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Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (review)

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Among the writers presented, Jakob Wassermann reveals a deeply conflicted attitude toward Jewish creative identity, whereas Max Brod presents a writer from a Zionist perspective in a 1933 novel who accepts that “Jewish artists cannot by definition be German” (p. 173). This writer defines his relationship to German culture as Distanzliebe, that is, “love from a distance.” Ferstenberg interprets Brod’s Distanzliebe as expression of a crisis for the Jewish artist who faces exclusion from a German identity. His Zionist commitment is considered an abandonment of artistic creativity. The passage on Kafka, focusing on his well-known short story “Josephine, the Songstress or: the Mouse People,” touches upon the issue of Jewish creative identity and parallels to the Jewish people as audience. Lion Feuchtwanger with his Josephus trilogy (1932–1945) is the last author discussed. Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century A.D., serves as his protagonist whom Feuchtwanger tries to establish as model for the Jewish artist “beyond anti-Semitic attacks on the one hand and Zionist positions on the other” (p. 187). Ferstenberg presents Josephus as Feuchtwanger’s alter ego, who taught him to survive as “the most successful and prominent German-Jewish writer in exile” (p. 202). This slightly hyperbolic assessment of Feuchtwanger’s career obscures the fact that his Josephus figure is more problematic regarding the issue of Jewish creativity and double identity than expected. His life is not a success story reflecting a development from ambivalence to firm commitment, but rather a history of adaptation and survival. Helen Ferstenberg has raised a central issue of German-Jewish literature and made a convincing case for the writers she presented, but her positive conclusion needs to be amended, as she does not take into consideration other prominent German-Jewish writers, such as Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, or Arnold Zweig, who avoided the issue of Jewish artistic creativity or did not consider it central to their work. For the modern period, Feuchtwanger was the exception rather than the rule. Ehrhard Bahr Department of Germanic Languages University of California, Los Angeles