Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 21 3

oneself to be the opposite of Heine added urgency to Auerbach’s critiques of

Heine and the cultural currents for which Heine, however unjustly, was widely

held responsible.

Attacks on egoism, indulgent subjectivity, Zerrissenheit, Ichspoeten, Selbst-

bespiegelung, and so forth were mainstays of the literary criticism Auerbach

published in the late 1830 s in the journal Europa. His pronounced antipathy to

literature that drew attention to the joys, torments, contradictions, and ironies

of subjective experience is overdetermined by the wider characterization of in-

dulgent subjectivity as socially corrosive and typically Jewish.^77 As Auerbach

distanced himself from the specter of Heine and Jewish subjectivity in his liter-

ary criticism, the alternative cultural vision he articulated drew implicitly on his

conception of Spinozan totality. More than any other figures during his early ca-

reer, Heine and Spinoza would embody for Auerbach, respectively, the cultural

political problem of the widespread perception of an un-German Jewish egoism

and its possible resolution.

Auerbach’s Early Literary Criticism:

Spinoza against Heine

In an 1838 review of Ernst Willkomm’s novel Die Europamüden: Modernes Leb-

ensbild (The Europe weary: a portrait of modern life), Auerbach justifies the

relatively extensive critique to which he subjects this novel with the claim that

it is emblematic of contemporary literary culture.^78 He objects to Willkomm’s

failure esthetically to transform the Lebensschmerzen he depicts. Typically, Au-

erbach takes particular aim at Willkomm’s staging of the problematic subjectiv-

ity that experiences such woes. He dismisses the book as “nothing but theatrical

trappings and coquettish self-reflection” and finds its “coquetting with itself...

offensive and unnatural.”^79

In Auerbach’s view, contemporary literature’s prodigal concern with the

problematic modern self stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the na-

ture of historical agency. Against the prevailing pathos of the battered and torn

modern subject, Auerbach frames modernity as what we could call a postheroic

age. Auerbach’s conception of modernity as postheroic tends to strip individu-

als of their status as historical agents and to assign historical agency, instead,

to a collectivity or distilled Everyman. Auerbach welcomes literature that de-

picts the “wrestling and struggles of our age,” but he insists:

Real or poetic truth must assert its right; no one who desires what is better

will be able to befriend manufactured confusions and turpitude; despairing