The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture by Martha B. Helfer (review)

Martha Helfer’s bold new book, The Word Unheard, offers rigorous close readings of canonical works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature with an eye to the complex workings of latent anti-Semitism in these texts. The last two decades have seen an explosion of scholarship in German-Jewish Studies, and in this context, the legacy of anti-Semitism has hardly been ignored. But Helfer undertakes something new in her book. Rather than looking for anti-Jewish sentiments in the obvious places—Grattenauer’s anti-Semitic rants, the pamphleteers who incited the Hep-Hep riots in 1819, Karl Sessa’s anti-Semitic farce Unser Verkehr (1819), Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855), anti-Semitic caricatures in popular culture, etc.—Helfer examines canonical works by authors whom German Jews themselves often revered. The book is divided into six chapters, each of which focuses on a major figure: Lessing (Die Juden, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, Nathan der Weise), Schiller (Die Sendung Moses), von Arnim (Isabella von Ägypten), Droste-Hülshoff (Die Judenbuche), Stifter (Abdias), and Grillparzer (Die Jüdin von Toledo). In each of these chapters, Helfer proves her talent for producing elegant, dynamic, and persuasive close readings, and she uses these skills to zone in on the specifically literary workings of anti-Semitism, often reconstructing complex anti-Jewish sentiments in ways that will surprise readers familiar with the material under study.

No study of this nature can be comprehensive, of course, but Helfer chooses a representative and diverse cast of characters, and in each chapter she demonstrates an unusually deep grasp of the vast scholarship that has been produced on these writers. In this way, she does not merely offer up compelling close readings. She also puts herself in a position to reflect critically on the various ways that the discipline of German Studies has failed to address the issues she wants to put on our radar. Helfer contextualizes her readings through a dynamic dialogue with the field of German Studies, and while the main ambition behind her close readings is rhetorical critique and not sociohistorical analysis, she is nevertheless extremely conscientious about setting each of the texts she studies in its various historical contexts. Each of her individual chapters is a scholarly tour de force, and each can easily be read alone as an example of the distinctive contributions that literary scholarship can make to the study of anti-Semitism.

But this book is much more than a collection of essays. Taken together, the chapters offer a provocative interrogation of the workings of literary anti-Semitism for which there is really no parallel in the existing literature—in English or German. Helfer opens her book with a substantial introduction that reflects in methodological and theoretical terms on what is at stake in reading for latent anti-Semitism in canonical works of German literature in the way she does. The book is well structured and beautifully written, without a single lapse into unnecessary scholarly jargon, and marks an important contribution to both German and German-Jewish Studies. To be sure, The Word Unheard is bound to open up dialogue, and perhaps even controversy, not least because Helfer is able to link familiar works of literature to types of anti-Semitism they have often been seen to challenge. Readers of Helfer’s book may not agree with all of the conclusions she comes to, but this book will be a force to reckon with. Indeed, The Word Unheard is a major study, one that should be required reading for students and scholars of German Studies and Jewish Studies alike.