Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

216 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

der neuesten schönen Literatur” (Remarks on titles and prefaces in the most

recent literature), Auerbach castigates broad contemporary literary trends and

offers a programmatic vision of the purposes that literature and literary criticism

should serve. Literature should act as “a powerful lever for the higher cultivation

[Bildung] of the age” and, to do so, must assume the form of “clear, unadorned

simplicity,” which Auerbach opposes, once again, to the literature of indulgent

subjectivity, self-reflexivity, irony, and inner turmoil.^83 In this review Auerbach

bemoans the wave of travel writings initiated by Heine’s Reisebilder ( 1830 ). He

disparages Heine’s “Selbstironisirung” and expresses the hope that with Hein-

rich Laube’s multivolume Reisenovellen ( 1834 – 37 ), “subjective, niggling [subjec-

tive räsonirende] travel literature has... been put to rest.”^84 Auerbach emphati-

cally rejects self-conscious writerly postures, which isolate a clique of literati

from the broad public.

Auerbach’s meditation on the prefaces—the most subjective form of para-

text—to recent books amounts to his own preface of sorts to the literary criti-

cism on which he was embarking at Europa:

Among the ancients a preface was an appeal to the muses; for us it is an

appeal to the critics. Among the ancients the poet retreated with his per-

sonality [Persönlichkeit] completely into the work; among the moderns we

find “I” or the modest royal “we” on nearly every page. Börne was the first

to have the courage truly to say “I.” This is acceptable for discussion [für

die Discussion], but not in higher poetic composition.... Critics, for their

part, should avoid this self delight [Ichslust] most of all, and vigilantly guard

against appraising new literary publications with reference to their own liter-

ary positions.

These individual observations may then be regarded as a preface to criti-

cal reviews that we are here beginning anew. “I” and “we,” which have be-

come so commonplace, will not appear here in this personal sense. Hence-

forth all of the significant publications of contemporary literature of all casts

shall be evaluated here with scrupulous impartiality, far from all cliques; and

we hope that our readership [das Publicum] will not deny us amicable inter-

est [freundliche Theilnahme].^85

In Auerbach’s contest between the ancients and the moderns, the emergence

of the ego into literary (or public) culture represents modernity’s defining fea-

ture. In contradistinction to a temporally vague group of premodern authors

(ostensibly it reaches back to antiquity and ends definitively only with Börne’s

emphatic Ich), modern authors are marked by and stage their subjectivities. In

place of the ancient continuity between muse, poet, and (implicitly) audience,