Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

204 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

Tracing Auerbach’s engagement with Spinoza and his changing visions of

German community from his first novel through his abortive cycle of Spinozan

stories to the verge of his literary breakthrough as the author of village stories

reveals the extent to which Spinoza inspired Auerbach’s particular liberal in-

vention of the German Volk. The title Auerbach chose for his planned Spinozan

cycle—Deutsche Abende—attests to his attempt to situate Spinoza at the heart

of a vision of Germanness. In the period between the height of his engagement

with Spinoza’s thought in 1840 – 41 and his emergence as a phenomenally popu-

lar Volksschriftsteller in 1843 , Auerbach’s vision of Spinozan philosophy and

his vision of German community would continue to inform each other in strik-

ing ways. Even as the Volk displaces Spinoza, and the Dorfgeschichte the phi-

losophische Novelle, as the focus of Auerbach’s literary ambitions, Auerbach’s

understanding of Spinoza continued to undergird his idealized liberal vision of

the Volk.^18

Auerbach and the Anxiety of German-Jewish Identity

David Sorkin’s epochal The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780 – 1840 (orig-

inally published in 1987 ) challenged the paradigm of German-Jewish assimila-

tion by unearthing a distinct German-Jewish subculture. As Scott Spector notes,

however, Sorkin did so not by investigating subjective experience as a complex

historical phenomenon, but through a structuralist analysis that tends to short-

circuit questions about German Jews’ own awareness of their situation and

predicament.^19 In Sorkin’s ingenious interpretation, acculturating nineteenth-

century German Jews constituted “a community invisible to itself.”^20 An irony

lies at the heart of Sorkin’s analysis of German Jewry’s acculturation process:

while Jews in Germany thought they were doing German, Sorkin reveals how

they were unwittingly doing German-Jewish. Sorkin defines this irony as struc-

tural and therefore not experiential.^21 The subculture’s irony is its invisibility to

itself; it is a kind of dramatic irony born of the fact that Sorkin recognizes some-

thing in the situation of the historical actors that they were not equipped to see

themselves.

Sorkin devotes an important chapter of Transformation to Auerbach as an

avatar of the German-Jewish subculture in the realm of secular culture, read-

ing him as a paradigmatic embodiment of the subculture’s blindness to its par-

ticular situatedness vis-à-vis German culture.^22 Auerbach, however, was not

naively blind to acculturating German Jews’ discernible Jewishness; rather, he

was haunted by anxiety that the Jewishness of his Germanness might indeed

be visible. The irony of Auerbach’s identity that I would underscore is not the