Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 20 5

structural irony of self-blindness but an anxious irony of double consciousness.

Due to differences in social position and the liminality of Jewish visibility, this

form of double consciousness is both similar to and distinct from W. E. B. Du

Bois’s classic theorization of the divided self-consciousness of fin de siècle Af-

rican Americans.^23 Whereas Du Bois described American blacks’ attempt to

overcome this painful self-division and achieve a more authentic and unified

self-consciousness, Auerbach was more inclined to postulate, idealize, and cre-

ate forms of German culture in which Jews could see themselves as unprob-

lematically German and no longer subject to double consciousness. Auerbach’s

pronounced antipathy for any esthetic or political orientation emphasizing

social fracture or subjective doubling, non-self-correspondence, wit, or irony

is not born of naive freedom from, but rather an anxious disavowal of, double

consciousness.

Auerbach’s desire to inhabit a unified, quintessentially unironic locus within

German culture is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his vexation over

Heine and Heinean irony. Auerbach’s attack on divided subjectivity and irony

and his eschewal, in particular, of a cultural discourse linking irony and Jewish-

ness suggests that the irony of the subculture’s situation did not remain neatly

in that subculture’s own blind spot but haunted its self-image. The linkages be-

tween Jewishness and problematic, fissured, or ironic subjectivity that Heine

dramatized both as a provocative agent and as an excoriated target converged in

the specter of unreconciled Jewish particularity that Auerbach could not blithely

or blindly ignore but rather had, anxiously, to try to disavow and neutralize.

Both implicitly, in Auerbach’s literary criticism, and explicitly, in his novelis-

tic and biographical portraits of the philosopher, Auerbach found in Spinoza’s

ontology and ethics support for understanding shared human qualities, rather

than subjective idiosyncrasy, as embodying true virtue and freedom.

Heine and the Specter of Jewish Egoism

Warren Breckman has demonstrated that, at the latest after David Friedrich

Strauss’s epochal 1835 Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), Young Hegelian theologi-

cal debates became deeply politicized.^24 The key targets of the Young Hegelian

assault on Christian personalism were Restoration Germany’s sovereign and

aristocratic privileges, which Young Hegelians understood to be theological

personalism’s political analogues. As it became more radical, the German Left

extended its critique from theological to increasingly liberal models of the self

until, in Breckman’s words, “by the time Marx described political democracy

as ‘Christian since in it man, not merely one man but every man, ranks as sov-