Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben. Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (review)

The capacity of anniversaries in German literary studies to raise the dead and vivify the moribund is quite remarkable. For a long time Gustav Freytag was a rather barren topic, regarded as a deeply conventional partisan of the evolving juste-milieu in German society and a willing collaborator of the Beckmesser of realism, Julian Schmidt.

In the 1960s I had some difficulty getting a paper on Soll und Haben published. In the post-Holocaust discourse of the '70s and '80s there were several efforts to determine on what scale of anti-Semitism Soll und Haben was to be measured. But the 150 ^th anniversary of that novel brought forth a flurry of publications, not only about it but about Freytag in general. Sometimes nearly simultaneous publications make it difficult for any of them to have the benefit of the others. In her study based on a Nottingham dissertation, Christine Achinger apologizes for not giving them adequate attention, but she does in fact cite them.

Achinger undertakes a full-scale sociopolitical contextualization of Soll und Haben, independent of the intentions and subsequent history of the author, as a set of solutions to the alienated condition of the modern in Prussia, which she equates with bourgeois society. (Achinger believes in the objective reality of alienation, division of labor, the transformation of use value into exchange value, etc., more than I do.) The novel presents the image of a "versöhnte Moderne," a society that, owing to German values, is unalienated and harmonious; Freytag overcomes Hegel's skepticism about epic harmoniousness in the bourgeois novel. The disruptive, mean-spirited, and materialistic characteristics of capitalism are ascribed to the Jews, a foreign element in the otherwise organic nation. German work is pursued not for personal gain but in service to the commonweal; the merchant class and the workers are one. Achinger is not patient—I think rightly—with efforts to mitigate the anti-Semitic thrust of the novel on the grounds that it antedates biological racism. She argues that the substantial anti-Semitic tradition was already in place, called by a repeatedly cited scholar named Moishe Postone "national anti-Semitism," an expression of the diversity intolerance of the imagined nation, within which Jews are insuperably other and unassimilable despite all efforts at mimicry and intrusion. In this reading the distinctions among the Jewish figures are less important; even Bernhard Ehrenthal, regularly put forward as an evolved, morally sensitive Jew modifying the anti-Semitic severity of the novel, is weak and unhealthy; his private philological studies contribute nothing to the productive work of the nation. Achinger points out that even those liberals who, like Freytag, supported Jewish emancipation, did not, as a rule, welcome Jews as fellow citizens with equal rights and respect, much as, one might add, many American opponents of slavery continued to regard blacks as racially inferior and inadmissible to equal standing with whites.

In addition to her extensive treatment of the figuration of the Jews, Achinger devotes detailed attention to the representations of the nobility and the Poles, and to gender matters. Throughout she endeavors to show contradictions within the apparently firm order of the novel's world. In the case of the nobility Achinger discusses the obvious and familiar displacement of the novel's boring protagonist by the renegade aristocrat Fink. With his superior military skills and financial resources, Fink is able to defend and rescue the Rothsattel estate in Poland to a degree beyond Anton Wohlfart's abilities, and he mounts a cynical critique of the conventionality and pettiness of Anton's commercial milieu that Achinger believes remains with the reader. It is true that the traditional Rothsattels are incompetent in modern society and irrelevant to it, but Fink seems to project a new kind of aristocrat, building for the future. As Achinger rightly remarks, Anton rejects "Habitus und Mentalität des Adels" but not its political and social preeminence (91). Bourgeois society is still a...