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Chapter Five

Patriotic Pantheism

Spinoza in Berthold Auerbach’s Early Career

Berthold Auerbach ( 1812 – 82 ) and Moses Hess ( 1812 – 75 ) were intimate friends

for a number of years in the late 1830 s and early 1840 s, a period during which

both young men were trying to establish themselves within German culture and

politics. As they sought to situate themselves on the German scene Auerbach

and Hess both engaged intensively with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, in

whom they both found inspiration for their progressively divergent, and ulti-

mately mutually hostile, cultural and political orientations. This tale of two Spi-

nozas is the subject of this chapter and the following one.

Literary scholars remember Auerbach chiefly as the author of the Schwarz-

wälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Stories), which catapulted him

to literary stardom in 1843. Before his unlikely rise to fame as a German Volk-

schriftsteller Auerbach was a poor, unknown erstwhile rabbinical aspirant try-

ing, through various genres, styles, and subjects, to break into the literary mar-

ket. Hess has a secure place in two different intellectual contexts: as the au-

thor of the 1862 proto-Zionist epistolary treatise Rome and Jerusalem and as a

pioneering socialist theoretician and activist who made his most influential

contributions in the 1840 s. Auerbach made his novelistic debut in 1837 with

Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman (Spinoza: a historical novel), and in 1841 he

published a five-volume German translation of Spinoza’s works, prefaced with

an original biography of the philosopher.^1 Hess also published his first book in

1837 : Die Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit (The Holy History of Mankind),

which inscribes Spinoza as the avatar of the modern age and appeared anony-

mously, “by a disciple of Spinoza.” One of the rare contemporary mentions of

this work by Hess came, in fact, in a review of the Spinoza novel by Auerbach,

whom the reviewer mistakenly assumed also to be the author of Hess’s anony-

mous book.^2

Against the background of wide-ranging debates about the role of subjectivity,

egoism, and personality in religion, literary culture, philosophy, and politics in

Germany in the 1830 s and 1840 s—some key moments of which I explored in the

previous chapter—Hess and Auerbach each drew on Spinoza to try to resolve