanimity. The pain of loneliness is a recurring theme in his diaries. So is the frustration of unreciprocated amorous feelings. Scholem also adverts bitterly to his awkward appearance, remarking more

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than once on his “ugliness” (he was gangly and had “jughandle ears”). And sometimes the conflicts aroused by his austere positions and dismissive judgments led to intense, biting self-doubt, even to suicidal impulses. This is where the diaries are at their most revelatory, for Scholem encouraged the impression that he pursued his goals with unflinching confidence. The diaries provide us with uniquely raw accounts of Scholem’s personal crises—accounts that are, in some cases, quite different from the later accounts in the memoir of his youth, From Berlin to Jerusalem. Compare how the diaries and the memoir describe the aftermath of getting kicked out of the house. In the memoir, Scholem suggests that although the episode was a major imbroglio, he got over it fast. He stresses that he had the good fortune to wind up at the Pension Struck, a boarding house in Berlin populated mostly by Eastern European Jews. The Pension Struck, Scholem recalls appreciatively, exposed him to unassimilated Jewry and lively debates about the right course for Zionism. Not only that, the woman who ran the pension, Frau Struck, “knew how to keep house.” The winter of 1917 was “the turnip time” in Germany, and many staples of the German diet were scarce, yet Frau Struck regularly managed to bring her tenants torte. (By this point in the memoir, readers have learned of Scholem’s prodigious sweet tooth.) In the diaries, however, he is irate about having to live in the pension, where “almost every one of the lodgers is a nasty bourgeois.” Scholem seethes: “I hate Frau Struck.” He complains: “This pension disgusts me in exactly the same way as my parents’ home.” And he swears: “No more pensions– not ever!!!!!!” Nowhere do the diaries imply that the situation improved. In fact, the succeeding diary entries evince

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an unprecedented despondency. Referring to himself in the third person, Scholem broods, “There once was a man who led a pointless life and lacked the courage to end it.” From there he proceeds to charge himself with the worst hypocrisy: His “new knowledge” of Judaism is just a device for “covering over the emptiness of his heart.” In effect, Scholem is accusing himself of violating his own code of intellectual purity. It is here, accordingly, that he begins to speak of the great “swindle,” whereby he “desecrates the righteous cause of Zionism.” Another discrepancy between the diaries and Scholem’s later, polished recollection of events emerges in the entries on Walter Benjamin. Not long after his father had pushed him out, Scholem made Benjamin, older by half a decade and his friend of several years, into an idealized figure, one who would guide him in both intellectual and domestic affairs. Benjamin and his wife, Dora, would give Scholem the perfect new family. Having shammed insanity to avoid combat, Scholem got permission to leave Germany in 1918 and promptly joined Benjamin in Switzerland (Benjamin also had a medical exemption). Upon finally becoming Benjamin’s neighbor, Scholem wrote, “Dora will be my mother.” Soon Scholem was forced to recognize that Benjamin could never live up to the quixotic image he had constructed. Scholem had set himself up for a disappointment whose intensity neither his letters nor his memoir about his friendship with Benjamin do anything more than hint at. As had happened with the Zionist movement, ecstatic embracing gave way to more complicated and painful interactions. For one thing, Benjamin’s marriage turned out to be a problematic, fightfilled affair, and it degenerated further as Scholem’s erotically charged investment in the couple created some jealousy. Also, Benjamin may

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have been a radical theorist, but in everyday life he was, it seemed, a materialistic, self-satisfied “bourgeois.” The disappointment almost killed Scholem—quite literally. He recorded in his diaries that he had “never thought so much of suicide.” His “misery” was “bottomless.” No one could ever suspect “how sick” he really was. His “death must be near.” Scholem eventually pulled himself together. Benjamin and Dora moved to another part of the town, putting some much-needed distance between them and Scholem. Benjamin nevertheless remained Scholem’s closest friend and most important interlocutor until Benjamin’s suicide in 1940. Seeing less of each other, they got along better, and Scholem stopped dwelling so much on the theme of his own demise. Coming out of the crisis with Benjamin appears, in fact, to have made Scholem more open to certain life possibilities. Perhaps the experience disabused him of some of the extreme, debilitating idealism about relationships that had helped engender such anguish in the first place. Scholem left Germany for good in 1923, shortly after finishing his dissertation, which he characterized as “a vast foundational philological-philosophical monograph on an early Kabbalistic text.” His diaries went with him. He is said to have kept them, a large stack of notebooks filled with his tiny script, locked in a closet in his home in Jerusalem, giving access exclusively to himself. Fitfully, as it turns out, Scholem used the diaries as a source for his autobiographical reflections. A few years after his death in 1982, his widow made the journals available to be published, though with the most erotic parts omitted. A team of German scholars soon went to work. The result of their labors is a two-volume German edition that preserves

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the structure of the original notebooks, in which diary entries are interspersed with theoretical texts, poems, and other writings. Published in 1995 and 2002, respectively, these volumes run to more than 1,200 pages, and it is this scholarly edition that served as the basis for Anthony David Skinner’s more compressed Lamentations of Youth. Having put together a useful anthology of Scholem’s correspon­ dence, a sort of epistolary biography in English translation, Skinner has done some valuable work in producing an English edition of the diaries. His introductory essays are lucid and informative, and his choices in abridging the sprawling German edition seem reasonable, as does his overall logic of selection: “My main criterion in culling material has been to reconstruct the main lines of Scholem’s personal and intellectual journey that make his youthful diaries a kind of Bildungsroman.” Nevertheless, despite the considered manner in which Skinner presents his approach, he has made a number of odd decisions, and the strangest of them was to efface the intimate syntax of the diarist. Quite a few of the moments when the writing is—or is meant to seem— spontaneous are lost as Skinner expands Scholem’s notational forms into a very different idiom. Consider what Skinner does with a phrase whose direct equivalent would be, “Don’t want to measure or orient the future against the past” (Nicht die Zukunft an der Vergangenheit messen oder orientieren wollen). In the original German edition, it sounds like something that could have been jotted down quickly, in a burst of enthusiasm; the sentence becomes altogether more formal and even a little academic in Skinner’s translation: “The future is not to be measured or oriented according to what has been.” Skinner also

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renders what could have been translated as an abrupt “No going back to Judaism” (Keine Rückkehr zum Judentume) as “There shall be no return to Judaism.” It isn’t clear why he does this, but the irony is obvious. After all, German is famous for the difficulty of its coiling sentences. Skinner himself speaks to that issue, a little floridly, in his introduction. He tells us that in the original German, Scholem’s diaries contain sentences whose form “mirrors the ethereal content”: “Sentences with gnarled syntax can be half a page long and loaded down with a dozen clauses that lead nowhere, like stairways in a haunted castle.” Reassuring his now uneasy audience, Skinner adds that he has renovated Scholem’s sentences, breaking up the unity of style and sense in order to create manageable verbal units. But if readability is the goal, why elongate engagingly pithy phrases that would carry over nicely into English? Elsewhere, Skinner’s translation goes so far as to change, and even reverse, the meaning of the original. Scholem’s appreciation for the Viennese critic Karl Kraus was such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find flattering words about Kraus’s “fight for incomprehensibility” (Kampf geradezu um die Unverständlichkeit) in a 1919 diary entry. But in Lamentations of Youth, that isn’t what we encounter. Here Scholem praises Kraus’s “war on incomprehensibility” (italics mine). Skinner also mistranslates (and therefore misreads) another phrase—an die ich nämlich glaube—in such a way that Scholem no longer endorses Kraus’s incomprehensibility. Instead of “believing in” Kraus’s incomprehensibility, Scholem merely believes that Kraus “is incomprehensible.” Praise for the incomprehensible is perhaps unusual, but the editor of Scholem’s diaries should have been prepared for it, given Scholem’s love of dialectics and counterintuitive

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positions. Indeed, in another entry Scholem writes that Kraus “never had an original thought in his life, which is meant infinitely more as a compliment than as a criticism.” Scholem’s diaries break off in 1923, but they had already started to peter out in late 1919, which is when Lamentations of Youth ends. Why did a diarist as prolific as Scholem begin to neglect his diary? Perhaps the shift had to do with a change of circumstances. He returned to Germany from Switzerland in the fall of 1919, with the aim of going to Munich to begin working toward his thesis. That his girlfriend, Else Burchhardt, would be living there was one reason he chose the city. With dissertation work to do and a future wife nearby, he may not have had the same need—or the same opportunity—for recording his emotional states and his latest ideas. Scholem’s dissertation was a success, very much the “foundational” text he presented it as being. Deeply impressed, his advisers offered to help him with an academic career in Germany. Arthur Scholem was proud—the status of Herr Doktor was respectable. But he seems also to have been genuinely happy for his son. During the standoff of 1917, Arthur Scholem had blinked first; he had resumed supporting Gerhard before the war had ended. In 1922, when postwar financial circumstances had made publishing doctoral theses almost unthinkable, Arthur used his print shop to turn his son’s dissertation into a handsome first book. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem at the age of twenty-five, Scholem was an expert in a discipline that didn’t yet exist, in a land whose only university was barely up and running. But within two years he became Hebrew University’s—and probably the world’s—first professor of Jewish mysticism, having received crucial backing from

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surprisingly receptive administrators. Scholem kept the job for more than half a century, during which he built Kabbalah studies into a thriving enterprise, while his own stature grew to almost mythic proportions. His writings themselves became something like objects of ecstatic contemplation—both in and beyond academic circles. Here is Cynthia Ozisck exalting Sabbatai Sevi in 1974, just after it appeared in English translation: There are certain magisterial works of the human mind that alter ordinary comprehension so unpredictably and on so prodigious a scale that culture itself is set awry, and nothing can ever be seen again except in the strange light of that new knowledge. Obviously, it is not possible to “review” such a work, any more than one can review a mountain range: an accretion of fundamental insight takes on the power of a natural force. Scholem’s ability to resonate with diverse audiences—Major Trends began as a series of public lectures in the United States—is remarkable, considering that his core method was to give close readings of highly esoteric material. It’s not clear what he expected from popular interest in the Kabbalah, but he seems to have found amateur Kabbalah enthusiasts entertaining. Had Scholem lived to see it, he might have gotten some wry pleasure out of the current Kabbalah craze. Indeed, Scholem had, among his other dispositions, a mischievous sense of humor. As he and Benjamin alternated between parsing neo-Kantian philosophy together and feuding with each other in Switzerland, Scholem amused his friend with satirical rhymes whose chief target was German academic culture: “About Heidegger I recently heard, that when reading [his teacher] Husserl he didn’t

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understand a word.” In Jerusalem, Scholem belonged to a circle whose members were passionately devoted to discussing important ideas and composing ironic poems about one another. He dubbed the group “Pilegesch,” an acronym formed from the first letters of the participants’ names, as well as the Hebrew word for “concubine.” Scholem’s Zionism, however, hardened somewhat over the years. During his youth, Scholem had used the word “nationalist” as a term of opprobrium; by 1946, he was speaking of his belief in the “eternity” of anti-Semitism and of himself as a Jewish “nationalist.” But the foundation of his Zionism remained what it had been from early on: metaphysical. Scholem never renounced his belief in Wesensbestimmung, that determining Jewish essence, and his belief not only continued to animate his Zionism but also made him enduringly critical of the German-Jewish culture in which he had grown up. Not one to avoid contradicting himself, Scholem nevertheless told a friend in a 1939 letter that “the most original products of Jewish thinking are, as it were, products of assimilation.” And, understandably, after the Second World War, Scholem was sometimes wary of sharp distinctions between Jews and other people. Yet he went on to insist that all the great German-Jewish thinkers and writers—such as Kafka and Freud—were Jews who remained “substantially Jewish,” even if they themselves thought otherwise. What he had asserted in his diaries still held true for him, at least sometimes: “The Jewish genius seems to be sealed off from the Germanic world.” For someone who spent his life challenging the rationalist approach to Judaism as being too limiting, contradiction made sense. Scholem’s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a book that in various ways argues for the autonomy of Jewish culture, begins with an epigraph

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that—fittingly enough—doesn’t have a Jewish provenance. It comes from the correspondence of Wilhelm Dilthey, a neo-Romantic German philosopher, with one of his contemporaries: “Paradox is a characteristic of truth.”

3 The Text Life of Dreams: Arthur Schnitzler’s Nighttime Diaries

The year 2012 is, among other things, a Schnitzler year: it’s the sesquicentennial of his birth. This was bound to prompt a surge in activity and interest, particularly in the German-speaking world, and it has. Indeed, one book about Schnitzler whose debut was timed to coincide with his Festjahr has approached best-seller status, and not only has the book’s amazon.de ranking climbed high, but critics have also enthused over it in major newspapers, as well as in radio and tele­ vision programs. In May, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung named it a “book of the week.” So did Deutschlandfunk, one of Germany’s largest radio stations. The twist here is that the book is by Schnitzler himself. It’s the work he liked to refer to simply as “my Dreams.” During his last decade (1921–31), Schnitzler dictated to his secretary most of the dreams he had recorded in his voluminous journals, altering and editing, not infrequently, as he did so. The result was a draft of a kind of spin-off diary: a stylistically consistent typescript of

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more than 400 pages, which gives accounts of oneiric experiences that span half a century—the earliest ones date to 1875, the final ones to 1927. It’s hard to say why scholars have mostly neglected the typescript, or why it took so long for the typescript to be published. After all, it wasn’t lost or unknown. And the topic of dreams has been anything but marginal in discussions of Schnitzler’s work. For example, Schnitzler’s use of a “dream-like” style of narration, especially in Lieutenant Gustl (1900) and Fräulein Else (1924), the extended interior monologues that helped establish and burnish his literary reputation, has long intrigued critics. Perhaps it was the overlap between the typescript and the diaries that deterred prospective editors. But as the admirably capable editors of Träume (or Dreams) point out, there was a reason why Schnitzler thought of creating a separate journal of his dreams. Even if Schnitzler had dictated the dreams in his diaries without making any changes, encountering his dreams in a stand-alone text would be very different from reading through them in his journals, where they are interspersed with so much else. The “dream text,” as Schnitzler also called it, allows for an immersion in Schnitzler’s dream life, which makes the meaningful, revealing patterns much easier to mark. As it turns out, the surprise of Dreams, quite a bit of the time, is how little there is that is surprising. With striking directness, the impressions and concerns of the day asserted themselves in Schnitzler’s mind as he slept. They include Schnitzler’s unflattering views of some of his literary rivals (like Karl Kraus); his uncertainties about the extent of his own literary talent; his difficulties with his wife, Olga (their marriage ended in divorce); his relationship with Heinrich, his son; his worries about his daughter Lili, who committed suicide in 1928; Austria’s political instabilities; and its anti-Semitism.

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Readers familiar with Schnitzler’s life and fiction will also be unsurprised to find numerous entries in which his medical knowledge plays a role—Schnitzler worked as a physician before becoming a full-time writer. In a 1916 dream, for instance, he counsels Gustav Klimt to have a bothersome tooth pulled, and to use cocaine or adrenaline for anesthesia. Dreaming itself comes up quite a bit, too. Schnitzler dreamed both of describing his dreams and of dreams being described to him. And the kinds of liminal spaces that figure so prominently in Schnitzler’s stories—for example, theater and hotel lobbies and waiting rooms—have an important place in his dreams as well. The intense morbidity of Schnitzler’s dream life is somewhat more unexpected. To be sure, certain dark dreams resemble scenes from his works. As he wanders around in the middle of the night, Fridolin, the physician protagonist of Dream Novella (1921), broods over the possibility that a patient has infected him with a deadly illness; in a dream, Schnitzler himself expresses the same fear. But the dreams also go much further than this. Schnitzler dreamed of his own burial, where, in one case, things are seriously awry: the burial has begun, but his body is missing. Schnitzler didn’t simply keep a record of his dreams; he also tended to interpret them. Occasionally, though, he felt stymied by the frankness of their symbolism. In response to a dream that involves him running after his wife, only to lose sight of the streetcar in which she’s sitting, he dryly remarks, “Sometimes the dream god doesn’t put much effort into his symbols.” But more often than not, the dreams are followed by pithy analyses, which both draw on and resist Freud (a recurring figure in Schnitzler’s dreams). This complicated pushpull dynamic gets a lot of attention in Leo A. Lensing’s afterword, and

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with good reason. For if there is a pervasive myth about Schnitzler, it is that he managed to intuit and impart poetically insights that Freud gleaned and articulated in other ways. As Peter Gay once put it, “Students of Schnitzler have liked to think of him as the Freud of Fiction.” Freud himself helped to advance such perceptions. In an often-cited response to the card Schnitzler had sent him on his fiftieth birthday, he tells Schnitzler: For many years, I have been conscious of the far-reaching agreement between our ideas about various psychological and erotic problems, and I have just now found the courage to speak of it explicitly. I often asked myself how you have been able to come by the secret knowledge that I was able to acquire only through laboriously investigating my object, and in the end, I went so far as to envy a writer whom I otherwise admire. But as Schnitzler makes clear in the (less widely cited) birth­day greeting, he had been getting at least some of that “secret knowledge” directly from Freud’s works. Indeed, Schnitzler had been reading Freud for quite a few years, having first taken notice of him back in the 1880s, as the “outstanding” German translator of the neurologist Jean Marie Charcot, whose writings he, young Schnitzler, reviewed for such publications as the Wiener Medizinische Presse and the Internationale Klinische Rundschau. And not long after Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) appeared, we find Schnitzler eagerly comparing one of his own dreams to a dream discussed in it. At the same time, however, Schnitzler began to develop reser­ vations about psychoanalysis. He would later observe about his

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ini­tial encounter with The Interpretation of Dreams, “I had (and have) my doubts (which isn’t to question Freud’s greatness).” Some of those doubts stemmed from Schnitzler’s own thoughts about how consciousness works. In “On Psychoanalysis,” a reckoning with psychoanalysis written between 1922 and 1926, Schnitzler maintains that Freud is wrong about the meaning of certain dreams, because he is wrong about the “entryways” to the subconscious. Arguing against the notion that memories can originate in the subconscious, Schnitzler insists that “everything in our subconscious was once in our consciousness.” Schnitzler also objects to how psychoanalytic dream interpretation is often carried out. Here he points to a sort of vicious hermeneutic circle. Too often, he claims, a set of “dogmas” determines “the results” of dream analysis, which are then used as evidence that confirms the dogmas. According to Lensing, the real model for Schnitzler’s Träume wasn’t Freud’s “dream book,” but rather the dream-laden diaries of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich Hebbel, whom Schnitzler revered. In tracking Schnitzler’s attitudes about psychoanalysis, as well as in making the case for Hebbel’s influence on Schnitzler, Lensing stays true to the guiding editorial principle of Träume: unobtrusive thoroughness. His discussions of the Schnitzler-Freud and SchnitzlerHebbel links are comprehensive and erudite enough to count as major additions to the research on those underexamined topics. Yet the discussions are also compact and artfully set up: the latter one flows from the former. Similarly, the annotations in Träume provide a great deal of helpful information without ever swelling to unruly dimensions. And they aren’t forced on the reader; rather, they have been tucked away at the end of the text. The editors have also

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(meticulously) identified the many changes Schnitzler made to the dream accounts in his journals, marking alterations (some of which weren’t intentional) using italics. Dreams from the diaries that didn’t make it into the typescript have been included in Träume, including those recorded during the years 1928–30, and are given, unlike the rest of the text, in sans serif typeface. Let us hope that we don’t have to wait until the next big Schnitzler year—2031—for the English translation of this stellar edition.

Part TWO

Legendary Lives

4 Misreading Kafka

“Germany declares war on Russia—in the afternoon, swimming lessons”, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary on August 2, 1914. The line has often been cited as an expression of Kafka’s estrangement from life, of his Weltfremdheit. And why not? After all, the incongruity conveyed in the line jars us like the one we encounter at the beginning of The Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa wakes up as a “monstrous vermin” and wonders: How will I ever get to work on time? But if the famous journal entry feels Kafkaesque, it hardly leaves us with an accurate sense of what Kafka thought about the war. Indeed, a former classmate of Kafka’s recalled seeing him at an early demonstration in support of the war, “looking oddly flushed” and “gesticulating wildly.” Max Brod, his closest friend and most fervent admirer, allowed that within their circle of Jewish literati, Kafka alone had believed the German and Austrian forces would necessarily prevail. So when Kafka put a chunk of his savings into war bonds, he aimed to perform his civic duty and turn a profit. The timing of the war, on the other hand, couldn’t have been crueler, as Kafka saw it. For months, he had been trying to resolve to quit his job. His plan was to escape its bureaucratic tedium and the scrutiny

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of his parents, and relocate to Berlin, where he would, or more likely wouldn’t, manage to marry Felice Bauer. In July, Kafka finally made the decision to leave. He even drafted a letter to his parents notifying them that he would finally be moving out (at the age of thirty-one). Now Kafka was stuck in Prague for the foreseeable future. It could have been worse, of course. Deemed fit to serve, Kafka was spared active duty through the intervention of his supervisors at Prague’s Accident Insurance Institute, who got him categorized as an indispensable worker. With the Institute now understaffed and overwhelmed with new, war-related tasks, Kafka really was indispensable and lost his prized perk: afternoons off. Finding time and psychic energy to write, which had always been a challenge, now became almost impossible. By 1916, Kafka’s literary production had dwindled badly, and he was beside himself. He demanded either a leave or a release into the army. Kafka was demanding, in effect, vacation or death. He got a vacation. Thus it seems fair to claim that Kafka’s response to the war does, indeed, bespeak a Weltfremdheit, though not quite in the way it is supposed to. We can say much the same thing about many Kafka myths—such as the idea that Kafka’s talent was generally unknown during his lifetime or that his father was a psychological bully. They are sort of true, and this leaves would-be myth-busters in an awkward position. Announcing that you will be overturning an established notion is more exciting than telling readers that you are going to subtly revise one. But in the case of Kafka, more often than not, revising is the activity that makes sense. Unfortunately, in order to present themselves as being properly myth-busting, a number of recent works on Kafka engage in quite a bit of myth-building.

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James Hawes, who has a doctorate in German literature but left academia to become a novelist, tells us that his slim volume Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life “isn’t going to argue that the K.-myth has wildly skewed our view of Kafka and his writings. It’s going to show it—where necessary by using some long-lost dynamite that no one, not even the best modern German scholars, has ever used before.” What is this “spectacularly fake” K.-myth? Among the ten “building blocks” that Hawes lists, in lazy bullet-point form, are the following: ●●

Kafka was imprisoned, as a German-speaking Jew in Prague, in a double ghetto: a minority-within-a-minority amid an absurd and collapsing operetta-like empire.

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Kafka’s works are based on his experiences as a Jew.

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Kafka’s works uncannily predict Auschwitz.

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Kafka’s works were burned by the Nazis.

The general idea here is that we’ve made Kafka into a martyred prophet, whose art owes everything to Jewish persecution and marginality. This is laying it on pretty thick. You don’t need to have studied up on late-Habsburg Prague to know that its German speakers, whose language was that of the Habsburg government, didn’t constitute a beleaguered minority. That Kafka’s writing has his “experiences as a Jew” as its sole cause isn’t really a dominant critical impression. After all, the word “Jew” never appears in his fiction, which is often understood as revealing precisely the plight of the representative everyman. As it happens, Representative Man is the title of one of the first major Kafka biographies. I have, by the way, just provided more evidence

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to support my point than Hawes gives to underpin the argument of his book. Hawes tries to illustrate the claim that for many influential readers, Kafka augured Auschwitz, but all he produces is this: So when a recent biographer (Nicholas Murray) writes with a straight face of “the long-standing debate about whether Kafka foresaw the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe,” I throw his book across the room. Hawes’s apoplectics would be hard to take seriously even if Murray were guilty of actual myth-mongering. But because Murray was merely referring to a critical exchange, the histrionics are silly. At the very least, Hawes ought to have brought up the most influential advocates of the Kafka-as-oracle-of-doom position, Ernst Pawel and George Steiner, but, of course, that would require sustained argument with formidable critics. As to the myth of Kafka’s works falling victim to Nazi book burnings—which I can’t recall having encountered— it sounds like a reasonable historical assumption, rather than “rubbish.” What, finally, about that dynamite Hawes promises to set off? There is nothing new about the idea that Kafka’s life had its normal features. For many years, critics have been pointing out that Kafka was interested in fashion, the movies, and, as a young man, prostitutes. Nor has the fact that he kept a stash of erotic magazines—or “porn,” as Hawes calls it—gone unnoticed. Yet Hawes acts as though broadcasting this will blow things wide open. His claim that the source of Kafka’s famous bug figure can be found in the work of Heinrich von Kleist is, in any case, several megatons short of explosive. Kleist has been

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overlooked, Hawes implies, because critics want to view Kafka as part of Jewish literature, not Western literature. Yet much has been said about Kafka’s debt to non-Jewish authors. Kafka himself improbably remarked that the model for his work Amerika was Dickens: “It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the sharper lights I would take from the times, and the duller ones I would get from myself.” In trying to deracinate Kafka’s work, Hawes asserts that “very little in the actual writings should make us think—as so many critics have claimed—that, to understand these stories properly, we need to reach for our Torah or our Hasidic tales. What makes us think this is not anything in his writings but our knowledge of his life.” Well, Kafka did give an eloquent lecture on Yiddish theater (“I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, how very much more Yiddish you understand than you think you do”), tried to study Hebrew, read Martin Buber, and even visited the Belzer Rebbe and so on, but does any serious critic really claim this? Theodor Adorno famously said that Kafka’s fiction was like “a parable whose key has been stolen,” and it would be nice to know which Judeocentric critics would disagree. When Walter Benjamin (reflecting on his conversations with Gershom Scholem) discussed one of Kafka’s brief parables with Bertolt Brecht, it was Brecht whose reading seemed forced in its determination to avoid the subject of revelation. The exchange was brilliantly discussed by Robert Alter in his 1991 book Necessary Angels, which showed that one could discuss Jewish motifs in Kafka’s work without reducing it to them. If anyone might be thought to be guilty of over-Judaizing Kafka, it might be Rodger Kamenetz, whose Burnt Books (the newest volume in

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Schocken’s Nextbook series) compares Kafka with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Rabbi Nachman was the great grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, and a writer of odd, powerful, and parabolic folk-inspired tales himself. Kamenetz is a poet best known for his book The Jew in the Lotus, which chronicles the discussion between the Dalai Lama and leading rabbis on the challenges of exile. Kamenetz has also long been interested in the connection between Kafka and Kabbalah, and teaches a course on the topic at Kafka’s alma mater, Charles University, in Prague. But Kamenetz doesn’t try to convince us that Kafka was a kabbalist or a proto-Neo-Hasid. He just wants to put Kafka into conversation with Jewish traditions and theologians. The goal isn’t so much arriving at a “proper” understanding of Kafka as it is mutual illumination. Following Scholem, Kamenetz wants to read Kafka’s works as employing Jewish forms and motifs (commentary, allegory, the ineffability of revelation) in such a way that, among other things, they offer an inspired commentary on the fate of Jewish tradition in modernity. This was Alter’s project, too, and it is hard to see how Kamenetz advances the argument. On the other hand, Alter’s Necessary Angels reads like what it is: a collection of academic lectures. In addition to providing more in the way of biographical storytelling (especially welcome for the non-specialist) and imaginative associations, the prose in Burnt Books is snappier. Here is Kamenetz giving the kind of qualification that, according to Hawes, we never find in “Jewish readings” of Kafka: “What can any reader do, except scare up another ghostly face to haunt Kafka’s literary remains, guided by personal obsessions and projections?” Kamenetz doesn’t go very far beyond such intelligent haunting.

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Zadie Smith’s essay “F. Kafka, Everyman” first appeared in the New York Review of Books, and is included in her collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Like Hawes, Smith tries to make the case for a more “quotidian Kafka.” In doing so, she leans on another young novelist and critic, Adam Thirlwell: It is now necessary to state some accepted truths about Kafka and the Kafkaesque ... Kafka’s work lies outside literature: it is not fully part of the history of European fiction. He has no prede­ cessors ... These fictions express the alienation of modern man; they are a prophecy of a) the totalitarian police state, and b) the Nazi Holocaust. His work expresses a Jewish mysticism, a nondenominational mysticism, an anguish of man without God. His work is very serious. He never smiles in photographs ... It is crucial to know the facts of Kafka’s emotional life when reading his fiction. In some sense, all his stories are autobiographical. He is a genius, outside ordinary limits of human behavior. All of these truths, all of them, are wrong. Thirlwell holds Brod responsible for establishing these mistakes, and ridicules the hagiographic excess of Brod’s 1947 biography, its talk of “ultimate things,” “angels” laughing, and Kafka’s “metaphysical smile.” Smith is fully on board with this. She writes, “These days we tire of Brod’s rough formulations: for too long they set the tone. We don’t want to read Kafka Brodly, as the postwar Americans did so keenly.” But have we ever really read so Brodly? It was more than a decade ago that new English translations of Kafka’s major works supplanted the Muirs’ renderings, based on Brod’s German editions. Furthermore,

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the authority of Brod’s word on Kafka was never self-evident. Despite his commercial success as an author, Brod always had a talent for calling forth critical derision. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was probably the first to mock Brod’s literary sensibility via his surname. In 1911, he wrote, “Geist smeared on Brod is Schmalz.” Nor is it true that postwar Americans read Kafka as a Jewish saint. Heinz Politizer’s Franz Kafka: Paradox and Parable, which Time glowingly reviewed in 1952, doesn’t reinforce a single one of Thirlwell’s “Brodish” truths. On the other hand, if people want to see Kafka as a singular genius and his writings as expressing the alienation of modern man, well, so what? Are such interpretations really so outlandish? What business do we have to pronounce them as not simply flawed or superficial, but outright “wrong?” To her credit, Smith gives a candid answer. She allows that behind the desire to debunk Brod’s banal pieties, there is a Kafka “purism”—that is, more Kafka reverence. For Smith, what makes Kafka universal is that he captured quotidian experience. His ability to speak to us all has to do with how well he conveyed the very local alienation of being an assimilated German-speaking Jew in Prague, who didn’t fully “belong” anywhere, rather than with his evocation of some vague modern existential malaise. Making much of Kafka’s famous image of German-Jewish writers sticking “with their back legs” to Judaism and reaching “no new ground” with their front ones, and sounding more than a little pious herself (even as she freely mixes Kafka’s bug metaphors), Smith concludes: For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (“What have I in common with the Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What

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is Muslimness? What is Femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer now. Never mind that Kafka didn’t include himself among those GermanJewish authors whom he saw as flailing about with their anterior legs. Hasn’t Smith once again made Kafka into a prophet—a prophet, that is, of the post-everything age? How is this better than reading him Brodly? Smith’s essay is primarily an appreciative review of Louis Begley’s biographical volume The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head. While far less sensationalistic than Hawes’s book, and not as catty as Thirlwell’s writing, Begley’s work also relies on some dubious generalizations to make a case for its own importance. One notable instance comes in the middle of its chapter on Kafka’s Jewish identity. Begley writes that Kafka’s “intermittent self-lacerating and provocative pronouncements,” as well as his oft-mentioned “qualms” about the ability of Jews to write effectively in German, “have been used by scholars to buttress the argument that Kafka was himself a Jewish anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew.” Begley, by contrast, wants us to see Kafka’s response to the Jewish questions of his day as normal, but his efforts are less than concerted. For example, in commenting on Kafka’s fantasy of stuffing all Jews (himself included) “into the drawer of the laundry chest” and “suffocating” them, Begley writes that the “outburst” was probably just a function of the “fatigue” that stems from living with anti-Semitism. Such exhaustion might account for a desire to achieve individual release, but Kafka is dreaming of genocide, which, obviously, is something else. Maybe he was expressing some kind of self-hatred.

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Or maybe Kafka’s line, which occurs in a letter to Milena Jesenská, is a provocation meant to elicit a revealing response from his nonJewish married lover—the attraction Jews held for her fascinated Kafka endlessly. One thing that Hawes is right about is the importance of Reiner Stach’s masterful German language biography-in-progress, the first two volumes of which devote more than 1,400 pages to tracking the last fourteen years of Kafka’s life. When the first installment of Stach’s biography appeared, back in 2002, no full-scale life-of-Kafka had been written in German. In that volume, Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidung (available in an English translation by Shelley Frisch titled Kafka: The Decisive Years), Stach reflects at length on this odd fact and his biographical goals. Stach’s account of his aims gives the reader an early taste of both his modesty and his interpretive good sense: He speaks of having to “anticipate failure,” of the real but limited value of biographical inquiry for understanding Kafka’s prose, and of having as his main end “to explain how a consciousness that is set thinking by everything could evolve into a consciousness that set everyone thinking.” Less satisfying, however, is Stach’s answer to the question of why he has no predecessors writing auf Deutsch. His theory centers on the relative lack of movement in Kafka’s life. Kafka, as Stach writes: wrestled his whole life with the same problems, and seldom took on a new one. Father conflict, Judaism, illness, the struggles with sexuality and marriage, work, the writing process, literary aesthetics: One doesn’t need to carry out an extended analysis to identify the key themes of this life, which appears so static that one

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could ask, and one has asked, whether it makes sense to talk of any sort of development here at all. But if Kafka’s stasis was really so intimidating in this case, then why didn’t it scare off biographers writing in languages other than German? It is true, on the other hand, that the seemingly given character of Kafka’s driving concerns makes it nearly impossible for Stach to achieve his goal of tracing the emergence of Kafka’s “consciousness.” Stach has good reason to brace for failure. But he also shows how much Kafka’s positions on his “burning issues” did, in fact, develop, how much they shifted and evolved over the years—hence the titles “The Decisive Years” (1910–15) and “The Years of Knowledge” (1915–24), the latter of which is scheduled to appear in English in 2012. Or rather, Stach does this brilliantly, producing as engaging a literary biography as any I have read, one that is every bit as good as Leon Edel’s magnificent, multivolume account of Henry James’s life. Stach does everything well. His prose is lucid and his learning is vast. Without compromising the flow of his biographical narrative, he manages to work in a wealth of information about both Kafka’s cultural context and the people who mattered in his life. He sketches important life scenes in vivid detail, right through to the drama of Kafka’s last hours, during which he suffered terribly and demanded a lethal dose of morphine. Moreover, Stach is an astute reader of Kafka’s fiction, and his interpretations generally both point to the connections between life and text, and demonstrate why those links don’t hold out the key to revealing the text’s meaning. Finally, through thick biographical description, Stach shows how Kafka was able to create works that

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were seen by his circle as being about distinctively Jewish problems, and by other readers as being about “the human condition.” He also effectively addresses the issue of why Kafka was so committed to doing things that way: Kafka always maintained that literary writing and propagandizing were utterly incompatible. The task of the writer isn’t to discuss what he has experienced, but rather to represent it in the purest form possible—to achieve a kind of “self-forgetting,” as Kafka remarked to Brod ... Kafka’s aesthetic ideal mandated keeping all the experiential connections in his writings indeterminate: personal, Jewish, or simply “human,” and for this reason he confronted everything explicitly Jewish with a taboo. The concept doesn’t occur in his literary works. It may be that at the end of Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (The Years of Knowledge), we get a deeper, if less direct, explanation as to why this magisterial work is the first major German Kafka biography. Stach concludes the book with an epilogue that is about the effect of the Holocaust on what had been Kafka’s life world. We are told that if Kafka had managed to survive tuberculosis and, unlike his three sisters, the camps, “he would have recognized nothing at the end of the catastrophe. His world no longer existed. Only his language lives.” Writing the life of Kafka is, among other things, a special kind of memorialization, one that may be especially difficult to carry out in his language. After all, Kafka is not the only great, much-discussed German-Jewish author of his era whose German biography was either written just recently or remains to be written. This group

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includes Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Siegfried Kracauer, and a host of others. Maybe, then, the Holocaust has mattered in Kafka studies as much as the myth-busters say, just not in the way that it is supposed to.

5 The Wittgensteins and the Perils of Family Biography

In 1851, a middle-aged German wool trader named Hermann Christian Wittgenstein entered into a partnership of sorts with his Austrian in-laws, who also dealt in raw materials, only on a greater scale. Hermann moved to Austria, where he began giving, in today’s parlance, extreme makeovers to estates local aristocrats had neglected, with the understanding that his in-laws would help him sell the wool, coal, wood, and corn the estates produced. The arrangement worked brilliantly. Frugal and hard-driving—and eager to use industrial methods in a country that had been slow to industrialize—Hermann transformed poorly tended lands into robust enterprises. Meanwhile, his in-laws not only did their part, but they also thought of directing the money that came streaming in toward lucrative holdings in Viennese property. Within a few years, Hermann was able to install himself, his wife, and several of their eleven children in a palace outside Vienna. They soon left it, despite

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Hermann’s parsimony, for an even grander residence, a castle in which one of Empress Maria-Theresa’s prime ministers had lived. Never mind that Hermann leased the place: he had built a House of Wittgenstein. It would be hard to think of a family more deserving of a group biography. After all, Hermann Christian was far outpaced by the son from whom he expected the least—namely, Karl, who failed in high school and ran away to America as a teenager. Not long after his return, Karl, the third of Hermann Christian’s sons, followed his father in marrying well; then, thanks to good instincts, an appetite for risk, booming markets, and probably some manipulation of them, he made a fortune in the steel and banking businesses. It was a fortune of Carnegie-like dimensions that dwarfed most others in his country. After retiring at fifty-one, Karl spent the majority of his remaining days in his marble palais, which spanned more than fifty yards along Vienna’s Alleegasse. When he took his last breath, in 1913, he may have been the richest man in Austria. Imperious and hot-tempered, Karl wasn’t known for behaving gently, and neither did he die that way. He suffered much the same fate as Freud: they were both prolific cigar smokers whose health was ravaged by cancer of the jaw, though in Karl’s case the proximate cause of death was an operation that was likely to have lethal effects. That he chose to spend the evening before the surgery making music with his wife, Leopoldine, would have surprised no one. For to say that Karl and Leopoldine were deeply devoted to the arts would be as much an understatement as calling them very rich. As worshippers of culture, they were zealots. Karl’s house was so full of Kunst that he began referring to his eldest daughter (Hermine), who never married

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and became a kind of secretary to him, as his “art director.” The house also had seven pianos, as well as one of the world’s greatest collections of musical manuscripts. Schoenberg and Mahler were regular guests. Brahms was a family friend. Then, of course, there are the dramas and soaring accomplishments of the next generation. Three of Karl and Leopoldine’s five sons committed suicide. Precocious in music and possibly autistic, Hans, the eldest, vanished during a trip to America in 1903, and is thought to have drowned himself, though where exactly this happened remains unclear. Rudi, who was gay, poisoned himself in a Berlin bar a year later, perhaps because he believed his sexual orientation was about to be made public. Like quite a few Austrian officers, Kurt shot himself during the final days of the First World War. At the time, Paul was busy resurrecting his career as a concert pianist—this despite the fact that he had lost his right arm on the Eastern Front. His younger brother Ludwig had already written his epochal Tractatus, which would appear in the early interwar period. But even as Ludwig was winning new and, as it would turn out, enduring recognition for the name “Wittgenstein,” the family seemed to be spiraling downward. The traumas of battle and imprisonment had exacerbated Paul’s inclination to extreme self-censure, as well as his difficulties in getting along with other people, and for quite a while, he threw himself into meeting the challenges of one-handed play, isolating himself more than before. Ludwig, too, was prone to violent feelings of self-disgust, and after the war he sought to assuage these through virtuous living as defined by Tolstoy, his spiritual guide. Having given up his post at Cambridge, and given away his inheritance, he took a job for which he proved catastrophically unsuited, that of

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a provincial schoolteacher (it would end with Ludwig beating an eleven-year-old boy into a coma). Hermine, the oldest of all the siblings, had reached her late forties, and still alone, she was growing bitter about the family’s situation. Indeed, in an unpublished memoir she would speak reproachfully of the drop in “vitality and will for life” that separated Karl from his sons. Of Karl and Leopoldine’s children, only the two other daughters, Helene and Gretl, had married. And Helene had weak nerves and a husband who would begin to suffer from dementia at a relatively young age, while Gretl, by all accounts a standoffish person, married an American who never found a career, but succeeded in losing a lot of her money through bad investments. In this, however, Paul outdid him: because of Paul’s patriotic purchasing of government bonds, when Austria’s currency collapsed in 1922, the Wittgensteins were left with vastly diminished holdings. Money would become a key source of tension among the siblings, and amid the chaos of the Second World War, a financial dispute had the effect of bringing to the breaking point relations that had long been strained. During the last twenty years of his life, Paul had no contact with any of his siblings.

I In Alexander Waugh, the story of the Wittgensteins would seem to have its ideal chronicler. Waugh, for one thing, has formidable expertise in both music and philosophy. And for another, in Fathers and Sons (2004), his acclaimed book about his own high-flying clan, Waugh shows that he has a gift for evoking the mind-sets of talented

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and combative people. Yet Waugh’s biography of the Wittgensteins fell far short of being a success. To be sure, The House of Wittgenstein (2009) won some perfunctory-sounding praise in the British press. But in the United States, the book elicited mostly negative reviews, some of which are very negative: Harper’s, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books all ran rather searing appraisals. If, after reading Waugh’s book, you were asked to guess what the reviewers disliked (and disparaged), you wouldn’t have to think very hard to come up with plausible answers. For quite a few aspects of Waugh’s book seem to clamor for criticism. There is, for example, Waugh’s tone, which can be jarring. Among the qualities of Father and Sons that readers and critics warmed to is its style of humor. Hence, perhaps, Waugh’s attempt to import that element of his family memoir into his Wittgenstein family biography. But the satirical and scabrous touches that worked so well in—and helped to produce—an atmosphere of memoirist self-deprecation feel forced and out of place in the more scholarly, altogether grimmer The House of Wittgenstein. Indeed, some of these touches just don’t make sense. Consider what Waugh says about the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger, who famously shot himself in the chest at twenty-three. Sounding lofty while striking low, Waugh describes him as being “simian of aspect.” The contrast is perhaps a little funny, but the modifier on which it turns is clearly a stretch, as readers would have seen if Waugh had provided an image of Weininger, who was, for all his virulence, more doe-eyed than monkey-like. Or take Waugh’s evocation of Hermine as she entered her dotage. Just after stating that Hermine had grown—inwardly as well as outwardly—“somber” and “school-marmish,” Waugh goes on to

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draw a comparison that doesn’t jibe with those adjectives, “In her last years she resembled a handsome army officer in the first gloat of early retirement, a bit like Captain von Trapp in the film version of The Sound of Music.” Above all, however, it is Ludwig whom Waugh strains to mock. When Ludwig took up Tolstoy’s moral code, he did so, according to Waugh, as a means of “conscious self-elevation and transfiguration from mere mortal to immortal Jesus-like, prophet-like, perfect human being.” Moreover, in Waugh’s splenetic view the farce of this self-perception stemmed from an earlier absurdity: “Having thrown himself at Bertrand Russell’s feet, Ludwig soon discovered that, without having completed a single significant piece of written philosophical work and while still only in his mid-twenties, he was being hailed by many of the brightest minds of Cambridge University as a genius.” One can argue, of course, that Ludwig has long been overrated, and that his being seduced by his own reputation led him to wander off to ludicrous extremes, both in his life and in his work. But Waugh doesn’t make a case to that effect; nor does even he lean on any of the existing attempts to debunk Ludwig. Instead he offers a lot of remarks like the ones cited above, while merely stressing that Ludwig has had “many doubters,” including Paul, who dismissed his brother’s breakthrough—the Tractatus—as “garbage.” Meanwhile, Paul is mostly spared from ridicule, despite the fact that by Waugh’s own standards for meting out abuse, he sometimes invites it. Paul was the one who actually pursued fame, and he was also the one who eagerly took advantage of the cult that formed around him. More than any other flaw, it is this inconsistency that critics of Waugh’s book have singled out. It forms, for example, the gravamen of the case Evelyn

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Toynton brings against The House of Wittgenstein, in a long essay that appeared in Harper’s. Toynton writes: Waugh’s animus toward Ludwig seems almost like protective jealousy on Paul’s behalf, as though all the acclaim the philosopher has received was stolen from his musician brother, who was much better known in their lifetimes but is virtually forgotten now. Whereas Waugh is always urging Paul’s heroism on us, and either excuses or glosses over his less likable qualities—his rudeness, his self-absorption, his seduction of vulnerable young women— practically every passage dealing with Ludwig is subtly or not so subtly denigrating. Where Toynton—who seems downright aggrieved on Ludwig’s behalf—claims that “Waugh is always urging Paul’s heroism on us,” she is offering up some hyperbole of her own, as her own formulation indicates. If she were right about the “always urging,” how would we have learned, if only in passing, of Paul’s “less likeable qualities?” Nevertheless, Toynton’s (widely shared) main objections make sense. The question I want to raise is this: are they enough to warrant a generally negative assessment of Waugh’s book? It is really a question that “raises itself,” to borrow a German phrase, because while The House of Wittgenstein has obvious shortcomings, the biography also has real strengths. These cluster around Paul, Waugh’s central figure. Briskly, yet in vivid detail, Waugh describes how a sniper’s bullet shattered Paul’s right arm in the fall of 1914; how Paul was taken prisoner by the Russians just moments after the arm was amputated; how Paul suffered through a year of perilous incarceration in Siberia (rampant disease,

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sadistic officers, temperatures of below eighty); and how amid all these hardships, Paul managed to develop techniques for playing the piano with one hand—techniques that he would begin implementing as soon as his family was able to secure his release. A music critic and sometime composer, Waugh is also deft at explaining how Paul managed to achieve the effects that made him a cultural sensation between the wars. According to Waugh, for example, Paul’s “most far-reaching innovation” was “a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique that allowed him to sound chords that were strictly impossible for a five-fingered pianist to play. By striking a chord loudly in the middle-register, using a subtle ‘halfpedal’ technique with his right foot, and by following immediately with a barely audible pianissimo note or two in the bass, he was able to deceive even the sharpest-eared critic into thinking that he had played a chord with his left hand alone that required a span of two and a half feet across the keyboard.” Furthermore, Waugh not only situates Paul’s development and success within the context of Vienna’s celebrated culture of music, he also reconstructs Paul’s interactions—and frequent disagreements— with the composers whom he hired to write scores for a one-handed pianist, for example, Richard Strauss, Ravel, and Britton. Here Paul comes across as having been egomaniacal, obstinate, and a bit obtuse. Never mind Toynton’s suggestions to the contrary: Waugh dutifully points out that Paul often revised the scores he had commissioned to make the piano parts more prominent, and also because he didn’t quite comprehend what the innovators on his payroll were trying to do. Much the same can be said about how Waugh treats Paul’s relationships with his siblings. Having gained access to Paul’s modest

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Nachlaß, as well as other family papers, Waugh is able to give us precise, intricate accounts of how the siblings dealt with each other and what they thought of each other. And if Waugh takes Paul’s side in the intrigue-filled fight over money that led him to cut his ties to Ludwig and his sisters—a measure of Nazi extortion was involved in the conflict—The House of Wittgenstein hardly presents Paul as the hero figure of the family. The well-researched portrait that emerges in Waugh’s book renders in bold colors Paul’s courage, tenacity, probity, generosity, and passion for his craft, without neglecting his insen­ sitivity, solipsism, artistic limitations, melancholia, and irascibility. So let’s say that Waugh had compressed his already compact sections on the other siblings, expanded the parts about Paul somewhat, and presented his book—whose cover, fittingly enough, Paul’s image graces—as a Paul Wittgenstein biography. No doubt this would have been bad for sales, as some critics observed. In all likelihood, however, it would have resulted in a better critical reception. After all, when we discuss individual biographies, we tend to be rather accepting of both besotted qualities and some stylistic extravagance, as how could we not be? For it is clear that those features often go along with an essential enthusiasm, or with the kind of enthusiasm that has helped to produce many great biographies, including Ray Monk’s tellingly subtitled classic, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990). As Freud once put it, overgeneralizing a bit, “biographers are fixated on their hero in a very particular way,” one in which “affection” plays a decisive role. What Toynton and other reviewers have implied—or really, have assumed—is that we should change our standards for family biographies. In their responses, what they do is hold that relatively

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rare genre to stricter standards of judiciousness and nonpartisanship. This move, which seems to have been carried out without much reflection, strikes me as unproductive. Not only does it lead to lessthan-edifying criticisms that belabor the obvious, but it could also have a deleterious effect on the authors of family biographies. If their animating investments resemble those of other biographers—and Waugh’s book suggests that this is so—then a heightened critical sensitivity to the signs of their investments could prompt dissembling, and writing that feels disingenuous, because it is.

II But if you are primarily interested in an individual figure, why write a family biography? Why didn’t Waugh, to use the example at hand, write a life of Paul Wittgenstein? As intimated, the cynical view here is that Waugh’s decision was a matter of marketing. In an essay that appeared in the New York Review of Books, for instance, Adam Kirsch goes so far as to claim that “The House of Wittgenstein would not have been published or perhaps even written, if not for the fame Ludwig brought the Wittgenstein name.” But to propose this is to treat the Wittgensteins sans Ludwig as though they were, say, the Kafkas minus Franz—that is, as unremarkable—when that manifestly isn’t the case. Furthermore, given that Waugh’s name, too, carries weight, it seems improbable that Waugh structured his book as he did simply in order to get the thing published, or even to make some extra money. A more likely factor is that at some point Waugh was daunted by the lack of source material. Paul was, in Waugh’s phrasing, a “neurotically

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private man,” who didn’t write many letters or wax confessional in diary entries. On the other hand, devoted biographers are able to surmount such obstacles. Waugh, indeed, is one of them: by the end of his book, it is clear that he could have written a life of Paul Wittgenstein. So perhaps Waugh opted not to do otherwise for a good reason. Perhaps Waugh took the path of tracing Paul’s story within the context of a family biography, because whether consciously or not, he, Waugh, came to feel that with Paul, a family context that itself merits attention was decisive in the extreme. It isn’t hard to see how Waugh could have formed this impression. Not every biographical subject took on his father’s great passion, used the family’s outsized resources to shape his career, shared in what might be described as the family talents and temperament, competed with a genius brother, and spent much of his adult life vying with his sister (i.e., Gretl) for the role of head of one of the most prominent families in his country. Freud, to name just one example, did none of the above. As it turns out, the most satisfying, most illuminating parts of The House of Wittgenstein speak precisely to the issue of how intergenerational links equipped Paul to do such extraordinary things. When Paul made his debut as a concert pianist, soon after Karl died, he was actually rebelling against his father’s wishes. Notwithstanding his love of music, Karl had pushed Paul into banking, which was reliably respectable. Thus it was only just before the war that Paul, at twenty-six, rented Vienna’s Großer Musikvereinsaal, and to much applause, performed before critics and an audience for the first time. Yet according to Waugh, Paul owed both the boldness of this gesture and his later perseverance to his father. Within weeks of losing his

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arm, Paul, now a prisoner of war, was spending as much time as he could hunched over a keyboard he had sketched on an old crate, devising ways to make left-handed play work. Speculating on how Paul summoned the resolve to do this, Waugh writes: The alternative to success was not failure but death, and although his mother and sisters anxiously scoured letters from Russia for hints that he might be contemplating suicide, the trauma of his condition had, if anything, made him more determined than ever to return to his homeland and resume his concert career. He had been trained by his father to confront fear and despise self-pity and these lessons were taken to heart. In a solitary effort of will, he trained himself to understate the gravity of his condition and to dismiss, often quite rudely, the sympathy of friends and their well-meaning offers of help. If, at any stage, he had feared for his future as a five-fingered pianist, at least he would have relished the opportunity to stare that fear down. Whatever Waugh’s motivations for writing a family biography may have been, such moments of analysis are, unfortunately, more the exception than the rule in The House of Wittgenstein. If Waugh makes intriguing points about certain aspects of Karl’s legacy, he leaves related questions open. How did Paul’s revolt against a dead father of such towering dimensions affect his relationship with his art? Did it, too, help to generate the energy and tenacity characteristic of that relationship? Waugh doesn’t begin to say. Nor does he even mention notable analogous cases—for example, that of Arthur Schnitzler. On the whole, in fact, the consequences of Karl’s domineering ways are considered only in passing. Waugh hazards only the most

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obvious points about how the suicides of Paul’s older brothers affected Paul. We hear a little about Paul’s initial response, but the question of whether so much self-slaughter in the family made Paul’s depressions more terrifying goes unaddressed. So does the issue of whether Leopoldine’s off-the-charts devotion to Karl might have been a causal agent in the relationship difficulties of her children, as well as in Paul’s predilection for much younger women who were in no position to challenge his authority (when Paul took up with his future wife, he was in his forties, and she was eighteen; she was, as well, his student). On one occasion, apparently, Leopoldine went to bed with her feet wrapped in rags that had been soaked in pure carbolic acid, instead of the diluted solution she had meant to use, and so as not to disturb Karl’s sleep, she lay still for hours while her skin burned. That this bothered her children is clear. Indeed, some of them expressed disappointment in her for placing spousal obligations before all else. Always putting Karl first, Leopoldine not only failed to shield them from him—Karl would pick up his young sons by their ears and call them “rabble” if they cried out—but she was also inattentive as a mother. Or so the complaint ran. The family’s Jewish background is another underexamined area. Not until we get to the Anschluß crisis are we given any reason to suspect that Hermann Christian was actually born Hirsch Moses Meyer, the son of the Sayn-Wittgensteins’ Jewish land agent Moses Meyer. Waugh seems almost to be avoiding the issue, probably as a way of allowing the reader to share in the Wittgensteins’ surprise upon learning that the Nazis considered them, for a time, to be “full Jews.” In fact, in a section that has the curious title “Anti-Semitics,” Waugh notes the Wittgensteins’ generally anti-Semitic attitudes, while

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omitting to discuss something of immediate biographical relevance: Ludwig once applied those attitudes to himself. Adam Kirsch sensed a cover-up in this. In his review, he writes of the “calculated obscurity” in Waugh’s handling of the Wittgenstein family tree, adding that Waugh “faithfully follows the example of Hermann Christian, who not only forbade his children to marry Jews, but kept them in the dark about their own Jewish background.” These remarks elicited a short, heated letter from Waugh, in which he professes to esteem the Wittgensteins “as Jews.” It is an unedifying rebuttal, for not only does Waugh sidestep the question of why his group biography offers such a belated and partial account of the Wittgensteins’ roots, but he also fails to engage with the larger question of how much those roots mattered prior to the Anschluß, and that they mattered a lot is Kirsch’s main contention. Indeed, Kirsch’s essay puts forth a criticism much like the one Steven Beller’s book Vienna and the Jews (1989)—which Waugh lists in his bibliography— aims at Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980). The shared objection is that you cannot truly understand the cultural dynamism of a family like the Wittgensteins without considering the crucial factor of Jewish identity, however ambiguous and difficult to define it may be. Yet Kirsch, in a way, goes further than Beller. He argues that the Wittgensteins’ response to their position as people of Jewish descent largely explains both their outsized cultural productivity and their extreme psychic troubles. Having invoked Stefan Zweig’s observations about assimilated Austrian Jewry’s special investment in Bildung (i.e., cultural education), Kirsch concludes his piece with the claim, “In a sense, of course, this is what the family had believed all along: that appearing non-Jewish and looking down on Jews meant

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that they would not ‘count as Jews’ themselves. Where Waugh errs is in allowing the reader to suppose that they paid the price for this illusion only in 1938. In fact, they had been paying it all along.” Kirsch appears to be suggesting that the Wittgensteins’ baleful relationship to their heritage made for a “spoiled identity,” to use Erving Goffman’s phrase, that it made for selves turned against themselves, and thus for suffering. This, presumably, is why the “illusion” that they could recast themselves as non-Jews came at such a high price, even before it quite literally cost the Wittgensteins a good chunk of their fortune. In other words, it was the hyper-assimilationist, even selfhating mentality that fostered the illusion that was so painful. Given what we know about the inner lives of German Jews who saw their Jewish descent as a compromising stain, given what we know, that is, about the anguish of those Jews, for example, Rahel Varnhagen and Weininger, Kirsch’s assertion has the potential to be apt. But to locate such a formative “German-Jewish” dynamic in a case where, in the end, there is little supporting evidence is to court the charge that Ernst Gombrich leveled at Beller: that of cultural determinism. Again, what we do know is that the Wittgenstein family had a low opinion of Jews. Despite the fact that he defied his father by marrying a half-Jew, Karl liked to dispense as a piece of life advice the saying, “In matters of honor, one does not consult with Jews.” And by 1931, Ludwig knew enough about his Jewish heritage to feel that he should subject himself to the anti-Semitic stereotypes he had internalized—for example, the stereotype that deracinated Jews are incapable of philosophical genius. What, then, about Paul? As the controversies around Mahler show, anti-Semitic ideas about the Jews’ musical limitations enjoyed wide currency in the Vienna in which

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Paul dreamed of becoming a star pianist. Certainly it seems likely that he would have taken on some of these, and even if, in contrast to Ludwig, Paul didn’t confess to having done so, a truly probing biographer would have looked for traces—or effects—of this family pattern in Paul’s artistic anxieties and the musical choices made. It’s a shame, of course, that the house of Wittgenstein ended as it did. It’s also a shame that Waugh didn’t give this extraordinary family a better biography. Perhaps if he had reflected more concertedly on what the genre of family biography can do, he would have gone farther toward providing an effective instance of it. But the absence of such reflection shouldn’t surprise us. After all, it’s generally absent from the reviews of Waugh’s book, too. In a way, then, Waugh’s book and the reviews that assail it are symptomatic of the same problem: our conversation about family biography hasn’t gotten off the ground.

6 Dust-to-Dust Song: Nelly Sachs’s Life

In 1940, when Nelly Sachs and her mother arrived in Sweden, having escaped the Third Reich only a week before they would have gone to a concentration camp, the idea that she would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature would have seemed absurd. Pushing 50, Sachs was lightly published, and her poems to that point rarely, if ever, anticipated the force or inventiveness of her post-Holocaust work. Sachs was, to be sure, always a deft writer, but she was not yet a deeply original one. Legenden und Erzählungen (Legends and Tales), Sachs’s debut, captured the style of Selma Lagerlöf so exactly that it elicited wry praise from her literary idol: I couldn’t, Lagerlöf more or less said, have done it better myself. Sachs’s poetry of the 1920s and 1930s is more original, but hardly unconventional. Her poems from this period appeared in the prestigious Berliner Tageblatt and often fea­ tured the motif of the threatened idyll. But they also dealt in neat rhymes, familiar metrics, and a tender handling of animals. When Sachs tried out freer forms, the result was, in the words of her most recent biographer, “epigonal exercises in sentimentality.”

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It was only with the publication of her first collection of poems, In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death), which Sachs wrote in Swedish exile and dedicated to her “dead brothers and sisters,” that she established herself as an important poetic voice. “Death,” she said, “was my teacher.” The title Aris Fioretos has chosen for his biography is taken from the title of a later collection of poems, but it also describes her literary career. Fioretos’s elegantly written biography is the first of Sachs to appear in English. Another fitting title from Sachs might have been even more apt: Glühende Rätsel (Glowing Enigmas). Fioretos sees the late work that bears this name as the “high point” of Sachs’s career. Moreover, as much as Fioretos plays up the extent of Sachs’s remarkable transformation in middle age, he seems uneasy with his own conceit. Indeed, he devotes most of his interpretive energy to puzzling over the possible connections between Sachs’s early sensibilities and the poetry that made her famous, to the extent that Sachs became famous. She is well known in Sweden and Germany, but mainly as a figure; her writings aren’t widely read in either country. Fioretos spends more than half of the book chronicling the three decades that Sachs, who died in 1970, spent in Stockholm. As befits “an illustrated biography” (it accompanied a traveling museum exhibition and looks like an exhibition catalog), it also lingers here on the material circumstances of Sachs’s life. There are, for example, long descriptions of the tiny apartment where Sachs lived and worked and in which S. Y. Agnon visited her after they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1966. But Fioretos is also skillful in his discussion of the influences on Sachs’s poetry, and their relationship to the many developments during her years in Sweden.

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These included the death of her beloved mother in 1950, which precipitated a breakdown, and her friendship and correspondence with her “brother poet,” Paul Celan. In addition, Sachs was close to many younger Swedish poets, whose, poems she translated into German in order to make ends meet, including Tomas Tranströmer, the then Nobel laureate. During these years she developed an interest in Jewish mysticism. Toward the end of her life she also underwent bouts of paranoia; at one point in the 1960s, she became consumed by the belief that a neo-Nazi terrorist group was responsible for the random noises in her home. Fioretos suggests, imaginatively and not implausibly, that the engagement with mysticism and mental illness were, for Sachs, related. Certainly, the idea that another world inhabits our everyday reality is a crucial motif in Sachs’s later work. Fioretos’s reflections on what endured from flight through meta­morphosis are sometimes less successful. Sachs’s father was an entre­preneur and inventor who created, among other things, “the expander,” a fitness device that worked very much like the strengthening bands of today. (The book contains several reproductions from the expander’s marketing materials.) Having doubted that the contraption helped William Sachs’s nervous daughter, Fioretos speculates that, nonetheless, “stretching survived as a poetic principle. Lines and cords appear repeatedly in her texts, just as do the expansive veins and arteries of language.” Were it not an unpardonable pun, it would be tempting to call this a stretch. After all, where exactly is the tautness in the illustration Fioretos offers? Fioretos may be succumbing to a hazard of his genre experiment. A biographer who fills the margins of his biography with catalog-style images will naturally want them to play a narrative role.

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More often, however, Fioretos is thoughtful and careful in simul­ taneously reinforcing and complicating the idea of Sachs’s metamor­ phosis. Perhaps the key event in this effort is the romantic trauma that Sachs experienced in 1908, when she was seventeen. What exactly happened is unclear; in fact, Sachs refused to disclose the identity of the unattainable object of her adoration, an episode she would repeat twice more. In this first instance, the emotional damage was such that Sachs refused to eat and had to spend more than a year residing in a kind of psychiatric halfway house. Picking up on Sachs’s cryptic reference to the episode as the “source of my endeavor to take on poetically our people’s greatest tragedy,” Fioretos tries to fill in the space that she left blank—the space between personal woe and collective destiny—exploring at length the loneliness of Sachs’s life as an only child in the well-to-do Berlin home of her assimilated Jewish parents. There were cousins and a couple of dear friends around, and Sachs was extraordinarily close to both her parents, but she also felt a pronounced feeling of “difference” at school, which was exacerbated by the isolation caused by her mental illness. Around 1930, when Sachs was no longer young, she had her second romantic trauma. It was this long-standing loneliness, according to Fioretos, that allowed for Sachs’s intense identification with the Jews, as well as for her poetic project of the 1940s. He stresses that Sachs herself observed after the war, “It is my fate to be alone, as it is the fate of my people.” And without saying when exactly this began to be the case, Fioretos asserts, “Loneliness became the distinguishing mark of [Sachs’s] poetry. Without it, no poems.” From there he proceeds to suggest that the “most intimate texts” in the “Prayers for a Dead Bridegroom” cycle, which has been seen as emblematic of Sachs’s metamorphosis, “may actually have been written before the flight.”

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To its credit, Fioretos’s lucid, well-researched book never feels hagiographic, despite its abundant expressions of admiration for its subject. About Sachs’s most famous poem, “O the Chimneys,” written in 1947, Fioretos soberly admits that “if a poet were to use such imagery today, he would risk counteracting its purpose. The diagnosis would be evident: Holocaust kitsch.” (O the chimneys/On the cleverly designed dwellings of death/When Israel’s body dispersed in smoke.) If this poem was part of the project for which “Sachs wished to be remembered,” its aesthetic value, in Fioretos’s view, lies in its preparing “the tone for what was to come”—namely, the enigmatic, lapidary later work whose light comes from luminous images: Mankind, delivered up for so short a time Who in this case can speak of love The sea has longer words and the crystal-spectered earth with its prophetic form This suffering paper already ill with the dust-to-dust song abducting the blessed word back perhaps to its magnetic point which is God-porous Of course, not everyone will share Fioretos’s literary enthusiasm. For some readers, Sachs’s poetry will go from being too obvious to too obscure. Her life, with its heartbreaks and literary perseverance, is a different story, and it is more likely to resonate in the English-speaking world, where it is newly available.

7 Sadness in the Mountains: Freud and the Upside of Transience

“On Transience” is not on anyone’s list of Freud’s most important works. Indeed, the essay is hardly known. Only about a thousand words long, and lacking a clear theoretical point, it has been overshadowed by larger, more programmatic, more widely anthologized writings, such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Ego and the Id. And yet, in suggestive ways, “On Transience” stands out. For one thing, the essay is the most literary of Freud’s many publications. “On Transience” is both poetic and fictional: it recounts, in evocative language, a bucolic moment of walking and talking that never happened. As in the case studies, Freud’s conversation partners in “On Transience” are unnamed real people. The “young poet” is Rainer Maria Rilke, the “taciturn friend” Lou Andreas-Salomé. And perhaps that high-powered trio did ruminate together on the topics Freud has them discussing in the essay: beauty, love, and loss. But the only actual dialogue among Freud, Rilke, and Lou, as she is generally

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called, occurred with other people present and participating, and in the lobby of a Munich hotel. Then there is the uncharacteristically sunny and sentimental message of “On Transience.” This message seems all the more striking when we take into account the circumstances of its composition. Freud wrote the essay in the autumn of 1915, during a dark moment in his life. The war was starting to become an epic disaster; two of his sons were in the field; austerity measures were setting in at home; and his therapeutic practice was drying up. In addition to all that, Freud had recently turned sixty, and he had long convinced himself that he would die at sixty-one. Yet his main aim in “On Transience” is to distance himself from the young poet’s saturnine views. The scene Freud creates is a “blooming summer landscape” in 1913. Among gorgeous mountain vistas, the young poet comments that the ephemeral character of beauty spoils our experience of it. According to him, the transience of beauty renders it meaningless and, in turn, hard to appreciate. The taciturn friend opens up just long enough to agree. Freud is left shaking his head in wonder. He has heard opinions like these before, but he still finds them jarringly misguided. For Freud, the fact that beauty disappears is self-evidently part of its appeal. Beautiful flowers, the beauty of youth—to a great extent these things have so much value and give us so much pleasure because we know they will vanish. Instead of lamenting transience, Freud asserts, we should embrace its meaning-bearing function. Yes, beauty is transient. And only as a result of this transience does it have “scarcity value in time,” and, thus, real value. Here, then, we find the author who set out to “disturb the peaceful sleep of mankind” telling his readers to keep on enjoying

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the pretty blossoms. Moreover, the learned father of psychoanalysis sounds oddly ingenuous as he brackets centuries of aesthetic theory and discusses the pleasure of the beautiful in the simplest economic terms. At the same time, “On Transience” begins to articulate one of the more paradoxical and influential notions in all of psychoanalytic theory, namely its notion of mourning. The starting point for this line of thought is the idea that the impulse to run from transience is understandable. An effect of transience is loss; loss is painful; and it is in our make up to avoid pain—or so Freud proposes in an axiomatic observation. From there he attempts to interpret the young poet’s dour attitude. Freud seems to surmise that the young poet, too, is engaging in a form of protection against loss, a tortured form of protection that diminishes the pleasure we take in life. Sensing the prospect of loss, the young poet feels an anticipatory “sadness” that blocks his ability to enjoy. He thus avoids the much greater sadness we feel when we lose real sources of pleasure. While Freud continues to frown on the young poet’s melancholy outlook, he is satisfied that he has uncovered its logic. No longer does he find the poet’s response to beauty so baffling. More mysterious, for Freud, is the more normal response to loss. Freud allows that he doesn’t know why we stay attached to lost objects, why we feel a consuming sadness that can stop us from investing our libidinal energies in “substitute objects.” What he does purport to know is that a failure to reinvest can be damaging in a variety of ways. Especially during times of war, with much destructive loss occurring and many of the most “exalted” institutions proving to be “fragile,” people need to manage their sadness effectively. If they don’t, Freud

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warns, they could wind up following the young poet and devaluing what is most valuable. At this point Freud is beginning to express his paradoxical theory of mourning. Its crux is that only by accepting the loss of a loved object—only by meeting loss head on and then letting go—are we able to access the lost object meaningfully in our memories, thereby making the object “unlost.” In Freud’s Requiem, Matthew von Unwerth takes the remarkable features of “On Transience” and runs, or, rather, glides with them. It is not just that his prose style has the melodic grace of a fin de siècle Viennese feuilleton. A trained psychoanalyst, von Unwerth excels at reading associatively. His associations proceed from the following premise: the rare fictional character of “On Transience,” along with the text’s mix of sentimental and seminal ideas, forms a signal. That Freud displaced his thoughts about transience into fiction, tempering them with sentimentality, marks those thoughts as being a particularly important source of difficulty for him. So pursuing the connections between “On Transience” and Freud’s life should be revealing. And, indeed, von Unwerth claims that “On Transience” is nothing less than a “portrait in miniature” of Freud’s “troubled” mind and disintegrating “world.” According to von Unwerth, it is a text “teeming with the same themes that shaped his life and work.” This kind of approach is a staple of intellectual biography, and ultimately Freud’s Requiem belongs to that genre. But von Unwerth doesn’t offer anything like a standard exercise in working with a special text to understand the person who created it. What makes Freud’s Requiem so unusual is that it is doubly associative; not only does von Unwerth draw illuminating associations between “On Transience” and Freud’s mental life, but he also links

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those associations associatively. Consider, for example, his second and third chapters. Having briefly profiled Freud, Rilke, Lou, and the relationships among them, von Unwerth returns to 1915 and “On Transience.” His second chapter begins with the line: “In 1915, the year of Rilke’s visit to Berggasse 19 and the writing of ‘On Transience’, Freud was completing work on his theory of mourning, which he would first set before the public in the essay.” Thus we embark on a discussion of Freud’s theory of mourning, which opens onto a discussion of the basis for the theory, Freud’s ideas about narcissism. This leads to a broad-ranging discussion of the love and death drives, which brings us back to mourning and, a little later, to the young poet, who “failed to face the reality of grief.” The discussion of the poet leads into a discussion of Carl Jung, who, like Rilke, rejected Freud, taking us into a discussion of the strange things Freud said about death after fainting in Jung’s presence. Chapter 2 ends with that episode. At the beginning of Chapter 3, we hear about the 1913 conference where Jung and Freud avoided each other and Freud met with Rilke and Lou. Next, von Unwerth describes the mountainous summer landscape where Freud had spent a holiday just before the conference—the landscape that Freud evokes so poetically in “On Transience.” We then learn about Freud’s passion for hunting mushrooms in the wild. Moving smoothly from life to work, we arrive at a discussion of the mushroom metaphor that plays an important role in Freud’s theory of memory, and that von Unwerth borrows as he sums up the interpretive goals of the book. And so on. While he adopts and openly admires pieces of Freud’s rhetoric, von Unwerth’s aim is to understand Freud, not to defend or sell him. Freud’s Requiem steers clear of tendentiousness, but it exhibits a

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different problem. Despite the engagingly modest tone of its author, the book overreaches itself. For the most part, von Unwerth gives his readers a probing, imaginative, well-informed, lucid account of how certain theories—namely, the theories of memory and mourning—emerged alongside such personal “crises” as the death of Freud’s daughter Sophie, and his difficulties with Jung. But where von Unwerth tries to show that the main themes in “On Transience” thoroughly pervaded Freud’s cultural world, the level of the discussion sometimes drops. The commentary on relevant works by Goethe and Schiller can even be misleading. Von Unwerth erroneously calls The Sufferings of Young Werther a bildungsroman, for example. Yet since the defects in Freud’s Requiem appear when the author isn’t discussing his core material, they seem fairly minor. Much more prominent are the book’s eloquence and creative intelligence.

8 The Middle Way of Erich Fromm

It’s odd that Erich Fromm, who died in 1980, didn’t get a fullscale biography until 2013. After all, what a life—or, to speak with his biographer, what lives! Born in 1900, Fromm grew up in Frankfurt, the only child of acculturated Jewish parents. His father, a not-very-successful merchant, came from a family of rabbis, and early on, Fromm developed an interest in Jewish culture, which as a young man he discussed in a group that included Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. The same inclination helped determine Fromm’s focus at the University of Heidelberg. In 1922 Fromm completed a dissertation on Jewish law in the diaspora, under the direction of Alfred Weber, Max’s brother and an important figure in his own right. Fromm soon thereafter took up psychoanalysis as a prospective métier, training in Heidelberg, with the woman who would become his first wife acting as his mentor, and then in Frankfurt and Berlin, under such heavyweights as Georg Groddeck and Hanns Sachs. By the time he opened his own clinical practice, in 1929, he had begun to chart his own course—as both a therapist and a theoretician. In the former area, Fromm sought to apply Buber’s notion of an authentic I-Thou

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relationship, as well as what he saw as Groddeck’s principle of humane openness. In the latter, Fromm tried to combine psychoanalytic and sociological approaches in innovative ways, something that made him generally well suited for collaborating with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Working with the Frankfurt School in the years before its and his exile, Fromm laid the foundation for one of his signature concepts: “social character,” which ties the development of individual psychic traits to social and class contexts. In the United States Fromm and the Frankfurt School broke rather messily. He was pushed out, in large part over growing intellectual differences, though there were also personality conflicts (Theodor Adorno didn’t like Fromm and once disparaged him as a “professional Jew”), and Fromm wound up suing for breach of contract. But this was really a minor setback. During the early years of his exile, Fromm, despite recurring struggles with tuberculosis, resumed his career as a practicing therapist; carried on affairs with dynamic, creative women, including the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and the dancer Katherine Dunham; exchanged ideas with leading American intellectuals, like Margaret Mead and Henry Stack Sullivan; and gained a wide following with the book Escape from Freedom (1941). Here Fromm built off the idea that the freedom of “modern man” has left him isolated. Fromm’s thesis reads: “This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he [modern man] is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of a positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.” Presented as an explanation of, among other things, fascism and the “automaton conformity” in democratic societies, and punctuated

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with a burst of optimism, the book has sold more than five million copies and been translated into twenty-eight languages. Fromm wrote further best sellers in the 1940s, most notably Man for Himself (1947), which expands on the theme that selfishness and materialism result precisely from a lack of sense of self. During that decade Fromm also continued with his psychoanalytic practice and with involving himself in the training of analysts, navigating, with some success, the rifts in the American psychoanalytic community. He forged fecund new friendships, such as the one with David Riesman. He became a popular university lecturer and teacher. And he entered into marriage again, this time to a woman, the photographer Henny Gurland, whose health would decline precipitously. Indeed, Fromm spent much of the latter part of the decade caring for her, and in 1950 the couple moved to Mexico largely because of her ailments. Henny committed suicide two years later, but Fromm stayed on for nearly a quarter of a century, leaving a significant mark: he founded the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society and did more than anyone else to bring psychoanalysis to Mexico. It was during his time there that Fromm’s fame spread well beyond intellectual circles. This was due in part to his political activism. In the 1960s Fromm became a high-profile advocate of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union; his writings on the topic would command the attention of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. He also produced a book whose popularity has far outpaced that of Escape from Freedom: The Art of Loving (1956), which to date has sold about twenty-five million copies in more than fifty languages. With its brevity, its message of self-affirmation (you must love yourself before you can fully love others), and its abundance of

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mantra-like lines (“if I truly love one person, I love all persons”), The Art of Loving exposed Fromm to the charge of having written a self-help book, much to his displeasure. In addition, the book elicited the more familiar criticism that Fromm was throwing out large assertions for which he had no evidence. But these responses didn’t stop Fromm from having the time of his life, from living, that is, the sort of joyful productive life he had long held before readers as an ideal. He had remarried in 1953, and his relationship with his third wife, Annis Freeman, was by all accounts one characterized by great mutual affection and devotion. Fromm, furthermore, was not above appreciating the material spoils of his publishing success. His interest in Buddhism may have been burgeoning, and thus he may have been on the way to writing To Have or to Be (1976), whose title aptly describes its content, but Fromm had a beautiful house built for himself in Mexico, bought himself a spiffy car, smoked high-end cigars, and was glad to be able to live like the affluent man he had become—that Annis Freeman was herself a person of means only added to his financial ease. On the other hand, Fromm also shared his wealth, giving generously to the causes that mattered so much to him in his final decades, like the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and Amnesty International, which he helped found. During this time, Fromm became, if anything, even more prolific, with much work going to advance the idea of a third way between capitalism and communism—what he called “socialist humanism.” Lawrence J. Friedman’s biography tracks Fromm through the various phases of his life in detail: it provides a thickness of description that hasn’t been available before. Clearly, a prodigious amount of research went into this project, quite a bit of it original.

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And as is often the case with thorough cradle-to-grave biographies, the required dedication was born, at least in part, of admiration. Indeed, Friedman celebrates his subject. Consider these lines from his prologue, which present the fact that Fromm didn’t in fact save the world more as a concession than as an inevitability: “In his life as a political activist, Fromm never realized his primary political goal of lasting international peace sealed by love, though there were some magic moments when his prophetic vision for a world without war was taken seriously by very high officials.” Nevertheless, Friedman’s accounts of Fromm’s works and clinical endeavors aren’t tendentious. Friedman allows, for example, that some of the key analyses in Escape from Freedom were based on a limited, partial knowledge of historical figures and periods. What occasionally feels unsatisfying is Friedman’s mode of con­ textualization. The problem isn’t so much that Friedman sometimes moves quickly in situating Fromm’s work and its reception within large historical conditions, both political and cultural. Unless you want to write a great tome of biography, a measure of rapid movement is in most cases unavoidable. It’s the choice of where to place that movement that doesn’t always make sense here. Fromm’s notion of love and its impact are central themes in Friedman’s biography— hence its subtitle. Yet, to cite just one example, Friedman does little more than list the titles of a few hit songs to evoke the popular cultural status of love during the moment in which The Art of Loving came to be. The greater disappointment, however, is that Friedman doesn’t consistently shine where he promises real illumination. He maintains that his book will bring to light the connections between Fromm’s personal circumstances and his major works, but while Friedman ably

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reconstructs those circumstances and judiciously assesses Fromm’s writings, his linking of the latter with the former often fails to deliver subtle or penetrating insights. Furthermore, Friedman too frequently points up the significance of personal contexts without tracing their imprint on the texts they supposedly helped shape. We read, for example, that Escape from Freedom owes a great deal to Fromm’s experience of exchanging letters with German Jews who were trying to get out of Europe in the months before the Second World War began. Friedman writes that “this correspondence is of incalculable importance in comprehending the book.” On the next page he asserts that “more than any other source, this correspondence reveals the strong personal dimension in Escape from Freedom.” It is “inconceivable,” adds Friedman, that Fromm “could have written” with such a “passionate voice” if he hadn’t had direct communication with imperiled German Jews. Friedman concludes the sections in which the preceding quotations occur with a similar proposition: the “force and clarity” of Escape from Freedom were “surely influenced by his [Fromm’s] almost daily interventions for émigré assistance.” But where he actually discusses Escape from Freedom, Friedman barely mentions the experiences that he frames as being of immeasurable value for understanding the book. All he does is restate his observation yet again, though in somewhat weaker terms: “Given Fromm’s efforts to help Heinz Brandt, Sophie Engländer, and others in a family being brutalized by Hitler, there may also have been a profoundly personal dimension here.” We are left with a broad association that most readers would have come to on their own; namely, in writing about Hitler in 1939, Fromm was probably affected by the damage Hitler was inflicting on friends and family members.

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But the moments of hermeneutic letdown hardly spoil things. Friedman’s biography is a welcome effort. It remains difficult to say why Fromm, with his colorful life and enormous influence, had to wait so long for a comprehensive, authoritative biography—the research obstacles in his case are formidable but not forbiddingly so. However, we can say with certainty that the wait is over.

Part THREE

Beyond the Canon

9 Bambi’s Jewish Roots

On January 20, 1909, the Bar Kochba association in Prague launched a program of “festive evenings.” The organizers wanted the series to have an immediate impact, and they had reason to believe that they would succeed in this. Martin Buber, whose mode of cultural Zionism had been generating much excitement in their circle, would be the main speaker. Buber’s emphasis on education and inner selfdevelopment; his call for the recovery of subterranean Jewish forces and sensibilities; his promise that Western Jewry’s spiritual renewal would equip Western Jews to have a key part in a larger, cosmopolitan project of rebirth—this set of features resonated powerfully with the young German-Jewish intellectuals who had taken over Bar Kochba’s leadership. Indeed, in addition to paying tribute to Buber again and again, they kept inviting him back. It was as their guest that Buber gave all the addresses in his celebrated volume Three Speeches on Judaism (1913). And it was enthusiasm like theirs that eventually led Gershom Scholem, who went through his own adolescent infatuation with Buber, to remark on the excesses of “Buberty.” If landing Buber was a coup, Leo Hermann, the man in charge of setting up Bar Kochba’s initial festive evening, hadn’t done as well with

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his other invitations, or so it must have seemed. Hermann wanted to pair Buber with a different kind of Jewish author, with someone who would broaden the appeal of the event. But his top choice for that role, the novelist Arthur Schnitzler, turned him down. His second choice, the poet Richard Beer-Hoffmann, did, too. So Hermann went with Plan C—Felix Salten, a friend of both Schnitzler and Beer-Hoffmann. Like his friends, Salten had been a member of the Young Vienna circle of writers in the 1890s. Unlike them, however, he hadn’t produced major works, let alone ones that artfully engage with Jewish themes, as, for example, Schnitzler’s novel The Road into the Open (1908) does. In 1909, Salten was known mostly for his wide-ranging activities as a feuilletonist, for cultivating connections to the Habsburg family (Karl Kraus once described him as a “court journalist”), and for being the author of the pornographic fictional memoir Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906). Published anonymously but immediately attributed to Salten, the book relates, in vivid detail, the story of a prostitute who has “experienced everything a woman can experience in bed, on tables, chairs, and benches, leaning against bare walls, lying on fields, in the corners of dark hallways, in chambres séparées,” etc., and who claims to “regret none of it.” Hermann, of course, turned to Salten for other reasons. At thirtynine, Salten was as fit—he was a devoted hiker and cyclist—and as lively as ever, and he could be a charismatic, even beguiling, presence. Rilke, who wasn’t quick to praise Jewish journalists, effused over the charm and energy of Salten’s conversation. After attending one of Salten’s lectures, Kafka noted that “the pleasure” of the female auditors had been palpable. Salten was, moreover, intriguing as a Zionist. Of the Young Vienna authors, he alone mobilized his pen

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in support of Herzl’s Zionist newspaper The World: during its first year, Salten had a regular column. Inspired by Herzl’s message of self-acceptance (or really, of self-improvement through selfacceptance), Salten became an effective critic of the attempt to hide or disown Jewish heritage (this despite the fact that he published the column under a pseudonym and had changed his own name from Siegmund Saltzmann). He was also concerned about the menace of anti-Semitism. Salten grew up poor and feeling vulnerable, and in his column he addressed the vulnerability of Ostjuden living in destitution, as well as the anti-Jewish utterances of demagogues like Karl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer. But, above all, it was cultural questions that interested Salten. His most substantial, most searching essay for The World underlines the importance of the theater for Jewry’s self-awareness. His profile of Herzl, which he composed just after Herzl’s death in 1904, treats the project of political Zionism as the culmination of Herzl’s efforts as a playwright, rather than as a departure from them—as the “fifth act” that Herzl plotted out for the drama of his own life. Having consulted with Buber, Salten brought together his various tendencies as a Zionist commentator in the speech he gave on January 20, 1909. The combination proved to be a winning one: both the Zionists and non-Zionists in attendance responded to it with clamorous approval. As the applause for Salten thundered on, Buber, who had worried that following him would be hard, was left wondering how under such circumstances he would manage to “connect with the public.” Reviews of the event suggest that Buber’s lecture didn’t, in fact, go over as well. Hence one scholar’s conclusion that “the evening was successful ... mostly because Salten gave a brilliant performance.”

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The years before the First World War mark the high point of Salten’s career as a Zionist speaker: Salten, too, was invited back by Bar Kochba’s leaders, and when, in 1911, he made another appearance in the festive evening series, he shone just as much as he had the first time. But even after lecturing in a Zionist key was mostly behind him, Salten continued to write from a Zionist perspective. He traveled to Palestine in 1924, for example, and published a mostly positive book about what he saw there. This was just after Salten, a prolific author of animal stories in his later decades, had produced the work that would win him a measure of international fame: Bambi (1923). Yet critics have hardly ever tried to put that novel into conversation with Salten’s Zionism. Indeed, they have spent far more energy tracking the affinities between Bambi and Josefine Mutzenbacher. Which isn’t to suggest that critics have spent much energy on Salten. He is, you could say, something like the Max Brod of fin de siècle Vienna. Because of Salten’s role in important literary networks, as well as his enormous productivity, his name comes up a lot. But even his own friends—for example, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal—had their doubts about the seriousness of his literary efforts, which have been assigned to a place well outside the canon of modernist masterpieces, to a place, that is, where relatively few scholars tread. If the scholarly discussion of Salten’s works were larger, it is likely that we would have detailed interpretations of Salten’s animal stories as allegories of Jewish experience. For, as is the case with Kafka’s animal stories, Salten’s often lend themselves to such readings. Consider The Hound of Venice (1923), another work that has had an afterlife in American popular culture: it was—and was formally

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credited as being—the inspiration for Disney’s The Shaggy Dog film franchise. This semiautobiographical novel deals in, among other things, the theme of the outsider as abject insider. The Hound of Venice tells the story of an artist who must spend every other day in aristocratic society, as a dog. Much more central in the animal stories, however, is the theme of persecution. It was Kraus who first linked this aspect of the stories to Salten’s Jewish background, though not in the way you might expect. Writing about a Bambi spin-off in 1930, Kraus purported to hear the sound of Jewish dialect in the speech of Salten’s hares. Since Salten was a hunter (a humane one, he always insisted), and since Salten had also had some embarrassing grammatical problems during his career (he never finished high school), Kraus could proceed to joke that Salten’s hares had adopted elements of Jewish dialect in order to blend in with an odd type of hunter: that is, the type Salten represented. The hares were “perhaps using mimicry as a defense against persecution,” Kraus quipped. When Salten died in 1945, an American critic drew a more straightforward connection between the plight of certain animal characters and that of the Jews. In his obituary for Salten, the critic, having noted Salten’s “Zionist sentiments,” maintained that the fox in Bambi not only appears as the rapacious “Hitler of the forest,” but also has a mentality of hatred and frustration that bears similarities to Goebbels’s anti-Semitism. An actual reading of the “Zionist overtones” in Bambi wouldn’t come about until much later—2003, to be precise. Not coincidentally, we have an essay by a Kafka scholar, the Germanist Iris Bruce, to thank for a first pass at that. Without claiming that Salten set out to create an early instance of Zionist children’s literature, Bruce tries

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to show that Bambi imparts messages that echo, mostly in a general way, the Zionism of its author. To begin with, she traces how the novel evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.” Salten’s suggestive phrase for butter­flies is “wandering flowers,” and Bambi describes them also as “beautiful losers” who have to keep moving, “because the best spots have already been taken.” Bruce stresses, as well, that the culture of the deer develops around the fact of their victimization: they tell their children tales that “are always full of horror and misery.” She then gets to the heart of her case. Likening Bambi to Kafka’s talkingape story “A Report to an Academy” (1917), Bruce argues that Salten’s work, too, conveys critical views about assimilation. One of the deer uses the loaded verb verfolgen to ask whether humans and deer might get along: her query reads, “Will they ever stop persecuting us?” When another deer answers that “reconciliation” with humans will eventually happen, Old Nettla, a third deer with vastly more experience of the world, anticipates a melancholy line from Salten’s Zionist book New People on Ancient Ground (1925), which dismisses the “dream of complete integration.” Old Nettla rejoins that humans “have given us no peace and have murdered us for as long as we’ve existed,” so why should we expect them to act otherwise? Not many deer in the story persist in believing that living harmoniously among humans is possible. Of the deer that do, two, Bruce points out, wind up being killed by hunters. One of those deer, Bambi’s cousin Gobo, spends time in captivity, and when he returns to the forest boasting of how well he was treated, Bambi is taken aback by how “strange and blind” Gobo has become. Furthermore,

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where Gobo is proud of the band humans have placed around his neck (which should have made him off-limits to hunters), the wise “King of the Deer” regards it and Gobo’s attitude toward it as signs of degradation. Upon hearing Gobo speak of the band as “the greatest honor,” the King labels Gobo “an unfortunate child” (that Gobo’s faith in the goodness of humans leads directly to his death reinforces the King’s assessment). The label “King,” on the other hand, reinforces the old deer’s status as a cipher for Herzl, since at the time Herzl was often given that title in Zionist discourse. As Bruce puts it, “The old Prince of the Forest, then, can be said to represent Herzl.” That formulation may be a bit stark. After all, Salten’s Zionist back­ ground isn’t the key to understanding what Bambi is really about, as Bruce herself allows. But, in the end, Bruce’s essay provides enough support to make its conclusion seem plausible: “Bambi has Zionist overtones because the critique of assimilation and the longing for a new Herzl figure are prominent themes.” We could, however, cite quite a bit of additional evidence to underpin this claim, especially the part about the critique of assimilation having salience in the text. For example, Bruce might have mentioned the memorable scene that occurs when one of the hunters’ dogs chases down the fox, who has been shot: even the fox’s prey stick up for him, accusing the dog of a self-betrayal that can’t be compared to the fox’s natural cruelty. Also worth noting is the scene in which the deer King, who turns out to be Bambi’s father, takes Bambi to see a slain poacher. As the two of them stand over the dead body, the King encourages Bambi to draw the lesson that he shouldn’t see his oppressors as almighty or himself as inferior to them. Then there is the fact that the most assimilationist of the deer is also the weakest of them, both physically and mentally. Indeed, what

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brings Gobo together with humans is his frailty and lack of resolve. While trying to escape from a group of hunters, he gives up, allowing himself to collapse, and the hunters take pity on him, at least for a while. By contrast, one of the King’s notable properties is endurance in flight, and another of his main teachings is that in order to survive, you will likely have to exceed what you take to be the limit of your capacities. He impresses upon Bambi that you can—and must—keep going and going, even when the hunters who are chasing you have put a bullet in your back. Piling up such examples has its merits, but it isn’t the only way—or, I think, the most productive way—to develop further a reading of the traces of Zionism in Bambi. Salten’s Zionism consisted, as we know, of more than a broad critique of assimilationism and his veneration of Herzl. Salten had other Zionist concerns, too, and taking them into account as we read Bambi will not only make the possible echoes of his Zionism in the text seem even more substantial, but it will also help us to make sense of some of the book’s more enigmatic and resonant moments. I am thinking, above all, of Bambi’s encounters with the elk. It turns out that Bambi’s father isn’t the only royalty in the forest. The elk, Bambi’s towering “relatives,” are referred to as “kings” as well. These majestic animals intimidate Bambi, even more than his father. Around them he feels not simply small, but also diminished. Confronted with their looming regality, Bambi becomes ashamed of the diffidence of the deer group to which he belongs: the elk seem like mighty deer that haven’t been cowed by persecution and its attendant anxieties. Bambi’s response is to try to think of himself as their equal, and to attempt to connect with them. But he is too awed to reach either goal.

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He winds up seeing himself as “nothing” by comparison. And he is unable to bring himself to strike up a conversation with one of the elk, which further undermines his sense of self, and, which, from the perspective of the elk, is too bad. As Bambi chides himself, the elk casually wonders why deer and elk speak to each other so seldom. Bambi, for instance, appears to be such a “charming fellow.” This drawn-out communicative failure has its counterpart—and complement—in Bambi’s experience of the elk’s mating calls, which the novel presents as a kind of aesthetic experience, or rather, as the kind that Salten the cultural Zionist wanted to see. Like other cultural Zionists, including Buber, Salten thought that Western Jewry had fallen into an unfortunate cycle. Deracination had made real creativity hard to come by, and real creativity in the aesthetic sphere was both a primary end itself and a privileged means to greater self-consciousness and spiritual renewal. “Artistically formed,” as Salten once put it, was how “objective Judaism” could be made perceptible, if not graspable. Where Buber believed that Western Jews could find crucial knowledge and inspiration in the folk culture of Eastern Jewry, Salten envisioned a different progression, one that would take Jews from the “tear-filled” Zionist dramas of the present to the liberating artistic expressions of “Ur-power” that are rooted in the “consciousness” of the “free person,” and to “mother sounds” as primordial as those “in the books of Job and Solomon.” In the meantime, though, you could find a taste of the elemental in Jewish culture in the “raging” work of Heinrich Eisenbach, a dialect-speaking Jewish comedian whom Salten admired. Suggestively enough, Salten employs the key terms from his cultural Zionist writings to evoke the sounds with which the elk,

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those undaunted kings of the forest, call for renewal. As Bambi listens to the “elemental tones” of “a noble, unsettled blood, raging with Ur-power in its longing, anger, and pride,” he is transfixed. Regular conversation with the elk may not work quite yet, but their song affects him profoundly. Bambi can think of nothing else until it stops, and it makes him afraid, in part, perhaps, because of the stirring it induces in his deepest mental faculties. Yet as Bambi takes in his relatives’ expressions of Ur-power, he feels something else, too: “pride.” In the end, Bambi may be Austrian schmaltz—this no doubt facilitated its assimilation into American kitsch—but it is a book with complicated roots, which go back to and beyond Bar Kochba’s first festive evening.

10 Appraising the Collector: The Life and Work of Stefan Zweig

In the 1930s, when his fame had reached its peak, Stefan Zweig had the distinction of being the most translated author in the world. He may also have been, as one critic put it, the world’s “most hated” author. Did these things go together? Of course they did. The animus flowed mostly from Zweig’s colleagues, for whom, in quite a few cases, his success was an object of envy, a sign of the times, and a badge of mediocrity. Zweig’s prominence was a “symbol,” according to Robert Musil, of the depths to which culture had sunk. Hermann Hesse complained that Zweig was “an intellectual rather than a poet,” and not only that, an intellectual who lacked the gift of originality, yet in the “age of the feuilleton,” he was being feted as one of the faces of German letters. The satirist Kurt Tucholsky treated the devotion to Zweig as a kind of unflattering shorthand: “Frau Steiner isn’t as young as she once was.... Every night she sits at her table, completely alone, wearing a different dress and reading from a finely made book. To bring this to a point, she adores the works of Stefan Zweig. Enough said? Enough

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said.” Another contemporary remarked that “Zweig created literature” out of “the feuilleton style—Viennese like Sachertorte with whipped cream, just as delicious and artful (and, unfortunately, just as sloppy).” Serious, but always accessible, close enough to the modernist literati to be measured against their standards, but far enough away not to measure up, prolific on an industrial scale, Zweig found a sweet spot that was simultaneously a lightning rod. He wasn’t the only one from his literary precinct to do so. If not quite to the same degree, Hesse himself had popularizing tendencies, and he, too, both profited from and paid for them. But Zweig elicited, and continues to elicit, an entirely different order of contempt. He has been on “most embarrassing” and “most overrated” lists in the German media, and one recent appraisal went so far as to ridicule the style of his suicide note. It wasn’t just the tricky combination of seriousness and mass consumption that put Zweig in the running for the title of most hated author in the world. There were other factors involved. Some of these are obvious; critics, after all, tend to name their grievances. At the top of many lists has been Zweig’s engagement with politics, or rather, the lack of it. For example, there are claims to the effect that Zweig, who as a nonpartisan cosmopolitan wouldn’t sign petitions protesting the Nazis’ rise, committed the sin of being incapable of political courage. The same reckoning that mocks Zweig’s final words lampoons him as a “passivist” by nature. But the classic account of Zweig’s politics, Hannah Arendt’s essay “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday” (1948), develops a more sociological critique. In Arendt’s reading, Zweig possessed a “vanity that could hardly have originated in his own character.” Here, too, Zweig is a

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symbol, a symbol of a generation of assimilated Jews who eschewed “political values” for “cultural and personal” strivings, like the “idolatry of genius” and the pursuit of “fame.” This was caused, in Arendt’s view, by the conditions of the age, its combination of enfranchisement and exclusion. She writes, “For a Jew to be fully accepted into [Austrian] society, there was one and only one thing to do: become famous.” The result, according to Arendt, was a blindness that fostered disaster: “Concerned only with his personal dignity, he [Zweig] had kept himself so completely aloof from politics that ... the catastrophe of the last ten years seemed to him like a lightning bolt from the sky.” In despair over the loss of his celebrity status, which was all he had, Zweig in turn lost his will to live. Hence, Arendt reasons, his suicide in 1942 (in which he was famously joined by his young second wife). Like so many reckonings with Zweig, Arendt’s postmortem appears not to have fairness as its main aim. Indeed, it relies rather frankly on overstatements about Zweig’s context: “Among the Jews of Vienna no one took antisemitism, in the amiable version Lueger represented, seriously—with the exception of the ‘crazy’ feuilleton editor of the Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl.” Just as frank is the literalism in Arendt’s interpretations of Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday (1943). Never mind the fact that the book belongs to a genre notorious for its deceptions—with good reason, Gershom Scholem called the form a “mode of concealment.” The nostalgia Zweig expressed in 1941 is taken to be an absolutely reliable mirror of what was in his soul. Arendt writes: It is astounding, even spooky, that there were still people living among us whose ignorance was so great and whose conscience was

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so pure that they could continue to look on the prewar period with the eyes of the nineteenth century, and could regard the impotent pacifism of Geneva and the treacherous lull before the storm, between 1924 and 1933, as a return to normalcy. But it is gratifying and admirable that at least one of these men had the courage to record it all in detail, without hiding or prettifying anything.

I Anyone looking to gain a deeper sense of how Zweig in fact saw the world and experienced exile would do well to consult two newly published books, which complement each other nicely. Oliver Matuschek’s Three Lives, which first appeared in German in 2006, is a cradle-to-grave, comprehensively researched study—the most thorough biography of Zweig to date. It draws on numerous archival sources that don’t figure in Donald Prater’s biography of 1982, the previous standard setter. But for all its devotion to its subject, Matuschek’s book is a work more of patience than of passion. Maintaining an attitude of impartial sympathy, to speak with Nabokov, Three Lives dutifully tracks all phases of Zweig’s personal and intellectual development, without trying to make the case that he was, say, a writer of the very first rank, and also without advancing a particular argument about the factors that drove Zweig to such enormous productivity. Nor is Matuschek interested in engaging with the arguments of others: Arendt goes unmentioned. Matuschek tends, rather, to cite eyewitness accounts—especially Zweig’s epistolary selfreflections—and he leaves readers space to consider how these voices

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line up. In this, Matuschek doesn’t shy away from relating many episodes in which Zweig’s behavior is off-putting in the extreme. We learn, for example, that when Zweig found out he and the dying Gustav Mahler were on the same Atlantic crossing, Zweig pretended that he wanted to be of assistance to Mahler and his wife, just so he could get close enough to gawk at them. As Matuschek works his way through other areas, however, like Zweig’s relation to the political scene, a figure emerges who is altogether more sympathetic and certainly less benighted than the one whom quite a few commentators have presented. This isn’t to suggest that Zweig metamorphoses here into a man of great courage. But as Matuschek shows, in mining his subject’s correspondence, Zweig had opinions that resonate with those of thinkers to whom he is seldom likened, such as, well, Arendt herself. Consider these lines, which are from a letter Zweig wrote in 1919: “I see the political task of Jewry as consisting in uprooting nationalism in all countries.” Or these ones, from a 1918 letter to Romain Rolland that deals with how the “double pressure” of hatred toward Germany and hatred toward Jews will affect the collective psyche in Germany and, in turn, Zweig’s social world: “People of my ilk will be destroyed. They won’t even be allowed the little air they need to live.” A “spooky” stance, yes, although not in the way Arendt suggested. Like Three Lives, George Prochnik’s The Impossible Exile shines in bringing to light notable complexities in Zweig’s outlook, blowing up, too, by implication, an array of clichés that not only Zweig’s critics, but also his memoir and his self-slaughter have done much to encourage. But Prochnik does this in a very different manner. Indeed, his book isn’t really a biography. It’s an original mix of travelogue,

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family memoir, literary criticism, psychological portraiture, and inquiry into the experience of exile. Here, in addition, the prose is more graceful, and there is more of a synthesizing spirit. Many of Prochnik’s overviews seem to glide down the page: He [Zweig] wrote of men running amok through the tropics, unraveling inside casinos, chasing dreams around the Prater amusement park; of women who jeopardized a lifetime of respectability to follow the flame of momentary passion—or who devoted their whole lives to a passion that ought to have been momentary. Of men and women who commit a crime just to see how it feels. Of men, women, and children who obsessively spy on one another’s erotic lives, until surveillance becomes their chief form of eroticism. Of people who sacrifice everything for one cosmic instant of unity with everything. And, in one novella, Buchmendel, of a man whose immersion in books is so consuming that he actually becomes a “magical walking book catalogue”—until the “blood-red comet” of the First World War bursts into his remote life at a Viennese café and reduces him to a bundle of rags. As one would imagine, given Prochnik’s title, his evocation of Zweig’s work is meant to help us understand why Zweig’s exile ended as it did, as are Prochnik’s evocations of such things as Zweig’s voyeuristic bent, his relationship with his mother, whose vitality put him ill at ease, his close but complicated first marriage to a divorcee whose mind he admired, but whose daughters annoyed him, and his lifelong depressive tendencies. Although Prochnik concludes with a detailed account of Zweig’s suicide, it’s actually in an early

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chapter, “The Beggars and the Bridge,” that he offers his most direct thoughts on why Zweig failed, fatally, to find a foothold in the United States (or anywhere) in the way that other refugees of his stature managed to. Prochnik doesn’t dismiss the established idea that Zweig’s dedication to antinationalism and his corresponding “Europeanism” made the fracturing of the continent especially hard on him: Zweig felt “the pain of psychical dismemberment,” according to one witness. But Prochnik endeavors to go further, and he does. By drawing on a series of observations by European exiles in the United States, many of them little cited, Prochnik sets into relief the disorienting texture of the experience, its numerous “paradoxes,” which include the utter, almost primal foreignness of New York’s rhythms and architecture coupled with the presence of so many familiar faces. As Prochnik puts it, “This strange, displaced aura of home, borne out by New York’s emigrant character if not its physical atmosphere, may have been the final paradox that overwhelmed Zweig.” If it did, this was, of course, a function of Zweig’s particular constellation of aversions and sensitivities. Throughout his book, Prochnik traces that constellation, but he brings parts of it into play upfront, mentioning certain features in the “Beggars” chapter, like Zweig’s long-standing inability to be polemical. Thus Prochnik creates and steadily builds upon a framework for making sense of why, during his time in New York, Zweig felt so hollowed out by the demands placed upon him: be a spokesman for antifascism, keep your door open to fellow exiles in need, etc. Indeed, in Prochnik’s telling, it’s not so much the loss of celebrity status as the persistence of it after emigration that did Zweig in, pressing him into a despair that he found a way out of only in a bottle of Veronal.

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II Ultimately, however, Zweig’s response to Hitler only goes so far in explaining the intensity of the scorn that was heaped on him, because the intensity reached near peak levels at least a decade before the Nazis came to power. How, then, does one make sense of the cultural phenomenon of Zweig hatred? In the ongoing debate about him, this question has been mostly ignored. Zweig’s defenders tend to brush off the criticisms of his peers as nastiness from nasty people (Karl Kraus, Brecht, Musil, etc). If Zweig were really such a hack, his defenders ask, why do so many intelligent people like his works? What about the psychological acumen that Freud lauded and Einstein enjoyed? Why the handsome new editions from Pushkin Press and the New York Review of Books Classics series? Those who find the current enthusiasm for Zweig distressing, on the other hand, cite early judgments of him as though their extraordinary biliousness were solely a function of Zweig’s extraordinary foibles. I know of just one attempt to situate the enmity directed at Zweig within its context, and it leaves out the stratum of circumstance that is, to my mind, the important one: the views on Jewish assimilation that we encountered in Arendt’s essay, which we’ll be coming back to. To begin with, though, Zweig appeared to advance, with an energy few could match, precisely the values, norms, and beliefs that his modernist denunciators wanted to oppose, all while operating in their orbit. Zweig was born in 1880, into a bubble of bourgeois security— about as much of it as assimilated Viennese Jews could hope to have. His father was a staid, prosperous manufacturer of textiles, whose ascent was a function of prudence and thrift, rather than innovation or

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daring. Above all, Moritz Zweig prided himself on keeping the family business out of debt. “Stefferl,” as he was known within the family, led a very different life, which had its periods of sexual adventuring and bohemianism. But he seems to have inherited something of his father’s aversion to risk. Early on, Zweig wrote poetry, but he soon shelved that, and for the bulk of his career, he held closely to triedand-true formulas for commercial success: novellas, biographies, and biographical essays, all of which seemed to pour out of him. Hence the fun that Kraus, Zweig’s most relentless critic, had with his name: Zweig means “branch,” in German, and Kraus liked to refer to Zweig as “Erwerbszweig,” or “branch of industry.” If Zweig, who was also dubbed an “industrialist of literature,” had needed money, he might have gotten a pass. But that the family business, which his older brother eventually took over and ran with success, had made him wealthy was common knowledge. Even friends like Joseph Roth flashed frustration over Zweig’s tendency to play it safe, despite the cushion he had to fall back on. Zweig also had a penchant for presenting himself as a solid cultural citizen, a good Bürger in the realm of Kultur. He looked askance at countercultural figures and wrote that one of the reasons why he decided not to relocate to Vienna after the First World War, the better part of which he had spent in Switzerland, was that expressionism— or as he called it, “excessionism”—had taken hold in his home town. Instead, the newly married Zweig opted to restore and reside in a castle-like house in the hills above Salzburg, which he made into a reliquary of sorts, filling it with Beethoven’s desk, drawings by Goethe, signed editions, thousands of manuscripts, etc. Zweig saw his collecting as a service, one whose impact would be greater than

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that of his writing. Others, like Arthur Schnitzler, found it alienating. Upon meeting Schnitzler, Zweig informed him that he had been buying up his correspondence— Schnitzler hadn’t even known his letters were for sale. Furthermore, Zweig apparently grew “very upset” when Schnitzler told him that he had just burned several of his manuscripts. But the deeper issue is that Zweig seemed to be promoting the calcification of bildung. For late eighteenth-century thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Herder, the term “bildung” had signified a dynamic process. In the age that witnessed the birth of the bildungsroman, Herder defined it as “being your own creator.” But what counted as bildung had changed by Zweig’s day, devolving, in the eyes of critics like Nietzsche, into a social instrument, a fetishized source of prestige, something that could be acquired, consumed, and displayed. Zweig’s collecting seemed to be of a piece with this. His work did, too. For Kraus, Zweig’s “scribblings” about “the giants of world literature” (Montaigne, Hölderlin, Kleist, Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, etc.) were not only presumptuous, implying, with their turgid flourishes, that their author was “on the same level as his subjects,” but they also flattered Zweig’s “bourgeois readers.” As Kraus saw it, Zweig’s writings provided those readers with a ready-made cachet in the form of fake bildung. Zweig, according to Kraus, “decorates the gap out of which their bildung consists, making it warm and cozy.” He gives “an introduction to world literature with the maximal time savings.” All you have to do is step in, Kraus complained, and, “like an elevator,” Zweig’s biographies will “lift you up to the loftiest heights.” Those works tickled the bourgeois imagination in other ways as well. At a time when, in avant-garde circles, the self-determining

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subject was famously dissolving, Zweig told the story of genius as the triumph of individual agency. Kraus, by contrast, spoke of his own achievements as being at bottom effects of structure: he was just “an epigone in the old house of language.” Or consider that Freud, upon reading Zweig’s biographical essay on him, was taken aback, because, as he put it, the essay overemphasized “all my bourgeois features.” Moreover, Zweig liked to smooth out the disparities between artists as people and the art they created. Great accomplishments reflected internal merit: hence the feeling that Zweig’s humanist outlook aligned a bit too well with the myths of capitalism, that it was a form of “stock market humanism.” When a friend brought up Wagner’s anti-Semitism, Zweig, who admired Wagner’s music, blanched. He “hated dissonance,” the friend recalled. Thus, it’s probably no coincidence that Kraus seized upon Zweig’s misuse of the word “gleichen,” which means “to be equivalent to,” in attacking the style of Zweig’s biographical writing. The problem was that gleichen actually has two forms, intransitive/irregular and transitive/regular, and they are not, in fact, equivalent: The latter signifies “to make equal to.” What Zweig had done was put the regular form where its irregular counterpart should have been, and this was no innocent error, according to Kraus. Indeed, Zweig’s misstep was, in Kraus’s view, part of a pattern of language abuse. Zweig opted for “gleichte,” because it looks like an archaic form of the irregular verb, and thus “something precious.” Once again, Zweig was trying to offer his readers bildung on the cheap—the decorative version of it—while trying to make himself seem better versed in the language than he was. Once again, he was peddling “pretentious” vacuity.

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Here Kraus sounds a lot like Leopold von Andrian, one of the Young Vienna writers, discussing Zweig’s novella Confusion of Feelings: “Each sentence pretentious beyond all measure, false and meaningless, the whole of it an absolute nothing.” But the shortcomings of the novellas were thought to be different, in some ways, from those of the biographies. You could say that in the eyes of many critics, Zweig exhibited the twin vices of the fin de siècle feuilleton, that highly popular, much-maligned form; he just didn’t exhibit them in the same place. It’s true that both the biographies and the novellas were derided for piling on the adjectives (a key characteristic of the feuilletonism in question). But in the biographies, Zweig was the contemplative-sounding, yet ultimately shallow admirer of genius, who mass produced easily consumable nuggets of bildung. The novellas and stories, on the other hand, were said to suffer from an overload of feeling. In the latter works, Zweig mistook intensity of emotion for emotional and literary depth, or so the line of attack went. (His critics might have said that the title Confusion of Feelings was more apt than he knew.) Zweig had a justification for his strategy. Using rhetoric that brings to mind, despite Zweig’s opposition to expressionism, expressionist calls to achieve “world brotherhood” by overcoming the tyranny of the intellect, Zweig wrote that he was “suspicious of cerebral people, because they negate too much and are incapable of loving from the heart.” Similarly, he once admonished: “Let us stop thinking for a while of state and standing.... Let us search for brotherhood beyond politics, let us think beyond geography and history. No, let us not think at all. Let us feel!” The novellas, accordingly, often explore the feel of feelings. They abound with lines like these ones, which are from a story about a

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male professor infatuated with a male student: “The brilliant blue rose out of his pupils and bore into me. I felt their warm wave softly penetrate me, going deep inside, its flow spreading out there and causing the feeling to expand into a strange desire.” Freud loved this stuff. However, for some critics, the novellas pushed—and even spilled across—the boundaries of propriety. The writer Otto Flake found the story in question “sensuous to the point of being lecherous.” He also described it as “enormously indiscreet.” According to Flake, the story “straps its characters to the examining table and exposes their innards. No gynecologist digs deeper.” But for readers like von Andrian and Siegfried Kracauer, there was no radical dimension to Zweig’s fiction, except perhaps how radically awful it was. His stories were antithetical to the modernist literary project, if one can speak of such a thing, offering fluff instead of exactitude and cognitive exercise, and pandering to the lowest impulses of its audiences. For Kracauer, Zweig’s novellas “strike just the tone that appeals to cultivated circles, where taste wanders and bildung haunts. Middlebrow readers and the impoverished masses demand the heart, which is free, not distance, which costs them. Feeling is everything, where everything else is missing.” Thomas Mann, the author of a very different kind of fiction, claimed that “if a Jew had written Buddenbrooks, it would have been labeled a snob book.” He might have added that there probably would have been some Jews among the critics doing the labeling. If German Jews had an intense and complex relationship with bildung, using it as a means for channeling traditional energies and aspirations, as well as a vehicle for achieving both integration and a measure of distinction, they also had, in quite a few cases, an intense and complex relationship

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with that relationship. Broad as it was, the appropriation of bildung, was a flashpoint in German-Jewish culture, a place where suspicions and the narcissism of small (and not so small) differences ran high. As it turned out, just defending Buddenbrooks could help earn a Jewish writer the snob tag. Samuel Lublinski was a solid critic from humble origins, and a few years after he had made his mark by championing Mann’s novel, a fellow Jewish critic presented Lublinski’s affinity for German high culture as deeply overdetermined. The critic, who himself was no stranger to admiring German high literature, asserted that Lublinski pompously held forth about Mann and Rilke and others as a way of trying to cover over his (still evident) background as a “synagogling.” The list of those assimilated Jewish culture-makers who, with greater or lesser degrees of acuity and vitriol, made similar accusations about assimilated Jews is long: Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Arnold Schönberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Kraus, to name just a few. Kraus, indeed, was always on the lookout for instances of linguistic overreach driven by assimilationism (this is different, we should note, from the Wagnerian attitude that the Jews’ participation in German culture is necessarily inauthentic). For example, Kraus once attributed a rival’s stilted misuse of the dative case to the rival’s desire to “distance himself from being a schmock,” that is, a shabby and disreputable Jewish journalist. In the essay that explores Zweig’s trouble with “gleichen” (a word that also resonates with the assimilation question), Kraus is a little less direct, but Zweig’s Jewish background still forms part of, and helps fuel, the critique. Kraus begins, in fact, by using a Yiddishy term to introduce his subject. He calls Zweig , who himself explored the connection between Jews and bildung in his memoir, “one of the

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representative schmoozers in European culture,” thereby underlining, in advance and in a suggestive way, the difference between his own stylistic openness and Zweig’s tendency to opt for “precious” formulations. Later in the essay, Kraus reinforces the point. He contrasts his own preoccupation with linguistic “details,” or the aspect of his “method” that quite a few critics saw as a Jewish inheritance, with Zweig’s attempt to vault himself into the ranks of “world literature” by manufacturing bildung. Furthermore, the reference points Kraus provides together present Zweig’s mistake as belonging to a pattern of problematic prose that has a Jewish component. Kraus groups Zweig together with Emil Ludwig, another best-selling German-Jewish serial biographer, and he likens Zweig’s misstep to one committed by Felix Salten, a Jewish writer whose literary affectations Kraus often related to his, Salten’s, attempt to insinuate himself into the center of Austrian culture. This, I think, is the context against which Arendt’s critique of Zweig becomes illuminating. Her portrayal of Zweig as the shining example of failed assimilation, the parvenu par excellence, is illuminating less as a piece of sociocultural analysis than as an example of that widespread sensitivity to the nexus of bildung and Jewish integration, which Zweig, to the detriment of his reputation, pressed on as few others did. Here, again, is Arendt: There is no better document of the Jewish situation in this period than the opening chapters of Zweig’s book. They provide the most impressive evidence of how fame and the will to fame motivated the youth of his generation. Their ideal was the genius that seemed incarnate in Goethe. Every Jewish youth able to rhyme passably

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played the young Goethe, as everyone able to draw a line was a future Rembrandt, and every musical child a demonic Beethoven. No better document? Every Jewish youth? What would be the point of debunking Arendt’s prickly overreach when, for those of us looking to understand the phenomenon of Zweig disapprobation, the point is the overreach itself?

11 Fear and Self-Loathing in Fin de Siècle Vienna: Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character

A source of fascination in his own day, Otto Weininger has become one again in ours. Since the early 1990s, scholars from a whole parade of disciplines have analyzed his “case,” as an early biographer put it. And Weininger recently inspired a drama and a historical novel. Not many fin de siècle Viennese intellectuals receive as much attention. In fact, only Freud and Wittgenstein come immediately to mind. Both remarked on Weininger’s appeal. What has changed is the way in which Weininger fascinates us. Quite a few of his contemporaries regarded his early suicide and strident philosophizing as the acts of a tragic genius. Today, those acts captivate more often in the manner of a train wreck. We still feel that we can learn from Weininger, but where he wanted to provide a diagnosis, we find a symptom. Through Weininger and his work we recognize, or think we can recognize, the force of lurid fin de siècle

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social anxieties and theoretical upheavals—we think we can see how they ran a bright young author spectacularly off the rails. Weininger was born in Vienna on April 3, 1880, into an acculturated Jewish family. His mother, a Hausfrau, was apparently a timorous person. Weininger’s father Leopold was an autodidact who believed that Richard Wagner represented the high point of German culture. According to his daughter, Rosa, Leopold Weininger shared Wagner’s low opinion of Jews. She once described her father as being “highly anti-Semitic.” Yet she added that he “thought as a Jew and was angry when Otto wrote against Judaism.” Notwithstanding this enigmatic qualification (“thinks as a Jew?”), it seems reasonable to surmise that Otto Weininger began to develop his notorious anti-Jewish views early on, and at home. At school he displayed talent as well as ambition. He claimed that he “knew Latin and Greek, spoke French, English and Italian well, and was fluent in Spanish and Norwegian.” When Weininger was only sixteen, he submitted an essay on Greek adjectives to an eminent philological journal. Defying his father, who wanted him to study languages, Weininger enrolled in the philosophy faculty of the University of Vienna. There he led an uncommonly abstemious life. That he did might have had something to do with his homosexual proclivities, but with so little biographical information available, it is hard to tell. Weininger, in any event, scorned the carousing that was considered a standard part of the student experience, preferring instead to spend his free time discussing “the most difficult philosophical questions.” His friend Hermann Swoboda recalled that in such exchanges he was “quite indefatigable.” For Swoboda, Weininger was “a passionate thinker,

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the prototype of a thinker.” It was this manifest passion for “difficult” inquiry, as much as anything Weininger said, that won him the respect of luminaries such as Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus, who disdained what they saw as Vienna’s culture of superficiality. Weininger himself professed his respect for an array of authors. Foremost among them, at least at first, were the philosophers Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. Around the turn of the century, Avenarius and Mach advanced programs of “critical positivism” with considerable success; indeed, Mach’s concept of the “unsalvageable self ” caused a sensation among all kinds of Viennese intellectuals. His claim was that traditional—that is, metaphysical—notions of personhood rest on a mind-body distinction that simply isn’t tenable. Mach and Avenarius proposed that mental experiences can be traced to their physical roots, and that these roots should be studied scientifically. In the appendix to his dissertation, Weininger states that his approach to psychology derives from Avenarius’s “biological” method. Freud, too, influenced Weininger’s doctoral thesis, which eventually became Sex and Character. In 1900, Swoboda was a patient of Freud’s. It seems that, in a moment of indiscretion, Freud passed on to Swoboda, Wilhelm Fliess’s theory of human bisexuality. When Swoboda passed the theory on to Weininger, the latter resolved to produce a work on gender identity. That work, Sex and Character, proceeds from the idea that humans are part male and part female, and tries to do nothing less than comprehensively investigate the differences between male and female “principles.” As a published volume, it left Weininger’s dissertation adviser stunned and embarrassed. The study that the adviser, a positivist philo­ sopher, had regarded as promising now seemed full of “mysticism”

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and bigotry. What happened is that between 1901, when he submitted his thesis, and 1903, when he finished revising the book, Weininger had shifted his philosophical commitments. In particular, he forswore the theories of Avenarius. Weininger attempted precisely to salvage “the unsalvageable self.” Then, shortly after converting to Protestantism, and having become increasingly depressed, Weininger fatally shot himself, in October 1903. Weininger had set about rehabilitating the Kantian ideal of the autonomous moral individual. In doing so, he had relied on negative models and vicious stereotypes—specifically, of women and Jews. Sex and Character’s early “scientific” discussions of cells and plasma, which are holdovers from the dissertation, give way to the most chauvinistic theorizing. When Weininger counterposes the “principles” of femininity and Jewishness to the Aryan male principle of autonomy, he invokes a catalogue of deprecatory generalizations. We read that “just as in reality there is no such thing as ‘the dignity of woman’, it is equally impossible to imagine a Jewish gentleman. The genuine Jew is deficient in the inner nobility that generates the dignity of the self and respect for another. There is no Jewish nobility, which is all the more remarkable as Jews have practiced inbreeding for thousands of years.” Thus in a recent article, the intellectual historian John Toews anathematizes Sex and Character as a “cartoonishly hyperbolic, pretentiously philosophical, manically simplifying book, throbbing with uncontrolled misogynist and anti-Semitic feelings.” Such reactions tend to call forth further revisionist ones—and the case of Weininger has been no exception. Indeed, the new translation of Sex and Character, which is the first complete English rendering, comes in revisionist packaging.

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Daniel Steuer’s introductory essay is learned and far from being program­matic, but it does make an obvious effort to polish Weininger’s image. This is not necessarily a problem; no doubt there is plenty of room for refining here. Unfortunately, Steuer often does little more than carry on an unedifying side conversation with Weininger’s critics. He challenges their assumptions without providing actual counterarguments. Witness how he deals with, or rather ducks, such complicated issues as the extent to which Weininger’s anti-Semitic ideas guided his philosophical concerns. Commenting on the passage The fundamental psychological precondition for all practical altruism is a theoretical individualism. Only those who feel that the other person is also a self, a center of the world, will automatically be protected from using and considering another human being purely as means to an end, as is the way of the Jew: because usury implies the same attitude toward one’s fellow human beings as that of the tick to the dog. Thus, the self is a condition for any altruistic ethics. In the face of a pure knot of “elements” I would never act ethically. Steuer writes, “This suggests that the obsessional and prejudiced side of Weininger was something that operated almost as an independent part of his thought in parallel to his other reflections.” Elsewhere, Steuer sounds the partially true truisms of the revisionist camp. He asserts, for example, that by “Jews” Weininger means “a type and not a race.” The point makes sense because Weininger defines “Judaism” as “a cast of mind, a psychic constitution, which is a possibility for all human beings and which has only

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found its most magnificent realization in historical Judaism.” What goes unac­knowledged is that Weininger doesn’t hold to his own distinction. References to “Semitic blood” often occur where he is supposed to be examining “a cast of mind.” Consider the passage from Sex and Character that I cited earlier. An “analysis” of Jews and dignity ends with the question of Jewish inbreeding. So by presenting Weininger’s ideas about Judaism as Weininger presents them, Steuer misleads his readers. Ladislaus Löb is more reliable. In both fidelity and readability, his rendering of Sex and Character far exceeds William Heinemann’s 1906 English edition. Whatever might draw us to Weininger—his insight or passion, or our interest in fin de siècle science and Viennese “crises of identity”—Löb’s translation will serve us well.

Part FOUR

Renderings

12 That Other Metamorphosis: Translating Kafka1

Kafka’s career auf englisch began in 1930, with the publication of British and American editions of his final novel, The Castle. The book sold poorly. But its translators were undeterred. During the next eight years, Edwin and Willa Muir teamed up with various presses, including Alfred A. Knopf, to put out most of Kafka’s corpus. The Great Wall of China, a collection of short writings, appeared in 1933. The Trial and Amerika followed—in 1937 and 1938, respectively. Soon the Muirs were rewarded for their resolve. By 1943, Edmund Wilson had identified a Kafka “cult” in American letters. And the buzz that bothered Wilson quickly intensified. Having come to New York by way of Czechoslovakia and Palestine, Samuel Schocken, Kafka’s German publisher in the early 1930s, founded Schocken Books in 1 Since this essay was first published, many excellent Kafka translations have appeared, and the landscape here looks quite different. There is now, moreover, a monograph-length study of Kafka translations and their effect on how Kafka is read: Michelle Woods’s Kafka Translated (Bloomsbury, 2013).

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1946 and immediately reissued the Muir translations. Then, in the late 1940s, Schocken commissioned translations of Kafka’s diaries and letters, “placing him at the center” of an English language “publishing program,” in the words of the press’s then director. Of course, this move reflected a change more than it created one. When the war ended, Kafka was hagiographed with new ardor. He eventually became—in Britain and America—nothing less than a “prophet.” He became the writer who foresaw totalitarian horrors “to the point of exact detail,” or so George Steiner insisted, and who therefore emblematized with unmatched immediacy the artistic power of a complex, mysterious, freshly annihilated Central European Jewish culture. The rest is literary history. Well, not quite. Mediated largely through the Muir translations, Kafka’s works have continued their extraordinary run among English-speaking readers—right up through our own turn of the century. Wilson’s “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka” (1947), in which he laments how “Kafka is being wildly overdone,” has remained just that: a dissenting opinion on Kafka. But amid all the applause, the Muir translations have elicited high-profile hissing and scowling. Indeed, precisely because of Kafka’s success, because of his status as a revered, classic author, the Muirs’ deficiencies became a magnet for criticism. As J. M. Coetzee recently wrote about The Castle, “The Muir translation and the Muir monopoly ... assumed a faintly scandalous air.” The “Muir monopoly” is really the Brod monopoly. Kafka published only a few short stories and fragments during his lifetime (most notably “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Country Doctor”). Everything else he left to his friend Max Brod. And while Brod rescued Kafka’s

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manuscripts one and a half times—he disregarded Kafka’s injunction to destroy them, and he got them out of Nazi-occupied Prague—he also hoarded the original texts, keeping them off-limits until the 1960s. Not only was Brod aggressively protective, but he also edited aggressively. He finished Kafka’s unfinished novels; he normalized Kafka’s programmatically sparse punctuation; and in some cases he invented titles and added chapter breaks. Since the Muirs had to rely on Brod’s compromised editions, they could not have avoided basic structural defects. But as many critics—for example, Steiner, Ronald Gray, S. S. Prawer, and Mark Harman—have emphasized, the Muirs made mistakes of their own. Like Brod, they tried to domesticate Kafka, occasionally inserting little pleasantries into his unconventionally unornamented prose. In the first sentence of The Trial, for instance, the Muirs rewrite Kafka’s “one morning” as “one fine morning.” Their phrase isn’t exactly the verbal equivalent of a floral pattern. It is foreign to Kafka’s stark minimalism, however. And because Josef K. happens to be arrested on the “one morning” in question, the Muirs also change Kafka’s tone. They introduce a contrast—to be arrested “one fine morning”—that is not present in the original. What caused these lapses? Why, to cite another famous example, do the Muirs transform Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s “monstrous vermin,” into a “monstrous insect?” Or why do they have Georg Bendemann, of Kafka’s breakthrough story “The Judgment,” write to his friend about “unimportant occurrences,” when in the German he writes about “meaningless occurrences?” Certainly the shift matters, given that the work itself flirts with meaninglessness, though of a different kind. Kafka said that he couldn’t “find any coherent meaning” in the “The Judgment.” It is the only one of his writings that he regarded as a masterpiece.

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In such places Edwin Muir tended to discover straightforward meanings. Muir saw Kafka as a “metaphysical” writer who allegorized man’s search for “salvation.” He even compared The Castle to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Hence, perhaps, the Muirs’ frequent lack of attention to words like “meaningless,” or to self-reflexive usages that evoke the very interpretive difficulties with which Kafka confronts us. In fact, as the Muirs’ critics like to note, there are moments where a shallow understanding of Kafka appears to have guided their decisions as translators. Yet most of the problems mentioned here can’t be explained in this way. Nor would having an insecure grasp of German nuances (the Muirs have been accused of that), or a desire to render Kafka’s writing into “natural” English (Edwin Muir expressed one), lead a translator to render “vermin,” a term loaded with ominous associations, as “insect.” And this sort of desultory act is particularly troubling in Kafka’s case. Even by the standards of his language-obsessed context, late Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Kafka had an especially visceral relation to his medium, to the sound and shape of its smallest units. He spoke of “the terrifying corporeality” of his prose and once remarked, “I find the letter K offensive, almost nauseating, and yet I write it down. It must be characteristic of me.” A famous diary entry suggests that the German word “Mutter” misrepresents “Jewish mothers,” causing them to be “a little comic” and their sons to love them less than they deserve. In another famous passage Kafka broods over the incompatible impossibilities of “writing in German” and “writing differently.” The Muirs proceeded “factory” style, by contrast, and might simply have done too much too fast. In 1921, Edwin and Willa left

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London to live in Prague. After spending almost a year there, the couple relocated to Dresden, and then to Vienna. They returned to London sometime in the mid-1920s, where they became, as Edwin Muir put it, a kind of “translation factory,” rendering into English works by Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch, Gerhard Hauptmann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Scholem Asch, Carl Burkhardt, and Kafka. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, consider that between 1927 and 1940, the Muirs translated multiple books by most of these authors, including ten of Feuchtwanger’s novels. Furthermore, during this great surge Edwin Muir wrote criticism and poetry, his actual métier, while Willa Muir branched out into French and Hungarian translations. Such productivity is impressive. And taking it into account lends an extra sheen of accomplishment to the Muirs’ Kafka editions. They gave readers generally competent translations of extremely difficult material under very crowded circum­stances. Yet, as we know, they left ample room for improvement. So it was a matter of time before retranslations appeared. Some came out early. Clement Greenberg re-rendered a few short stories in the late 1940s, for example. But most sponsors of larger retranslation projects, that is, the novels, waited for restored German texts, which did not become available until the 1980s. Brod gave up the manuscripts in 1956. After that, however, they sat in a Swiss vault. Serious editorial work on them did not begin for years. This is why the first widely publicized, eagerly anticipated retranslation efforts fructified only at our own fin de siècle. All of them—Mark Harman’s The Castle (1998), Breon Mitchell’s The Trial (1999), and Michael Hofmann’s Amerika (2002)—are careful and intelligent. Each deserves the praise it has received. But Hofmann’s

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version of Kafka’s first novel feels ripest. Of course, Hofmann, a poet and seasoned translator, also had it easiest. As he observes about Amerika, “Although there is quite a bit of the fluid, bewildering and hilarious description that one thinks of as Kafkaesque, playing Zeno-like games with time and space, more striking is the number of sentences that do nothing but advance the action.” Needless to say, sentences that “do nothing but advance the action” generally pose less of a challenge to translators than do lines that play “Zeno-like games with time and space.” Since such tricks, as well as intricate meditations on bureaucratic authority, populate The Trial and The Castle more densely, they are the more difficult works to translate. Kafka began writing Amerika as early as 1912, which means that most of his literary career stands between it and the later novels. Part picaresque, part travestied bildungsroman, Amerika tells the story of Karl Rossmann, a seventeen-year-old from Bohemia struggling and failing to develop himself in an entirely unknown, fre­quently threatening, threateningly eroticized country. As Karl sails into “New York,” the Statue of Liberty appears to have just “raised aloft” a sword while “unfettered winds” blow “about her form.” And his trajectory takes him from his uncle’s fancy apartment—his first residence in America—to the brothel where he dwells when the novel breaks off. Along the way Karl is throttled by a girl who is trained in jiu-jitsu and moans under his touch; he works briefly as a “lift boy” at a futuristic hotel full of intrigue; he runs from the police; and he has a series of disorienting encounters with conspicuously fleshy figures. Not all too surprisingly, Kafka had been reading David Copperfield and had felt inspired, albeit with a characteristic twist, “It was my intention, as I now see, to write a Dickens novel, but enhanced by the

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sharper lights I should have taken from the times, and the duller ones I should have gotten from myself.” Other direct influences include Ferdinand Kürnberger’s Der Amerika-Müde (The Man Exhausted by America, 1910). Still, as we saw, translating Amerika entails translating the Kafkaesque, which is no simple task. Unlike Harman and Mitchell, both of whom are academics, Hofmann does not create new problems with high concept solutions to old problems. Witness how Mitchell translates a key phrase in The Trial. He writes that Josef K. was arrested “without having done anything truly wrong.” In the German a subjective form (“ohne daß er etwas Böse getan hätte”) indicates that Josef K. did not do anything wrong from a “limited perspective,” from the perspective of someone who isn’t sure that Josef K. did not do anything wrong. After all, an omniscient narrator would be able to say, in the more decisive indicative mood, whether or not Josef K. did anything wrong. The Muirs’ jettison Kafka’s hard-to-translate, contrary-to-fact uncertainty, rendering the phrase as “without having done anything wrong.” We are informed, simply and misleadingly, that “without having done anything wrong,” Josef K. was arrested one (fine) morning. With “truly,” Mitchell attempts to unsteady the narrator’s claim about Josef K.’s innocence and to reproduce Kafka’s ambiguity. And the result? Perhaps Mitchell’s device would work later in the novel—after we have learned that Josef K. likes to use words such as “admittedly” and “naturally” as he spins out rationalizations. There “truly” could mark a thought as possibly belonging to Josef K., or as less than authoritative. At the very beginning of the novel, however, Mitchell’s “truly” does not distinguish the assertion of innocence from an objective statement. We still read that Josef K. did not do anything

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wrong, only now we have to reckon with a new category: deeds that might be wrong, but are somehow not “truly” wrong. Hofmann never tries to outsmart the disparities between English and German. Nor does his translation contain a line as unidiomatic as Harman’s “‘Not so angry, Landlady,’ said K.” Instead he creates an English style that is no stranger than Kafka’s German and comes remarkably close to approximating the general flow of Kafka’s prose. That is the Muirs’ strength. And more than either Harman or Mitchell, Hofmann surpasses them in it—mostly without Muir-like simplifications and gratuitous changes. Indeed, Hofmann attains this effect through his greater fidelity to the original text. His punctuation is lighter than that of the Muirs. His language is plainer and more sinuous, and it tends to move faster, like Kafka’s. But it is more repetitive too—Kafka often carries words over from one sentence to the next—and it more palpably conveys the movement of thought and speech in Amerika, which so frequently is at once associative and obsessive. Hofmann is also more attuned to the darkness of the novel and to its dark comedy. For his part, in fact, Edwin Muir labeled Amerika “delightful.” Yet whatever large principles might guide a translator, the act of translating consists in making individual choices. And the most basic way to get a sense of the differences between two translations is to compare a representative sample of those choices. Here is a passage pulled from the center of Amerika. Of course that put an end to the idea that the two might be taken along to the hotel. The waiter swung the suitcase on to his shoulder, Karl took the straw basket and they set off. Karl was already on

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the road when, reflecting, he stopped and called into the darkness: “Listen to me! If one of you should still have the photograph on him, and would like to bring it to me in the hotel, he’ll still get the suitcase and—I give you my word—immunity from prosecution.” There was no reply as such, just a blurred word, the beginning of a reply from Robinson before Delamarche obviously stopped his mouth. Karl still waited for a long time for them to reconsider. Twice more he called out: “I’m still here.” But there was no answering sound, just once a stone rolled down the slope, perhaps by chance, perhaps it was a misaimed throw. (Hofmann) There was naturally no question now of the two men going to the hotel with Karl. The waiter swung the box on to his shoulder, Karl picked up the straw basket, and they set off. Karl had reached the road when, starting out of his thoughts, he stopped and shouted up into the darkness: “Listen to me. If either of you has the photograph and will bring it to me at the hotel, he can still have the box, and I swear that I won’t make any charges against him.” No actual answer came, only a stifled word could be heard, the beginning of a shout from Robinson, whose mouth was obviously stopped by Delamarche. Karl waited a long time, in case the men above him might change their minds. He shouted twice, at intervals: “I’m still here!” But no sound came in reply, except that a stone rolled down the slope, perhaps a chance-stone, perhaps a badly-aimed throw. (Muir) Neither translation qualifies as an overwhelming tour de force. First, both pass on reproducing an important part of the first sentence, which literally states: “there naturally could no longer be any

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discussion”—“es war gar nicht mehr die Rede davon”—of taking “the two” to the hotel. The passage deals primarily with discussion, or the lack of it. And the initial movement away from discussion belongs to a process that ends with Karl waiting and listening in the dark, and getting, at best, a nonverbal reply. Hofmann’s rendering does have an advantage, though. He translates Kafka’s pronominal construction simply as “the two,” whereas the Muirs write “the two men.” This shift—from “the two men” to “the two”—might seem trivial. But a major difficulty in translating Kafka is retaining his vaunted economy of expression. Every superfluous word matters here. Often, unfortunately, you simply have to inflate Kafka’s phrasing. German might be notorious for long sentences, among other things, yet case and gender markings allow for adjectives to become nouns with enviable concision. Witness the subtitle of Amerika. Our The Man Who Disappeared seems ponderous next to Kafka’s typically lean Der Verschollene. Verschollen comes from the verb verschallen, which denotes sound dying out. Quite a bit of that happens in the passage cited above. But which sounds fade away into the blackness? Karl’s “calling” (Hofmann)? Or his “shouting” (Muir)? Hofmann again offers the more effective translation. For the word that Kafka uses, rufen, has “to call” as its primary meaning, and what Karl says amounts almost to a supplication. While Karl’s proposal to grant Robinson and Delamarche, two alcoholic journeymen, “immunity” has an officious tone, Karl is not so much trying to cajole them into a deal as pleading with them. His invocation of semi-technical legal terminology (“immunity from prosecution”), which Hofmann renders better than the Muirs, is a measure of his benightedness. Twice expelled—first

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by his parents, for having been “seduced” by a maid, then by his American uncle, also under morally ambiguous circumstances—Karl faces yet another separation. Now he stands to lose not only his one social connection, but his only image of his parents as well (i.e., the photograph). Karl becomes contemplative, rather than angry. As he walks away from Robinson and Delemarche, he is “reflecting.” “Interrupting himself ” (“im Nachdenken sich unterbrechend;” both Hofmann and the Muirs lose that auto-interruption), Karl stops and speaks, in an attempt to prevent his image of home from disappearing and his traveling companions from doing likewise. It is in this context that he either calls or shouts. While the Muirs miss one opportunity to register the beseeching something in Karl’s words, they pursue another too far. They have Karl “wait in case the men above him might change their minds.” But in the original, Kafka’s narrator does not tell us where the men are. The Muirs extrapolate from the line: Karl “shouted up into the darkness,” then add that extrapolation to the text, probably because doing so bolsters their interpretation of it. For if the novel is a religious allegory, then Karl should direct his appeals upward, even if the men above him are lowly types. Hofmann does just the opposite, perhaps in order to distance himself from the Muirs. Rather than overemphasizing Kafka’s spatial index, Hofmann deletes it, translating the verb “to call upward” (heraufrufen) as “to call.” His Karl merely “called into the darkness.” Less explicably, Hofmann drops the words “at intervals” (“mit Abständen”) from the sentence in which Karl repeatedly states: “I’m still here!” This is too bad. Only through “at intervals” do we know that Karl waits—and do suspect that he hopes in vain—before

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he again asserts his presence. Removing the phrase therefore dulls Kafka’s evocation of hope giving way to futility, which is a basic principle in Amerika, as Hofmann’s own introduction stresses. There Hofmann writes, “While ... the book’s plunging onward movement breeds hope, its cyclical organization guarantees doom.” And so we arrive at the last lines of the passage. Hofmann closes well: he displays inventiveness and sensitivity. Meanwhile, the Muirs falter. Their “chance-stone” anticipates Harry Potter’s magical props better than it captures Kafka. But the more serious problems are more subtle. According to the Muir translation, after Karl repeatedly tells Robinson and Delamarche that, in fact, he is still there, “no sound came in reply, except that a stone rolled down the slope.” Nothing in the German corresponds precisely to the word “except.” It is another addition, one that affects Kafka’s sentence in two ways. First, if the sound of the rolling stone is an exception to the absence of an “answering sound,” to use Hofmann’s apt phrase, then it must be an answering sound. However, as Hofmann’s version indicates, all we really learn is that “there was no answering sound,” and that “just once a stone rolled down the slope.” Since we do not know whether any sound would constitute an answering sound, we do not know enough to suggest, as the Muirs do, that no sound answered Karl, except the sound of the rolling stone. All this sounds like hair-splitting, no doubt. Yet the ambiguity at issue here has an important role. It lingers in the speculations with which Kafka leaves us. For don’t those final clauses (“perhaps by chance, perhaps it was a misaimed throw”) ask whether the rolling stone is an answer, whether it is a crude reply that has missed its mark, just as Karl’s words seem to have missed theirs?

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The second problem with the Muirs’ “except” has to do with rhythm and irony. Kafka’s sentence has a paratactic structure. Its four clauses—none of which are subordinate—are juxtaposed rather starkly: no conjunctions or connecting phrases link them together. Not only that, the second clause (a stone rolled down the slope) pushes against the first clause (no sound answered), while the fourth clause (perhaps it was a misaimed throw) and the third clause (perhaps by chance) speculate in opposite directions. Each clause has the weight of an independent thought; each clause counterbalances a neighboring clause. This taut syntactical and semantic standoff results in a deliberate, verse-like rhythm, which Hofmann translates nicely, and which, in turn, produces a comic contrast. In portentous cadences we come to a tawdry possibility: that someone has thrown a stone, presumably at someone else, and missed. Because the Muirs’ “except” sets up a subordinate clause, they lose Kafka’s paratactic tension. Along with it they lose some of Kafka’s humor. Line by line, Hofmann brings forth superior, if not always unimpeachable, judgment. And his edition offers all the advantages of the restored text: Brod’s fatuous ending has been excised; several fragments have been added; various orthographical inconsistencies have been reintroduced, though Hofmann stops short of writing New York as “Newyork” as Kafka did. By getting closer to the original text on both the micro level of structural idiosyncrasies and individual usages and the macro level of general consistency, Hofmann has raised the bar for English-language Kafka translators. More immediately, however, he has given us a truer, more chilling Amerika. His timing is good, too.

13 The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and the Task of the Retranslator

When a key text has not yet been translated with great fidelity, it often happens that the first retranslation of it is at once awkwardly faithful and too technical, with the latter problem occurring where the retranslation’s answers to linguistic conundrums speak to experts, but leave everyone else tripping over ponderous phrasing. Thus initial retranslations frequently wind up being less engaging than the semi-competent original translations they are supposed to supplant. Witness how, for the most part, the first English re-renderings of Kafka’s major novels disappointed Kafka enthusiasts, many of whom, understandably, preferred the old Muir translations. And so when setting out on a retranslation project, it would be wise to reflect on how you aim to improve upon an existing translation, while avoi­ ding the perils of retranslation. By “you,” I mean, of course, myself as well. Indeed, as I embarked on my own retranslation undertaking,

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I attempted to think through how I could rise to the challenge laid out above. What follows is an account of that effort. My “key text” is really a classic one. Or rather, it is the classic Jewish autobiography written in German: Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte (1792–93), the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon. In a 1789 letter to Kant, who saw him as his, Kant’s, sharpest critic, Maimon describes himself as someone “condemned at birth to live out the best years of my life in the woods of Lithuania,” until he finally had the good fortune to get to Berlin, “late though it was.” Maimon’s time in Berlin would not last much longer. Having Kant’s respect gave Maimon enormous cachet among the educated Jews of the city, but Maimon’s predilection for liquor and brothels and all kinds of intellectual and theological provocation kept wearing away the support of his Jewish patrons, forcing him to leave. He spent the last years of his short life (1753–1800) on the estate of Baron Wilhelm Adolf von Kalckreuth, where he produced some of the philosophical works that Fichte, in underlining the extent of his debt to Maimon, described as the link between Kant’s critical project and Hegel’s absolute idealism. By applying robust criteria for the validity of knowledge, he revealed that even Kant’s attempt to limit epistemological claims to the realm of possible experience could not be secured without a substantial ontological presupposition. Kant, Maimon showed, faced a vexing choice: to either adopt elements from the rationalist metaphysics he set out to challenge or accept that his system would itself be vulnerable to rational skepticism. While raising important objections to Kant’s critical idealism, Maimon also developed deep insights into the problems of experience and givenness. His “skeptically rationalist” claims about the nature and limits of human cognition offered an original and compelling

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perspective on the Kantian project of transcendental idealism, as well as on central epistemological issues concerning the relation between thought and the world. It wasn’t long after writing to Kant that Maimon began to compose his autobiography, which first appeared in the form of fragments in the pioneering periodical Maimon coedited with Karl Philipp Moritz, The Journal of Empirical Psychology. The book recounts the story of his childhood and his early Jewish studies, and also tells of how he outraged rabbinic authorities, spurned the Hasidic enthusiasm of the Maggid of Mezheritch, befriended and then alienated Moses Mendelssohn, and won over, at least for a time, many other personages. Maimon’s life narrative, as he related it, was an instant success: no less celebrities than Schiller and Goethe praised it effusively. For later generations, Maimon’s autobiography became, as Marcus Moseley has claimed, the paradigmatic work of Jewish auto­ biography. Indeed, during the two centuries after its publication, almost every major German-Jewish philosophical and literary figure read and commented on the book. Among them were Heinrich Heine, Berthold Auerbach, Hermann Cohen, Ernst Cassirer, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Franz Kafka, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Maimon’s Autobiography was first—and until now, last—translated into English in 1884, by J. Clark Murray, professor of moral psychology at McGill University, who sought out Maimon’s book after seeing the reference to it in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Though generally usable, Murray’s rendering lost much of Maimon’s scabrously humorous tone, his philosophical precision, and what might be called his Jewish nuance.

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A characteristic example is where Murray renders the verb “umfassen” as “to grasp all around,” presumably in order to reproduce a prominent aspect of Maimon’s distinction between “fassen” (to grasp) and “umfassen.” Murray keeps the repetition present in the original text, where, needless to say, we have two forms of the same verb, “fassen.” He thereby conveys to the reader that Maimon is distinguishing between concepts that share a base metaphor. But the term “grasping all around” does not effectively evoke what Maimon means by “umfassen.” For Maimon does not have in mind a process of total or complete grasping, which is what “grasping all around” suggests. Rather, Maimon is describing a process of “encompassing within”—“encompass” is a standard connotation of “umfassen”—as over against a mode of comprehension that does not place an object within a certain kind of larger thought context. Thus it seems fair to claim that Murray blurs a relatively clear and rather crucial distinction between two forms of mental activity. At the same time, Murray’s translation abounds with quaint usages that soften the brutality so pervasive in the world of Maimon’s youth. Where, for example, Maimon discusses wolves being able to “kill sheep whenever they wanted to,” Murray writes of wolves “worrying sheep at their convenience.” This translation is, in fact, doubly unfortunate. For today’s readers, “worrying” does not in the first place evoke violent action. Moreover, because we generally do not regard animals as experiencing situations as convenient or inconvenient, Murray’s phrase “at their convenience” makes Maimon’s recollection seem odd rather than menacing, even vaguely farcical. Murray also domesticates Maimon’s text where its linguistic rough­ ness is significant: where it is an important part of his unique voice.

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By contrast, I have in mind to evoke—where possible—Maimon’s tendency to employ syntactical structures that are common in his native Yiddish, but that are not quite consistent with German grammar. Certain instances of such constructions have English equivalents; that is, there are equivalent constructions in English that will be recognizable to many readers as Yiddish-inflected language (e.g., “he wanted I should go”). Whereas Murray recast these moments as “normal” English, I will attempt to reproduce their “ethnic character.” I want to stress, however, that I will be proceeding with great caution here. Maimon has a reputation for having developed a sort of German-Yiddish idiolect. But this reputation is based to a large extent on reports of Maimon’s spoken German. Composed for a broad audience, and thoroughly edited by Maimon’s friend Karl Philipp Moritz, the Lebensgeschichte is a relatively fluid text, much of which, therefore, should be rendered into relatively fluid English. Furthermore, while I would be doing readers a disservice by putting too much emphasis on making Maimon’s prose overly accessible, that is, the same disservice that Murray did them, they would be served just as poorly if I failed to take into account both their expectations and my own limitations. Many of us, it seems, read translations in a particular way. Even readers who are keenly aware of the grammatical idiosyncrasies in an original text are likely to be distracted rather than intrigued by corresponding formulations in a translation, as informal responses to drafts of my translation suggest. And in addition to the tricky matter of special reader expectations, there is the fact that German and Yiddish have a special relationship. They are closely related language systems, and because of this proximity, the pulling of German into

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Yiddish syntactical patterns can, and in Maimon’s case does, manifest itself much more subtly than the equivalent process with English and Yiddish. For many of Maimon’s German readers, moreover, Yiddish had the status of a dialect, and thus those readers would have regarded his moments of irregular syntax as dialect-influenced German. As I stated above, one should try to retain Maimon’s irregularities in English, but what one generally cannot do, since Maimon’s was not a German spiced with Yiddish words, is convey their linguistic logic and reproduce their cultural meaning, that is, how they signal Maimon’s cultural provenance. Without such meaning or legibility, and when no longer identifiable as connected to a related language system (as a dialect, that is), Maimon’s grammatical deviance becomes, for the most part, simply ungainly—an obstructive, awkwardly salvaged sign that would promote misapprehension and frustration. Otherwise put, carrying over into English every instance of grammatical deviance in the Lebensgeschichte would distract readers, drawing their attention too often to the translation, and thereby attenuating an important part of the experience of reading the book: the pleasure. The same goes for Maimon’s coiling sentences, which purists would have me keep more or less intact. Breaking the sentences up does, indeed, alter the rhythm of Maimon’s prose. But long sentences are much more common in German than they are in English, and so they and, in turn, their authors will be received differently, or as windier than they really are, when those sentences are carried over intact into English. Similarly, portraying Maimon as a kind of generic nonnative speaker, which would be a further effect of universally retaining his nonstandard usages, would do little to convey the peculiarity of

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his voice. It would, in fact, distort his voice, since Maimon hardly sounds like a generic nonnative speaker of the language in which he was writing. As I see it, the often-repeated call to make a text that sounded strange in the original sound strange in translation overlooks the fact that there are different types of strangeness, which carry different meanings. It would be relatively easy to give a noncolloquial air to Maimon’s prose, but I am wary of making Maimon “sound strange” in English in a way that does not quite correspond to the way he sounds strange in German, since this, too, would alter the effects of his writing. If, in the end, I produce an autobiography that feels more polished than the original, I will not have done so naively, or simply to spare readers difficulty. Rather than focusing on recreating Maimon’s syntactical and grammatical peculiarities, I have as my main concern the related, but certainly not coextensive, matter of rendering his voice more adequately. “More adequately,” because, again, the really crucial flaw in Murray’s translation is that it does not begin to rise to this challenge. Consider the following passage from part one of the autobiography. My translation reads: I had, as I have mentioned, a great love of painting. But my friends advised me not to give myself over to it. For I was no longer young, and, consequently, I would not have the patience necessary for the precision work that painting requires. Someone finally suggested that I study the art of pharmacy. Because I already had some knowledge of both physics and chemistry, I decided to act on this idea. Yet I never intended to make practical use of my expertise. Rather, I wanted to acquire only contemplative,

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theoretical knowledge. So instead of participating directly in the most important work with chemicals, I remained a spectator. I thus learned the art of pharmacy without becoming a pharmacist. After my three-year apprenticeship, H.J.D. gave Madame Rosen— in whose store I had studied—the sixty thalers she had been promised. I received a certificate documenting that I was learned in the art of pharmacy. Everything seemed to be in order. Yet this episode did a great deal to drive away my friends. And in the end Mendelssohn summoned me, took me aside, told me of my friends’ growing disaffection, and laid out its causes: 1) My life had no direction whatsoever, and I had rendered fruitless all of my friends’ attempts to give me guidance; 2) I had been spreading harmful ideas and philosophical systems; 3) My lifestyle was thought to be dissolute, and I had a reputation for being an ardent devotee of sensual pleasure. I countered the first reproach by citing the fact that from the very beginning, I had told my friends of how my special upbringing had left me unsuited for practical undertakings—and with a proclivity for the quiet, speculative life. Furthermore, this life could both enable me to satisfy my natural inclinations and serve as a means of income (e.g., through information and such things). “As to the second point,” I continued, “my opinions and systems are either true or false.” If they are true, then I do not know how knowledge of the truth could be harmful. If, however, they are false, then let people refute them. I have shared my views only with Herr A., Herr B. Herr C., and Herr, D., who, as enlightened men, seek to get beyond all prejudice. Yet it is not the harmful character of my

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views that has led these men to turn against me. Rather, what has been motivating them is their inability to understand my ideas, as well as their desire to avoid a humiliating confession to that effect. As to the third reproach, I say to you, Herr Mendelssohn, nothing less than this: We are all epicureans. Moralists can merely give us the rules for practical success, i.e., they can give us rules for finding the right means to achieve established goals. But they cannot prescribe the goals themselves. “Still,” I added, “I realize that I must leave Berlin. Where will I go? It does not matter.” And with that, I said goodbye to Mendelssohn. He gave me a statement testifying, in very strong terms, to my abilities and talents, and wished me a pleasant trip. Among other things, the passage showcases Maimon’s combination of intellectual intensity and extreme impishness. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his frustration at encountering biases and petty insecurities in men who presented themselves as “enlightened.” Yet Maimon also seems to be taking pleasure in playing himself off against the more assimilated, more straight-laced Mendelssohn. Or rather, Maimon seems to be delighting in playing a mischievous game of self-fashioning that involves both mimicking the Talmudic style of argument he often purported to disdain and offering up colorfully blatant contradictions. He speaks, after all, of wanting to lead a “quiet, speculative life,” then proceeds to defend a sybaritic lifestyle that included visits to brothels and heavy drinking. Beyond that, Maimon claims that the life of contemplation will be a means of earning a living, just after stressing his unwillingness to make his knowledge remunerative (through the pharmacy episode). And the sample

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“occupation” that Maimon lists to support his statements about the practicality of the impractical life is so vague and nonlucrative as to seem almost deliberately unconvincing (“through lessons”). Readers of the Murray edition will miss out on that move completely, because Murray replaces the rather unclear and unpromising prospect of “through lessons” with the straightforwardly plausible idea of “teaching.” This, then, is my plan for retranslating The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon. Given the intransigence of the difficulties I will be facing, the result of acting on it will no doubt feel inadequate, in various ways, even to readers unable to understand the original German text. But if, to borrow a line from Walter Benjamin, there is such a thing as a “beautiful failure,” certainly there can also be an appealing one. Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad way of describing Maimon’s life.

14 The Poetics and Politics of Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Can a bad economy make for great poetry? Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought so. Indeed, he saw his own gift for lyrical writing and reflection as being, in a way, a consequence of the stock market crash of 1873. This self-understanding starts with the fact that Hofmannsthal was conceived at the very moment of the bust. His father, a banker, got word of it soon after arriving in Naples for his honeymoon. Cutting his trip short, the newlywed hurried back to Vienna, where he confirmed that the family fortune, which stemmed from his silk-trading, titleof-nobility-earning, orthodox Jewish grandfather, was no more. But even harder hit, Hofmannsthal believed, was his mother. She had weak nerves to begin with: according to him, the cause was the tumultuous context of her own birth—the uprisings of 1848. So when the shock of financial worry came, she dealt with it poorly, falling into a long-term panic. In Hofmannsthal’s view, his mother’s stress imprinted itself on him as he left the womb. Its mark was the special sensitivity of the poet.

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This foray into neonatal autobiography is part of a familiar pattern: Hofmannsthal was an author who liked to spin myths about himself. Yet in treating his talent as the kind of phenomenon that demands a genesis story, he was merely acknowledging what was plain to see. Even Karl Kraus—who loathed Hofmannsthal and seized every opportunity to debunk his self-stylizing—registered Hofmannsthal’s greatness as a writer. In a fin de siècle Viennese literary scene famously well stocked with brilliant Dichter und Denker. Hofmannsthal had the rare power to astound. It helped that he entered the scene so very young. He was still in high school, still a Knabe in short pants, when, under the pseudonym “Loris,” he began placing essays and poems in the city’s best journals. But not only did Hofmannsthal’s precociousness seem unrivaled, but his formal virtuosity and the refinement of his observations soon did as well. Here is Arthur Schnitzler evoking his impression of a reading Hofmannsthal gave in 1892, at the age of eighteen: After a few minutes we riveted our attention on him, and exchanged astonished, almost frightened glances. We had never heard such verses of perfection, such faultless plasticity, such musical feeling, from any living being, nor had we thought them possible after Goethe. But more wondrous than this unique mastery of form (which has never since been achieved in the German language) was his knowledge of the world, which could only have come from a magical intuition in a youth whose days were spent sitting on the school bench. If Goethe is an apt point of comparison, so is Mozart, as Hermann Broch once suggested. For Hofmannsthal, too, had a father for

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whom aesthetic education was the pedagogical priority. As an adult, Hofmannsthal would depend on the revenues his writings generated—they were his livelihood, or at least much of it—but his patrician father stressed the arts as a way of life, rather than as a means to an end. “What alone mattered,” as Carl Schorske put it, “is that the boy cultivate his faculties for the optimum enjoyment of refined leisure.” In an environment where gifted authors were beginning to find inspiration in French symbolism, this upbringing helped produce an “early ripened” poet whose incandescence was more sunset than sunrise. Or to speak with Schorske again, young Hofmannsthal’s language “glowed darkly with purple and gold, shimmered with world-weary mother-of-pearl.” Or—better still—consider a few lines from the poem “An Experience” (1892): What wondrous flowers had bloomed there, Cups of colors darkly glowing! And a thicket Amidst which a flame like topaz rushed, Now surging, now gleaming in its molten course. All of it seemed filled with the deep swell Of a mournful music. This much I knew, Though I cannot understand it—I knew That this was Death, transmuted into music, Violently yearning, sweet, dark, burning, Akin to deepest sadness. Not everyone was enamored of this style and the outlook that seemed to go with it. An avid collector of porcelain who contributed poems to Stefan George’s rarified Blätter für die Kunst, Hofmannsthal attracted, in addition to praise, the charge of aestheticist decadence. It was Kraus

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who leveled the accusation most forcefully. Early in Hofmannsthal’s career, Kraus mocked him as a gatherer of precious “gems,” who “flees life,” while worshipping “the things that prettify it.” The criticism stuck, but it was hardly fair. From the start, in fact, Hofmannsthal expressed doubts about the very tendencies that Kraus associated with him. Doing some mocking of his own, Hofmannsthal once spoke of how counting as “modern” seemed to mean displaying “new neuroses and old furniture.” And while aestheticist escape is an important theme in his works from the 1890s, it is dramatized as a problem, rather than as an ideal. Part of the problem, as Hofmannsthal saw it, was that late-Habsburg life did not allow for a flight into the realm of art. The reason was that “the nature of our epoch” has to do precisely with “multiplicity and indeterminacy,” with the experience—so keenly felt and captured in fin de siècle Vienna—of established spheres, orders, and beliefs breaking down. Aestheticist escapism would thus be selfdelusional, even self-destructive. Hofmannsthal first brought the new instabilities under a heading in 1905. It was then that he labeled them “drift,” or “das Gleitende.” But his interest in such processes had begun at least a decade earlier. We find it, for example, in the short story “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” (1895). Here a young man who is “very handsome” and wealthy, and whose entire family appears to have perished, decides to withdraw from social interaction. Like his late businessman father, only more so, the unnamed protagonist surrounds himself with beautiful things. He spends his days gazing at them, becoming a figure much lionized in symbolist writing: a solitary student of interconnectedness. Indeed, the young man sees “how all the shapes and colors of the world lived in his artifacts.” Yet

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for all its structural simplicity, his life is not free of complications. Four servants inhabit his house, and the thought of their remaining days going by in this “airless” setting haunts him, not least because it also draws his attention to his own death. Beyond that, two of the servants are adolescent girls, and one of them harbors an ominous, possibly class-based resentment toward the young man, while the beauty of the other awakens in him an unwelcome “longing.” It is the sole male servant, however, who sets the young man’s undoing into motion. Having met this “mulberrycolored” person at the local residence maintained by the “envoy of the Persian king,” and having hired him away after a chance encounter, the young man has grown strongly attached to his somewhat exotic and extraordinarily “tactful” servant. So when the servant’s former employer sends a letter in which, with a menacing tone, he accuses the servant of committing an “abominable crime,” the young man is disquieted in the extreme. Determined to clear up his Eastern problem, he goes to the envoy’s house. But the envoy is not there, and the young man soon finds himself wandering in a shabby part of town at once new to him and oddly familiar. At first, the oddly familiar effects are comforting, even vaguely arousing. For the young man sees objects that make him think of things that, in turn, he associates with both his motherly older female servant and the delicate body of the attractive young one. Soon enough, though, the uncanniness of the situation becomes threatening. Having drifted into a greenhouse that evokes his own beloved garden, the young man notices a small child who has exactly the same face as his hostile female servant, and is staring at him with unconcealed animus. This unnerves him utterly. He attempts to placate

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the girl by giving her money, but she rejects his offering, dropping it at his feet. As his coins slip through cracks in the floor, the feeling of groundlessness induced by all the doubling is coupled with a sense of powerlessness, and the young man further loses composure, so much so that he flees. But flight only makes his situation worse. In his frantic search for a back exit, he wrecks the greenhouse, and when he manages to get outside, he winds up on a plank, dangerously suspended above a kind of urban abyss. We know by now that the protagonist’s crisis can have only one outcome: the young man will soon be fatally kicked in the groin by a horse. Well, perhaps this manner of death is not quite so easy to predict, but the closing symbol for which it allows is hardly surprising. Lying in great pain, aware that he is dying, the young man becomes increasingly bitter. He blames his servants for his demise; hates his life for having ended prematurely; and renounces “everything once dear to him.” Then the handsome young aesthete “brings up bile and blood” and dies alone “with deformed features,” his final expression a hideous grimace. In 1902, Hofmannsthal wrote what would become his most famous meditation on the themes of withdrawal, drift, and crisis, “The Letter of Lord Chandos.” Here, however, the order is changed around. Chandos, once a promising writer in Elizabethan England, stops working and pulls back because of a crisis that has to do with a sudden inability to organize the world. What he calls his “disease of the mind” seems close to being a sort of referential mania. As Chandos explains, in his letter to his friend Francis Bacon, he had formerly “conceived the whole of existence as one great unit,” but then “everything disintegrated into parts, and those parts into parts again.”

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The result is that all description feels hopelessly inadequate: “no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.” Words now taste stale in Chandos’s mouth; they are like “moldy mushrooms” on his tongue. Gone, too, in the face of so much of “das Gleitende” are the relationships among verbal units that enable language to function as a coherent system. The effect is frightful: “Single words floated around me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back—whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.” Chandos can still write brilliantly—he provides, after all, a vivid account of his linguistic troubles—but he nevertheless feels that silence is the only way for him. Although Hofmannsthal’s own productivity remained steady, the “Chandos Letter” has often been seen as an “autobiographical confession.” The case for this reading, which J. D. McClatchy advances in his introduction to The Whole Difference, turns largely on the fact that Hofmannsthal’s career changed course not long after the “Chandos Letter” had appeared. Hofmannsthal “abandoned his lyrical isolation,” McClatchy asserts, and sought in the public forms of drama and opera the things for which Chandos longs: “A hopeful new relationship with the whole of existence.” For McClatchy, Hofmannsthal moved from “the mystic to the moral.” By operating in a “social context that restores language to community,” he simultaneously overcame his lingering aestheticism and his “language skepticism.” Here, then, Hofmannsthal’s artistic biography has a heroic arc. Indeed, McClatchy sweepingly presents Hofmannsthal as a great humanist in dark times. He even declares—without any supporting exposition— that Der Rosenkavalier has, thanks to its “similarity to Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro and Wagner’s Meistersinger,” a “rare place among the most

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humane works of art ever conceived.” The motivation for hazarding such claims seems to be a perceived need to sell Hofmannsthal. As McClatchy notes, Hofmannsthal is known in the English-speaking world mostly for his libretti, and he is read—and admired—much less than many other Central European modernists. It may be for the same reason that McClatchy goes for likeability in his sketch of Hofmannsthal’s personality, minimizing or leaving out his subject’s enduring ambivalences and troubling sides. All this promoting does not serve its cause well. In fact, in McClatchy’s hands the story of Hofmannsthal’s life and work becomes nobler, but also less complex and therefore duller, than it was. Take the post-Chandos turn. It is true that Hofmannsthal began to write plays and, in collaboration with Richard Strauss, operas a few years after the publication of the “Letter.” And it is also true that Hofmannsthal tried to make theater into a means of community building. But it is hardly clear that a resolute humanism on his part prompted and guided his efforts. Indeed, the politics of Hofmannsthal’s involvement with the Salzburg Theater Festival, which he helped resurrect after the First World War, has long been a controversial topic. One historian, for example, recently described Hofmannsthal’s play Salzburg’s Great World Theater as having “a tendency to cultural totality,” and thus as having been, in effect, a proto-fascist spectacle. In trying to make this sort of case, commentators have drawn heavily on Hofmannsthal’s essays and speeches from the wartime and interwar years. For here Hofmannsthal’s “conservative imagination,” as McClatchy calls it, sometimes has a far-right feel. More specifically, as Hofmannsthal struggled to define post-Habsburg Austrian identity, he exalted the authentic character of Volk culture at the expense of

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what he termed “the intellectuality of the educated.” Hence the line, “When one considers the strongest representatives of our literature, one can speak of a poetry of peasants.” Along with such thinking went a valorizing of nonrational, mystical states of mind: “In the depths of nature where the Volk has its being, just as in those dark depths of the individual, where the border between the mental and the somatic grows hazy, reflection and knowledge are out of place, and only desire and faith are at home.” Despite the fact that Hofmannsthal had a non-Jewish mother and a full set of grandparents whose Konfession was some form of Catholicism, he was often regarded as a “Jewish artist.” In some cases, Hofmannsthal’s work was claimed as a German-Jewish literary accomplishment, as the volume Jews in German Literature (1922) did. In publicly enthusing about Austrian peasant poets, he may, on some level, have been trying to shake this perception. Seeing himself categorized in that way bothered him and not only as a matter of principle. His own estimation of Viennese Jews could be, after all, witheringly negative. It was especially vitriolic during the last part of his life, or from the beginning of the First World War until his death in 1929. Tellingly, when Hofmannsthal became engaged to a (soon-to-be-baptized) Jewish woman in 1905, he merely worried that the “trait of Jewish hyper-cleverness” would manifest itself in his children. But in 1917 we find him taking it upon himself to warn a non-Jewish friend about “educated Viennese Jews,” a group he now purported to regard “with genuine hatred and disgust.” For these “lemurs of a parasitical existence” are the “worst of the worst.” Having “no substance, no respect” and “no piety,” they go around “touching everything, licking

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everything, dissolving everything, discussing everything to death.” This is not to suggest that Hofmannthal became a bigoted churl; he remained, in some ways, a warm person (Jakob Wassermann said about him that he was “made for friendship like no else.”). And neither is it to imply that Hofmannthal’s dramatic works lack a “humane” perspective (the two included in The Whole Difference, The Difficult Man and The Tower, are good places to find it.). The point, again, is that McClatchy buries meaningful tensions underneath prettifying impressions like this one: Hofmannsthal “occasionally engaged in the casual antisemitism that was so common at the time.” Still, The Whole Difference has its merits, and they are substantial. McClatchy, himself an acclaimed poet, offers a beautiful account of Hofmannsthal’s particular gift for lyric forms. And he has rendered seven of Hofmannsthal’s poems beautifully. Witness the lines from “An Experience” cited above, which come from McClatchy’s translation. But McClatchy’s renderings seem to be the only new ones in the entire volume, and the quality of the old translation—some of which have been around since Hofmannthal’s day—is mixed. Not only that, several of his most important works, for example, “The Chandos Letter,” are among the least competently translated. So while it is certainly handy to have in-print English samples of Hofmannsthal’s poetry, essays, short fiction, and major dramas, The Whole Difference feels, on balance, like not enough.

Part FIVE

Studying German Jewry

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15 Kafka’s Identity Politics

Most Jews who began writing in German wanted to get away from Judaism ... but their hind legs were still stuck to the Jewishness of their fathers, and with their front legs they could find no new ground. Their despair over this was their inspiration. Franz Kafka

In 1949 Germany celebrated Goethe’s 200th birthday. Still picking their way out of the material and psychological rubble left by the war, Germanists in the fledgling Federal Republic used the occasion to try to construct a positive cultural identity. They praised Goethe, the life-affirming humanist, suggesting that at the center of real German culture we find, paradoxically, a bighearted cosmopolitanism. Goethe also became a kind of escape route out of so much ugliness and into a realm of beautiful neoclassical forms. For, with only a few exceptions, German mandarins, including several ex-Nazis, claimed that the proper way to access Goethe’s humanizing effect was to cultivate a rigorous appreciation for his lyrical genius. Pursuing references to politics and history would only deflect attention from what was really important: the poetic text.

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Germanists in the United States held to a similar formalism. Worried about the political contamination of their field, they found a powerful ally in the Anglo-American method of retreating from a shattered reality and into closed forms, New Criticism. This they used as a justification for focusing on the measured tones of Weimar classicism and for bracketing what had taken place just outside Weimar, in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Things soon changed. With his famous dictum, “To write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno played herald to an era in which it would eventually become difficult to read German poetry without considering its relation to the Holocaust. Some Goethe scholars may still cling to the hagiography of the late forties and early fifties, but the mainstream has been rushing past them. Last year, on his 250th birthday, Goethe was often on trial. At commemorative conferences and in countless public discussions both here and in Germany, the central question was the “Jewish Question.” What should we make of the great humanist’s not-always-so-humane utterances about, and representations of, German Jews? Indeed, today, in the era of cultural studies, the questions that Germanists ask most avidly may well be: How has modern German literature participated in the fateful construction of German-Jewish identity? And how, in turn, has the enduring crisis of German-Jewish identity figured in the development of modern German literature? Two new books add breadth and depth to these discussions: Ritchie Robertson’s The “Jewish Question” in German Literature, 1749–1939, and Scott Spector’s Prague Territories. Robertson surveys the tradition, pointing out meaningful patterns and counterintuitive moments. Spector penetrates deeply into the works of the German-speaking

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Jews of the “Prague circle,” shedding light on the intricate particularity of the link between writing and cultural identity in Kafka’s context. Moving with impressive dexterity between micro and macro levels of analysis, Spector also finds in this setting general theoretical reasons for studying the Jewish Question in German literature at the turn of our own century. Robertson comes out of his corner swinging. In the book’s long first section on the German Enlightenment he argues that G. E. Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, which is generally regarded as a shining moment of eloquent tolerance in the dark history of German-Jewish relations, has an exclusionary subtext. Kant gets a similar treatment. So does Goethe, whose anti-Semitic utterances are catalogued in detail, as are the anti-Semitic stereotypes he invokes in his works. It would be unfair, however, to portray Robertson as a muckraking polemicist. His readings are balanced—that is, he conscientiously brings both progressive and problematic attitudes to light. Furthermore, Robertson does not only go after German cultural monuments. He subjects German-Jewish writers to the same scrutiny, and this may be where his most substantial achievement lies. After working over Lessing, Robertson, who is a reader in German studies at Oxford, develops a critical analysis of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Like his friend Lessing, Mendelssohn is often viewed as the embodiment of an ideal: he achieved a high level of cultural integration, engaging Kant, among others, in conversation, without giving up his Jewishness. But Robertson contends that Mendelssohn did internalize anti-Semitic stereotypes—such as the idea that the Yiddish-inflected German spoken by many Jews was an abject ghetto language—even as he effectively debunked other

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prejudices. And under the headings “Liberalism,” “Antisemitism,” “Assimilation,” and “Dissimilation,” Robertson proceeds to locate this kind of multivalence in a long list of German-Jewish writers. Significantly enough, many of them, for example, Else Lasker-Schüler, Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Benjamin, and Elias Canetti, are seldom associated with Jewish self-hatred, and are instead held up as models of courageous and subtle self-awareness. Here Robertson’s book is enlightening. He does not suggest that we abandon the perceptions we had of these writers completely; his claim is that their cases are more complex than we have, to this point, thought. If we go through their letters, diaries, and obscure works thoroughly, we will generally find poignantly contradictory claims about German-Jewish identity. Yet Robertson’s goal is not simply to draw our attention to neglected material. He wants, rather, to explain how this material emerged out of, and contributed to, the cultural process of GermanJewish identity formation. And here Robertson’s book loses force. His appropriation of what might be loosely called cultural theory is singularly uninspired: “Here we encounter the central problem of present-day identity politics. I want an identity: I want to be able to identify myself with a larger group outside myself; I want to associate my fleeting unstable self with something at least relatively fixed. But culture is not fixed; it is continually reinvented, as we know from the plethora of books with ‘Invention’ or ‘Inventing’ in their titles.” We can only hope that this last line is meant to be a joke. Since Robertson neither articulates a coherent theoretical position of his own nor engages with the works on identity that he obliquely refers to here, it is difficult to tell. He simply covers pages with commonplaces about how minority cultures often attempt to gain acceptance by

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conforming to the standards of the dominant culture. When he attempts to do more—by using Sander Gilman’s influential theory of Jewish self-hatred to interpret the anti-Semitism of writers who also proudly identified with Jewish culture—Robertson does himself a disservice. Gilman’s theory has explanatory power where self-hatred is a thoroughgoing psychological affliction; where it is occasional, and even ironic, a different approach is in order. Robertson even suggests as much—but then proves unable to act on his own advice. The space left open by the absence of a theoretical framework for identity-building is filled up instead with moralizing. Indeed, Robertson perfunctorily upbraids every German-Jewish writer who did not manage to anticipate the multiculturalism of the 1990s. Neither does he delve beneath the surface to locate literary responses to the Jewish Question where they are not immediately manifest. He even fails to do this with the Viennese modernists, his own area of expertise: Schnitzler is criticized for having cynically portrayed Jews as incapable of profound artistic expression in The Road into the Open, when in fact the aesthetic intensity of his novel belies these representations. Like Kafka, Schnitzler might have sometimes regarded German Jews as linguistically effete. However, and perhaps for this reason (despair may have been their inspiration, to paraphrase Kafka), their books tell a different story, at least on the level of form. Robertson does not get to this level. He avoids what could have been a deep reading of the significance of the Jewish Question for German literature and, by extension, the significance of German literature for the Jewish Question. But his lucidly written book does offer an excellent survey of relevant sources, and it will be a very useful guide for those interested in the subject.

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Prague Territories excels in precisely the area where Robertson disappoints: the politics of form. And unlike many students of German-Jewish culture, Spector, who teaches history and German studies at the University of Michigan, pays close attention to regional differences. His argument, in fact, is that Prague was different, even “extraordinary,” and that its extraordinary difference has to do with the political significance of cultural forms. According to Spector, in turn-of-the-century Prague, cultural forms were caught up in an unusually dense web of identity politics, as the German minority invoked its major culture—the “universalist” ideal of a German cultural mission—to support its claims to political domination over an increasingly assertive Czech majority. Germanspeaking Jews in Prague found themselves in a strange and tenuous situation: They were a minority within a majority culture that was sustained by a minority! This is the context in which something like Kafka’s literary creativity became possible, Spector contends. “These layers of identity trapped the young Prague German-speaking Jews between identities inside and outside the power structure, so that an analysis of their literary products as representations of ‘minority culture’ is itself problematic. I will argue that it is in the uniquely charged space between identities—social identities, but also national, spiritual and political identities—that the creative moment of the Prague circle takes place.” The formal innovativeness of the Prague circle (Kafka, Max Brod, Egon Kisch, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, and Franz Werfel) emerges from, and responds to, a “uniquely charged” crisis of cultural identity. Kafka, Spector points out, insistently figured language as a kind of cultural “territory” (Besitz), which strongly suggests that, for him,

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writing was thoroughly politicized. Thus Spector rebuts one of the most influential readings of fin de siècle Central European cultural efflorescence (according to which the rapid growth in the arts was made possible through a turning away from politics by the heirs to a flagging post-1848 bourgeois liberal tradition—on the part, that is, of young men like Kafka and the other Prague circle members). But Spector does not try to frame the art of the Prague circle as a calculated political subversion. Hence his claim that the idea of a “deterritorializing minority culture,” a culture that strategically displaces the major culture from within by reconfiguring its elements (for example, by mixing high and low cultural forms, as Kafka often did; consider the pathos of his talking animals), does not quite apply here. Refining another famous interpretation of artistic creativity in fin de siècle Central Europe, Spector argues that Kafka’s relation to art can be viewed also as an inheritance of German cultural nationalism. Kafka may have found that culture to be largely vacuous. However, his desire for some kind of redemptive cultural unity and his use of culture as a vehicle for self-definition are rooted in very particular appropriations of the German culture in which he grew up. Kafka wound up creating a rich “minor literature” only because the unproblematic “linguistic existence” with which he identified—Yiddish—and after which he strove proved to be impossible. “The Prague circle writers opened their eyes to see themselves precariously suspended between territories, with no firm ground beneath their feet, and grasped at the air.” Hence the pervasive, probing melancholy in Kafka’s writing, and its famous ontological absurdities: “There is plenty of hope, just not for us.” The provocative implication is that Kafka’s singularly critical works, his de facto minority literature, depended on a futile search for

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something like a nineteenth-century “universalist” majority culture, a culture with a comfortable, provincial belief in its superiority. It’s just that Kafka’s search took him ever farther away from bourgeois sanctimony and into the straining heart of modernism. Spector shows us, then, that when Kafka spoke of German Jews as caught between identities, and of “their despair over this” as “their inspiration,” he was actually speaking about German Jews in Prague. For it was in Prague that the points of identification were sufficiently sticky to produce such despair and, concomitantly, such inspiration. The irony here is that Spector’s detailed analysis of a relatively small local culture yields a greater general theoretical relevance than most broad surveys. He takes us through the “extraordinary” moment of fin de siècle Prague, in which various identity crises—Jewish, German, Czech, gender, aesthetic, political—converged in the field of culture, provoking new kinds of art, among which there were often sharp dissonances. (The “cultural production” of the Prague circle members was, he emphasizes, exceedingly diverse: Werfel’s postliberal humanist expressionism versus Brod’s eroticized Judaism versus Bergmann’s maverick Zionism versus Kafka’s minor literature.) In doing so, Spector impresses upon us that tracking the Jewish Question in German literature reveals, among other things, just how complex the relation of art and construction of cultural identity can be. And he leaves us with a formidable challenge: to situate the Jewish Question within the context of other crises of identity. This is a very valuable service, a compelling call to self-awareness at a time in which, as Robertson notes, studies on the invention of identity are coming at us in dizzying numbers.

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Prague Territories is not without its bumpy spots. I tripped over a few of Spector’s straw men: for example, where he tries to make a case for studying the politics of art by asserting, “At our own fin de siècle, the claim of a political operation of art is apparently untenable.” One wonders what Hans Haacke would make of that idea. More jarring, Spector comes very close to arguing that the Prague circle members “decentered” a “hegemonic” majority culture with unparalleled effectiveness, which would amount to locating the center of progressive modernist cultural decentering in turn-of-the-century Prague. And, in fact, Spector frequently contends that the Prague circle members were “in a privileged position vis-a-vis a set of issues at the center of the Modern.” When coupled with statements like “with a Praguer’s eye Kafka spies upon the writers of his generation, commenting as an outsider,” such claims, unfortunately, give the book a slightly programmatic feel. But for the most part, Spector channels his passion wisely. Working in between historical and formal literary analysis with great skill, he has produced a major contribution not just to German and German-Jewish studies but to the question of literature and formation of identity for us all.

16 Whose Jewish: Theorizing German-Jewish Culture

In 1934, Sigmund Freud, old, ailing, and painfully aware of the precariousness of the political situation in Austria, decided to write a book about Moses. Ostensibly, the point of Freud’s inquiry was to understand how it was that the religion Moses founded could elicit such “undying” hatred. The book turned out to be Freud’s last work, and also one of his oddest. Completed in exile in Britain, Moses and Monotheism argues—doggedly and not very convincingly—that the historical Moses was an Egyptian. Thus, at a time of unprecedented Jewish dispossession, we find Freud struggling mightily to take away Moses, too. Indeed, as he introduces his project, Freud himself states that his book will, in effect, “deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons.” For many years, Moses and Monotheism had few fans. It was even left out of the “Standard Edition” of Freud’s works. The story of its reception, however, has taken some dramatic turns recently, and the most dramatic of them comes in the first two chapters of Michael P. Steinberg’s engagingly provocative Judaism Musical and Unmusical,

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a book about the “self-consciousness” of Central European Jewry. In Steinberg’s reading, Freud, by denying “his people” Moses, does nothing other than make his greatest “gift to the Jews.” The idea on which this interpretation rests is an organizing principle in Steinberg’s book. What he admires and wants to track are certain modern Jewish “subjectivities,” ones that for him emerged vividly in Central Europe and (especially in exile) involved “resisting” the ideology of origins, “loving history,” and cultivating a reflective cosmopolitan “secularity.” The bulk of the book, therefore, focuses on works such as Benjamin’s late essays on aura (1936) and collecting (1937); Charlotte Salomon’s haunting work Leben? Oder Theater? (1940–42); and Arnaldo Momigliano’s postwar scholarship on pagans and Jews. This also explains Steinberg’s claim that Freud’s originbusting “outing and othering of Moses” should really be seen as a gift to the Jews. The categories of music and musicality serve here largely as a means of making palpable both such a notion of Jewishness and the challenges of talking about it: “At stake in the cases of both music and the Jews are non-essentializable products of history, temporally, culturally, poli­tically contingent beings, whose own subjectivities and subjectpositions are aesthetically constituted and therefore require an aesthetic dimen­sion from the discourses that attempt to understand them.” At once theoretically sophisticated and richly imaginative, Steinberg’s “constellating” of Jewishness and music could well have a substantial impact on discussions of Central European Jewish culture, where, as he emphasizes, there is a pressing need for new conceptual life. Welcome as it is, however, Judaism Musical and Unmusical also has its share of problems. Sometimes the exposition stalls on the

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level of exhortation. Consider what happens with Steinberg’s call to integrate “an aesthetic dimension” into attempts to understand “aesthetically constituted” Jewish subjectivities. In the end, Steinberg’s “reaestheticization” of his own work doesn’t appear to be particularly persuasive. His writing is frankly associative at times, moving at one point from an extended analysis of a Henry James novel to an intricate reading of a Benjamin essay, but this, needless to say, is hardly a move that pushes the discursive envelope or fundamentally bucks the conventions of academic prose. Then there is Steinberg’s emphatic, insistently restated claim about the disparities between Austrian and Prussian Jews, or “Catholic Jews” and “Protestant Jews,” as he provocatively labels them. Having noted that the historiography of modern Jewish life in Central Europe has “paid scant attention to regional differences and comparative dimensions,” he writes: “It is crucial, in my judgment, that the majority culture of the German north is Protestant; that of the south, largely Catholic.” Readers who believe that local contexts matter will agree. And they will likely be intrigued by the broad and original suggestions that Steinberg offers. Here are two: the relative “absence of an Austrian-Jewish Enlightenment” led to an “increase of pressure, for the formation of Jewish modernity, on the liberal and modernist generations after 1859”; and the culture of theater in the north was performative in its commitment to the rational, liberating word, whereas in Austria theater was performative in the sense of embodying the (baroque) cultural norms against which modernists rebelled. But when Steinberg tries to show how the cultural differences between “Protestant” and “Catholic” Jews were played out in practice,

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the results are disappointing. The problem isn’t that he quickly points to how some northern Jews evinced characteristics associated with the south. There are, after all, different routes to the same place. More important, to present the north-south divide as manifesting itself cleanly in individual actors would be to display the determinism that plagues so many studies of cultural identity, or a mode of analysis that Steinberg seeks to avoid and does indeed avoid. What goes wrong, rather, is that his attempt to make concrete north-south differences turns on a comparison of incommensurate figures: Hannah Arendt and Stefan Zweig. Can Arendt be deemed representative, as the best-selling author Zweig, whom she disdained, might be? Perhaps Arendt did draw on the “northern German” tradition of Lessing’s theater of the word, while Zweig partook of a theatrical Viennese sentimentality. For this difference to qualify as an emblematic split, which is how Steinberg describes it, Arendt’s local identification would have to have been as widespread as Zweig’s, and this is doubtful. The letdown here stands out because it comes after such a resonant call for greater rigor. More often, however, Michael Steinberg heeds his own admonitions. He does so as he takes on the politics of public commemoration in his final chapter, and also as he takes his reader through such exciting dialectical moves as the idea that self-conscious unmusicality can be a form of hypermusicality. His example is the austere music in that other perplexing late modernist work about the founding of Judaism, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron.

17 Rabbis Making Role Models: German-Jewish Middlebrow Literature

In theory, scholars of literature have blown up the canon. In practice, they often cling to it. Certainly this has been the case in GermanJewish studies, where a small number of high-flying writers—like Heine and Kafka—have commanded most of the attention. And in a way, the same goes for German-Jewish readers. Here, too, the focus has been on the high cultural—or more specifically, on German Jewry’s romance with classic works of German literature, and on the role that romance played in the process of Jewish acculturation. As one frequently cited saying had it, Jews became Germans “by the grace of Goethe.” You could argue, of course, that Heine isn’t canonical in the way that Goethe is, because for all his popularity, Heine wasn’t accepted in the way that Goethe was. Indeed, Hannah Arendt understood Heine’s brilliance as precisely that of a “Jewish pariah.” Nor did Heine stop being an outsider-as-insider after his death. Witness what happened

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to the statue that Düsseldorf commissioned, in 1887, to mark the centenary of his birth. It wound up in the Bronx, having been forced into exile by anti-Semitic protests. I could go on in a similar vein about Kafka, and I should say that the discussion of German Jewry’s affinity for high culture has been a searching one, which has shown that the storied romance with Bildung was, at times, a profoundly ambivalent affair. But none of this changes the fact that in probing the high, the study of German-Jewish literary life has largely missed the middle— or really, the middlebrow. What, then, have we been missing? A lot, as it turns out. To be sure, in his excellent new book, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity, Jonathan Hess doesn’t try to claim that the authors of nineteenthcentury German-Jewish middlebrow literature were so many protoSchnitzlers who have gone unrecognized. Hess’s aim, in other words, isn’t to win appreciation for his large body of material on aesthetic grounds. But neither does he treat German-Jewish middlebrow literature merely as an evocative sign of the times, which needs only to be framed historically in order to illuminate further its historical situation. Instead, Hess takes German-Jewish middlebrow literature seriously as a literary endeavor, though quite not as seriously as it took itself, reading it accordingly. He penetrates deep into the structure of the texts he discusses, and in the end he brings much to light. Hess reveals not only how German-Jewish middlebrow literature adopted and adapted popular literary conventions, but also how it at once borrowed from and engaged critically with German classicism, and, at times, carried out meaningful self-critiques. If this literature, which was both a form of and a vehicle for acculturation, often dealt in homiletic messages (“acculturate, but keep the faith!”), it was hardly

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free of inner tensions, as Hess deftly shows: in art as in life, balancing tradition and modernity was easier said than done. What emerges in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity is a learned, nuanced, fascinating portrait of works that—unlike Heine’s—served as a model for nineteenth-century German Jews as they struggled with that balancing act. The book also contains quite a bit of institutional and reception history. One of Hess’s key figures was, in fact, more important as an organizer of middlebrow literature than as an author of it—namely, the Magdeburg-based liberal rabbi Ludwig Philippson. In 1837, Philippson helped found the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, which quickly became a leading newspaper of German Jewry, and which immediately began to publish German-Jewish popular fiction in serialized form. Indeed, Philippson included the first installment of a story by his brother Phöbus in the paper’s debut issue. Philippson was involved, as well, in the creation of the Institut zur Förderung der Israelitischen Literatur, which put out book editions of middlebrow German-Jewish literature, and was envisioned as a kind of series of great books for the growing ranks of Jews reading belles lettres auf deutsch. As for reception history, Hess surveys many reviews and individual responses, which often underscore the point that in the case of German-Jewish middlebrow literature, the conceits of historical fiction and melodrama worked their usual magic: readers became hooked and emotionally invested. This, for example, is what Jonas Lehmann, the son of the orthodox novelist Marcus Lehmann, wrote in recalling the impact of his father’s stories, “When they were serialized in Der Israelit, I could hardly wait to find out more about the fates of the

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heroes. And thousands of children had the same experience. In our youth, we laughed and cried along with his heroes and heroines, and made them our role models.” In addition, Hess traces the influence of middlebrow German-Jewish literature up to the present day. He stresses that the form Philippson helped pioneer in the 1830s lives on, and also that certain individual works have enjoyed a lengthy afterlife. We learn, for instance, that a Jewish school in Los Angeles recently staged one of Lehmann’s novels, several of which have been translated into English. But the heart of Hess’s undertaking is historically oriented exegesis, and so it makes sense that his book is, for the most part, organized according to genre: tales of the Spanish Inquisition in chapter one, ghetto fiction in chapter two, and romance stories in chapter three. The exception is the fourth and final chapter, which I found to be the most intriguing of all of them. It deals with middlebrow literature produced by orthodox authors for the orthodox community, and their work manifests certain driving tensions with particular vividness. German-Jewish middlebrow literature didn’t see itself as middle­ brow. The problem, among other things, was that its didactic content didn’t jibe with its ambitious packaging and self-understanding. Paradoxically, some of the authors writing for the reform community tried to defuse the contradiction by upping the didactic content. Some of them suggested that classic works of German literature lacked a definite moral compass, and that the consumption of such literature could be an agent and a sign of internal unmooring. The problem here was that in taking this tack, reform authors were veering ever farther away from the standard to which true art was supposed to measure up: aesthetic autonomy.

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Several of the leading orthodox authors dealt more directly with the contradiction—with even more paradoxical results. They declared that the fiction of their reform counterparts lacked a strong message, because its authors lacked a strong commitment to Judaism. But they raised a very different objection as well. Reform fiction didn’t reach the level of art because its aim was simply to convey a message: it was, in addition to being too conventional, too engagé. It was too closely tied to ideological and practical considerations, and this precluded any real efficacy. Invoking the notion of aesthetic autonomy—a key tenet in German culture since the eighteenth century—orthodox authors contended in the 1850s and 1860s that only the loftiest, freest art would ring true, yielding “archetypes we can imitate,” as one orthodox commentator put it. Orthodox authors regarded themselves as being in a position to bring forth such literature, because with their ethos of spiritual devotion, they knew how to pursue high ideals. The implication, then, was something like this: being more authentically Jewish, the orthodox would be better able to conform to the aesthetic standards of German high culture, which, in turn, would enable them to produce the great German-Jewish novel, whose “archetypes” would help orthodoxy—and its greater degree of Jewishness—survive. According to Hess, the outcome of this theorizing was “a distinctive model of middlebrow fiction.” It distinguished itself, at least in part, in the stress it laid on engaging imaginatively with the present (for the sake of creating modern “archetypes”), and thus the orthodox model contributed to the diversity of German-Jewish middlebrow fiction. What it didn’t do was lead to the great GermanJewish novel. That would have to wait for modernists like Schnitzler,

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and the radical questioning of the bourgeois values that both reform and orthodox middlebrow novelists generally promoted. In the end, orthodox fiction was every bit as propagandistic as the reform literature its authors set out to surpass. Maybe it was more so. Characters who stray from ritual observance invariably come to no good end, and in one of Lehmann’s stories, the authoritativesounding protagonist dilates on how Heine would have soared much higher as an artist had he “remained true to his religion.” But the view from the middle proves very rewarding. Indeed, if Lehmann fell short of his goals, Hess keeps his promise. In tracking the complexities in and underlying German-Jewish middlebrow literature, he arrives at a crucial window from which to observe the making of German-Jewish identity.

18 Schnitzler’s Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go?

Exile is the best school of dialectics. Bertolt Brecht

Peter Gay emigrated from Germany when he was a teenager and worked his way through the American academic system, taking a doctorate at Columbia University and then setting out on his career as a historian. It has lasted more than fifty years so far—at Columbia and, eventually, Yale. (Now emeritus, Gay directs the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers.) His first book, which appeared in 1952, examined Eduard Bernstein and evolu­ tionary socialism. From there, Gay proceeded to cultivate a long and fecund engagement with the French Enlightenment, translating, anthologizing, and interpreting key texts, and in doing so establishing himself as a major figure in the field. He also wrote a history of Puritan historians in America, which only added to his reputation for being prolific and self-reflexive. Toward the end of the 1960s his interests shifted, and Gay began to study the Germany of his youth.

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The move resulted in an instant classic, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. Gay’s timing was excellent, as the zeitgeist in America had generated enthusiasm for the antiestablishment fulminations of German expressionist art. Compact, lucid, and informative, Weimar Culture had a ready audience both outside and inside academe. But while Gay admired innovators like Kandinsky and Rilke, he hardly celebrated expressionism in general. Indeed, here is where we first see Gay’s impatience with, even disdain for, the modernist “revolt” against bourgeois culture. He wrote about “the danger of the movement’s commitment to passion.” And Gay heaped approbation on what was so often the object of its scorn, arguing that Weimar democracy had a chance against Nazism only “because there were republicans who took the symbol of Weimar seriously and who tried, persistently and courageously, to give the ideal real content.” Yet Gay was still years away from The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, his five-volume attempt to rehabilitate nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. He seemed to be up to something altogether different, in fact. In the mid-1970s, Gay began to use an interpretive tool that often functions as a sledgehammer in theories of Victorian society: psychoanalysis. Of course, Freud himself was in some ways thoroughly bourgeois. He worked assiduously and enjoyed family picnics. And, unlike many of the critics who have appropriated his thought—for example, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—Freud subscribed to moderate political values. Gay has made much of this point. In Freud, Jews and Other Germans, which appeared a decade after Weimar Culture, Gay not only employed Freudian concepts to

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understand history, but also discussed the founder of psychoanalysis under the heading “the bourgeois as revolutionary.” A decade later, Gay invoked this oxymoron again in his greatest scholarly achievement, a biography of Freud. In his new book, Schnitzler’s Century, Gay asserts—to no one’s surprise—that “bourgeoisophobes,” who anathematize nineteenthcentury bourgeois culture as grimly repressive, are misguided, for it was bourgeois thinkers who enabled us to penetrate into the deep structures of sexuality, meaning that there must be more to this culture than Victorian squeamishness and hypocrisy. Witness Freud. Witness also turn-of-the-century Vienna’s most successful playwright, Arthur Schnitzler. According to Gay, Schnitzler, like Freud, recognized the ubiquity of sexual drives in psychic life: indeed, Freud himself praised Schnitzler’s psychological acumen. And, a medical doctor who often reproached himself for being slothful, Schnitzler, too, had certain bourgeois sensibilities. But Schnitzler is no Freud in Gay’s book; Gay bluntly contends that between the two, there is only one epoch-making thinker: Freud. So why did Gay call his new book Schnitzler’s Century? The fact that he had put Freud’s name in the subtitle of his multivolume history of bourgeois culture may be one reason. More important, despite his various bourgeois tendencies, Freud is too extraordinary, or not representative enough. The possessive form in Gay’s title does not suggest that Schnitzler captured the essence of Victorian culture but rather that, while not at all average, Schnitzler’s mind and lusty life are emblematic of his century. Gay’s title makes a statement about Schnitzler’s times, not about Schnitzler’s art.

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But Schnitzler’s art matters. Again, it undermines the myth of bourgeois prudery. Schnitzler’s stories and plays about Vienna evoke a world of small lies and swirling concupiscence. The dark comedy La Ronde is the most familiar example. Written in 1894, the play was deemed too racy for the Viennese stage, and the first performance of it took place in Berlin more than twenty-five years later. La Ronde consists of ten one-acts. In each case there are two characters, a man and a woman; the center of the action, a sexual encounter, has been omitted, and prevarication pervades the dialogue. One partner always moves on to the next one-act. The prostitute who is with a soldier in the first one-act rounds out the play by reappearing with a count in the final one-act. Dream Novella, whose premise Stanley Kubrick borrowed for Eyes Wide Shut, broods over similar themes, including dishonesty and too much honesty in the bedroom, and lust circulating recklessly through different social spheres. Schnitzler’s writings abound with autobiographical references, and therefore, along with his letters and diaries (in which Schnitzler kept an exact and prodigious record of his orgasms), his art can be used to document the sexual openness of a real bourgeois experience. But Gay works with it sparingly. Schnitzler himself moves in and out of Schnitzler’s Century, helping to introduce Gay’s arguments and occasionally to illustrate them. As Gay writes in his preface, “He will appear in each of the chapters that follow, sometimes briefly as an impetus to broader investigations, sometimes as a participant.” Gay’s main organizational conceit is that Schnitzler’s Century is the biography of a class. Yet the book is actually the biography of classes—the middle classes. Gay stresses that bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century encompassed an array of lifestyles, from the

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penury of struggling shopkeepers to parvenu opulence. His claim makes sense, of course, but it creates logistical difficulties. How to tell so many stories in a single book? And, in fact, Schnitzler’s Century has very little narrative development. To get that you would have to read the books that it is supposed to synthesize, The Bourgeois Experience. In Schnitzler’s Century Gay presents material from the most diverse regions of bourgeois culture. He helps us to see, for example, the variegations in Victorian sexology. However, he does not show us how sexology in the Victorian era changed, and why. Schnitzler’s Century might address a century, yet its approach is mostly synchronic. Gay fits this century into a large frame and points to its parts—Schnitzler, Dickens, theosophy, German Romanticism—as though they belonged to one complex portrait, which he sets up as a triptych. He begins with the “Fundamentals,” or basic living and working conditions. In the other two sections, “Drives and Defenses” and “The Victorian Mind,” Gay analyzes different areas of the bourgeois psyche. Drawing on such sources as good and bad novels, the letters of famous politicians and of everyday people, newspapers, cookbooks, the writings of eminent scientists (Darwin, Rudolf Virchow), the writings of quacks, and self-help manuals, Gay offers many lurid instances of sensuousness in bourgeois culture. But sometimes he goes over them too quickly. For example, he writes, “Here is a Parisian petty bourgeoise, a dressmaker, name and age unknown, writing to her lover in 1892: ‘I am compelled to acknowledge to myself, “I love you,” and I won’t forget the night of love I spent with you. Dear friend, you must have noticed with what freedom I abandoned myself. I was not at all embarrassed by your presence for the first time. It must be

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that I am greatly taken with you, and that I’m almost convinced that I will experience happiness in your arms.’” According to Gay, the quotation bespeaks the earthy communication and relatively guilt-free legitimate pleasure among Victorians. Certainly the letter is passionate. And for just that reason the cautious phrase, “I’m almost convinced that I will experience happiness in your arms,” has a jarring effect. After so much rapture why “almost?” Why hit the brakes in an otherwise full-speed-ahead love letter? Many things could have prompted her to do so—including the very Victorian sexual unease that she supposedly did not feel. Gay does not stop to consider this possibility. No doubt he avoids involved analysis because he wants to make his book readable. And it is that. It is also admirably balanced. While Gay celebrates the polychromatic side of Victorian society, he also acknowledges its industrialized grayness. He discusses other nineteenth-century ills as well, such as imperialism and the emergence of racist anti-Semitism. Here his debt to Freud is at its most obvious: Gay views these problems as effects of our aggressive drives. Yet, elsewhere Gay distances himself from Freud, arguing that Freud generalized unduly about the links between common neuroses and sexual restrictions in bourgeois culture. Freud is not the hero of Schnitzler’s Century. If the book has a guiding spirit it is Freud’s American colleague, the psychologist and philosopher William James. In Gay’s brief account of James, his tone becomes effusive. He calls James the noblest exemplar of the Victorians’ spiritual needs and states that James takes pride of place in these pages. Second, and more important, Gay focuses on the part of James’s career that bears an affinity with his own project: James’s

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will to believe. Just as James worked his way through modern doubt to a considered religious faith, Gay seems to be attempting to achieve a kind of erudite belief in the bourgeois world of yesterday, and in its transformation of the world. Gay adverts to many of Victorian society’s horrific moments—like ritual-murder trials and cheering at executions. But he resolutely underlines what he sees as its humane successes, such as labor and voting reforms and the spread of cultural literacy. Indeed, although Gay does not sketch the development of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, he leaves us with images of progress. For example, a section of Schnitzler’s Century that begins by enumerating the casualties of capitalism ends with the sentence: “More than ever before, the middle classes could spend money and time in pursuits more elevated than chasing wealth and make room in their daily schedules for listening to music, looking at art, and attending the theatre.” Gay thinks, or rather, has decided to think, that things got better. This generally sanguine attitude plays a greater role here than it did in the various volumes of The Bourgeois Experience, which, notwithstanding its much larger size, deals more narrowly with the question of bourgeois sexuality. In fact, Schnitzler’s Century might connect more profoundly with My German Question, the memoir that Gay wrote several years ago, than it does with its explicit antecedents. My German Question defends the bourgeois Berlin milieu in which Gay grew up. It was, Gay insists, a vital culture, whose demise was far from inevitable. And by professing his belief in the overall value of Victorian culture and its possibilities, Gay extends this defense. Read My German Question and Schnitzler’s Century together, and Schnitzler’s Century will read that much more like a vastly learned

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existential reckoning. This is what makes it a powerful book, not its pummeling of tired ideas about middle-class prissiness. Still, Schnitzler’s Century would be stronger if Gay had taken on more formidable opponents. He could have found them among his fellow refugees from Nazi Germany. Consider just a few examples. During the West Coast stage of their exile, in the mid-1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno traced the rise of Nazism to blind spots in Enlightenment rationality. Years later Hannah Arendt saw Eichmann’s neat, bureaucratic countenance, rather than Hitler’s psychotic gaze, as the real face of fascism. Meanwhile, Marcuse had been exploring the connections between the libidinal demands of bourgeois culture and the orgy of Nazi violence that almost destroyed it. And with his studies on the interplay of bourgeois sexuality and nationalism, George Mosse did more than anyone else to perpetuate this kind of analysis. In doing more than anyone else to defend bourgeois culture, Gay attacks the sort of criticisms that Steven Marcus raised in his famous study The Other Victorians. Leaning on a small body of sources, Marcus made far-reaching claims about the tortured character of Victorian sexuality. Gay easily piles up texts and facts that militate against them. He rejects Freud’s arguments about bourgeois repression on the same grounds: insufficient evidence. But for the most part, Freud articulates these views in essays on culture, theoretical speculations that he did not try to prove empirically. Needless to say, elsewhere Gay does not hold Freud to the same positivistic standard. Furthermore, Gay ignores the rich literature on the cultural construction of sexuality, much of which is inspired by Foucault’s unfinished History of Sexuality. Such works—Thomas Laqueur’s

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well-researched book Making Sex is a persuasive example—challenge Gay’s basic assumption about sexuality: that it exists more or less as we understand it, beyond our invented world of concepts. After all, Gay presupposes as much in asking whether the Victorians gave their sexuality room to breathe. The more critical approach to sexuality, which has led to readings of Victorian society that differ dramatically from Gay’s, should have received at least some attention. And the same goes for the writings of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Obviously, Gay could not have taken into account every influential antibourgeois utterance. But engaging with such vigorous arguments would have given his own historiographical inversion just the sort of resistance it lacks—or would need in order to be satisfying. On numerous other levels, however, Schnitzler’s Century remains impressive. Anyone interested in Victorian culture should appreciate the colorful sources Gay has gathered together; anyone interested in the writing of history should appreciate the elegance with which he arranges them. Writing about one of Schnitzler’s early plays, a Viennese reviewer exclaimed, “How well everything is set up! How gracefully the characters are handled!” He could have been describing Schnitzler’s Century.

19 Rereading Freud’s Moses (Again)

In the introduction to his acclaimed history of psychoanalysis, Eli Zaretsky writes that historical perspective “requires distance.” This observation is, of course, a truism, but it comes attached to an idea that isn’t. According to Zaretsky, historical perspective has been difficult to achieve in psychoanalysis because it is such a special case. We have lacked distance here as a result of the fact that psychoanalysis has been “so central to our own self-constitution.” Thus, only now that psychoanalysis has become less axiomatic “has it become possible” to stand back and “see psychoanalysis whole.” In turn, it has only just become possible to historicize psychoanalysis effectively, or so Zaretsky argues. It is a tempting thought. After all, Zaretsky is holding out the prospect of a double advantage for those who study psychoanalysis as a historical phenomenon. Not only do we have chronological distance, but we also have the entirely new boon of existential nonencumbrance. For the first time in a long time, examining psychoanalysis does not mean simultaneously examining a “central”

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component of our own “self-constitution.” In Zaretsky’s reading, new doubts about psychoanalysis—especially from within the “medical” community—have seen to that. What, then, about the old doubts? Psychoanalysis has manifestly influenced the way many people think and speak. Yet there have always been prominent skeptics, from Freud’s fellow turn-of-the-century Viennese Karl Kraus to our contemporary Frederick Crews. There have been many true believers, too. But how many? When Zaretsky maintains that psychoanalysis has been “so central” to “our” sense of self—that is, more central than most other forms of self-knowledge— who is the “we” to which his emphatic “our” belongs? It would seem to be a large group. Indeed, Zaretsky omits to circumscribe or limit his “we” in any way. Perhaps he even means to imply something as broad as “we members of Western culture.” For Western culture is the context he tends to have in mind: it is the context within which he seeks to situate the development of psychoanalysis and which serves as his general point of orientation. But if the paradigm change that Zaretsky invokes had actually occurred, if a crucial part of the selfunderstanding of Western subjects had recently become unusable, would not the mental effects have been hard to miss? Surely better perspective among historians of psychoanalysis would not be the only symptom of such a historic shift. So where—and what—are the other symptoms? Zaretsky is correct, of course, to suggest that the truth status of psychoanalysis affects how scholars relate to their topic. If Peter Gay, for example, were not deeply invested in presenting Freud’s basic insights as being, for the most part, valid scientific knowledge, he, Gay, would probably be more open to exploring the contingent and

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local character of those insights. Gay would likely be more open to the claim that Freud’s Jewish heritage expresses itself in his work and to the less speculative notion that Freud’s work is in many ways the product of a specifically fin de siècle Viennese cultural dynamism. It is striking, after all, to see a historian decontextualize his subject as thoroughly as Gay does at the beginning of his Freud biography: “In truth Freud could have developed his ideas in any city endowed with a first-rate medical school and an educated public large enough to furnish him with patients.” But Gay’s approach is hardly representative. Many (perhaps even most) scholars interested in how psychoanalysis happened betray a conceptual debt to their object of inquiry. However, who besides Gay has exhibited a high-profile desire to depict the emergence of psychoanalysis in such a manner that psychoanalysis comes across as “untainted” by local color? Recent examples are not exactly easy to identify. Zaretsky’s readers might also wonder: Does it seem likely that doubts raised by the medical community would have a significant impact on contemporary scholars of psychoanalysis? Have there not been thinkers who have taken psychoanalysis seriously without accepting its scientific validity? Almost forty years ago, for example, Paul Ricoeur meditated critically on the “problem of proof in psychoanalysis,” while seeking to identify the constructive philosophical content of Freud’s writings. Zaretsky, however, appears uninterested in dealing with the body of evidence that militates against his opening claims. He seems content to build his case on his own book, his underlying historiographical premise being something like this: “Given how much attention the subject has received, if it had been possible to write a history of psychoanalysis earlier, one would have been written.” That

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one was not implies that a new condition of possibility is in place, that is, a novel skepticism toward psychoanalysis. In other words, for Zaretsky, the very fact of his book, which is the first comprehensive “cultural history” of psychoanalysis, points to a large new enabling circumstance, which he can—and does—use to explain how he was able to write the book. This equation is logical, if somewhat narrowly structural, but for it to work, the enabling circumstance that is connected to it needs to make sense. In the end, Zaretsky’s does not. Why begin an article titled “Rereading Freud’s Moses” with these observations about Zaretsky’s book? I do so not because I intend to put the book into conversation with Moses and Monotheism, but rather as a way of making tangible a general problem. This is the problem of scholarly self-analysis. Any scholar who purports to be saying or doing something new might find it useful to give an account of how he or she managed to go beyond the contributions of other scholars. A cogent narrative of the author’s own innovativeness can make him or her seem compellingly self-aware and self-reflective. It can also help readers to understand the author’s perspective and thus follow his or her argumentation. Of course, what matters more is to present an original argument. That—and not whether the author has effectively explained his or her originality—is often seen as the base requirement for publishable scholarly work. Moreover, demonstrating originality means showing that and how the author has exceeded the existing scholarly material on the topic, not reckoning with the metaquestions: Why the author? Why now? But in certain (endlessly discussed) cases, these latter questions need to be asked. Psychoanalysis can be one of them. As we have also seen, satisfying answers can be difficult to find.

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In contrast to Zaretsky’s book, this article aims to add in a rather modest way to the existing body of research on psychoanalysis. Accordingly, I feel less pressure, or no pressure, to see my work as a function of large factors, like existential paradigm shifts. Distance, to be sure, has mattered here. But what has mattered is not so much distance from the psychoanalytic material itself—Moses and Monotheism never had much scholarly credibility—as distance from debates about the material. Indeed, it is likely no coincidence that the most strident discussion of this topic, Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct, has just become a decade old. Boyarin’s study critically analyzes Freud’s “Jewish question,” among other matters, culminating in its responses to those persistent concerns: What does Freud’s late foray into history writing, that is, Moses and Monotheism, tell us about how “Jewish issues” figured in Freud’s own self-constitution? How, in turn, can we use the background of such issues to make sense of the book? As my phrasing suggests, the intensity of Boyarin’s answers stood out. But it is not the case that we are not only now in a position to see its shortcomings. In fact, almost ten years ago, I wrote a review essay on Unheroic Conduct that lauds some aspects of the book, but is particularly skeptical of how the book deals with Freud. What I objected to was the hastiness and tendentiousness with which Boyarin sketches out Freud’s “anti-Semitic context,” a factor that has a decisive part in his reading. What I did not take issue with, or even address, was the underlying cause of that tendentiousness: Boyarin’s highly evaluative mode of interpretation. At the time, it may well have seemed like the natural thing to be doing. Let me now try to explain why this was so, and how the new distance has mattered.

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Boyarin’s book is a direct descendant of Marthe Robert’s From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, which first appeared in 1974. Here Robert treats Moses and Monotheism as another tortured response to the problem of deficient Jewish manliness. For Robert, the problem had surfaced in Freud’s first major study: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). According to her, the earlier text reveals that Jakob Freud’s unashamed recollection of his “unheroic conduct” in the face of an anti-Semitic slight disturbed his son, Sigmund, deeply. Freud goes on to contrast his father’s behavior with the implacable spirit of the historical Semite Hamilcar Barca, who forced his son Hannibal to swear vengeance against the Romans. Giving this scene the significance of a “primal scene” in the formation of Freud’s Jewish identity, Robert argues that Moses and Monotheism, which presents the first and great Moses as an Egyptian, is the ultimate illustration of Freud’s adoption fantasy. In her view, Freud’s wish fulfillment comes at a steep price. By making the father of Judaism into a heroic non-Jewish Egyptian, Freud renders “a whole people illegitimate.” These are harsh words, but they easily could have been harsher. Freud, in letters dating back to the dark moment when he began working on Moses and Monotheism, speaks of wanting to solve the age-old riddle of anti-Semitism. Returning to the very foundations of Judaism, Freud suggested in 1934, will make it possible to identify Judaism’s enmity-inducing characteristics, the ones that have “attracted the undying hatred” of other peoples since biblical times. It would be hard to find someone who would say that the book carries out this design successfully. Freud winds up offering a variety of implicit explanations for anti-Semitism, most of which

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receive little detailed support. Think of his claims about how the special instinctual renunciation demanded by what he sees as Judaism’s signature Geistigkeit is threatening in its austerity. Next to those claims, Horkheimer and Adorno’s statements about Judaism’s threatening refusal of the West’s dominant representational practices come across as full-bodied historical observations. And Freud’s Moses lacks the kind of narrative framework that Horkheimer and Adorno offer through their famous idea of a progressive “dialectic of Enlightenment.” Moreover, they put their points much more forcefully. Freud’s Moses is, indeed, something of a rhetoric mess. The book “tormented” Freud like an “unlaid ghost,” as he acknowledged. Freud spoke of its noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions, and obvious contradictions. Because of such flaws, early commentators tended to dismiss Moses and Monotheism as the work of a senescent titan, as the one-fight-too-many of a great combative mind well past its prime. Robert does not dwell on the theoretical and rhetorical short­ comings in Moses and Monotheism. Furthermore, if Robert views the book’s main argument as the unseemly effect of identity trouble, her “constellating” of Jewish identity and psychoanalytic theory is limited. She does not try to assert that Freud’s whole notion of gender identity is deeply indebted to his Jewish crisis of masculinity. Boyarin would go considerably farther. First, however, Yosef Yerushalmi published a noteworthy counter-reading. His Freud’s Moses is a stirring and learned work of revisionism and rehabilitation. One primary target as he frames his position is Robert’s book. According to Yerushalmi, the discussions of Jewish Geistigkeit in Moses and Monotheism forcefully embrace the very type of salutary Jewish identity that Freud himself exhibited throughout his life. This identity is the “Psychological Jew,”

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who is characterized by “intellectuality and independence of mind; the highest ethical and moral standards; concern for social justice; and tenacity in the face of persecution.” Thus, Yerushalmi works his way to the proposition that Moses and Monotheism does not so much reject the “unheroic” Jewish father as honor his wishes: Jakob Freud apparently wanted to see his son maintain ties to Jewish tradition. As Jacques Derrida put it—in an approving 1997 commentary on Yerushalmi’s book—“like Freud’s father, the scholar wants to call Sigmund Shelomoh back to the covenant by establishing, that is to say, by restoring the covenant. The scholar repeats, in a way, the gesture of the father.” Boyarin has a different agenda. His book operates within the paradigm of what (in the year Unheroic Conduct appeared) Eric Santner called “the new Jewish cultural studies.” For Santner, the new Jewish cultural studies were to be defined as “efforts to bring to bear recent innovations in the study of gender and sexuality on readings of canonical Jewish texts.” Boyarin writes: I hypothesize that in the 1890s Freud panicked at the discursive configuration imposed on him by three deeply intertwined cultural events: the racialization/gendering of anti-Semitism, the fin de siècle production of sexualities, including the “homosexual,” and the sharp increase in the contemporary Christian homophobic discourse (The “Christian Values” movement). These discourses produced a perfect and synergistic match between homophobia and anti-Semitism. In Boyarin’s view, this discursive context actually led Freud to equate “Jewification” with emasculation: “I might put it in the following

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fashion: [for Freud] Verjudung is equivalent to Entmannung.” This link played a crucial role in the formation of psychoanalytic theory. Key features of it, Boyarin maintains, should be seen as his semisublimated “response.” The Jew was queer and hysterical and therefore, not a man. In response, the normatively straight Jewish man was invented to replace the bent Ostjude, and his hysteria—his alternative gendering—was the first victim: “All psychoanalytic theory was born from hysteria, but the mother died during the birth.” The Oedipus complex is Freud’s family romance of escape from Jewish queerdom into gentile, phallic heterosexuality. If Freud’s Jewish “panic” began to express itself in his theory of the Oedipus complex, it found its most explicit articulation in Moses and Monotheism. Freud shifts from sublimation and a “family romance of escape” to an outright reinscribing of Judaism according to German standards of male virtue. This, Boyarin argues, explains Freud’s dramatic attempt to define Judaism as the religion of Geistigkeit. For Geistigkeit, which might be defined as rational intellectuality, was treated in Freud’s day as a masculine principle, as a faculty that Jews and women tended to lack. As Boyarin himself puts it, Moses and Monotheism is a function of “Freud’s need to be manly, to discover a manliness at the origins of Jewishness, Moses, and the Bible.” For Boyarin, the text tries, in effect, to “wipe out any trace” of the unGermanic Jew. Thus, rather than merely making a whole people “illegitimate,” the book makes Jews and Judaism un-Jewish. The publication of Moses and Monotheism is nothing less than an act of betrayal, one committed out of panic and under extreme duress

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(Freud wrote parts of the book under the shadow of the Anschluß), but still an act of betrayal. Moses and Monotheism has enjoyed a more positive reception over the last few years. For example, Santner, who stated some enthusiasm for the sort of reading that Boyarin developed, made a case for the book as containing valuable ethical insights that are tied to Freud’s outsider position in German culture and that we might even usefully apply in our own lives (see On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life). Michael Mack authored a similar interpretation two years later (see German Idealism and the Jew). Both readings are subtle and intelligent, and altogether less polemical than Boyarin’s. But, in the end, they more or less fit into the pattern of analysis I have been describing, which is itself part of a larger interpretive tradition. This is the tradition that Scott Spector has recently called the “orthodox” approach to German-Jewish historiography. In its starkest form—for example, Gershom Scholem’s essays on the “myth” of the German-Jewish “dialogue”—it is the position that featured a misguided attempt at assimilation by German-Jewish culture.1 In the less stark, more frequent versions, it is a position that can accommodate the complexity of individual lives by treating German-Jewish identity as a set of behaviors to be plotted along a spectrum running from dissimulation to the attempted effacement of Jewish identity. But here, too, the focus is squarely on assimilation. Assimilation and reactions This does not begin to do justice to Scholem’s views about German Jews, for his diaries and letters are full of nuanced readings of individual cases and acknowledge the complexities in and ambivalences among German-Jewish attitudes toward Jewishness.

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to it are seen as the driving forces in German-Jewish culture, and the terms of analysis often remain strongly evaluative. So it is possible to say, as Spector does, that scholars can stay within the parameters of the orthodox approach even where they seek to challenge it by pointing to unacknowledged German-Jewish modes of Jewish identification and culturally productive, if also perhaps unwitting, manifestations of “Jewish difference.” Indeed, the persistence of this approach explains the back-and-forth movement I tracked above. Scholars might disagree fiercely on their reading of an individual work, such as Moses and Monotheism, doling out approbation and condemnation by turns, even as they are reading it in much the same way: with the aim of placing it on the assimilation spectrum and judging it accordingly. Once a dramatic either-or dynamic sets in, it tends to be difficult to stop. For example, scholars who work on Karl Kraus continue to debate the old question: Was Kraus a “Jewish selfhater” or an “arch-Jew?” The “orthodox” approach is certainly not the only one in GermanJewish studies. In this issue, Jay Geller treats Moses and Monotheism as an expression of Freud’s “Jewish question.” But he does so without portraying the text as either assimilationist treason or a resonant identification with Jewish culture, which is what Boyarin and Yerushalmi do, respectively, in readings that seem more similar than they used to. Furthermore, the orthodox approach has been trenchantly criticized over the years. Thus, Zaretsky-like claims about a sudden loss of scholarly credibility and a novel freedom would be seriously out of place. At the same time, Spector points out that the approach has stayed remarkably entrenched despite potent critiques.

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Consider, for example, how Todd Presner frames his historiographical perspective in a book that appeared in 2007: In terms of methodology, I position my thinking about German/ Jewish modernity closer to the work of Michael Brenner and Peter Eli Gordon, the latter of whom explored what he called the “intimacy of the relationship between Germans and German Jews” through the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig. Both Brenner and Gordon focus on the “richness of German-Jewish history” without foreshadowing (or ignoring) the catastrophe that ensued. Like Gordon, I do not believe that we can maintain that the “richness and reality of intellectual exchange between Germans and Jews” did not occur because of the Holocaust; and, at the same time, I do not believe that we should restrict ourselves to a narrowly conceived notion of dialogue, as Scholem insists. What matters for us is not whether Presner’s “methodology” is compelling, but how he presents it. More precisely, what matters is the fact that he feels obliged to situate himself in relation to Scholem’s approach and ones like it (i.e., ones that use the Holocaust as a hermeneutic wedge and a moral cudgel). It is also telling that Presner names as thinkers with whom he feels affinities youngish authors, whose key works are relatively recent. Another telling moment is the line, or really the chiasmus, with which Presner sums up his stance: “In effect, I am positing that German modernity cannot be understood without its Jewish other and that Jewish modernity cannot be understood without its Jewish other.” That someone today can present such a claim as a bold

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theoretical statement testifies rather powerfully to the durability of the orthodox approach. And yet, as Spector’s article shows, there does seem to be a burgeoning of theoretical reservations, a newly sharpened consciousness of the limitations of the assimilationdissimilation paradigm and the conceptualization of identity that underlies it. One way to act on these reservations is to sketch out an alternative approach, to map out an alternative strategy for conceptualizing the German-Jewish experience and GermanJewish cultural production, as Spector and Presner are currently trying to do (see Spector). Another way is simply to look for what has been missed in debates where, not withstanding the exceptions, the orthodox dynamic of evaluation has been in place, and scholars have been focusing on the features of a text that could go to prove or disprove the charge of assimilationism. In what follows, I will pursue the latter course of action. More specifically, I will offer an alternative reading of how invoking Jewish concerns might help us to make sense of Moses and Monotheism. The particular concern I have in mind is Jewish anti-Semitism. This topic was clearly a matter of importance to Freud around the time that he began working on his Moses. Indeed, a passage from a 1933 letter to Arnold Zweig reads: “We defend ourselves against castration in every form, and perhaps a bit of opposition to our own Jewishness is hidden here. Our great leader Moses was, after all, a vigorous antisemite. Perhaps he was an Egyptian.” With these lines, Freud seems to be developing further the ideas he had first stated in the famous footnote to the Little Hans case, where circumcision sets off castration anxiety and, in turn, a hostility toward the Jews that is best exemplified by the “neurotic” Jew Otto Weininger.

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Such statements have, of course, elicited attention from scholars. But scholars have tended to see them more as Freud’s semi-disguised acknowledgments of self-hatred and Jewish anxieties than as expressions of interest in the theoretical problem of Jewish antiSemitism. Consider what Boyarin does with the passage from the letter to Zweig. For Boyarin, the passage is both a confession and a denial. It illustrates that Freud “accepts the characterization of Jews as differently gendered.” Yet through the passage, Freud “was enacting, at the same time as he was denying and disavowing, the self-contempt of the racially dominated subject. He was discursively closeting his circumcision. What we have here is a sort of psychic epipasm, a wish fulfillment to be like all other men, a fetishized whole phallus.” Boyarin is saying that the important aspect of the letter is the part about Moses being “perhaps an Egyptian,” which expresses Freud’s “closeted,” self-contemptuous desire to make Jewish history more phallic at the cost of making it less Jewish. But how does Freud deny his “self-contempt?” Does not he speak quite candidly of an “opposition to our own Jewishness?” And is not this claim more than a confession? Is it also not a theoretical statement about Jewish antiSemitism, an insight about the problem that Freud attempts to ground in the principle of castration anxiety? As Freud was attempting to develop a theory of anti-Semitism, he was also theorizing Jewish anti-Semitism. This should not come as a surprise. The late-Habsburg years witnessed much talk among German Jews about overassimilation and a self-abasing lack of Jewish self-consciousness. But after the war, amid a culture of drastically intensifying anti-Semitism, Jewish “opposition” to Jewishness seems to have become that much more

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striking. Tellingly, in the early 1920s, some Jewish critics began to call for a more serious way of discussing the problem and in response, coined the concept “Jewish self-hatred.” Thus Theodor Lessing’s study of Jewish self-hatred, which appeared in 1930 (and which Freud found unsatisfying) is not the afterthought that some historians, such as Shulamit Volkov (260), have made it out to be. It is just as little an afterthought as Freud’s comment about Lessing’s “particularly Jewish” self-disdain or Zweig’s thematically related Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit 1933 (1934), which Freud admired. As his frank reference to an antagonism toward “our own Jewishness” implies, the moment prompted concern about Jewish anti-Semitism. Again, I want to suggest that this concern is an important and underappreciated part of the background of Moses and Monotheism. We have here another way of accounting for that central, seemingly overdetermined move in Freud’s Moses, namely, its attempt to portray Moses as an Egyptian. The move seems overdetermined because even by Freud’s own admission, it requires quite a bit of argumentative casuistry: witness, again, his remark about the text’s contradictory, repetitive character. Why press so hard, around 1934, to cast Moses as an Egyptian? Why push on when the evidence is thin and the hypothesis is not essential for either a psychoanalytic understanding of monotheism or Freud’s main claim about anti-Semitism? As I have indicated, the prevailing answers to these questions have been that in his last work, Freud sought to resolve the troubling “family romance” and gendering of Jewishness that had come to light in his first book. By making the father of Jewishness into a virile non-Jew, Freud effectively adopts as an Ur-father the kind of father for which he had wished in The Interpretation of Dreams. Maybe so, but what

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the Moses-as-Egyptian move does explain is the depth of Jewish auto-animosity, and that explanatory value, in turn, might well help to explain the persistence of the Moses-as-Egyptian theme. Let me be more precise. While the Bible depicts the relationship between Moses and his people as rancorous, Freud’s casting of Moses as an Egyptian has the immediate consequence of radicalizing the rancor. Indeed, Freud writes of Moses’s typical Egyptian “contempt” for the “inferior” Jewish people. This Egyptian Moses feels himself to be “stooping” down in his attempt to lift up the Jews. “Our great leader Moses” does, in fact, turn out to be a “vigorous antisemite,” yet not because he associates circumcision with castration and the Jews exacerbate his castration anxiety. Rather, Freud surmises that Moses brought circumcision to the Jews and despised them for being uncircumcised—for lacking that sign of civilized faith. The Jews, for their part, see Moses and the Mosaic ideals that would become Jewish ideals from the perspective of suspicious outsiders, for Freud has put them in that role. If the founder of Judaism hates the Jews as an inferior folk, the Jews hate their founder and his anti-instinctual Geistigkeit as other people do. After all, they are at first other people. Hence Freud’s idea that their rage against Moses and his Jewishness is greater than the Bible makes it out to be. According to Freud’s account, the Jews are the ones who smash the stone tablets, not Moses, and their rage against Moses eventually becomes homicidal. So in occluding Moses’s Egyptian origins and covering up his murder, the Bible hides the extent of his scorn for the Jews and their contempt for his Jewishness. That is what Freud has essentially proposed. Thus, Moses and Monotheism tries to lay bare a luridly xenophobic internecine enmity that, by the logic of the text, would

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have been carried forth as “memory traces.” However else we want to read Freud’s Moses—as an expression of fin de siècle Jewish “panic,” as a hearty embracing of Jewish identity, or as ethical German-Jewish theology—animating the book’s shaky signature move is a concern about Jewish self-hatred. For the move amounts to a theory of Jewish self-hatred, one that connects elements that are only suggestively juxtaposed in the 1933 letter about “opposition to our own Jewishness.” Recall Freud’s utterances there: “Our great leader Moses was an ... antisemite. Perhaps he was an Egyptian.”

20 Erich Auerbach’s Exile and the Motion of Mimesis

I would like to begin with a quotation. More specifically, I would like to begin with a quotation of a quotation. Here is Edward Said citing Erich Auerbach citing the twelfth-century monk Hugo of St Victor: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”1 Said reproduces these lines at least four times. Indeed, they appear almost everywhere he addresses Auerbach—in the body of Orientalism; at the beginning of The World, the Text, and the Critic; in Reflections on Exile; and also in Culture and Imperialism. This pattern has a clear implication, namely, that, for Said, Auerbach’s borrowing from Hugo of St Victor in his essay “Philology and Weltliteratur”

See, for example, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 185. 1

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best evokes Auerbach’s critical ethos.2 And so the recurring, doubly cited passage is a logical place from which to start discussing Said’s evocation of Auerbach. About Auerbach’s use of Hugo of St Victor, Said writes, “The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily one is able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combi­ nation of intimacy and distance.”3 Here, according to Said’s gloss, Auerbach expresses a kind of melancholy critical cosmopolitanism. Speaking through Hugo of St Victor, he portrays displacement as a hermeneutic imperative, and not just for gaining “true vision” of one’s own culture, but for analyzing “alien cultures” as well. These are words to work by, Said intimates. In fact, in Reflections on Exile he tells us that he had been wandering in the wilderness of criticism before stumbling upon Auerbach’s article. To set up this dramatic discovery, Said notes that even his mother had become concerned with his desultory approach to literary studies: “This was really bad business, my mother would say.” Then he writes, “Thus it went in my work for a couple of years more, until I began to translate ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, a remarkable essay by Erich Auerbach.” On the next page Said adds that Auerbach’s methodological claims “unlocked a whole system of correspondences between history and literature.”4

2 Said and his wife, Mariam Said, translated “Philology and Weltliteratur” for The Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 1–17, here 11. 3 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1978, 269. 4 Said, Reflections, 454.

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Said became famous for his suspicion of Western high culture— for his attempts to illuminate how it has operated as an instrument of domination. Understandably, then, this effusive identification with Auerbach, who concludes Mimesis by professing his “love for Western history,”5 has caused eyebrows, and in some cases, blood pressure, to rise among Said’s critics. For instance, both James Clifford and Aijaz Ahmad see Said’s treatment of Auerbach and Mimesis as slippages. Where Said invokes Auerbach, he reveals a core conventionality, even a fundamental hypocrisy. In Clifford’s reading, the Hugo of St Victor quotation is a case in point. According to him, the passage merely conveys an “anthropological commonplace.” It says nothing about how power dynamics affect cultural encounters. That Said could lose sight of this lack is telling. Said’s affinity for Auerbach indicates that Said is at bottom a Schöngeist, a cultural elitist who uses Foucauldian rhetoric to package himself as something altogether edgier. Ahmad is more strident. He asserts that Said “denounces with Foucauldian vitriol what he loves with Auerbachian passion, alternately debunking and praising to the skies again the same book as if he had betrayed the objects of his passion.”6 Ahmad’s Said has divided loyalties. This Said venerates, in an explicitly Auerbachian mode, the same Western high cultural traditions that he famously anathematized as “orientalist.” And Ahmad does not stop there. He argues that Said’s signature work,

5 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Kultur, Bern: Franke, 1988, 518. Translations from the German are mine. 6 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 263–4.

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Orientalism, is essentially a manifestation of “Auerbach envy.” Having stressed Orientalism’s “emphasis on canonical texts”; “its privileging of literature and philology”; and “its will to portray the West seamlessly, as having been the same from the dawn of history up to the present,” Ahmad proposes that Said’s book “derives from the ambition to write a history that could be posed against Mimesis.”7 Not only does Said exhibit Auerbach-like attitudes or “passion,” but he also wants to be like Auerbach. Of course, he wants to be unlike Auerbach as well. Hence the dichotomous character of Said’s criticism. It results from the push and pull of determined rebellion and irresistible attraction, from copying both Foucault and Mimesis—and from trying to exceed them. No doubt this is polemical stuff. But there might be something to Ahmad’s point about Said’s affective investment in Auerbach. After all, we have seen how Said brings Auerbach into a family drama. Auerbach appears on the scene like one of those wise, avuncular characters who help out the heroes of bildungsromane—he gives the young comparativist Said much-needed guidance, and thus helps placate the voluble, concerned mother. Here, incidentally, Said is not alone among major contemporary theorists. Frederic Jameson once called Auerbach his “real teacher.” And in an interesting and, I think, largely quixotic article, Emily Apter tries to show that Auerbach’s and Leo Spitzer’s comparative scholarship and contemporary postcolonial studies share a thematic orientation toward otherness, displacement, and cultural hybridity, even if Auerbach and Spitzer Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures, New York: Zone, 1992, 168. On Ahmad’s rhetorical excesses, see Marjorie Levinson, “News From Nowhere: The Discontents of Aijaz Ahmad,” Public Culture 6 (Fall 1993): 101. 7

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do not use those terms. The road from Auerbach to Homi Bhabi is a straight one for Apter.8 As other critics have pointed out, Ahmad too presses his case without questioning dubious premises. For one thing, Said never really frames his work as Foucauldian. So his lack of consistent Foucauldianism cannot be theoretical hypocrisy. Even more jarring is Ahmad’s misrepresentation of Mimesis. Whoever has read the work knows that Auerbach does not depict Western culture as a seamless continuum. He sees continuities, but also profound shifts, and, in certain figures, such as Dante, aesthetic eruptions. Furthermore, Said hardly vacillates between fully embracing and rejecting Auerbach. He makes critical observations in between those poles. In Culture and Imperialism, for example, he writes, “Mimesis immediately reveals [that] the notion of Western literature which lies at the very core of comparative study centrally highlights, dramatizes and celebrates a certain idea of history, and at the same time obscures the fundamental geographical and political reality empowering that idea.”9 Mimesis hides the hard sources of power on which its grand vision of history relies, and thus promotes a certain false consciousness or ideology, in other words. Elsewhere, Said bemusedly asks, “Who in his right mind would take on as a project a subject as vast as Western literature in its entirety?” But such remarks have a concessive or qualifying character. More substantial are what they modify: Said’s attempts to defend Mimesis

See Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature,” Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 86–96. 9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993, 47. 8

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against the kinds of charges that Clifford and Ahmad bring against it. Both Clifford and Ahmad omit to mention these counterclaims, which go to suggest that Mimesis is not simply an “affirmative” text. In his most extensive commentary on the work, Said writes: Mimesis owes its existence to the very fact of Oriental, nonOccidental exile and homelessness. And if this is so, then the book is not, as it has been so frequently taken to be, a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but a work built upon a critically important alienation from it, a work whose conditions and circumstances of existence are not immediately derived from the culture it describes with such extraordinary brilliance and insight, but rather on an agonizing distance from it. Auerbach says that when he tells us in an early section of Mimesis that, had he tried to do a thoroughly scholarly job in the traditional fashion, he could never have written the book: Western culture itself, with its authoritative and authorizing agencies, would have prevented so audacious a one-man task. Hence the executive value of exile.10 Said is wagering two propositions about exile and the etiology of Mimesis, it seems to me. First, he is asserting that the brute fact of Mimesis reflects critically on Western culture and imbues the text with subversive meaning. The book, Said emphasizes, could not have been produced within the West and in accordance with its “authorizing agencies.” So even if Mimesis contained a straightforward encomium

Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 8.

10

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for the Western canon, on the level of form the book would have critical implications. Clearly, however, its critical force does not derive only from its exilic, un-Western audacity. Auerbach’s interpretive procedure matters, too. Said suggests as much by piling praise on Auerbach’s exegetical “brilliance.” In fact, he keeps returning to “Philology and Weltliteratur” for insights into Auerbach’s critical methodology. As Said’s reading of the Hugo of St Victor quotation intimates, for him, Auerbach’s criticism has “true vision,” vision born of dislocation and characterized by the dialectical interplay of “intimacy and detachment.” Here Mimesis must be something other than an affirmation of Western culture. How could “true vision” yield only that? In defending Said’s appropriation of Auerbach, Aamir Mufti stresses this point—with Said’s own authorizing agency, by the way: Mufti thanks Said for reading and commenting on his article. Then he writes, “For Said, Mimesis, far from being a triumphalist text, is inscribed through and through with pathos, dignity and the ethical.” Mufti leaves his readers wondering not only what it means to be “inscribed with the ethical,” but also how exactly Mimesis takes on such characteristics in Said’s analysis of it.11 We don’t have to look very hard for the logic behind Mufti’s omission. The debate about Said’s relation to Mimesis has been concerned with figuring out Said’s complexities, not Auerbach’s. And so its various participants have hastily constructed Auerbach into an emblem of opposing aspects of Said’s work. That Said’s readings of Auerbach are both emphatic and Aamir Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the Question of Minority Culture,” Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul Bove, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 232–3.

11

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aphoristic only facilitates this process. Said repeatedly valorizes the critical operations in Mimesis. Yet he says almost nothing concrete about them. Hence Mufti’s response, which is simply to describe the upshot of Said’s readings, and then to embark on a long Arendtian excursion on the paradigmatic status of Auerbach’s German-Jewish exile. Of course, in order to make Said’s claims really compelling, Mufti would have to test them against Auerbach’s text. This is what I want to do, or try to do—but not because I want to vindicate Said. Rather, I am interested in looking at Auerbach’s neglected features. Let me put my idea in broader terms. Said’s statements about Mimesis and the exchanges they have engendered can stand on their own as a lurid chapter in the history of the book’s reception. Certainly they warrant the recounting that I have undertaken up to now. But perhaps they can do more. Perhaps we can bring the question, which Said raises, and which Mufti underlines and leaves open, productively to bear on the text of Mimesis. That question is whether we can find in Auerbach’s actual exegesis the non-affirmative “secular criticism” that Said abstractly ascribes to it—secular criticism being, again, the play of intimacy and detachment, or “filiation and affiliation,”12 which Said associates with the material experience of exile. In attempting to read Auerbach with Said, are we attempting to interpret Auerbach against the grain of his own methodological claims? Not really: Auerbach might have professed his love for “Western history,” but he clearly reveled in being able to throw off the constraints of Western scholarship. At the same time, in “Philology and Weltliteratur” he does not Said, World, 16.

12

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see in Mimesis, as Said does, an explicitly exilic hermeneutics. But Auerbach does dwell on the need for critical generosity, for a historicizing philology and, in a Benjaminian aside, states that he could recognize the key patterns of Western culture only at the moment of its demise.13 All this can be linked to his experience of exile. Still, in the end Said is extrapolating when he talks about the crucial displaced perspective in Auerbach’s criticism, and not from Auerbach, but from Hugo of St Victor. For Hugo of St Victor’s remarks support this position better than do Auerbach’s metareflections on his method, which further explains why Said turns to Hugo of St Victor so frequently in discussing Mimesis. I now want to turn to Mimesis itself and its famous first chapter. Initially, I thought I might be able to locate there a move that resembles one of the crucial dialectical reversals in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. With his distinction between the vertical structure of the Old Testament and the horizontal relations that govern Homeric texts, Auerbach, like Adorno and Horkheimer, breaks with a German-Jewish tendency to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem. And as several critics have argued, Auerbach seems to favor the Jewish mode of representation over its Greek counterpart, which, of course, is what Adorno and Horkheimer do in their famous contemporaneous text. Auerbach writes of the “flattening” or “leveling” and the “simplification” that occurs in Homeric representation. Moreover, he compares these characteristics to the psychological depth and narrative complexity of the Old Testament, to its serious attempt at For an account of how, the intellectual culture of Istanbul affected Auerbach as he wrote Mimesis, see Kader Konuk’s study East West Mimesis (Stanford University Press, 2010). 13

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self-recognition. These features of the Old Testament, he writes, “stem from the Jewish conception of man.”14 Then, while maintaining that no literary mimesis can reproduce the endlessly variegated texture of real history, Auerbach abruptly alludes to the effects of National Socialism. He claims that only one historical situation can be represented ade­ quately: a state of war—such as the one raging while Auerbach was writing Mimesis. So if we were to push a little, we might say that, like the Dialectic of Enlightenment, though much less pointedly, Mimesis casts the Third Reich as being the catastrophic realization of Greek mimesis. For in Adorno and Horkheimer’s account, the histo­ rical realization of Greek mimesis results in a leveling of complexity and difference, yielding the “Gleichmacherei” of the Nazi regime.15 But this line of analysis does not really work, and in thinking about why, we might get to the exegetical procedure at which Said repeatedly gestures. When we go over the reading I have just laid out, we see that it overlooks too much. For one thing, Auerbach attaches to the Homer text terms that do not jibe with a thorough critique. He writes of the “Homeric genius” and of its “fluidity and rhythm.” In addition to acknowledging these qualities, Auerbach emphasizes the paradoxical openness of Odyssey’s being so closed. Indeed, despite all its abstractions, or all its spatial and temporal indeterminacies, the Old Testament is much more rigid in a certain, key sense. According to Auerbach, the Homeric world refers to itself: it is a closed, self-contained system whose meaning is not affected by doubt. Auerbach writes that “it is a world that exists for itself,” Auerbach, Mimesis, 23. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988, 191. 14 15

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and, as such, “conceals nothing.”16 Anyone can follow it, and anyone is free to make of it what he or she will. Conversely, the truth claims of the Old Testament are “tyrannical.”17 It demands from the reader a certain interpretive disposition. With its psychological depth and suggestive opacity, it provides more room for interpretation, but it offers less freedom. And the realism of the Old Testament is only one kind of realism: Auerbach forgoes, or rather, refuses, the stability of an overarching definition of realism. To be sure, he explicitly praises the Old Testament’s inclusion of different social classes. Like an awareness of historical complexity, and an ability to distinguish between historical truth and myth, respect for social diversity was, in 1942, a very important matter. But if that were the ultimate value of literary mimesis, literature would reach its high point with naturalism. Needless to say, such an apotheosis does not take place in Mimesis. What does happen, at least in the first chapter, is that Auerbach enacts an interpretive method that resonates with the multiperspectivism he identifies and celebrates in Flaubert. This goes beyond the multi-perspectivism of historicist scholarship. Auerbach’s method entails a more intense imaginative output, because it operates with multiple perspectives on the multiple perspectives it reconstructs or inhabits. Call it multiperspectivism squared. In addition, as Auerbach penetrates into the literary “realities” of the Old Testament and the Odyssey, he describes their inner workings in strong language, allowing us to see his reading as both an endorsement and a critique. Auerbach, Mimesis, 22. Ibid., 18.

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Consider the following statement. Auerbach writes, “The tendency toward a leveling harmonization of events, toward a simplification of motives and toward a static framing of the characters that avoids conflict, changes and development, which is central to Homeric sagas, does not predominate in the world of Old Testament sagas. Abraham, Jacob and Moses come across as more concrete, more immediate and more authentically historical than the figures of the Homeric world.”18 “More authentically historical” versus “leveling harmonization” and “simplification.” This sounds like a boldly invidious comparison. But nothing in Auerbach’s text gives us the right to interpret it as such, since he does not set up standards according to which more authentically historical is good and simplification is bad. And yet appellations like “more authentically historical” are not neutral either. Auerbach’s embrace leaves things open, and he uses that space to turn around, while scattering adversatives, and to discuss the Odyssey in elusively positive terms. Here we have not so much a dialectical inversion, as a dialectical back and forth, or, Said would say, a dialectic of “intimacy and detachment,” of “filiation and affiliation.” I am not suggesting that Mimesis withholds any sort of critique. To the contrary, by decisively rejecting a formal Gliederung as well as theoretical abstraction—things for which you do not need a library with the latest scholarship—it performatively rebukes the very scholarly norms it flouts in addressing the whole Western literary tradition. Furthermore, Mimesis does contain evaluative claims. My point is that, with some exceptions, they are subject to implicit displacement, and they are therefore difficult to Ibid., 23.

18

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translate into general positions. Hence, in part, the widely, even wildly, divergent readings of Auerbach’s location on the literary critical map. But is it really fair to call Auerbach’s method exilic? With Said in mind, no doubt, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has argued that Auerbach had been an outsider before his exile, and probably would have developed in the same direction had he stayed in Germany.19 We can never know whether he would have, of course. However, we should acknowledge that other German-Jewish critics, for example, Adorno, underwent more profound transformations in exile. Certainly his writing bears the marks of displacement more perspicuously than Auerbach’s. And there is a self-serving note in Said’s emphasis on Auerbach’s exile. Through it Said establishes a kind of privileged relationship with Auerbach, his fellow émigré, and suggests that his own criticism is informed by the “true vision” that occurs only under such difficult circumstances. Finally, Said’s apostrophizing of Auerbach as his more immediate intellectual forbear strikes me as overdetermined, as a reaction against a phenomenon we witnessed earlier, namely, the tendency to treat Said as a “should-be” Foucauldian poststructuralist. Despite all this, there are points of correspondence between Auerbach’s text and its exilic context. I think that Said does point us toward some important ones, ones that, over sixty years after Auerbach began writing Mimesis, further illuminate Auerbach’s critical idiom, his continual interpretive displacements.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘The Pathos of Early Progress:’ Erich Auerbach’s Everydays,” Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, ed. Seth Lerer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 31. 19

Part SIX

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21 Hitler’s Viennese Waltz

Austria had many geniuses, and that was probably its undoing. Robert Musil

Hitler’s Vienna? It is certainly a sobering thought. After all, at the turn of this century, Hitler’s Vienna, that is, fin de siècle Vienna, is remembered by much of Western culture as Klimt’s Vienna, Freud’s Vienna, Mahler’s Vienna, and Wittgenstein’s Vienna. But what happens when we acknowledge that many of fin de siècle Vienna’s golden cultural accomplishments were animated by disgust? What happens when we recognize that many of them were gestures of protest against the Viennese ills that led Hermann Broch to describe turn-of-the-century Vienna as “the world-capital of kitsch” and “the gay apocalypse,” and Karl Kraus to label it as “the research laboratory of world destruction”: brassy, state-sponsored aesthetic pomposity; widespread Biedermeier provinciality; ubiquitous institutionalized corruption; state-sanctioned sexual hypocrisy; surging nationalism and anti-Semitism? Not as much as one might reasonably expect. Contemporary studies of fin de siècle Vienna tend to emphasize its exalted immediacy, the large degree to which its geniuses—Klimt, Freud, Wittgenstein, et al.—have shaped

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our aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities. Even if such studies duly note that these exceptional figures generally despised their fellow Viennese and displayed what one critic called “Viennese self-hatred,” the Vienna they present us with is characterized mainly by cultural efflorescence. Witness the case of Carl Schorske. Published in 1981, Schorske’s collection of essays, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, instantly became a classic; it is both widely read and of very considerable significance for academic discussions of Viennese culture. Schorske does not neglect the profane context out of which sublime Vienna emerged. His argument, in fact, is that the architects of Viennese modernism belonged to a small group of “sons” who scorned their bourgeois fathers’ flagging liberal politics and epigonic aesthetic values. Ultimately, however, Schorske pushes this un-modernist Viennese mainstream into the background. And yet a more consistent analysis of Viennese culture would spoil the fun. For if the city’s virtues were portrayed as intertwined with its ominous problems, our proximity to it would not be so flattering. In contrast, the idea of Vienna as “the research laboratory of world destruction” neatly articulates the upshot of Brigitte Hamann’s refreshingly dark new contribution to Viennese studies, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship. Hamann has managed, remarkably enough, to write a book that is both a detailed social and intellectual history of fin de siècle Vienna and a flowing biographical narrative; as her subtitle suggests, she argues that Hitler’s years in the city (1906–13) were fatefully edifying ones for him. This, of course, is not exactly a novel assertion. Hitler makes the point himself in Mein Kampf, in which he offers elaborate panegyrics to Georg von Schönerer, the rancorous anti-Semite who founded the Austrian Pan-German movement, and to Karl Lueger, who was the fantastically popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna when Hitler arrived there. But

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Hitler’s testimony in Mein Kampf is far from reliable, so a case still needs to be made for the claim that Schönerer and Lueger were his political teachers. Hamann, a seasoned biographer, does not simply confirm information that Hitler supplies. She shows that, contrary to his own claims, Hitler’s encounters with Schönerer’s ideas and with the cult of Lueger were not brought about by an ability to hone in on salutary influences in the midst of a large, degenerate city. Rather, Schönerer’s propaganda and Lueger inevitably found Hitler. For the fin de siècle Vienna that Hamann intricately reconstructs is Lueger’s Vienna, a city so saturated with vicious anti-Semitic and antiliberal rhetoric that Hitler could not have avoided, even if he had wanted to, direct contact with the terms that eventually became the core of his political vocabulary. Hamann’s damning main contention is that Hitler’s political development has everything to do with where he spent the last years of his youth and the first years of his adulthood. Accordingly, she forcefully debunks the claim that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was caused by unlucky accidents, showing in her footnotes that stories often invoked to support that idea have made their way into highly regarded scholarly works. We learn, for example, that Hitler’s relations with the Jewish shopkeepers who sold his paintings (and by whom he is supposed to have been swindled) were hardly contentious, and that Hitler even gratefully acknowledged their generosity. In fact, as a young man in Vienna, Hitler did not exhibit anything like the seething monomaniacal fixation on the Jews of his “mature” years. His attribution of such fervent views to his younger self in Mein Kampf is, according to Hamann, simply specious; Hitler had Jewish friends in Vienna, and he went so far as to defend Jews whom he admired (e.g., Heine and Mahler) when they were disparaged by

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anti-Semites. Hamann’s provocatively condemnatory point here is that Hitler did not so much become anti-Semitic in Vienna as learn about the political efficacy of anti-Semitism. She writes, “Nowhere could young Hitler have studied the power of the terror of a few and the impotence of a large organization better than in Austria’s Reichsrat Vienna.” And Hamann goes on to provide a scrupulously researched catalogue of Viennese figures and phenomena, from Schönerer and his Heil greeting to the obscure Viennese racist Guido von List and his use of the swastika, that Hitler appropriated as he rose to power and while he was the Führer. Especially important for Hamann are Hitler’s wide-eyed wanderings through the colorful scenes and literature of Viennese anti-Semitic agitation. Her conclusion reads: “Yet it was fragments of his readings with which he left Vienna in 1913, a grab-bag that was preserved inside an excellent memory. It was only in Germany that all these pieces fell into place, as in a magnetic field, to form a weltanschauung on the basis of ethnic antiSemitism.” Hamann’s theory is a harsh one: Vienna was a necessary, if not quite a sufficient, cause of Hitler’s murderous successes. It may well be too harsh. The delay between Hitler’s time in Vienna and the birth of his fanatical anti-Semitism is central to Hamann’s case against Vienna. What led him to his fatal plan was a uniquely Viennese political education: Hitler’s relatively favorable early attitude toward the Jews reflects unfavorably on the city. This assertion receives more emphasis than any other claim in Hamann’s book. The problem with it is that the very delay on which it rests opens up a space in which obvious objections can be raised. After all, Hitler could have culled extensive lessons on the significance of anti-Semitism from his post-Vienna political adventures, as there was no shortage of fascist

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activity in the Munich he returned to after the First World War. Hamann’s willingness to give credence to Hitler’s late ramblings on how deeply he was affected by Vienna’s public spaces is similarly suspect. And when she argues that Hitler might not have been able to stage urban political rallies so brilliantly had he not lived in Vienna, she goes over the top. Munich also had formidable squares. What about Hitler’s Munich? Most problematic of all, perhaps, is Hamann’s treatment of Viennese modernism. Schönerer, Lueger, quirky Viennese racists and their theories of Aryan supremacy—that Hitler was influenced by such things is not exactly surprising. Hamann, again, gives a lucid and thorough account of the pervasiveness of these insidious forces in fin de siècle Vienna, and she does an excellent job of documenting Hitler’s initial reactions to them, which is no easy task, since the sources here are extremely unreliable. They consist almost exclusively, in fact, of statements made by Hitler’s acquaintances in Vienna, many of which were altered, for obvious reasons, during and after the Third Reich. Where they can be checked against municipal records, Hamann has done the legwork. But she forecloses on the more complicated, more interesting question of the role Viennese modernism played in Hitler’s fascist apprenticeship. Hamann raises this question by noting that Hitler admired one of Vienna’s most prominent “modernists,” Mahler, while underlining Hitler’s general antipathy toward Viennese modernism. How could Hitler have idolized Mahler’s modernism just as he was laying down the foundation for his own monumental hatred of modernism? Hamann’s answer is disappointing. She contends that Viennese modernism was really about letting sexuality out of its

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bourgeois cage, and the eminently unerotic Mahler was therefore only a sort of marginal modernist. Since Hitler went on famously to denounce “degenerate art,” it is fair to say that he received an antimodernist aesthetic education in Vienna. Yet Hitler’s encounter with Viennese modernism was more complex. Indeed, his profound respect for Mahler points to another level of influence, one that Hamann moves past dismissively when she writes, “As in all of Europe, in Vienna modernism was defined by its revolt against the prudishness of the all-too-bourgeois nineteenth century. The artists of Expressionism fought for the liberation from moral constraints, against a cloying idyll, for truth, enlightenment, and the exposing of social ills and ugly realities.” The accent here is on the erotics of modernism. Its other aspects are listed as secondary or tertiary, as Hamann desultorily adds the naturalist cause, “the exposing of social ills,” to the expressionists’ agenda. What is missing, or almost missing, is the Viennese modernists’ push for social redemption through art. That was, to use Schorske’s terms, at the center of the Viennese modernist sons’ attempt to transcend their fathers’ failed liberal politics. It is also just what Hitler seems to have been so impressed by in Mahler. Mahler was no “fascist modernist,” but his zealous rigor did demand a kind of emotional submission from his audience, even as it challenged them to rise to his difficult standards. And, suggestively enough, Mahler’s severity was disturbing to liberal bourgeois Viennese operagoers, who sensed that his searching veneration of art was profoundly different from their “cloying” cult of beauty. When Mahler lost his position as conductor of Vienna’s opera, Hitler fulminated against his critics and expressed his appreciation of

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Mahler’s intensity and the select community of recipients it evoked. Can we infer from Hitler’s defense of Mahler that Hitler not only learned to hate modernism in Vienna but also learned from it? Was Viennese modernism Hitler’s unwitting mentor before it became his victim? Certainly anything like a Mahleresque insistence on formal integrity is difficult to locate in Nazi stagings of Wagner’s most turgid moments. Yet subtle influences are easy to lose sight of amid the garishness of Nazi spectacles. Anti-modernists are seldom, if ever, consistently anti-modernist. Hitler’s obsession with taking art beyond the safety of dilettantish bourgeois aesthetic experience may be grounded not only in Wagner’s bombastic ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk but also in Mahler’s ecstatically precise performances. In Mahler, too, there is a postbourgeois aesthetics; art is supposed to promise more than symbolic capital, anodyne distraction, a bit of bonheur. Of course, Viennese modernism is not “guilty” of helping to make the Holocaust possible. But the connection of violent anti-Semites like Schönerer and Lueger to Hitler’s use of anti-Semitism is incriminatingly thick. They taught him how to employ hatred of the Jews to great political effect, and their legacy is therefore directly linked to the Holocaust. It is quite another thing to indict less incendiary figures just because they were particularly Viennese. Hitler would have turned out differently had he not spent seven formative years in Vienna. But it is unfair and unproductive to flatten the obstructionist Viennese politicians who shut down Parliament—many of whom were not anti-Semitic and none of whom called for a dictatorship—with the crushing charge of mentoring him. To do so is to elevate moralizing anachronism to a historiographical principle. Yet Hamann does not raise the question of influence simply to lay blame. She also sets out to

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probe improbable and disturbing proximities. Even if these probings do not constitute the core of her book and are not always executed successfully, they are enough to make Hitler’s Vienna compelling. For the suggestion toward which they push us occupies, again, but a peripheral position in Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Schorske may remark on how Klimt, Schönberg, and Freud scandalized Viennese audiences, but nowhere does he examine this audience in detail. And only one of the essays in his book attempts to survey the political catastrophes that left “the sons” disillusioned with politics and looking for redemption in art. The brutal Vienna in which Egon Schiele was incarcerated as a pornographer and Karl Kraus was repeatedly assaulted for satirizing fellow satirists is confined to the background. We are reminded of its ugly importance. What we see, however, are the beautiful achievements to which we feel so indebted. Fin de siècle Vienna becomes, first and foremost, a time of intense creativity and relentless intellectual exploration, as the signs of crisis that remain in the picture are easily explained away as that faithful concomitant of interesting art: the personal identity crisis of the artist. And so we are invited toward ambivalence, to recognize that certain features of that society may have been serviceable to Nazism, which should shake us out of our often easy enthusiasm for, and identification with, Viennese modernism. It should prompt difficult critical reflection, which is what Viennese modernism was all about— at least some of the time.

22 The Führer Furor

Chaplinesque Rapscallion New Leader of Germany’s National Socialist Party The Onion (November 18, 1920)

“I have nothing to say about Hitler.” With this line Karl Kraus, turn-of-the-century Vienna’s most famous journalist, began his three-hundred page anti-Hitler invective. Kraus’s fate has been shared widely. Hitler tickles and tortures the authorial imagination like no other twentieth-century figure. At first as a hero, for the most part, then as a villain, also for the most part, Hitler has been a fantastically popular subject among all kinds of writers since his post-Putsch courtroom antics transformed him into something much larger than a right-wing rabble-rouser. Indeed, between 1923 and 1995, there appeared over 120,000 essays and monographs on Hitler. Atten­uation seems unlikely. For if it has changed at all, our fascination with Hitler appears to have grown even stronger in the last five years. And so we should not be surprised by the fact that a lot of books about Hitler have been published recently. Yet there is a twist here; it has to do with quality rather than quantity. We expected more books

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about Hitler. What we did not expect is that the most prominent of them would be so good. This remark is less cynical than it sounds. Over the years able scholars have produced a very substantial body of excellent research on Hitler. And, of course, it would be absurd to regard as unexpected everything that adds to it. Furthermore, we had reason to hope for significant new contributions. Ideology does not have quite the same place that it did fifteen years ago. Historians in East Germany and the Soviet Union tended to treat Hitler as an effect of capitalism, while their Western counterparts often viewed him in narrowly personal terms, as an individual tyrant crushing a malnourished democratic experiment. Of course, scholars in the West, and especially in West Germany, were not exactly of one opinion with regard to Hitler’s role in creating the Third Reich. And in the mid-1980s, what had been a rather solemn academic discussion, the grave “Hitler studies” that Don DeLillo parodies in White Noise, became a high-profile slug-fest, now known as “the Historians’ Debate.” At issue were a series of incendiary questions—Was Hitler a revolutionary? Which of his policies were rational?—and the question of whether it is ever appropriate to ask them. Ernst Nolte, who had drifted away from the trenchant reading of Nazism he advanced decades earlier, went so far as to call Hitler’s worldview an understandable response to the Bolshevist Revolution. Just a few months ago, Nolte received one of Germany’s most prestigious awards for cultural achievement, which simply confirms what we already knew: Hitler remains an intensely politicized field of inquiry. However, in general, the intellectual atmosphere in this area has improved. It is more open, as are archives in Moscow. And material

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discovered there, for example, Hitler’s skull and a complete copy of Goebbels’s diary, has helped to answer old questions. But discovering new sources will only get you so far. It certainly will not explain a phenomenon as complex as Hitler. Nor will sheer intellectual openness. The great majority of the thousands of open-minded books about Hitler have little interpretive value. In fact, until recently there were only two truly formidable biographies of him: Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952, revised 1962) and Joaquim Fest’s Hitler: A Biography (1973). We now have a third major biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw’s two volume masterpiece Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (1998); Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (2000). It is the best of the three, by far. Improvements in biographical research do not always imply a general shift in the significance of the subject. Yet that is likely the case here. For, again, the publication of Kershaw’s biography was accompanied by a procession of incisive and well-researched books about Hitler: The Hitler of History (1997), John Lukacs’s useful survey of, and critical conversation with, historical scholarship on Hitler; Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (1998), Fritz Redlich’s illuminating “psychography” of Hitler (This should not be confused with “psycho-history.” Redlich, who is a psychiatrist, works carefully with relevant sources and examines Hitler’s mental condition at every stage of his life, minutely charting the changes. He does not seek to “solve” the enigma of Hitler’s psychopathic behavior by focusing on childhood trauma or a particular psychic disturbance.); Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (1998), Ron Rosenbaum’s extensive collection of interviews with scholars, intellectuals, and artists who, in some form or other, have tried to “explain Hitler”;

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Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (1999, German original 1996), Brigitte Hamann’s scrupulously researched and intelligently argued account of Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1906–13) and of their influence on his later development. Every one of these books represents an attempt at a sustained, comprehensive critical reckoning with Hitler. In the past, the most compelling works on him frequently have had a very different character. Consider Eberhard Jäckel’s and Sebastian Haffner’s shorter, much more synthetic books on Hitler’s Weltanschauung, both of which were published during the 1970s. If there has been a structural change, what caused it? Kershaw himself offers an insightful answer. “Reflecting” on Hitler’s historical significance in the preface to Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, he writes: “Hitler’s dictatorship has the quality of a paradigm for the twentieth century.” Kershaw also claims that “Hitler’s mark on the century” has been “greater” than anyone else’s. The implication is clear. Taking leave of the twentieth-century means trying to settle our accounts with Hitler, its paradigmatic problem, which, in turn means engaging in a sustained, comprehensive critical analysis. Certainly something close to this seems to be at stake in Rosenbaum’s work, and in Hamann’s. Hamann suggestively tracks the full extent of Hitler’s debt to “twentieth-century culture” by examining his encounter with one of its paradigms: fin de siècle Vienna. Kershaw has given us a twenty-first century biography of Hitler that could have been written only at the end of the twentieth century. Kershaw’s biography is a true “social biography,” to use a phrase the great film theorist Siegfried Kracauer coined, in exile, as he wrote about the culture that Hitler’s Germany had begun to annihilate. Without a trace of moralism, and without losing himself in quotidian

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minutiae and psychological speculation, Kershaw shadows Hitler like a conscience might have. He examines Hitler’s daily life, as well as his emotional and political development, in vivid detail. At the same time, Kershaw situates Hitler’s personal narrative within its social context, charting their reciprocal influence and pointing out how Hitler’s experiences and attitudes were emblematic of large social trends. And he does so with impressive erudition. The result is a kind of interpretive balance, which is very difficult to bring off in Hitler’s case. With him, moving back and forth between the micro level of personal narrative and the macro level of social context entails entering into not so much a “hermeneutic circle” as a dizzying hermeneutic spiral. For, at a certain point, Hitler’s narrative begins to reshape—as few, if any, personal narratives have—the social context that shaped it, only, of course, to be shaped again itself by the context it reshaped. Neither Bullock nor Fest came close to producing a real social biography. Both focus on the personal narrative. They offer well-informed, penetrating answers to one crucial question: why did Hitler commit the terrible crimes for which he will be remembered? But neither Bullock nor Fest makes a serious attempt to shed light on Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, or to understand how he remained in power for twelve years while executing policies of mass destruction and mass self-destruction. They do not tell us how Hitler became Hitler. Kershaw’s book works so well as a social biography because his approach proceeds from a transitional concept: charisma. Elaborating on the argument he developed in The ‘Hitler Myth’ (1989), Kershaw invokes charisma as a sociological category. Here charisma is a modern, postliberal structure of authority, one that became possible in

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Weimar Germany for a number of impersonal reasons. These include the “ignominy of Versailles,” the concomitant collective longing for national redemption, and the inability of the democratic government to appeal to a strong democratic tradition in Germany. Charisma is also a psychological category. It therefore can function as a way to mediate between the levels of biographical analysis. And, indeed, Kershaw makes his overriding concern the fateful match between Hitler’s personal charisma and Germany’s impersonal read­ iness for charismatic rule. Summing it all up, Kershaw writes, “The Germany which had produced Adolf Hitler, had seen its future in his vision, had so readily served him, and had shared in his hubris, had also to share in his nemesis” (841). Germany followed the charismatic leader it “produced” because he envisioned, in just the right way, at just the right time, the Germany it wanted to see. In Hubris, Kershaw explains how Hitler’s idiosyncratic “vision” for a “better” future and Germany’s receptiveness to it took shape. In Nemesis, he tracks the bloody business of implementation. We might expect the second volume of a two-volume Hitler biography to begin in 1933. But Kershaw divides Hitler’s life into pre- and post-1936 stages. The reason is that 1936 marks “the culminating point of the first phase of the dictatorship,” and Kershaw wants Nemesis to begin with the beginning of the end, with the onset of the “ceaseless radicalization” that persisted until 1945. Both volumes are well written and come equipped with helpful maps and eerie photographs. Because Kershaw keeps his debates with other scholars, as well as his extensive remarks about primary sources, neatly contained in his footnotes, Hubris and Nemesis read smoothly, remarkably so, given their factual girth and cognitive intricacy. Some chapters are structured as accounts

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of Hitler’s life-stages, such as his “drop-out” years in Vienna, while others are organized around seminal events, for example, Germany’s strategic “miscalculation” during the 1939 Poland crisis. Kershaw puts personal narrative into the foreground where it seems to be of decisive importance. And he does the same with social context. Tellingly, all the chapter headings in Nemesis refer to large historical developments, starting, again, with the Nazis’ “ceaseless radicalization.” In 1936, according to Kershaw, Hitler was at once more delusional than ever and cannily realistic. His early diplomatic and economic successes had fed his surging megalomania. Both Hitler and the nation that, at the time, overwhelmingly supported him, believed that he could achieve whatever he wanted to. Yet Hitler also astutely recognized that his authority could not rest on a foundation of rationally organized domestic prosperity. It would last only as long as he was associated with a “project of national salvation.” The pressure to expand, “to radicalize” unremittingly, came from outside as well as from inside. Kershaw’s most original, most provocative claims have to do with the place of Nazi party leaders in this constellation of causal forces. He insists that even as they used the most cynical images and slogans to manufacture Hitler’s charisma, men like Rosenberg, Himmler, and, especially, Goebbels remained fanatically in Hitler’s thrall. As Kershaw puts it, they “combined pure belief and impure propaganda” (456). Working closely with Goebbels’s complete diary, which proves to be a key new source (Hitler’s bond with Goebbels’s was the closest thing he had to a friendship), Kershaw draws out the full, chilling extent of this belief. He also shows that well into the war, and until the very end, defeat did nothing to shake it. For in taking huge risks and

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losing, Hitler remained true to the principles that had won him such loyal disciples. Perhaps even more chilling is Kershaw’s account of how these same party leaders influenced the final solution. Here again Goebbels’s diary is crucially important. More lucidly than other sources, it reveals that Hitler had to be prodded into instituting not only the policy of mass deportations, but even the compulsory identification measure (the yellow Star of David) for Jews living in Germany. Party leaders had urged Hitler to take this latter step in the wake of Kristallnacht (November 1938). He resisted it until August 1941, when Goebbels finally “convinced” him to act (474). And, in the summer of 1941, he repeatedly “rejected” Rheinhard Heydrich’s proposals to make the destruction of Eastern Jewry more systematic (476). Why? Certainly moral compunction cannot be the answer. According to Kershaw, Goebbels expresses a certain dismay at the inconsistency between Hitler’s behavior and his stated principles on the “Jewish question,” but Goebbels never suggests that Hitler had softened his attitude toward the Jews. And, during this time, Hitler continued to cite his own prewar “prophecy,” according to which the Jews would be “destroyed” if they started another world war, and to provide various justifications for large-scale murder. Kershaw speculates that Hitler may have been acting, or not acting, out of denial. For to devise a “Final Solution” before winning the war in the East was to acknowledge that the war would not be won anytime soon. As long as the fiction of imminent victory could be sustained, it made more “sense” to wait for the acquisition of vast new territories. After all, the Nazis were trying to figure out how to dispose of millions of people and had not yet begun to think seriously about gas and ovens.

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The problem, for Kershaw, is that Hitler had given up this illusion by the fall of 1941, and yet he remained reluctant to authorize mass deportations and overtly genocidal policies. Hitler did not enumerate his reservations, at least not on records available to us. And so we are left wondering. What is clear is that the solicitations of Heydrich, Himmler, and Goebbels had the desired effect. Hitler eventually did license extermination. Yet, as Kershaw stresses, he did so only in the most general terms. Pushing his claim, Kershaw goes so far as to contend, “Whatever the reasons, he [Hitler] could never have delivered the sort of speech which, notoriously, Himmler would give in Posen two years later [1943] when he described what it was like to see 1,000 corpses lying side by side and spoke openly of the ‘extermination’ (Ausrottung) of the Jewish people as a glorious page in our history. ... Even in his inner circle Hitler could never bring himself to speak with outright frankness about the killing of the Jews” (487). Hitler “could not bring himself ” to discuss the Holocaust directly, apparently not even with Goebbels. This is an unsettling proposition. We should note that Kershaw circumscribes Hitler’s silence and ultimately leaves it to stand as a question. Far from exculpating Hitler, the move invites further inquiry. Nemesis does more than inform exhaustively and explain brilliantly: it points to what remains to be said about Hitler.

23 Holocaust Imponderables

The incomprehensibility of the Holocaust is no less true for being a truism. And it extends beyond the obvious historiographical no man’s land: how to explain genocidal anti-Semitism in Germany? For everywhere we turn in “Hitler’s Europe” we find imponderables. Why did Bulgaria refuse to deport Jews from within its own borders, yet give up practically all the Jews who lived in the territories it occupied? Why did Rumania, one of only two Nazi satellites that carried out mass exterminations on their own initiative, stop persecuting Jews well before it turned against Germany? Why did Pope Pius XII hide Italian Jews after having done nothing to warn them about their imminent fate? How can we compare the behavior of French and Polish “bystanders,” when the punishment for assisting Jews in France varied, and Poles caught doing so were executed, along with their families? In the countries allied with Germany—Romania, Finland, Hungary and Bulgaria, and Italy—proportionately, more Jews survived the Second World War than in anti-Nazi Poland and the democratic Netherlands: why?

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These are just some of the questions István Deák raises in his new book. Hitler’s Europe consists of review essays that Deák wrote over the last fifteen years, mostly for the New York Review of Books and The New Republic. In its first three parts it addresses, among other topics, Hitler’s popularity among everyday Germans, the Goldhagen debates, Victor Klemperer’s diaries, German Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, and the ambiguities of Italian fascism. Much of this is familiar ground. By uncovering complexities that scholars have passed over, Deák does us the great service of making it less familiar. For example, when I Will Bear Witness, the diaries Victor Klemperer wrote during the Third Reich, appeared in English several years ago, many critics and scholars hailed them as a triumphant deed and their author as an inspired humanist. A German Jew whose marriage to an “Aryan” kept him out of the camps, Klemperer took it upon himself to “bear precise witness,” creating a unique record of life in Nazi Germany. Deák shares the general enthusiasm for the book’s richness as a historical source. And he too admires Klemperer’s courage. Had Klemperer’s journals been found, Klemperer probably would have been put to death. However, without any revisionist bravado, Deák also directs our attention to Klemperer’s misanthropy. This includes the cruelty with which Klemperer treated the people who risked their lives to help him, his gratuitous recklessness with their safety (Klemperer names these quiet resisters by name in his journals, thereby endangering them), and his Schadenfreude toward fellow victims. But Deák is even more effective in a less well-trodden area. For various reasons, such as a new availability of sources, it might be the most dynamic in Holocaust studies: the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This is Deák’s field. It is also where his roots are, a fact that he

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laconically adverts to as he discusses certain fateful Eastern European resentments. “As a former Hungarian, I would like to add that the grumblings of East Central Europeans about a callous, uncaring, and ungrateful West are, in fact, not wholly unwarranted.” Calling himself a “victim,” Deák tells us that he lived through the Holocaust in Hungary. He refrains from saying how he was victimized. Now a long-time professor at Columbia, Deák has produced a number of influential works on Hungarian history. And while all of the carefully argued, elegantly written essays in Hitler’s Europe will inform and impress, Deák is at his most redoubtably erudite where he reviews books that deal with Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania during the Third Reich. Reviewing historical studies is like translating poetry—at least in one basic respect. The latter activity entails choosing between sound and sense, the former between text and context. For space limitations make it hard to interrogate a work thoroughly while acquainting readers with its topic. And unless the book under review analyzes a well-known, uncontroversial subject, it will be hard to express the significance of its claims without acquainting readers with its topic. Deák’s reviews are unrhymed. He engages with arguments and authors. Yet the substance of Deák’s essays lies in his own narratives of the historical developments at issue. For example, his review of Thomas Sakmyster’s book about Miklós Horty, Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback (Columbia UP, 1999), offers intricate accounts of Horty’s path to power, and of the difficulties he faced in answering his country’s Jewish Question. We learn that Horty owed his greatest triumphs to the Nazis, who enabled him to take back land Hungary had lost after the First World War, and that Horty was an anti-Semite

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who regarded Hitler’s plans for the Jews as impractical and inhumane, in that order. We also learn about the Hungarian fascists who pressured him. Horty set himself up to be squeezed. In the end that is what happened. The Nazis even kidnapped his son to secure his compliance. Horty argued that the “war industry” would not survive without them “whenever Hitler pushed” him “to take drastic measures against the 825,000 Hungarian Jews.” Could he have done more? Probably not, Deák suggests. He adds that this hardly exculpates Horty. Yet Deák does not simply give us a balanced interpretation, according to which the theory “that Hungary collaborated with the Nazis mainly to save Jewish lives is unconvincing,” as is the widely held “belief ... that Hungary could and should have resisted the Germans outright.” With his next remark Deák unsettles our equanimity: Horty was right in arguing that the Jewish community would have been annihilated had Hungary resisted. Such was the case in Poland and in the Netherlands. It is true that anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary prepared the way for the wholesale robbery of Jewish property as well as for the 1944 deportation by brutal gendarmes of nearly half a million Jews before the eyes of an indifferent public. But it is also true that in such countries as France—where there had been no anti-Jewish laws before the German occupation— thousands of Jews were also deported by brutal French gendarmes before the eyes of an indifferent public. Meanwhile, in fascist Italy—where Mussolini had introduced some anti-Jewish measures as early as 1938—the public (and the Italian occupation forces in France and Yugoslavia) sabotaged the efforts of the Germans and their Italian henchmen to deport Jews to Auschwitz.

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If we want to emphasize the causal link between the discriminatory laws, which were enacted in Hungary before the threat of a Nazi takeover, and the atrocities that followed it, we should be able to locate analogous connections elsewhere. But when we broaden our scope, a welter of counterexamples confronts us. That France did not have such legislation mattered little. Their similar indifference greeted a similar brutality. So how can we be sure that uncoerced anti-Semitic laws in Hungary facilitated what happened later—under Nazi supervision? This is not an isolated problem. In “Poles and Jews,” for instance, Deák cites events that militate against recent arguments about Polish anti-Semitism. And even as he tries to explain the notorious intensity of anti-Semitism in Poland, he reminds us: “There are more trees at Vad Yashem in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of Polish helpers of Jews than all such memorial trees combined.” Deák shows that although large, terrifying trends dominate the landscape in Hitler’s Europe, general tendencies—the kinds that bolster historical understanding—are scarce. “Horty was right in arguing that the Jewish community would have been annihilated had Hungary resisted.” Most historians focus on the causes of actions and their effects. In Holocaust studies, by contrast, inaction is a major theme. The reasons for this range widely, from the sense that Jewish victims displayed extraordinary passivity to the ways in which the criminal character of the Holocaust determines scholarly approaches to it. Inaction matters here partly because inaction in the face of crime is a moral problem, one that cries out for historical scrutiny. Deák asks: what might have happened if Horty had resisted. He does so to illuminate Horty’s constraints, or the roots of his inaction, and also to test the plausibility of Horty’s justification for

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not acting. What if he had defied Hitler? As Horty himself maintained, the consequences for Hungary’s Jews would have been catastrophic. This means that he easily could have believed his own claim. We cannot know for sure. Yet we can say, as Deák does, that opportunism and indifference alone probably did not motivate his passive behavior. And so Deák evokes Horty’s moral resonance. He writes, “He [Horty] was not an evil man, but he was not a humanitarian either.” “What would have happened if ” questions do not only assess character and assign responsibility. By their very nature they also argue for a principle that sometimes gets lost in discussions of the Holocaust: things could have turned out otherwise. Such gestures are important. However, set in the wide-open subjunctive mood, they build momentum fast and often go too far. Deák makes this point in the fifth and final part of Hitler’s Europe, which reckons with two famous “what if ” questions. What if Pope Pius XII had been less conciliatory toward Hitler? And what if the United States and Great Britain had bombed the gas chambers? His answers are forcefully sobering in both cases—especially in the latter one. But let us assume that such raids would have been successful and that only a few inmates of the camps would have been killed, even though some of the barracks were only a few hundred yards away from the gas chambers. And let us assume further that many inmates would have managed to escape. Where would they have gone without any knowledge of the Polish language (by then most Polish Jews were dead), emaciated and dressed in prison garb? In Poland, the penalty for hiding Jews was the execution of the host and his entire family. And even if all the gas chambers and

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crematoria were destroyed, experience had already demonstrated to the Allies that even greater complexes could become functional again in just a matter of weeks. (In August 1943 the U.S. Army Air Force sacrificed over five hundred airmen and fifty-four bombers in an attempt to smash the vast Rumanian oil refineries in Ploesti, which were vital to Germany. Despite horrifying losses, the raids destroyed nearly half of Ploesti’s total capacity; within weeks, however, the refineries were producing again at a higher rate than before the raid.) Moreover, the Germans would have been able to fall back on their time-honored method of shooting their victims. And if the rail lines had been bombed? The inmates in the cattle cars and those at the departure points would have been allowed to die of thirst, of the heat, or of the cold while the lines were being repaired. Deák puts the factual complexity of the Holocaust into his contraryto-fact scenarios. As a result, they offer only bloody alternatives to a bloody reality, and little reason to impugn the United States and Great Britain for not trying to destroy the Nazis’ killing machines. Where the book under review, Richard Breitman’s What the Nazis Planned, What the British and the Americans Knew, suggests otherwise, it loses sight of the intransigent difficulty of its topic. But here as well, there are twists. For Deák agrees with some of Breitman’s main criticisms. Not only did the United States and Great Britain know more about the Final Solution than they let on, according to Deák, they could also have done more to help. Late in the war, they could have pressured Hitler’s allies to undermine his genocide attempt. For, by then, the outcome of the war had become clear, and the prospective victors had

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leverage. What prompted their inaction? Deák asserts that strategic issues deterred the United States and Great Britain from combating the Final Solution more aggressively. Yet he states that Angloanti-Semitism probably did too. And so Hitler’s Europe concludes by showing how the historiographical challenges of the Holocaust extend beyond Europe. Deák’s focus, however, remains closer to the scenes of destruction. In fact, over the last several months he has written characteristically probing essays—on Polish collaboration and Bulgarian resistance—for the New York Review of Books. Hopefully Hitler’s Europe will have sequels.

24 Racism: Coded as Culture?

This book makes a good case for racism—the word, not the ideology. What necessitated a defense? The term has been both abused and abandoned; many scholars, and most of us, use it so widely that it has lost specificity and, with that, analytic value. As a result, other scholars have found alternatives. George M. Fredrickson tells us that he did, too. In an earlier book, he employed instead the phrase “white supremacy.” The problem was that his topic there, “color-coded” discrimination in the United States and South Africa, developed as part of a larger phenomenon, and the best word for that turned out to be “racism.” For despite having been stretched, the word has the weight of tradition. It became common coinage after one of the early systematic critiques of Nazism. Just after the Nazis had ascended to power, Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay GermanJewish sexologist, attached the label of racism to their worldview, pithily evoking the centrality of race in it. Racism stuck for a reason. Of course, Fredrickson’s main argument is historical rather than terminological. But the issue of naming deserves attention, because

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writing the history of “racism” entails defining or, really, redefining this very important word. And, indeed, at the beginning of his book Fredrickson hazards a formal definition: It [racism] originates from a mind-set that regards “them” as different from “us” in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable.... In all manifestations of racism from the mildest to the most severe, what is being denied is the possibility that the racializers and the racialized can coexist in the same society, except perhaps on the basis of domination and subordination. For Fredrickson, racism includes both idea and act. It occurs where stereotypes about irreversible racial differences mandate injustice. As he observes, “My theory or conception of racism, therefore, has two components: difference and power.” What limits his theoretical account of racism are the terms “permanent” and “unbridgeable.” These characteristics implicitly distinguish racism from the many forms of ethnic and religious prejudice that assign a more flexible role to race. They also set up Fredrickson’s historical narrative, which amounts to a practical definition of racism. In order to show us when racism began, he has to show us what is racism, and what is not. Fredrickson locates the origins of racism in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, putting himself into a kind of centrist position—twice. Whereas quite a few historians of anti-Semitism believe that racist anti-Semitism emerged as something fundamentally new in the nineteenth century, Fredrickson sees “proto-racist” anti-Semitism in certain late medieval Spanish attitudes. According to them, Jews could never become Christian; “permanent” differences separated Jews from, and made them enemies of, Christianity. Second,

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unlike some historians of the early slave trade and the first phases of colonization, Fredrickson thinks it is inaccurate to call these fateful undertakings “racist.” Here too proto-racism existed; yet during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, slavery and colonialism were not supported by an ideology grounded in “unbridgeable” racial differences. Witness, for example, the famous debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas. In 1550 Las Casas argued that because Indians had reason, they could be converted to Christianity and become “peaceful” subjects of the Spanish crown. Degrading them with slave labor was therefore wrong. Tellingly, Las Casas’s views, which the Catholic Church endorsed, became official policy. Europeans continued to enslave Africans and Indians, but for the most part they did so without an explicitly racist justification. That came later—in the Age of Enlightenment. Fredrickson frequently directs our attention to a depressing paradox: The scientific thought of the Enlightenment was a precondition for the growth of a modern racism based on physical typology. Consider that Johann Blumenbach’s “authoritative’’ physical typology, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, appeared in 1776, or at the very height of the Enlightenment. Around this time a prominent German advocate of Jewish emancipation insisted that “the Jew is more man than Jew.” Such assertions of universal human equality put new pressure on racists: if they wanted to legitimize their belief in inequality, they now had to make the opposite claim. So, not only did the Enlightenment make modern biological racism possible, it also made this nastiness necessary—it pushed racists into dehumanizing the objects of their biases. And they did that, working mainly in the burgeoning discourse of pseudoscience. Hence the nineteenth-century idea of

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the “White Man’s Burden,” according to which nonwhites are “halfdevil and half-child,” and color alone is a moral license for colonial rule. Hence also the term “anti-Semitism.” Circulated throughout the German public sphere in 1879 by a book titled The Victory of the Jews Over the Germans, anti-Semitism defines Jews as a race rather than as a religious or ethnic group. Many factors caused the radicalization of Western racism. In cases where racism was coded into law, military defeat often played a decisive part. Germany and South Africa enacted racist legislation after suffering bitter, humiliating losses. In the Southern United States, after Emancipation, there was a reintensification of race-based legislation, while overseas, other contingencies, like Hitler, were crucial. Furthermore, the histories of the racist regimes collided. Nazi ideologues influenced South African political theory, and the genocidal outcome of racist anti-Semitism in Germany discredited racism everywhere. Certainly it is no coincidence that in 1944, with rumors of the concentration camps spreading, pro-civil rights sentiment in the United States rose dramatically. To underpin this thought, Fredrickson cites several wartime admonitions for greater racial equality, including Gunnar Myrdal’s famous study An American Dilemma. He also notes that even neo-Nazis treat the Holocaust as a moral liability—after all, why else would they deny that it happened? Apartheid may have survived until the last days of the cold war, but that was largely because the people responsible for it presented themselves to the West as a buffer limiting the spread of Communism in Africa. By its end, apartheid had become one of the world’s most obvious atavisms. Needless to say, racist cultural stereotypes still pervade Western political talk. But the terms have

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changed. The “virus” of racism, as Fredrickson frequently refers to it, has traveled its course. Now we must endure “post-racism.” Fredrickson’s claim about the trajectory of racism runs parallel to William Julius Wilson’s argument in The Declining Significance of Race. When Wilson’s book appeared in 1978, it prompted rancorous debate. With fist-shaking indignation, Wilson’s critics demanded to know: how dare he suggest that the importance of race has ebbed in race-obsessed America? It would be surprising if Racism: A Short History elicited anything other than warm praise, for much has changed in the meantime. While insisting that race still matters, most scholars of the subject recognize that it matters in very new ways. Fredrickson himself adverts to the work of the sociologists John Solomos and Les Beck, who maintain that today race is “coded as culture.” The structures of racist ideology remain operative, in other words, but they now stigmatize cultural—not specifically racial— groups as innately deficient and dangerous. Yet shifts in cultural context only partly explain why Fredrickson’s book should be celebrated. The chief reason is the text itself. One of only a handful of attempts to cover Western attitudes toward race comprehensively, Fredrickson’s Racism is by far the most concise and lucid. It is also the most balanced. In Race: The History of an Idea in the West (1996), Ivan Hannaford asserts that the intellectual basis for racism developed in the seventeenth century. Imanuel Geiss, by contrast, finds embryonic racism in biblical and ancient Greek xenophobia. Moreover, both Hannaford and Geiss, whose Geschichte des Rassismus (History of Racism, 1988) has not been translated into English, focus on “classic” texts. Fredrickson engages with them as well; he offers a reading of Mein Kampf in which

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he artfully demonstrates how Hitler “managed to synthesize the mystical tradition of völkisch nationalism with the new scientific racism.” But in addition, Fredrickson discusses the views of everyday white Southerners in the Jim Crow era, and of everyday white South Africans during apartheid. And he alone effectively speaks to the question: in what ways did material contexts shape racist ideology? Writing about Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, Ralph Ellison challenged social scientists to examine race relations from the place “where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx.” That describes Fredrickson’s point of departure—racism as the meeting of a mentality and a practice—although his idiom is neither Marxist nor Freudian. Here a “mind-set” fixated on “difference” produces systems of power, of “domination and subordination.” At the same time Fredrickson stresses that in both the Southern United States and Germany, the process of social and economic modernization created anxieties that in turn facilitated racism. In neither American nor German studies is this a novel approach. But that is not necessarily a weakness. Fredrickson’s historiography is free of dogmatic tendencies, which enables him to draw effectively on the most diverse scholarship. In refining, qualifying, and substantiating his arguments, Fredrickson invokes thinkers as dissimilar as the historian Peter Pulzer, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the cultural theorist Sander Gilman, the sociologist Loïc Wacquant, and the film scholar Eric Rentschler. Still, what ultimately makes Fredrickson’s book so valuable is its original vision of the major racisms—its view of them as belonging to a coherent historical narrative, as sharing a basic logic of development, notwithstanding the many variations among them. “These continuities suggest to me that there is a general history of racism, as well as a

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history of particular racisms, but knowledge of specific contexts is necessary to an understanding of the varying forms and functions of the generic phenomenon with which we are concerned.” This innovative framework sets the stage on which Fredrickson plays out the plot of his book: a comparative analysis of the most virulent Western racisms. Reviewers often apply the term “pathbreaking” to works that simply trim back a few errant branches. But Fredrickson’s book really is pathbreaking. He takes on vexing issues, such as the problem of how Nazi anti-Semitism relates to Christian anti-Semitism, with aplomb. Again, we see the striking contemporaneousness of Western racist regimes: the emancipation of Jews in Germany and blacks in the Southern United States failed at almost exactly the same time—in the late 1870s. Also, the so-called Nuremberg Laws (1935) went into effect the year before the first ordinance against intermarriage was passed in South Africa. In both the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, racists contended that their racial Others spoiled modernization. But whereas blacks supposedly retarded progress with lethargy, the Nazis vituperated against archcapitalist Jews for recklessly accelerating the destruction of communal life. This comparison deepens our knowledge of racism’s embeddedness in particular cultural contexts. Yet, above all, Fredrickson teaches us to see the general historical specificity of the racisms in question, as oxymoronic as that may sound. Their singularity —especially the singularity of German anti-Semitism—has often been illuminated, albeit seldom with such precision. Understanding them as interdependent parts of a blood-soaked whole, of an era that has ended—that is new, and it gives new meaning to the word “racism.”

25 Gender Unbender: Pierre Bourdieu and the Enigmatic Durability of Bad Values

Pierre Bourdieu’s newsworthiness has become news. His profile in the New York Times deals more with how bright his star is than with its substance, and quite a bit of the attention Bourdieu receives from the French press has to do with the attention he receives from the French press. What set this cycle into motion? In France, where academics play a much larger role in public life than they do here, academic visibility is neither rare nor strange. So why did Bourdieu’s particular brand of it become a media spectacle? There are a number of reasons, some of which are obvious—for example, volume. Bourdieu gives televised addresses on the ills of television. He speaks about charged political issues, such as labor and immigration laws, at large demonstrations. He writes incendiary Op-Ed essays in major newspapers. Of course, in order to be taken seriously as a scholar while you do much more than your colleagues

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in the public arena, much more volubly, you must also maintain enormous intellectual credibility. Bourdieu does. He is professor of sociology at the Collège de France, the apex of French academe, as well as director of studies at the prestigious École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. And Bourdieu has very clearly worked his way to the top. In roughly forty years he has produced approximately thirty books, many of which are regarded by sociologists as major accomplishments. Indeed, the International Sociological Association put his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) on its list of the ten most important works of sociology written in the twentieth century. The book examines how aesthetic taste builds and reinforces social hierarchies. It is a typical theme for Bourdieu, who seeks in all his research to lay bare hidden mechanisms of power. When he writes best-selling essays in an activist key, Bourdieu can claim to be drawing directly on his expertise. In this regard, as is often pointed out, he stands in close proximity to another postwar maître penseur, Sartre. Bourdieu belongs to a different generation, of course, but not necessarily his own. In the early 1960s—before Foucault and Derrida— Bourdieu reoriented structuralism, which was then fashionable among French social scientists, and created a kind of poststructuralist theory. Bourdieu still uses structuralist code-cracking techniques; he sees culture as a series of “fields,” each of which is organized according to its own deep grammar. But he dismisses the structuralist principle that you can explain the internal logic of a social system—language, for example—without reference to external factors. Throughout his career, Bourdieu’s goal has been to trace shifts in the most autonomous fields, such as the evolution of aesthetic taste and the intensifying

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opacity of academic discourse, back to the struggle for social or “symbolic” power. This mode of cultural analysis is quite unlike the other great French poststructuralisms, even the one to which it is most similar, Foucault’s. Bourdieu may be interested in something he calls symbolic power; Foucault may have written a history of the prison. Yet the operations of power are much more concrete for Bourdieu than they are for Foucault, who often seems primarily concerned with highly abstract “discursive regimes” that have us by the seat of our subjecthood. And so Bourdieu sees more possibility for getting his hands on, and altering, the power structure: “We must work to universalize the conditions of access to the universal.” You will not find a sentence like that in Foucault’s writings. At the same time, Bourdieu hardly exudes optimism. His worldview is dark, but not quite in the way critics generally make it out to be. What they tend to find most striking is the ubiquity of competition—how, for him, the grubby struggle to get ahead, to accumulate “symbolic capital,” pervades all areas of culture, even the most refined. Yet something else weighs more heavily on Bourdieu: the unconscious complicity of the oppressed. Bourdieu’s world is Kafkaesque rather than Brechtian. For hidden, complicated reasons, those who are “dominated” cede authority to an “established order” that is manifestly absurd. This, Bourdieu claims, is the great “paradox of doxa.” Its prime example is masculine domination. Bourdieu, accordingly, takes up the topic of gender inequality in most of his studies on symbolic power. In fact, his earliest research— on familial organization in North Africa’s Kabyle society—figures prominently in his new book, as do ideas worked out in The Logic of

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Practice (1990). But Masculine Domination is neither a rehashing of old material nor a collection of thematically cohesive essays. Rather, it is itself an essay, the form of which may have been influenced by Virginia Woolf, whom Bourdieu repeatedly invokes as the guiding spirit of his project. For although he states that his deepest affinities are with To the Lighthouse, and not with Woolf ’s “endlessly quoted” feminist essays, Masculine Domination bears similarities to them in structure (its pointed argument is sustained over about 100 pages and divided into three sections), if not in style. Following Woolf, Bourdieu wants to “suspend ... ‘the hypnotic power of domination.’” With him, as with her, this means challenging readers to take a new approach to the problem, which in turn means exposing the inadequacy of existing approaches. Bourdieu believes that we produce gender identity. It is a function of our worldview, not a simple anatomical fact around which we form our worldview. For this reason he attacks “differentialist” feminists. By celebrating certain patterns of behavior as natural female strengths, they bolster the false consciousness on which masculine domination relies: the fallacy that what we consider to be male and female characteristics are essential properties. Bourdieu’s attitude toward the most dynamic alternative to this feminism, constructivist gender theory, is more complex. He agrees with its main premise: that gender identity is a linguistic construct, right down to its most intimate parts. But he questions its practical value and argues that while constructivism probes forcefully, it does not probe far enough. It is insufficiently radical. Here Bourdieu’s position is refreshingly counterintuitive. For constructivist gender theory, which has been influential in France and the United States since the late 1980s and is itself refreshingly

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counterintuitive, appears to be nothing if not radical. Indeed, Monique Wittig, a well-known French constructivist, avers that she has no vagina. This claim may sound strange. But its basis is a rational response to a series of reasonable questions: What is the real significance of the term “vagina?” What is its referent? And what is its social function? The point is that “vagina” is not a neutral, innocent label that we give to a self-evidently discrete body part. Rather, as for Bourdieu, it is a concept that imposes an artificial order on the body and regulates our perception of it. When such concepts feel natural to us, when we see what they refer to as organic objects, we are confusing linguistic objects, objects we construct by “inscribing” names and borders onto the world, with diffuse physical reality. Most of us accept as organically given a vast matrix of constructs, starting with our own bodies. According to critics like Wittig and Bourdieu, this leaves us blind to a very important fact: power interests always guide our articulation of the world. Concepts not only designate objects, they carry meanings, meanings that generally will be advantageous to some of us. For example, the word “vagina” does not simply refer to a female anatomical feature. In our culture it connotes the defining feature of the female body, the locus of gender identity. And classifying people according to their reproductive organs reflects and institutionalizes a heterosexual bias. One implication of all this is that when we use everyday language, we reinforce meanings and structures of perception that support our gender norms, even where our utterances contain annihilating invectives against our gender norms. Since these meanings and structures depend on reinforcement from the very people who suffer under them, refusing to acknowledge words like “vagina,” or playing

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with them subversively, counts, at least for some constructivists, as resistance. So does constructing identities that openly challenge “normal,” heterosexual assumptions about the stability of gender and the natural function of certain body parts. Bourdieu thinks otherwise. In his preface he declines, rather peremptorily, even to consider the idea that “parodic performances” of identity might loosen masculine domination. He calls instead for “political mobilization, which would open for women the possibility of a collective action of resistance.” And in the body of his book Bourdieu writes, “Symbolic power cannot be exercised without the contribution of those who undergo it and who only undergo it because they construct it as such. But instead of stopping at this statement (as constructivism in its idealist, ethnomethodological or other forms does) one has also to take note of and explain the social construction of the cognitive structures which organize acts of construction of the world and its powers.” In order to deconstruct patriarchy, it is not enough to speak in abstract terms about how gender identity is constructed. You need to know, in some detail, how gender identity has been constructed historically. This is not exactly a novel proposition. Much research has been done over the last two decades on the historical construction of gender identity. In fact, Bourdieu draws freely on this research in his own book. What such works—he cites the second volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as an example—have not done is grab the problem of masculine domination by its roots. They may go back to the ancient Greeks, as is the case with Foucault, but they discuss only famous interpretations of gender constructs (for instance, Plato’s), not the Ur-constructs that continue to undergird “masculine

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sociodicy.” For Bourdieu, it is crucial to penetrate to this level. If we do not, we will go on thinking in circles, laying down a Faustian injunction that is oppressive to both men and women: become what you already are. Or, as Bourdieu puts it, “The particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalized social construction.” Gender identity starts as a social construction, only to become biological. Because “it is brought about and culminates in profound and durable transformations of bodies (and minds),” masculine domination is its own justification. A relationship of domination produces the very biological differences that, when treated as ahistorical and organic, legitimize that relationship. The way to break out of such “circular causality” is to “reconstruct the history of the labour of dehistoricization.” And the way to do this is, again, to begin at the beginning, at the very beginning: with an archetype. In Kabyle society in North Africa, there exists, according to Bourdieu, “a paradigmatic form of the ‘phallonarcissistic’ vision and the androcentric cosmology which are common to all Mediterranean societies.” We can see, in Kabyle society, the foundation of Western patriarchal ideology being poured. By bringing to light similarities between it and us, Bourdieu hopes to show us that our most basic premises about gender rest upon an originary, arbitrary social construction and, therefore, cannot be timeless or natural. Bourdieu analyzes Kabyle society for a second reason. He often asserts that symbolic power works only when the dominated come to see the world from the perspective of the dominant. The process through which this happens, “symbolic violence,” is “gentle,” “invisible,”

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and “unconscious.” It creates cognitive structures so deep and so durable that superficial enlightenment as to the constructedness of gender norms does not suffice to dismantle their coercive power. For as we all know, people who know better behave in accordance with pejorative gender norms, “despite themselves,” all the time. More is necessary to break the hypnotic spell of masculine domination: the shock of seeing yourself, or a “paradigmatic” version of yourself, under hypnosis, and being eerily unaware of it. Bourdieu thinks that by confronting us with gender relations in Kabyle society, he will present us with our own “cultural unconscious,” making visible the invisible workings of symbolic violence. And so he takes us on a “detour through an exotic tradition” in his attempt to develop a forcefully historicizing, psychologically plausible, and, therefore, practically effective gender theory. This plan is very compelling. Unfortunately, the detour turns out to be little more than a bleak frontage road. For Bourdieu simply points out a series of damning parallels between modern and Kabyle gender discrimination. He does not go into the latter in detail; the invisible process of symbolic violence never becomes visible—a visible target for critical analysis. Thus his argument does not quite reach its goal. Yet this small book contains many original insights and, therefore, great promise. Indeed, if Bourdieu decides to write a more comprehensive study of masculine domination, a study on the scale of The Logic of Practice or Distinction, he will produce a theoretical breakthrough in an important field. And that, of course, would be big news.

26 The Paradoxes of Holocaust Literature: A Guide for the Darkly Perplexed

The scholar James E. Young once observed, in speaking about Holocaust literature: “If there is a line between fiction and fact, it may by necessity be a winding border that tends to bind these categories as much as it separates them, allowing each side to dissolve occasionally into the other.” If a critic accepts Young’s claim, as many would, where is he or she left? How is he or she to read the work of, say, Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel simultaneously as fiction and memoir? Is it his or her task to distinguish falsifications of the historical record born of intellectual or aesthetic exigency from self-serving omissions and embellishments? What, moreover, about Holocaust literature that comes from authors who aren’t witnesses? Those authors often see themselves as having special obligations to their material; do we

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agree? Does the Holocaust somehow complicate the relationship between historical fact and historical fiction? Ruth Franklin doesn’t ask her readers to take Young’s words to heart until the halfway-point of her important, if very uneven, new book, but they would have been an apt opening; for the questions that Young’s words raise make up the thematic core of A Thousand Darknesses. Instead, Franklin opts for a somewhat less direct approach to introducing the challenges we face when we write about Holocaust writing: she begins by maintaining that we haven’t put ourselves in a position to meet them. This turns out not to serve her audience well. With its mix of sweeping judgments and weak argumentation, Franklin’s introductory essay invites resistance to the point of being hard to get past. Take the essay’s invocation of the Fragments affair, which comes on its first pages. After winning praise and awards in the mid1990s, Fragments, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a child, was exposed as a fabrication. The success of this fake was no fluke, according to Franklin. What it shows, she insists, is that we have brought to Holocaust memoirs a surfeit of credulity, one that stands out even amid our general readiness to embrace memoirs of woe. Never mind that Wilkomirski displayed a talent for prevarication; that we’re all capable of falling for the work of gifted liars; or that it’s often easy to find their stories preposterous the minute they’re revealed to be untrue (we tend, after all, to want the facts of memoirs to sound like the stuff of fiction). Leaving such issues unmentioned, Franklin intones: “For the pathetic fraud perpetrated by Wilkomirski was the inevitable consequence of the way Holocaust literature has been read, discussed, and

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understood—in America especially, but also in Europe—over the last sixty years.” As she tries to back up her big point about how Holocaust literature has been received, Franklin gives us more of the same. For instance, she takes for granted the canonical status of Theodor Adorno’s claim, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” while abruptly asserting that how we use the phrase illustrates the flipside of our attitude toward Holocaust memoirs: our sloppy suspicion of Holocaust art. Sloppy, Franklin tells us, because the “original context” of Adorno’s “dictum” (of 1949) is a “brand of highly ideological Marxist literary criticism, which very few of those who approvingly cite it would be likely to accept.” In other words, most of the critics who go around quoting Adorno’s epigram don’t know what he was— and by extension, what they are—talking about. The very fact that they lean on Adorno’s line proves this, since its true nature would appall them. Franklin, as intimated, doesn’t provide examples of the critics she has in mind. Apparently, there’s no need to. Yet later in the book, Franklin herself puts forth a very different view of Adorno’s standing—without saying how we might square it with her earlier one. Indeed, she does nothing less than describe Adorno’s statement about writing a poem after Auschwitz as “the straw man of Holocaust studies,” who is, these days, “invoked in order to be knocked down.” Then there’s the issue: what’s so (alarmingly) Marxist about the thought the statement once conveyed? All Franklin offers as an explanation is the idea that in Adorno’s critical theory, “the Holocaust serves as the ultimate paradigm of the intersection of culture and barbarism.” But this, obviously, doesn’t begin to answer the question. A satisfying response would be hard to come by, because as it

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happens, Adorno’s debt to Marx has a smallish role in his approach to the relationship between the Holocaust and culture. Witness Adorno’s interpretation of the origins of genocidal anti-Semitism. He located its deepest roots in, of all things, the West’s way of privileging concepts and conceptual understanding. The situation doesn’t improve when Franklin tries to refine her position by suggesting that our attitudes toward the Holocaust—and in turn, toward representations of it—break down along two lines. These are the “academic” take, whereby the Holocaust is “knowable,” and the “popular” one, which is “more mystical,” and holds that the Holocaust “cannot be meaningfully compared to any other historical phenomenon.” It’s true, of course, that today’s scholarly journals aren’t the first thing to examine if you’re looking to find the Holocaust being discussed in mystical tones. But over the past few decades, scholars have led the way in underlining the extreme difficulty of imagining and comprehending the Holocaust. Indeed, it’s unsurprising, if ironic, that Franklin turns to a distinguished historian of the Holocaust for a sincere formulation of what she labels the popular approach. Without noting his academic background, Franklin cites Saul Friedländer’s warning that the Holocaust “could well be resistant to all attempts at a significant interpretation or representation.” Think, moreover, of how hard it would be to fit into Franklin’s scheme the divergent responses to Daniel Goldhagen’s treatise Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996). Goldhagen purported to have come up with an adequate theory of the Holocaust (whereby the really crucial thing was the depth and breadth of German anti-Semitism, its having become a “cognitive state”), and for the popular audiences who made Goldhagen’s book a hit, this interpretive boldness was part of the

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appeal. Academics, by contrast, blasted what they took to be the work’s interpretive presumptuousness, more or less driving (the untenured) Goldhagen out of academia. In doing so, they often stressed the unfathomability of it all. Here, for instance, is an observation from Fritz Stern’s review: “For many, myself included,” the “horror” of the Holocaust “somehow eludes understanding.” So it’s also unsurprising that Franklin’s mostly decades-old examples of critics sounding awed, and waxing mystical, as they ponder Holocaust literature turn out to be mostly academics. But more than anything else, what unsettles the frame Franklin wants her book to have is the book itself. After all, the strength of the book—and the reason why it’s an important contribution to Holocaust studies—has much to do with how deftly Franklin works with the ongoing critical discussions of her subjects, who range from Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Jerzy Kosinski to Wolfgang Koeppen, W. G. Sebald, Bernhard Schlink, and Nathan Englander. Rather than hastening to play her interpretations off against existing ones, Franklin sets up, and inserts herself into, conversations among commentators whose merits she’s quick to identify and praise. Nor, for the most part, is Franklin looking to be the one to solve the questions that interest her. In her best chapters, she puts her energy into the formulation of them. Thus, for example, the point of her chapter on Borowski isn’t ultimately to present a new theory of why he opted for fiction as a means of communicating “truths” about the Holocaust; it’s to lay out the biographical circumstances and complexities of the case, as well as the intellectual challenges it has both posed and still poses. All this Franklin does insightfully, and with admirable learning and clarity. The same goes for many of the chapters in A Thousand

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Darknesses, but especially for the one on the poeticizing tendencies in Levi’s memoirs and the chapter on reading Wiesel’s Night against the grain of Wiesel’s peremptory pronouncements about its facticity. Toward the end, however, Franklin’s book slackens, as Franklin stops playing to her strengths. Her penultimate chapter, which deals with literature by the children of survivors, begins promisingly enough. Franklin starts out by looking into what’s been written about the psychic effects of growing up as the progeny of survivors, and by asking how the becoming pervasive of trauma theory may have helped shape the self-understanding of the “second generation.” But as Franklin proceeds to examine that self-understanding, and its literary self-expression, her perspective shifts, or rather, narrows. As she herself makes clear, second generation writers who lay claim to “ownership” of the Holocaust haven’t been blind to the tastelessness or absurdity of their gesture. Yet, instead of treating their puzzling attitude as a further psychological question, Franklin waxes indignant, and treats it as an object of scorn. Moreover, her own attitude of aggrieved exasperation carries over into her analyses of the second generation’s literary works, giving her readings a programmatic feel— these do little more than deride breaches of tact and dwell on obvious aesthetic shortcomings. In her final chapter, which is really a kind of coda, Franklin celebrates the “third generation” for reaching higher artistic ground. The problem is that she doesn’t give herself enough space to explain why we should see the efforts of third-generation authors as such great successes. For example, Franklin exalts “The Tumblers,” a short story by Nathan Englander, as “the most brilliant treatment of the Holocaust in contemporary American fiction,” then provides only

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about a paragraph of not-quite interpretation. We read that Englander “riffs” on Jewish folklore, and that he sets up a situation in which, through the arrival of the Holocaust, the quaint “ridiculousness” of an Eastern European Jewish village “populated by fools” is raised to the level of “literary irony.” But from there, Franklin jumps to the assessment: “Forced through the sieve of this dramatically altered perspective, the familiar elements of the Holocaust story—a ghetto established and then liquidated, its residents loaded onto trains—have a newly concentrated power.” And after this, she simply fills us in on the rest of the plot. Thus the brilliance and power of the story are proclaimed more than they are illuminated. It’s an unsatisfying way to end an eminently useful book.

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Acknowledgments

In an era of toxic assets and austerity mania, economists—or at least some economists—have had to argue that not all debts are bad. Writers have long known this, and it’s with pleasure that I acknowledge mine. Without the enthusiasm and guidance of a series of gifted editors— Art Winslow at The Nation, Elizabeth Winter and Maren Meinhardt at the Times Literary Supplement, Jennifer Szalai at Harper’s, and Abe Socher at the Jewish Review of Books—most of the pieces in this book would not have been written. And if they had been written, they would in all likelihood compare unfavorably with the published versions. I’m especially grateful to Abe, whose drive for clarity and depth is complemented so winningly by his wittiness. Haaris Naqvi, too, deserves special thanks. Not only did he skillfully mold Bambi’s Jewish Roots into its present shape, but he also did as much as anyone else to make the whole thing happen, taking a chance on a book of mostly prepublished essays by a nonfamous author. Beyond all that, he was always a pleasure to work with. Brett Wheeler, my dear friend of many years, read drafts of all the pieces collected here, and he offered characteristically astute conversations about them and wise suggestions for revisions. Other friends and colleagues—Steven Aschheim, Nina Berman, David Biale, Gregor Hens, Bob Holub, June Hwang, Noah Isenberg, Matt Goldish, Robin Judd, Leo Lensing, and Ben Robinson—read and commented helpfully on individual essays.

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As always, my family provided much in the way of sustaining support and encouragement. For all this and more, I thank Maria Miller and our daughter Ceci; my father, Robert Reitter; my brother, Nicholas Reitter; my stepmother, Douglass Reitter; and Harriet and Bill Lembeck, my inspiringly energetic aunt and uncle. This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Rose Reitter.

Bibliography

This bibliography lists the most important secondary sources for the preceding study. The notes contain full references for all secondary sources cited, as well as for primary sources and archival material. Alon, Amos, The Pity of It All: A Histoy of Jews in Germany, 1743-1833. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002. Anderson, Mark, Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. — (ed.), Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Schocken, 1989. Arendt, Hannah, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Aschheim, Steven, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. —, Brothers and Strangers: The Eastern Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. —, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises. New York: New York University Press, 1996. —, “The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem.” The Journal of Modern History 76 (December 2004): 903–33. Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Beck, Evelyn Torton, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Beller, Steven, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Berghahn, Klaus (ed.), The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse. Bern: Lang, 1996. Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Bernstein, Michael André, Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

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Bernstein, Richard, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. Biale, David, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Botstein, Leon, Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der österreichischen Kultur, 1848 bis 1938. Vienna: Böhlau, 1991. Brenner, Michael, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Broch, Hermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Time: The European Imagination, 1860-1920, trans. Michael Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Cohen, Gershon, “German Jewry as Mirror of Modernity.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 20 (1975): ix–xxxi. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Driver, Eddy, Beverley, Felix Salten: Man of Many Faces. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2010. Fritzsche, Peter, Reading Berlin: 1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Gaugusch, Georg, Wer Einmal War: Das jüdische Großbürgertum Wiens, 1800-1938, A-K. Vienna: Amalthea, 2011. Gay, Peter, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Gilman, Sander, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. —, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Secret Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. —, The Jew’s Body. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. Gilman, Sander and Jack Zipes (eds), The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Goetschel, Willi, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, Heine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Goldberg, David Theo and Michael Krausz (eds), Jewish Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Grunfeld, Frederic, Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979. Handelman, Susan, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Harrison, Thomas, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.

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Harrison, Thomas, Essayism: Conrad, Musil, Pirandello. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Heller, Erich, In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. —, The Disinherited Mind. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. Hertz, Deborah, How Jews Became Germans: The Story of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Hess, Jonathan, German Jews and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, The Institution of Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Isenberg, Noah, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Jäger, Christian and Erhard Schütz, Städebilder zwischen Literatur und Journalismus: Wien, Berlin und das Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1999. Janik, Alan and Steven Toumlin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Touchstone, 1973. Johnston, William, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972. Julius, Anthony, T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Katz, Jacob (ed.), Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987. Kohn, Hans, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Otto Weininger: Aus dem jüdischen Wien der Jahrhundertwende. Tübingen: Mohr, 1962. Langmuir, Gavin, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Lensing, Leo, “Tiertheater: Textspiele der jüdischen Identität bei Altenberg, Kraus und Kafka.” Das jüdische Echo 48 (October 1999): 79–86. Le Rider, Jacques, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris. New York: Continuum, 1991. Levy, Richard and Albert Lindemann (eds), Antisemitism: A History. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2010. Liebschütz, Hans, Das Judentum im deutschen Geschichtsbild von Hegel bis Max Weber. Mohr: Tübingen, 1967. Mayer, Hans, Außenseiter. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1975. Mendes-Flohr, Paul, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. —, German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

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Meyer, Michael and Michael Brenner (eds), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin, 1990. Mosse, George, Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1993. —, German Jews beyond Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Myers, David, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Niekerk, Carl, Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Oxaal, Ivar, Michael Polllak and Gerhard Botz (eds), Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna. New York and London: Routledge, 1987. Pawel, Ernst, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Vintage, 1984. Peters, George, The Poet as Provocateur: Heinrich Heine and his Critics. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2000. Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Rabinbach, Anson, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Reinharz, Jehuda and Walter Schatzberg (eds), The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Robertson, Ritchie, Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. —, “The Problem of ‘Jewish Self-Hatred’ in Herzl, Kraus and Kafka.” Oxford German Studies 16 (1985): 81–108. Rose, Paul Lawrence, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Anti­ semitism from Kant to Wagner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Rozenblit, Marsha, The Jews of Austria, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984. —, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during the First World War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rürup, Reinhard, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur “Judenfrage der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975. Sammons, Jeffrey, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Santner, Eric, My own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor  41, 78, 158, 177, 183, 191, 210, 211, 259–60 aesthetic autonomy  173, 174 Agnon, S. Y.  67 Ahmad, Aijaz  204, 205, 206, 207 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums  172 Alter, Robert  41, 42 An American Dilemma  245, 247 Amerika  41, 121, 125, 126, 128–9, 130, 132 Amnesty International  80 Andreas-Salomé, Lou  71, 75 Andrian, Leopold von  108, 109 anti-Semitism  13, 26, 89, 91, 190–1, 192, 197, 198, 199, 217, 243, 245 Freud’s claim on  199 in Germany  234, 245, 248, 260 Hitler’s  219–20, 223 in Poland  238 Appiah, Kwame Anthony  247 Apter, Emily  205 Arendt, Hannah  98–100, 101, 104, 111–12, 136, 169, 170, 183 Arnold, Matthew  4 The Art of Loving  81 Asch, Scholem  125 Auerbach, Erich  202, 203, 204, 205–6, 208, 209, 210–12, 213, 214 The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon  134–43 coiling sentences in  139 grammatical idiosyncrasies in  138–9

intellectual intensity and impishness in  142–3 Kant’s view on  135–6 linguistic roughness in  137–8 Murray’s translation of  136–7 nonstandard usages in  139–40 passage from  140–2 Avenarius, Richard  115, 116 Bambi  90, 91 encounters with the elk  94–5 exclusion and discrimination in  92 expressions of Ur-power  95, 96 memorable scene  93–4 Barca, Semite Hamilcar  190 Bar Kochba association  87–8 Bauer, Felice  38 Beck, Les  246 Beer-Hoffmann, Richard  88 “The Begars and the Bridge”  103 Begley, Louis  45–6 Beller, Steven  63 Bendemann, Georg  123 Benjamin, Walter  11, 20–1, 41, 167 Berliner Tageblatt  66 Bernstein, Eduard  176 Bilanz der deutschen Judenheit 1933  199 bildung  63, 106, 108, 109–10, 111, 171 bildungsromane  205 Blätterfür die Kunst  146–7 Blumenbach, Johann  244 Börne, Ludwig  3–6, 7–8, 9, 10

274

Index

Borowski, Tadeusz  261 Bourdieu, Pierre  249, 253 analysis of Kabyle society  251, 255–6 exuding optimism  251 gender inequality  251–2, 254, 255 Masculine Domination  252 reoriented structuralism  250 symbolic power  254 bourgeois culture  11, 12, 19, 104, 106, 107, 175, 177–80, 182–3, 218, 222 The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud  177, 180, 182 bourgeoisophobes  178, 179, 180 Boyarin, Daniel  189–90, 192–3, 194, 198 Brandt, Heinz  82 Brecht, Bertolt  41 Breitman, Richard  240 Broch, Hermann  125, 145, 217 Brod, Max  37, 43–4, 122–3, 124, 125, 133 Bruce, Iris  91–2, 93 Buber, Martin  16, 41, 77, 87, 88, 89, 95 “Buberdeutsch”  16 Buchmendel  103 Buddenbrooks  109, 110 Bullock, Alan  227, 229 Burchhardt, Else  24 Burkhardt, Carl  125 Burnt Books  41–2 The Castle  121, 122, 124, 125 Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays  43 Charcot, Jean Marie  31 charisma  229–30 Clifford, James  204, 207

Coetzee, J. M.  122 Confusion of Feelings  108–9 constructivist gender theory  252–3 Crews, Frederick  186 Culture and Imperialism  202, 206 Daniel Deronda  136 Deák, István  235–6, 237, 238, 239, 240–1 “The Decisive Years”  47 The Declining Significance of Race  246 DeLillo, Don  226 Der Amerika-Müde  127 Der Israelit  172 Derrida, Jacques  192 Der Rosenkavalier  150–1 Der Verschollene  130 Dialectic of Enlightenment  210, 211 diaries  235 of Kafka  122 of Schnitzler  29, 32, 33, 179 of Scholem  18–20, 21–4, 194n. 1 Dichter und Denker  145 Dilthey, Wilhem  27 “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka”  122 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste  250 Dream Novella  30, 179 Dunham, Katherine  78 The Ego  71 Eisenbach, Heinrich  95 Eliot, George  136 Ellison, Ralph  247 Engels, Friedrich  4 Englander, Nathan  261, 262–3 Engländer, Sophie  82 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus  9 Escape from Freedom: The Art of Loving  78, 79–80, 81, 82

Index

“An Experience”  146, 153 Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil  227 Eyes Wide Shut  179 “F. Kafka, Everyman”  43 family biography  51–65 Fathers and Sons  53, 54 Fest, Joaquim  227, 229 Festjahr  28 Feuchtwanger, Lion  125 Fin-de-siècle Vienna  63, 113–14, 217, 218, 224 Fioretos, Aris  67, 68, 69–70 Flake, Otto  109 Fliess, Wilhelm  115 Foucault, Michel  183, 205, 250, 251, 254 Fragments  258 Frankfurt School  78 Franklin, Ruth  258, 259, 260–2 Franz Kafka: Paradox and Parable  44 Fräulein Else  29 Fredrickson, George M.  242–5, 247, 248 Freeman, Annis  80 Freud, Jews and Other Germans  177 Freud, Sigmund  31, 32, 58, 71–6, 104, 107, 113, 115, 166, 177, 178, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191–4, 197–201 Freud’s Requiem  74, 75–6 Friedman, Lawrence J.  80–3 From Berlin to Jerusalem  19 From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity  190 Fromm, Erich  77–83 freedom of “modern man”  78–9 socialist humanism  80

275

Gay, Peter  31, 176–7, 178, 179, 181 assumption about sexuality  184 The Bourgeois Experience  180, 182 My German Question  182–3 Schnitzler’s Century  178, 179–80, 182–3, 184 Geistigkeit  191, 193, 200 Geller, Jay  195 George, Stefan  146 German-Jewish culture  26, 110, 162, 194–5, 197 German-Jewish identity  158, 160, 161, 175, 194 German-Jewish middlebrow literature  170, 171, 172–3, 175 Gesamtkunstwerk  223 Geschichte des Rassismus  246 Gilman, Sander  161, 247 Glühende Rätsel (Glowing Enigmas)  67 Gobo (deer name)  92–3 Goebbels, Joseph  231–2 Goethe  76, 105, 111–12, 136, 145, 157, 158, 170 Goffman, Erving  64 Goldhagen, Daniel  260–1 Gombrich, Ernst  64 Greenberg, Clement  125 Groddeck, Georg  77, 78 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  214 Gurland, Henny  79 Haacke, Hans  165 Haffner, Sebastian  228 Hallermünde, August Platen von  5 Hamann, Brigitte  218, 219–20, 221, 222, 223–4, 228 Hannaford, Ivan  246 Harman, Mark  125 Hauptmann, Gerhard  125

276

Index

Hawes, James  39 Hebbel, Friedrich  32 Heine, Heinrich  3, 170–1, 175 criticisms of Jews  7–8 outlandish character of  9 relation between Börne and  6–7 “total polemic” strategy  5, 8 Heinemann, William  118 hellenes  8 Herder, Johann  106 Hermann, Leo  87, 88 Herzl, Theodor  13, 89, 93, 94, 99 Hess, Jonathan  171–3, 174, 175 Hesse, Hermann  97, 98 Heydrich, Rheinhard  232 Hezrl, Theodor  99 Hirschfeld, Magnus  242 History of Sexuality  183, 254 Hitler, Adolf  82, 217, 218, 231, 232, 233, 247 anti-Semitism  219–20 biographies of  227 books about  225–6 psychography of  227 Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris  227, 228, 230 Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis  227, 230, 231, 233 Hitler: A Biography  227 Hitler: A Study in Tyranny  227 Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet  227 The ‘Hitler Myth’  229–30 The Hitler of History  227 Hitler’s Europe  235, 236, 241 Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship  218, 228 Hitler’s Willing Executioners  260 Hofmann, Michael  125–6, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von  49, 144 aestheticist escapism theme  147 “conservative imagination”  151–2 drift or das Gleitende  147–9 “An Experience”  146, 153 lack of “humane” perspective  153 language  146 McClatchy on  150–1 Salzburg’ s Great World Theater  151 themes of withdrawal, drift and crisis  149–50 Volk culture  151–2 The Whole Difference  150, 153 Holocaust  234, 260, 263 in Eastern Europe  235–6 inaction as major theme in  238 literature  257–9 Horkheimer, Max  177, 191, 210, 211 Horney, Karen  78 Horty, Miklós  236–7, 238–9 Houlb, Robert  5 The Hound of Venice  90–1 The House of Wittgenstein  54 criticism on  54 description of Paul  56–8, 60–1, 64–5 Kirsch on  59 Toynton on  55–6 Hugo of St Victor  202, 203, 208 Humboldt, Wilhelm von  106 Hungary’s Admiral on Horseback  236 The Id  71 The Impossible Exile  101 In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death)  67 Institut zur Förderung der Israelitischen Literatur  172 Internationale Klinische Rundschau  31

Index

International Sociological Association  250 The Interpretation of Dreams  31, 32, 71, 190, 199 Jäckel, Eberhard  228 James, William  181–2 Jameson, Frederic  205 The Jew in the Lotus  42 The“Jewish Question” in German Literature  158 Jews  98, 99, 109, 110, 116, 152, 161, 164, 172, 177, 193, 200, 219–20, 232, 234, 237–9, 243, 245 disparity between Austrian and Prussian  168 Kirsch on  63–4 life in Central Europe  168 Protestant Jews vs. Catholic  168–9 Scholem on  13–14 Jews in German Literature  152 Josef K.  123, 124, 127 Josefine Mutzenbacher  88, 90 The Journal of Empirical Psychology  135 Judaism  7, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 44, 117–18, 174, 190, 191, 193 Judaism Musical and Unmusical  166, 167–8 “The Judgment”  123 July Revolution of 1830  8 Jung, Carl  75 Kabbalah  11, 16–17, 18, 25, 42 Kabyle society  251, 255 Kafka, Franz  37, 88, 90, 92, 121–2, 124, 126, 132, 157, 161, 170 Amerika  125, 126, 128–9, 130, 132 Begley’s view on  45–6 Brod’s view on  43–4

277

culture as vacuous  163–4 deracinating works of  41 experiences as a Jew  39 on German Jews  164 Hawes on  39–41 identity politics  157–65 Kamenetz on works of  41–2 relation to art  163 “A Report to an Academy”  92 response to war  38 Smith on universality of  44–5 Stach’s view on  46–8 writing into natural English  124 Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidung  46, 48 Kalckreuth, Wilhelm Adolf von  135 Kamenetz, Rodger  41, 42 Kant, Immanuel  135–6, 159 Kennedy, John F.  79 Kershaw, Ian  227, 228, 229–33 Kirsch, Adam  59, 63–4 Kleist, Heinrich von  40–1 Klemperer, Victor  235 Knopf, Alfred A.  121 Koeppen, Wolfgang  261 Kosinski, Jerzy  261 Kracauer, Siegfried  49, 109, 228–9 Kraus, Karl  23–4, 44, 49, 91, 105, 107, 108, 110, 115, 126, 130–2, 145, 186, 217, 224, 225 Kubrick, Stanley  179 Kürnberger, Ferdinand  127 Lagerlöf, Selma  66 Lamentations of Youth  22, 23, 24 Laqueur, Thomas  183–4 La Ronde  179 Las Casas, Bartolomé de  244 Leben? Oder Theater?  167 Legenden und Erzählungen (Legends and Tales)  66

278

Lehmann, Jonas  172, 173, 175 Lehmann, Marcus  172, 175 Lessing, G. E.  159 Lessing, Theodor  199 “The Letter of Lord Chandos”  149–50 Letters from Paris  8 Levi, Primo  257, 261 Lieutenant Gustl  29 Löb, Ladislaus  118 The Logic of Practice  251–2, 256 Loris see Hofmannsthal, Hugo von Lublinski, Samuel  110 Ludwig Börne: A memorial  3, 4, 6, 7, 9–10 Ludwig, Emil  111 Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius  58–9 Lueger, Karl  89, 218, 219, 223 Lukacs, John  227 Mach, Ernst  115 Mack, Michael  194 Mahler, Gustav  52, 64, 101, 217, 221–3 Maimon, Solomon  134–43 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism  16, 18, 25 Making Sex  184 Man for Himself  79 Mann, Heinrich  125 Mann, Thomas  3, 109, 110 The Man Who Disappeared see Amerika Marcus, Steven  183 Marcuse, Herbert  177 Masculine Domination  252 Matuschek, Oliver  100, 101 McClatchy, J. D.  150, 151 Mead, Margaret  78

Index

Mein Kampf  218, 219, 246 memoirs  11, 19, 258, 259, 262 Mendelssohn, Moses  136, 141, 142, 159 The Metamorphosis  37 Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity  171, 172 Mimesis  204, 205, 206–7, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214 Mitchell, Breon  125, 127 Momigliano, Arnaldo  167 Monatshefte  73, 5 Monk, Ray  58 Moritz, Karl Philipp  136, 138 Moseley, Marcus  136 Moses and Monotheism  166, 188, 189, 190, 191–4, 195, 197, 199, 200–1 Moses und Aron  169 Mosse, George  183 Mufti, Aamir  208, 209 Muir, Edwin  124, 125, 128, 131, 132 Muir, Willa  121, 122, 123, 124–5 Murray, J. Clark  40, 136–8, 140, 143 Musil, Robert  97 “my Dreams” see Festjahr My German Question  182 Myrdal, Gunnar  245, 247 Nabokov, Vladimir  100 Nachman, Rabbi  42 Nathan the Wise  159 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy  80 nazarenes  8 Necessary Angels  41 New People on Ancient Ground  92 Nietzsche  4, 18, 106 Night  262

Index

Nolte, Ernst  226 Nuremberg Laws  248 Odyssey  211, 212, 213 “On Psychoanalysis”  32 On the Natural Varieties of Mankind  244 “On Transience”  71 beauty description in  72–3 main aim in  72 psychoanalytic theory and  73 sentimental message of  72 theory of mourning  75 Unwerth on  74–6 Orientalism  202, 205 “O the Chimneys”  70 The Other Victorians  183 Pawel, Ernst  40 Pension Struck  19 Peter, Gay  186–7 Phelan, Anthony  9–10 Philippson, Ludwig  172 “Philology and Weltliteratur”  202–3, 208, 209–10 The Pilgrim’s Progress  124 Poland  231, 238, 239–40 “Poles and Jews”  238 “political Zionism”  13, 89 Politizer, Heinz  44 Pope Pius XII  234, 239 Prague Territories  158, 162, 164, 165 Prater, Donald  100 Presner, Todd  196, 197 Prochnik, George  101–3 psychoanalysis  85 cultural history of  188 emergence of  187 as historical phenomenon  185–6 Pulzer, Peter  247

Race: The History of an Idea in the West  246 racism  242 history of  243 origins of  243–4 radicalization of Western  245 trajectory of  246 vision of major  247–8 Racism: A Short History  246 Reading Heinrich Heine  9–10 Rebbe, Belzer  41 “Redemption through sin”  14, 16 Redlich, Fritz  227 Reflections on Exile  202, 203 Rentschler, Eric  247 “A Report to an Academy”  92 Representative Man  39–40 “Rereading Freud’s Moses”  188 retranslation  125, 134 Ricoeur, Paul  187 Riesman, David  79 Riesser, Gabriel  4 Rilke, Rainer Maria  71, 75, 88 The Road into the Open  88, 161 Robert, Marthe  190, 191 Robertson, Ritchie  158–61 Rosenbaum, Ron  227, 228 Rossmann, Karl  126 Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah  16, 25, 26–7 Sachs, Hanns  77 Sachs, Nelly  66–70 Said, Ahmad  204–5, 206–7 Said, Edward  202, 203–4, 208–9, 213, 214 Sakmyster, Thomas  236 Salomon, Charlotte  167

279

280

Index

Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte see The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon Salten, Felix  88–9 animal stories as allegory of Jews experience  90–1 Bambi  90, 91–5 Josefine Mutzenbacher  88, 90 New People on Ancient Ground  92 objective Judaism  95 as Zionist speaker  90, 91, 94 Salzburg’s Great World Theater  151 Sammons, Jeffrey L.  9 Samsa, Gregor  37, 123 Santner, Eric  192, 194 Schiele, Egon  224 Schlink, Bernhard  261 Schnitzler, Arthur  28, 30, 61, 88, 90, 106, 145, 161, 174–5, 178 art  179 attitudes about psychoanalysis  31–3 dream-like narration style  29, 30 medical knowledge of  30 The Road into the Open  88 Träume (or Dreams)  29, 32–3 Schnitzler’s Century  178, 179, 180, 181, 182–3, 184 Schocken, Samuel  121–2 Scholem, Arthur  12, 13 Scholem, Gershom  77, 87, 99, 194, 196 Benjamin’s association with  20–1 clash between father and  12–13 diaries  18–20, 21–2 disagreement with Zionists  14–15 dissertation  24

loneliness as theme  18–19 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism  16, 18, 25 memoirs  11, 19 relation to Nietzsche  18 resonating with diverse audiences  25–6 Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah  16, 25, 26–7 sources of inspiration  17–18 Zionism and  13, 14–15, 26 Schönerer, Georg von  89, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223 Schorske, Carl  63, 146, 218, 222, 224 science of Judaism  17 Sebald, W. G.  261 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de  244 Sex and Character  115, 116–17, 118 The Shaggy Dog  91 Skinner, Anthony David  22–3 Smith, Zadie  43, 44–5 Solomos, John  246 The Sound of Music  55 Spector, Scott  158–9, 162–3, 164, 165, 194, 195, 197 Spitzer, Leo  205–6 Stach, Reiner  46–8 “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday”  98 Steinberg, Michael P.  166, 168, 169 Steiner, George  40, 122 Stern, Fritz  261 Steuer, Daniel  117 Stevenson, Adlai  79 “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht”  13 Strauss, Richard  151 Strauss, Salomon  4 Struck, Frau  19 The Sufferings of Young Werther a bildungsroman  76

Index

“the suicide of Judaism”  17 Sullivan, Henry Stack  78 Swoboda, Hermann  114–15 Thirlwell, Adam  43, 45 A Thousand Darknesses  258, 261–2 Three Lives  100, 101 Three Speeches on Judaism  87 Thus Spoke Zarathustra  18 Toews, John  116 To Have or to Be  80 “total polemic” strategy  5, 8 To the Lighthouse  252 Toynton, Evelyn  55–6 Tractatus  52, 55 Träume (or Dreams)  29, 32–3 The Trial  121, 123, 124, 125, 127 Tucholsky, Kurt  52, 97 “The Tumblers”  262 Unheroic Conduct  189 “unsalvageable self ” concept  115 Unwerth, Matthew von  74–6 Varnhagen, Rahel  64 The Victory of the Jews Over the Germans  245 Vienna  99, 105, 115, 144, 178, 179, 217, 218, 220–5, 231 Vienna and the Jews  63 Volk culture  151–2 Volkov, Shulamit  199 Wacquant, Loïc  247 Wagner, Richard  4 Waugh, Alexander  53–4 description of Paul  56–8, 60–1, 64–5 evocation of Hermine  54–5

tone  54 on Wittgenstein  62–3 Weber, Alfred  77 Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider  177–8 Weininger, Otto  54, 64, 113–14, 115, 116–18, 197 Weltanschauung  228 Weltfremdheit  37, 38 Wesensbestimmung  14, 26 What the Nazis Planned, What the British and the Americans Knew  240 White Noise  226 The Whole Difference  150, 153 Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life  39 Wiener Medizinische Presse  31 Wiesel, Elie  257, 261 Wilkomirski, Binjamin  258 Wilson, Edmund  121, 122 Wilson, William Julius  246 Wittgenstein, Hermann Christian  50, 51–3, 62, 63 Wittig, Monique  253 Wohl, Jeanette  4, 5, 6 Woolf, Virginia  252 The World of Yesterday  99 The World, the Text, and the Critic  202 “The Years of Knowledge”  47 Yerushalmi, Yosef  191–2 Yiddish theater  41 Young, James E.  257 Zaretsky, Eli  185, 186, 188, 189 Zionism  13, 14–16, 19, 26, 87, 90, 91, 94

281

282

Index

Zweig, Arnold  197, 199 Zweig, Stefan  63, 97, 102, 103, 107, 111, 169 calcification of bildung  106, 108, 109–10 Confusion of Feelings  108–9

engagement with politics  98–9 misuse of word “gleichen”  107, 110 response to Hitler  104 as solid cultural citizen  105