Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

210 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

said in Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland that panthe-

ism was Germany’s secret religion; Spinoza was also a secret subtext of Auer-

bach’s polemic against Heine.^53

Attacks on the Jewish origins of Heine’s frivolity, caustic wit, and self-indul-

gence continued to shape the context in which Auerbach produced his earliest

work. Riesser’s sustained attention to the discourse of Heine as the embodiment

of a caustically witty and purportedly Jewish subjectivity provides an impor-

tant index of the extent to which this image of Heine was a political problem

with which German Jews had to contend. In 1838 the poet and critic Gustav

Pfizer published an eighty-page study of “Heine’s Schriften und Tendenz.”^54

Riesser devoted the third of his Jüdische Briefe ( Jewish letters)—in volume 1 ,

published in 1840 —to refuting Pfizer, and a significant portion of this important

work (all of letters 4 , 5 , and 7 , and part of letter 6 ) to refuting statements by Men-

zel, Pfizer, Herman Marggraff, and others who in various ways held up Heine’s

perceived negative qualities as representative of “Jewish” intellectual currents.^55

Riesser argued that Heine’s Zerrissenheit, Witz, and egoism were functions of

his not identifying with the Jewish community and its struggles: “Egoism may

be cold, flippant, contemptuous, frivolous; empathy is warm and serious. This

is the point that distances us, the proponents of the Jewish cause, so infinitely

from Heine so that starker contrasts could scarcely be found in the entire field of

literature than between him and us.” Riesser concurs with Pfizer and his many

predecessors that Heine is motivated by “self-interested talent” (Selbstsucht des

Talents) and that “Heine’s subjects [Stoffe] merely allow him to practice his wit,

his rare talent of speech; he does not serve the cause he treats, he merely wants

to make it serve his talents.”^56 Proponents of the Jewish cause, in contrast, “have

generally been devoid of precisely the quality that Herr Pfizer has the benefi-

cence to designate as characteristic of the Jew, namely wit. The light, flighty,

unrestrained nature of wit is not terribly compatible with unconditional devo-

tion to one’s cause, with the dogged striving for a particular, serious objective.”^57

In the critique of Heine to which Riesser felt compelled to respond at length,

Pfizer, like almost everyone, acknowledges Heine’s poetic gifts but bemoans

how Heine has inspired so many imitators to take “wit, which kills genuine

poetry,” as their guiding principle [Lebensprinzip].^58 Heine’s poetry, moreover,

was popular among “frivolous, bored and blasé cosmopolitans [Weltleute]” be-

cause of the Witz, irony, nastiness, unbelief [Unglauben], and immorality it con-

tained.^59 Heine’s esthetic and moral flaws become only more pronounced in his

prose. He is capable of writing good prose when he, only ever briefly, holds back

his subjectivity [seine Subjektivität zurückhält] and something objective makes

him briefly forget “the fundamental theme of his entire authorship, his sublime