332 } Notes to Chapter 5
- Auerbach, SA 1 and “Das Ghetto,” vii.
- Auerbach notes that an advance he received for the novel allowed him to pay for better
food and the privilege to move freely about the fortress during his confinement (SA 1 ). - Ibid.
- Auerbach’s Spinoza edition and biography appeared in December 1841. He relates
that he began the translation “in 1840 , when I believed that my writing career was over and
that I must prepare to become a lecturer [Docent] in philosophy.” He remarks that he fre-
quently worked twelve-hour days on the translation (“Spinoza-Arbeiten,” September 15
[hereafter SA 2 ]. - Berthold Auerbach, Deutsche Abende, v.
- In addition to “Liebe Menschen” and “Deutsche Abende,” the two Spinoza-inspired
stories written in 1841 , the 1851 Deutsche Abende included “Des Waldschützen Sohn,” which
Auerbach had first published in a Jugendkalender for 1847. Auerbach continued to add to
Deutsche Abende in subsequent editions. He changed the title of “Deutsche Abende: Wer ist
glücklich?” to “Was ist Glück?” for the 1851 Deutsche Abende but did not otherwise revise
the stories. “Deutsche Abende: Wer ist glücklich?” was also included in an 1842 anthology,
Novellen-Album. Page references are to this edition. - Berthold Auerbach, Deutsche Abende, vi.
- According to a letter from Auerbach to Rudolf Kausler of December 15 , 1841 (see
the anonymous chronology of Auerbach’s life in Thomas Scheuffelen, “Berthold Auer-
bach, 1812 – 1882 ,” 45 ). In the same letter Auerbach relates his plan to move to London in
spring 1842 to start a German newspaper, an indication of how changeable his career plans
remained before his success with the village stories. - Ibid.
- Joseph Braun, “Ein Phänomen in der neuesten Literatur” (A phenomenon in the lat-
est literature). - The entry on Auerbach in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia wryly notes: “That an atmo-
sphere of ‘Spinozism’ breathed through these most artless tales did not materially detract
from their charm.” (“Auerbach, Berthold [Baruch].”) - Scott Spector, “Beyond Assimilation,” 92.
- David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 140.
- According to Sorkin, the ideologues of emancipation “could neither recognize nor
acknowledge that their ideology, designed to foster integration, had become a basis of sepa-
ration. The bourgeoisie could not see that its acculturation made it not German but German-
Jewish.... Invisibility was a structural and not a subjective problem. It did not occur because
of willful self-denial. To assert such self-denial imputes far too much knowledge to the ma-
jority of German Jews, for it assumes that they fully understood the nature of their nascent
community and simply chose to deny its existence. This book is not a study of self-denial
but of irony—the consequences of the discrepancy between German Jewry’s actual and its
imagined situation” (The Transformation of German Jewry, 7 ). Sorkin is surely right that
the issue is not one of self-denial as he defines it here, yet his either-or opposition between
self-denial and self-invisibility is ill equipped to appreciate much of the gray area in between.
Anxiety can be (in fact, generally is) based on very partial knowledge. The Jewishness of the
German-Jewish subculture was not invisible and unconscious but something acculturating
Jews partially and anxiously perceived and negotiated in various ways.