Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 (review)

Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918. Emily D. Bilski, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xix + 265. $60.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Bilski's richly illustrated edited volume appeared in conjunction with the exhibit of the same name at the Jewish Museum, New York (14 November 1999-23 April 2000). The exhibit, which she curated, was one of a series that also featured Paris, Rome, Moscow, London, and New York. The volume, although highly focused, examining modernist culture in a single city for a span of not quite three decades, favors a broad interdisciplinary approach. It features a diverse and impressive international roster of contributors, representing a wide array of interrelated disciplines (German Studies, Art History, and Jewish and European Cultural and Intellectual History).

In her introduction Bilski outlines the two central aims of the exhibit and volume. First, to examine how and why Jewish Berliners became the leading producers and consumers of Berlin's modernist culture during a time of continued and growing anti-Semitism. Well aware of the controversy surrounding the "elective affinity between Jews and modern culture," Bilski's volume confronts it directly in an effort to "evaluate the role of Jews in modern Berlin culture without employing tainted discourse and at the same time avoiding a celebratory display of self- congratulation" (4). The contributors' efforts to find a discursive space separate from the anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic discourses that dominated discussions of Jews' roles in modernist movements gives the volume a value beyond that of an exhibit catalogue. Framing this sort of methodological question within a study of fin-de-siècle Berlin Jewry is particularly relevant given the exhibit's appearance at the following turn of the century, ten years after Germany and Berlin's reunification, which has been deemed by some as Germany's tacit effort to move beyond its Nazi past.

The volume is further distinguished by its breadth. In their entirety the essays create a panorama of Berlin modernist culture, addressing the role of Jewish Berliners in the visual arts, literature, cultural theory, reform and political movements (from Zionism to anthroposophy), the performing arts, journalism, publishing, film, salons, and cafés. Both the individual essays and the volume as a whole highlight the productive interchange between theoretical inquiry, political and social movements, and artistic production characteristic of modernity. The editor orchestrates a constructive dialogue between contributors without the repetition that is sometimes a drawback in collections of essays.

Paul Mendes-Flohr's essay seeks German Jews' supposed propensity for modern culture in the unique pattern of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in nineteenth-century central Europe, which revolved around the middle-class ideal of "Bildung," a universal (race and religion-neutral) ethic of humanistic education. His contribution focuses on three seminal moments in the discourse on the role of Jews in modernist cultural production: Werner Sombart's characterization of Jews as "Asian Interlopers," the "Kunstwart" debate instigated by Moritz Goldstein's essay "German-Jewish Parnassus," and the advent of the Cultural Zionist Jewish Renaissance (17). Peter Paret's essay confronts the then-predominant assertion that degenerate modernist visual arts, which were supposedly dominated by Jews, expressed alien and international rather than German national values. Without diminishing the important role of Jews in the production and dissemination of modernist art, Paret critiques the notion that Berlin modernism was a "Jewish" phenomenon and that Jews were attracted primarily to modernist rather than traditional art.

Sigrid Bauschinger examines the role of Berlin's café culture in the expressionist movement, in particular how the café as public, neutral space facilitated the cooperation of diverse (in terms of ethnicity, gender, and profession) individuals, especially through the formation of organizations such as "Neue Gemeinschaft." Else Lasker-Schüler's defiance of borders (her gender-bending role-playing, for example, which eroded distinction between life and art) exemplified the artistic synergies made possible by the café. Bilski's own essay analyzes the...