Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 21 7

modern writers take up positions in a conflictual cultural field and confront crit-

ics in metatexts.

After such reflection on the nature and dangers of the authorial “I,” how

Auerbach negotiates his own voice in what he characterizes as a preface to his

activity as a literary critic for Europa becomes especially interesting. He delays

his own pronomial appearance until after he has emphatically denied critics the

right (and pleasure: Ichslust) of writing from a subjective position. Auerbach’s

“wir” finally appears, then, in already negated form. He assures readers he will

studiously eschew the prevailing trend of deploying a personal ich or wir. Yet

the status of the final “wir” in the passage quoted above (“we hope that our

readership will not deny us amicable interest”) remains enigmatic. Does it or

does it not refer to Auerbach as the subject of a desire to be accepted? In ren-

dering this question undecidable, Auerbach both abdicates a particular subject

position and performatively produces a literary community into which he can

be amicably received.

Auerbach continued to critique and dissociate himself from Heine and the

excessively subjective cultural trends for which Heine rightly or wrongly served

as the emblem.^86 His antipathy toward Heine finds its most vigorous expres-

sion in his scathing review of Heine’s (scandalous and almost unanimously con-

demned) 1840 book Heine über Börne. Auerbach’s review appeared on October

25 and 27 , 1840 , when he was intensively at work on translating Spinoza, and—

if read carefully—it points in subtle ways to a Spinozan ethos as a curative to

Heine’s egoistic pathology. Auerbach evokes the well-worn criticisms of Heine’s

attention-grabbing antics, Keckheit, fascination with himself, and so on.^ He also

joins the chorus of those who hold Heine responsible for the sort of ephem-

eral writing, sustained by spectacle and personality, that they thought was com-

promising literature in middle-class society (in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft).^87

Because “Heine remained reduced to his personality,” he had squandered his

poetic genius and made no abiding contribution to literature.^88

Auerbach cites a passage in which Heine derides the common notion of char-

acter (the quality routinely denied him) as merely a mirror in which philistines

admire their own conformity and insists that great spirits (like himself ) tran-

scend character as it is understood by the mediocre majority (die Menge). Auer-

bach counters by pitting what he sees as Heine’s lack of Charakter (and surfeit

of Persönlichkeit) against a concept of character clearly indebted to Spinoza:

Heine [considers] his a great life; thus he will relegate to the common masses

all who deny him character in the higher sense. Actually every thing has char-

acter, every person, even the most volatile, changeable, as nothing can step