Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries

Chapter 1. Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited

CHAPTER 1 Literary Culture and Jewish Space around 1800: The Berlin Salons Revisited Liliane Weissberg Breaking News An article in the ‘‘Style and Entertaining’’ section of the New York Times Magazine, dated October 6, 2002, offers a glimpse of present-day New York. Titled ‘‘Whiskey à Go-Go,’’ it features Hope Atherton, a young and stylish woman, who has undertaken to ‘‘reinvent the salon.’’ ‘‘To understand why, as people say, ‘it’s all about’ Hope Atherton this season, let us try to explain how so-called New York society is constituted’’ (119), journalist William Norwich writes as he compares the social scenes of ‘‘uptown,’’ ‘‘downtown ,’’ and everything ‘‘in between’’ to competitive athletics: As in sports, nothing energizes a team like new blood. . . . Enter Hope Atherton, 27, an artist who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, born and reared on a 400-acre working farm in Warrenton, Ca., where, she says, ‘‘as far as you could see you never saw a light at night.’’ She has the doe eyes of an Edie Sedgwick and the gamine qualities of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, but she also has the true grit and intellect, well, a young Elizabeth Hardwick comes to mind. At 27, Hopey, as her friends call her, certainly likes ‘‘the life,’’ and ‘‘the life,’’ the neo-bohemian life, that is—the team she and her friends play on—likes her right back. Berlin Salons 25 Hopey even entertains at home—on Wednesdays, about once a month, in a sort of easy, breezy salon she calls Whiskey Wednesday. Simple stuff: a few bottles of whiskey, small groups of chums and if there is enough money or everyone chips in, some take-away food from Rice, by her friend David Selig, on Mott Street nearby. ‘‘My only entertaining tip,’’ Hopey says, preparing for a recent get-together, ‘‘is to not entertain—it’s just to be.’’1 In a box next to the article and its accompanying pictures of this New York set, Norwich names other ‘‘great salonistas’’ that form Hopey’s ancestral line of entertaining women. Among them, he lists a Jewish salonnière from eighteenth-century Berlin, Henriette Herz. Herz’s tea parties and Hopey’s whiskey à go-go may be separated by centuries and continents. But the weekly Berlin meetings and the monthly New York gatherings are both depicted here as evidence of style, featuring desirable places where one should be, or should have been, ‘‘just to be.’’ The earlier Berlin salon that featured its own doe-eyed hostess was, indeed, described as an important way station in Friedrich Nicolai’s late eighteenth-century description of Berlin.2 Nicolai’s account was popular with many visitors and tourists to this city. As many soon learned, Herz gathered philosophers and actresses at her home, and Jewish women and the Prussian landed aristocracy met for regular conversation and tea. In Norwich’s account, Hopey’s salon seems to override the question of class; important instead are style (that of the guests) and location (that of the salon). Those who are affluent in looks and style, however, do not necessarily need spare cash for a meal. The salon, in any case, is not for the lovers of food but for the gourmands of the mind. Norwich’s celebration of the reinvented salon implies a celebration of its predecessors. In that, he agrees with most social and literary critics who view the Berlin salon, for example, as an ideal meeting place. Studies of contemporary Berlin praise Berlin’s early Jewish salons as well, and books with titles such as Das gesellige Canape (The hospitable sofa) celebrate its renewed interest among Berlin’s present and non-Jewish population.3 But while this renewal is taking place, important questions remain. Did Berlin Jewish hostesses like Henriette Herz view their tea à go-go as such desirable places? And how about their Jewish friends? Should one really take these early Berlin gatherings to be models for social life in the twenty-first century ? 26 Chapter 1 Establishing a Home Eighteenth-century Berlin was no metropolis, although it was a fast-growing town of soldiers, bureaucrats, and tradespeople, many of whom were immigrants. If present-day New York is teeming with new residents from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean Islands (none of them stylish enough, perhaps , to enter Hopey’s salon), Berlin featured settlers from across Europe, among them large minorities...