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  • The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture by Martha B. Helfer
  • Jeffrey L. Sammons
The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture. By Martha B. Helfer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 235. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 978-0810127944.

The Holocaust continues to demand explanation, some understanding of how such an unimaginable catastrophe could have emerged from one of the defining nations of Western culture. It is to the culture that we are tempted to look, especially to literary culture because of the extent to which it reflects and may to some extent contribute to the formation of consciousness. But German literature does not seem to be conspicuously relevant to the inquiry. Certainly one can find evidence of hostility to and contempt for the Jews, but it is no more pervasive or intense than in other [End Page 422] Western cultures. Except among some of the Romantics preoccupied with national purity, systematic racism seems vanishingly rare, as there are regularly concomitant sympathetic and respectful figurations of Jews along with cordial relationships with Jewish people. Only around and after World War I are there rare and peripheral traces of the protofascist “scientific” antisemitism (the spelling recommended by Richard S. Levy on the grounds that there is no such thing as “Semitism,” rejected by Martha Helfer.) We do not seem to get much help for comprehending the special case of the Holocaust from the main currents of German literature, to borrow a phrase from their Jewish admirer Georg Brandes.

This is not Helfer’s view of things. For her the retrospect from the Holocaust changes the meaning of texts; they cannot be read by “our post-Holocaust eyes” (xii) as they were in the past; “the very fact of the Holocaust makes ‘the Jew’ a privileged signifier” (171); of her admittedly debatable interpretation of Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche she asserts that “Germany’s unfortunate history lends urgency to this reading” (110); the hermeneutics of suspicion trumps philology. She employs discourse analysis, semiology, deconstruction, and etymology to expose previously unperceived subtexts, consistently antisemitic presuppositions, and, in some cases, intentions.

The investigation is densely and microscopically detailed with tiny equivocating associations, so that only some of the results can be summarized here. Lessing’s Die Juden presents a hidden Jew who dupes his own servant, who is also a hidden Jew; thus “a concealed, dangerous Jewish element . . . threatens mainstream Christian German Society” (14). In Nathan der Weise Recha’s “smoldering sexuality” (16) is a threat; the ring parable is “stereotypical crafty ‘Jewish’ behavior” (17) that claims Judaism as the original religion; Nathan’s offer to lend money to Saladin also a Jewish trait. Schiller’s Moses in his historical essay is a “shrewd charlatan” who “invented faith to dupe the Hebrews” (22); “numerous negative traits are inherent in Jews and Judaism from the start” (25). Along the way Helfer touches on Spiegelberg in Die Räuber and remarks that Franz Moor also has Jewish features. Schiller denies that Judaism is the origin of Christianity and Islam; “Judaism is, in effect, a farce” (35). Moses becomes a Wandering Jew, disguised, ambitious, full of hate. Moses “decides to become a politician” (53), apparently anticipating Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Schiller “invokes the most malevolent of anti-Semitic tropes: the singular accusation of deicide” (53); that is, Moses abolishes the Egyptian deities in favor of Yahweh. In Arnim’s Isabella von Ägypten the Gypsies are actually Jews, ghosts of a dead religion, threatening the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire, which is saved by sending them back to Egypt. In Die Judenbuche, the Mergels are also Jews; Mergel is an impure mixture used for fertilizer, thus dung, thus Jewish. Friedrich and Johannes are likely brothers, children of the incest of Margreth and Simon (a Jewish name!). All the murders are committed by Jews; the portrayals of Jews are blatantly antisemitic. The story is directed against the emancipation of Jews in Germany. Stifter’s Abdias [End Page 423] “presents a hermeneutic theory of literary anti-Semitism” (113), directed against emancipation and assimilation of Jews in Austria. Antisemitism is supported by nature; Ditha, the blinded...

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