Sorkin writes: “The role of the subculture played in both his [Auerbach’s] life and
his work remained invisible. Auerbach could not see how even the production of secular
culture could be conditioned by the subculture. His life presents an exemplary case of how
participation in secular culture did not lead to assimilation but to the confirmation, however
unwitting, of a new sort of Jewish identity. Thus where towards the end of the century the
historian Heinrich von Treitschke accused Auerbach of having created peasants who were
little more than ‘disguised Jews,’ he thought he was merely casting another anti-Semitic as-
persion. In fact, he revealed a significant truth not only about Auerbach’s literary vision, but
also about the nature of German Jewry” (ibid., 155 ). Sorkin’s analytic aperture tends to ab-
solutize a blindness that was never total and effectively removes from historical experience all
ironic awareness on the part of Auerbach (and the wider German-Jewish community) of the
tenuousness of their claim to unproblematic Germanness. Moreover, Sorkin passes over in
silence precisely the moments in which Auerbach’s nervousness about not being accepted as
German are most apparent, such as his debut essay, Das Judenthum und die neueste Litera-
tur, and “Das Ghetto,” his jittery preface to his 1837 novel about Spinoza. (Sorkin refers to
the revised 1854 version.) He is also silent about Auerbach’s Spinoza biography and a num-
ber of quasi-ethnographic journalistic essays that dramatize tensions between Auerbach’s
idealized version of the Volk and his experience of social exclusion as a Jew, including “Das
Sängerfest zu Frankfurt a. M.,” “Tagebuch aus Weilbach,” and the unsigned “Schildereien
aus dem Taunus.” Jeffrey Grossman challenges aspects of Sorkin’s interpretation of the cen-
tral role of Bildung in the “invisible” German-Jewish community by analyzing moments in
Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten in which the function of Bildung vis-à-vis com-
munity appears highly ambivalent, and Bildung’s capacity to unite the liberal national com-
munity Auerbach envisioned thus become dubious (“Auerbach, Heine, and the Question of
Bildung in German and German-Jewish Culture,” 85 – 96 ).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, chapter 1.
Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social
Theory: Dethroning the Self (hereafter DS). Auerbach attended two philosophy lecture
courses that Strauss, who would become a lifelong friend, gave at Tübingen in winter 1832 –
33 : Geschichte der Philosophie and Scholae Platonico-Aristotelicae (SA 1 ). Horton Harris notes
that Strauss used the privilege he enjoyed, as a lecturer at the famous Tübingen Seminary,
of being able to lecture at Tübingen University in order “to forward the new Hegelian phi-
losophy” (David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology, 36 ). Auerbach also refers to studying
Hegel in Tübingen (SA 1 ). Strauss’s epochal Das Leben Jesu, which would inaugurate Left
Hegelianism, did not appear for two more years, but Auerbach would have been exposed to
the more radical Hegelian framing of the ethico-political problem of personality and sub-
jectivity in his study of Hegel and recent German philosophy through the lens of one of
the boldest proponents of the new scientific approach. In summer 1832 , the semester when
Auerbach began studying at Tübingen, Strauss created a stir at the seminary by disputing,
in the presence of the seminary’s director, Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel, the Lutheran
Church’s doctrine regarding the Person of Christ (Harris, David Friedrich Strauss, 37 – 38 ).
Auerbach had read Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu by January 1836 (see the anonymous chronol-
ogy of Auerbach’s life in Thomas Scheuffelen, “Berthold Auerbach, 1812 – 1882 ,” 36 , 40 ).
Breckman, DS, 182 – 83. The internal quotations are from Marx’s “On the Jewish
Question.”
