The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For other studies of Jews in German literature in the time period under consideration see, for example, Ritchie Robertson’s magisterial The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1999), which concentrates on the years 1880–1939, and does not offer sustained textual analysis. Jeffrey Librett’s The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000) provides an in-depth interpretation of the structure of German-Jewish dialogue in the era of emancipation; it does not focus on the rhetoric of anti-Semitism per se, and does not consider latent anti-Semitism in literature. Jonathan M. Hess’s Germans , Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002) presents a groundbreaking analysis of the inception of the Jewish emancipation debate in Germany from a sociohistorical perspective, but offers relatively little discussion of literature. Gunnar Och’s Imago Judaica (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995) provides thoughtful analyses of Jews in German literature from 1750 to 1812, but does not consider latent anti-Semitism. Irving Massey’s Philo-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000) and Alfred Low’s Jews in the Eyes of Germans from the Enlightenment to Imperial Germany (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1979) are both well-intentioned studies that fail to offer comprehensive analyses of the literary texts under discussion. 2. For an in-depth analysis of the rhetorical strategies that inform the discursive construction of the Jew in the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Clemens Brentano, see my “The Fairy Tale Jew,” Neue Lektüren/New Readings, ed. Norbert Eke and Gerhard Knapp. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik , vol. 67 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi: 2009), 31–42. 3. For a theoretical discussion of textual latency grounded in Heideggerian philosophy, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “How (If at All) Can We Encounter What Remains Latent in Texts?” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7, no. 1 (2009): 87–96. Gumbrecht defines “latent” as “whatever we believe is in a text without being unproblematically graspable” (87). Gumbrecht proposes an approach to latency that abandons close textual analysis and “strenuous hermeneutic efforts,” arguing that we may best encounter latency by “taking a passive stance and an attitude of composure (Gelassenheit)” (96). 4. The poem, presumably written by Klee, is itself dynamically beautiful, composed of mellifluous language and abstract images that are strikingly poignant and singularly difficult to understand and to translate: “Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht / Dann schwer und teurer / und stark vom Feur / Abends 173 voll von Gott und gebeugt / Nun ätherlings vom Blau umschauert, / entschwebt über Firnen / zu klugen Gestirnen” (“Once emerged from the gray of night / Then grave [serious, heavy] and dearer / and strong from fire / Evenings full of God and bowed / Now ethereally showered all around by blue, / hovering away over snow-covered peaks / to wise stars [to knowing constellations]”). For a discussion of the painting, and Klee’s self-understanding as a poet, see K. Porter Aichele, Paul Klee, Poet/Painter (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2006), 45–48. Aichele provides an alternate translation to the poem (45). 5. Mark H. Gelber, “What Is Literary Antisemitism?” Jewish Social Studies 47, no. 1 (1985): 1. 6. Ibid., 16. Emphasis in the original. 7. Helmut Walser Smith has used the metaphor of the “vanishing point” from painting to elegantly demonstrate how very different pictures of history emerge by shifting perspective: “In painting, a vanishing point focuses the viewer’s attention and determines the relative size of detail throughout the canvas. By analogy, the vanishing point in history determines the central focus of a disciplinary community, establishing central questions and deciding the scope of what counts. It does this not only for events chronologically close to the vanishing point, but also for those at considerable distance. In this sense, vanishing points pattern the writing of history, whether or not we wish them to.” Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion , and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6. 8. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1993), 88. 9. This in itself is not a new argument: as Jonathan Hess has shown in his incisive analysis of late eighteenth-century German political, philosophical, and religious discourse, “distinctly modern forms of anti-Semitism emerged not as a...