The State, the Nation, and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany

Appendix 4. The Berlin Antisemitism Dispute in the Literature

Almost every book or essay on the development of antisemitism in the Bismarck period makes at least a passing reference to the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute and adds another layer to the now more than 120 years of interpretations of Treitschke’s remarks. Increasingly in recent years, scholars have also commented on the statements of those who responded to Treitschke, usually concentrating on Mommsen, while Lazarus tends to receive the second-biggest share of the attention. In one of the classic anti-antisemitic statements from within German liberalism,“On Antisemitism: A Pentecostal Contemplation”(originally of 1893), Gustav Freytag contrasts“the patriotic complaint of a well-meaning man of sincere intentions”to the concerns of “angry and discontent agitators .”1 As can be concluded from the context, this“well-meaning man”was Freytag’s political and personal friend, Treitschke (the“angry agitator”was the anti-liberal cleric, Stöcker). Similarly positive was the assessment by the socialist Franz Mehring,formulated already in 1882.2 Like his National Liberal opponent,Mehring contrasts Treitschke favorably to Stöcker,against whom he fiercely polemicized: Treitschke fulfilled “a serious political obligation to bring into the open the hatred that was smouldering under the ashes.” To have done this, and“in the only dignified manner possible, namely with manly frankness and scientific seriousness, is the great and unforgettable contribution of Treitschke” and a “patriotic deed.” Mehring held that Treitschke analyzed“the Jewish question as a contemporary phenomenon under Appendix4.TheBerlinAntisemitismDisputeintheLiterature TheBerlinantisemitismDisputeintheLiterature 379 scientific,historical,psychological,social aspects”while Stöcker made it“the substance of political party strategy,” which meant playing with the fire of “unleashing the beast” of “the three most potent sources of hatred known in history: a religious, a racial, and a class conflict.”3 Both Mehring and Freytag, leading representatives of the socialist and liberal traditions,respectively,are themselves well known for having harbored anti-Jewish feelings. More surprising might therefore be the mild judgment on Treitschke by Julius Bab, the influential left-wing liberal cultural and theater critic in Berlin in the years before and after World War I. In his book Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums (Life and Death of German Jewry) (written in 1939 but not published until 1988), Bab argues that Treitschke (“an intellectually eminent [geistig hervorragenden] German”) broke from the liberal tradition but still stood “unconditionally” behind legal emancipation. He emphasizes Treitschke’s distance from what later became National Socialism with the astonishing remark (considering that his formulation“the Jews are our misfortune”sat on the front-page heading of every copy of the Nazi publication Der Stürmer) that Treitschke would “without doubt end up in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.”4 Bab writes that Treitschke “was critical merely of the literary attitude of the Jews” and their “lack of nationalism.”5 A similar, if less amicable, view was expressed by Theodor Wolff in his book Die Juden (written in 1942–43 but not published until 1984). He, too, points first of all to the massive difference between antisemitism then and in his own time, little more than half a century later.Wolff makes fun of Treitschke’s affirmation that he did not want to see Jewish emancipation reversed: “One cannot rely even on Treitschke. . . . Compared to today’s standards, what half-heartedness, what hesitation, what inability to get away from Humboldt’s humanistic spirit, from culture! A little thunder, a few lightnings, and Treitschke confesses to the acquired rights, to the fact of emancipation!”6 Very different was the assessment by the Marxist sociologist Arthur Rosenberg in 1930. Seventy-five years after its publication, Rosenberg’s essay on Treitschke’s antisemitism remains one of its most intriguing interpretations . Rosenberg relates Treitschke’s rejection of “Jewish-German 380 Appendix 4 mixed culture” to his view of Christianity as the “rejection of the bourgeois spirit”and of “the Jew”as that spirit’s“most obvious embodiment.”7 Rosenberg argues that the discovery after 1871 that the Prussian state and military apparatus, not the political organizations of the bourgeoisie, had proved to be the backbone of successful German national unification, led to an identity crisis among the German educated classes. A fraction of the academic “support troops of the bourgeoisie” now gradually endorsed an (imagined) aristocratic life-ideal from the vantage point of which they reinterpreted the (commercial and industrial) bourgeoisie as greedy, selfish materialists...