Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (review)

This book results from the thirty-first Wisconsin Workshop, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 1999. The editors explain that its “subtext” is a state ment by the cultural historian George L. Mosse, who, after being awarded the Goethe Medal in Munich in 1991, concluded his speech: “Hitler destroyed the Jews of Germany, but not their cultural heritage.” In German Jews beyondJudaism (1985) Mosse had argued that the German concept of “Bildung” (education and art as forma tion of the self and as liberation) as advocated by Goethe had become an integral part of German-Jewish identity. This notion was debated at this symposium. Part one is specifically devoted to the topic “Goethe and the Jews,” and the remainder of the book explores the complexities of Goethe’s work and its contributions to German-Jewish identity. It presents new research on Goethe reception, especially in the contexts of the Berlin Salons of the Jewish elite in the nineteenth century, the Goethe biographies from Ludwig Geiger to Friedrich Gundolf, and Freud and the Frankfurt School.

Klaus Berghahn’s opening essay “Patterns of Childhood: Goethe and the Jews” argues that whereas Goethe had personal relationships with the Jewish elite and whereas he had an apparent respect for the achievements of Judaism, his actions were driven by early childhood images as documented in Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–22). Goethe described his first encounter with the Frankfurt ghetto, and his description much later in life still reveals that he only responded with repulsion but no compassion. Berghahn finds it characteristic of Goethe in his relations to Jews that there was always a distance and an ambivalence and that he was never able to let go of his deeply ingrained anti-semitic prejudice. Ehrhard Bahr’s “Goethe and the Concept of Bildung in Jewish Emancipation” is a critical response to George L. Mosse and instead builds on Wilhelm Dohm’s treatise “Über die bürgerliche Verfassung der Juden” (1781), which introduced the idea of Jewish emancipation in Germany. Bahr argues that it was not so much Goethe’s concept of Bildung that motivated Jewish emancipation as that of Moses Mendelssohn, especially in his essay “Über die Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift of September 1784. Bahr finds that the so-called “German-Jewish romance” with Bildung began with Mendelssohn in 1784 and not with Rahel Levin in 1812 as others had claimed.

The second part, “Goethe Cult and Criticism during the Nineteenth Century,” begins with the essay “Demarcations and Projections: Goethe and the Berlin Salons.” Barbara Hahn explores how Goethe became a figure of projection and documents that he was celebrated as a “secular God” in the Berlin salons where he had a circle of “believers” among the Jewish elite. Among these were Rahel Levin, Henriette Herz, Sara Levy, Sara and Marianne Meyer and others, including also the Swedish diplomat Karl Gustav von Brinckmann, whose correspondence is key to the documentation of this social milieu. Hahn also mentions that a Jewish appearance was projected onto Goethe by David Veit when he described his encounter with the great poet at a visit in Berlin in the spring of 1793 in emphasizing a resemblance between Goethe and Veit’s uncle: “Endowed with hooked nose, dark eyes, and dark skin, in terms of his figure similar to the uncle of the writer Goethe squares in his appearance with the then current cliché of the Jew” (p. 38).

Jost Hermand’s essay “A View from Below: H. Heine’s Relationship to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe” examines the key role Goethe apparently had for the younger Heinrich Heine, who desperately tried to gain Goethe’s acceptance and respect but was only ignored and put down by the great master. Hermand links Heine’s biography, including his conversion to Christianity and his subsequent return to topics of Jewish concern, directly with his relationship to Goethe and emphasizes most of all the class distinctions between the two.

The third part, “Goethe...