Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

212 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

and identified Protestant freedom as the pseudofreedom of abstract, antisocial,

and politically ineffectual individuals—in a word, as the problem rather than

the solution. Even after he had shed his optimism about the political viability of

secularized Protestantism, however, Ruge continued to hold up Heinean Witz

as the embodiment of the asocial subjectivity that he now associated chiefly with

Protestantism. Bad subjectivity was now Catholic, now Protestant, but it was

consistently Heine.^71

In “Der Protestantismus und die Romantik,” Ruge dismisses the Young Ger-

man writers collectively as the latest incarnation of the Romantic cultural ten-

dencies between 1770 and 1830 , although he does not single out Heine. In both

his 1838 Heine essay and much of his subsequent Heine criticism, however,

Ruge holds up Heine as a symptom of the age and the embodiment of the kind

of subjectivity he at that time associated with Catholicism.^72 In his 1838 Heine

essay, the still-patriotic Prussian Ruge characterizes Heine as more loyal to

France than Germany and contends that Heine’s Witz prevents him from pen-

etrating Germany’s religious and philosophical life.^73 Whereas Fichte and oth-

ers had sought to liberate the state, the uncommitted Heinean Genie wants only

to revel in his own impertinence and pseudofreedom.^74 For Heine, “fun and

wit are ends in themselves, the only ends.”^75 Ruge changed precious little in his

critique of Heine as the embodiment of pernicious egoism, even as he came to

associate egoism, frivolity, and pseudofreedom chiefly with Protestantism. In his

substantial review “Die Frivolität: Erinnerungen an Heine” (Frivolity: memo-

ries of Heine; January 1843 ), for example, Ruge equates “real” with “political”

freedom and warns against the “siren song of Protestantism,” which is “not to

be trusted when it points up [uns vorspiegelt] our spiritual freedom within an

unfree political life [Staatsleben] .”^76

There was, then, a widespread discourse that held Heine up as the em-

bodiment of a corrosive and decidedly un-German form of subjectivity. This

image of Heine was remarkably stable even as very different sorts of critics—

sophisticated Hegelians and more vulgar intellectuals, archconservatives, liber-

als, and left-wing radicals, Catholics and Protestants—pressed it into the service

of their disparate cultural political agendas. Heine was always implicitly, and

not infrequently explicitly, held up as a negative example from whom German

Jews should distance themselves. Even though Auerbach saw the weakness of

arguments like Pfizer’s and, indeed, articulately disputed the association of Jew-

ishness with Heine on which they rested, the Vormärz anti-Heine discourse still

profoundly shaped the way Auerbach approached his entry into the German

literary culture of the 1830 s and 1840 s. Although Auerbach’s distaste for Heine

was surely genuine, the call to prove oneself a good German Jew by showing