Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 211

and ingenious ego.” This, however, lasts only as long “as a fish can remain flying

above water: he always quickly plops back down into his natural element, his

authorial egoism [Autoregoismus], his frivolous addiction to wit [Witzsucht] .”^60

“To take up a lasting, honorable place in German literature,” Pfizer contends,

it would not suffice for Heine to break particular bad habits; rather, he “would

have to cease to be who he is.”^61

Pfizer moreover fantasizes that the proponents of Jewish emancipation “se-

cretly” regard Heine as “one of their own.” Even as, with their words, they

deplore Heine’s rashness, they applaud his blasphemy “with gestures”; and

“Christians would have to be quite deaf and dumb not to discern from the hiss-

ing and whispering that those ones [jene] are proud of their ally [Bundesgenos-

sen] Heine.”^62 Pfizer warns darkly that it could only damage the cause were the

advocates of Jewish emancipation to “move in the intimate company of open

enemies of Christianity, and defiantly and arrogantly make a spectacle of their

friendship with them.”^63 He raises the question of whether Heine, “a Jew by de-

scent if not by confession, has inherited in his essence and character individual

traits peculiar to his people [Züge von der Eigenthümlichkeit seines Volkes], e.g.

wit, audacity, etc.”^64 Pfizer further warns Jews that it would only feed the hate-

ful sentiment against them should they follow Heine in behaving tactlessly and

polemically, instead of peacefully cultivating the ground that has been yielded

to them. Jews should “avoid even the appearance of being in cahoots with a

Heine,” and eschew his “modish [eingerissene] literary Judaizing.”^65

Heine’s un-German egoism was not only a target of the Catholic Right and

of liberals like Pfizer. As the radical Left in the 1830 s took up and extended

in its own directions the Catholic Right’s earlier critique of Protestant egoism,

Heine continued to serve as a privileged bête noire, as the Heine criticism by

the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge attests.^66 In Jüdische Briefe Riesser notes

Ruge’s lengthy 1838 essay on Heine as a rare critique that refrains from asso-

ciating Heine’s flaws with his Jewishness.^67 Although Ruge portrays Heine as

essentially un-German and at times smears him with antisemitic associations,

indeed Ruge does not exploit Jewishness as a central component in his Heine

critique.^68 As Breckman notes, until his engagement with Feurbach’s 1841 Das

Wesen des Christentums, Ruge saw the incursion of Catholic irrationality and

arbitrary authority as the main threat to political progress in Prussia.^69 In the

manifesto he coauthored with Theodor Echtermeyer, for example, “Der Prot-

estantismus und die Romantik” (Protestantism and Romanticism; 1839 ), Ruge

assails Romanticism’s overvaluation of “das geniale Ich,” which he deems of a

piece with the Catholic dualism of God and world and its concomitant arrogant

disregard of humanity.^70 Under Feuerbach’s influence, Ruge changed his views