Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

222 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

access to European culture. The resolution of specifically Jewish into universal

culture, moreover, is to be celebrated, not bemoaned.^104

Beer’s indirect portrayal of Jews through the pariah class in India elicits in-

triguing remarks from Auerbach regarding the viability of representing the “hu-

manity” of Jews through direct portrayal of them as Jews. Auerbach opines that

it surely was not a coincidence that Beer wrote Der Paria—in which “the poet

tried to mollify the laments of his brothers and to erect an eternal memorial to

their pain”^105 —in 1823 , a year that witnessed the definitive repeal of many of the

civil rights extended to Prussian Jews during the era of reform following Napo-

leon’s defeat of Prussia in 1806 : “Yet he could not thematize Jews and Jewish

life directly, since, aside from the fact that ill-wishers here trumpet as animosity

much that is only a cry of pain from a tortured breast, tragic pathos could have

easily been redrawn here as comic derision. Hostile critics would have dragged

in a Jew from any old street corner with all his ridiculous junk, motley necker-

chiefs, worn trousers and copper kettles; and one single: ‘No business to do?’

[Nichts zu handeln?] would have destroyed the entire illusion among the broad

public, which sticks so fondly to externals.”^106 Auerbach’s meditation on Beer’s

predicament speaks volumes about his own. He suggests that the indirection by

which Beer engages Jewish concerns is necessary for any portrayal of the injus-

tice with which Jews contend. Had Beer approached his subject head on, his

play would have been taken by many as an act of hostility. Even more inescap-

ably, it would have forfeited its moral and political force because recognizable

signifiers of Jewishness needed only the slightest nudge—if indeed they needed

any at all—to cross over into despised and risible stereotypes in the eyes of the

broad public. Thus the Jewishness of Jewish experience had to be rendered

invisible.

Finally, the Beer essay exemplifies the intimacy between Auerbach’s persis-

tent efforts to attack and distance himself from what were perceived as corrosive

modes of subjectivity and his anxiety that any mark of Jewishness might signify

such subjectivity:

[Michael Beer’s] decided talent and his propensity for the theater protected

him... from the prevailing ego poetry [Ichspoesie], which collapses ut-

terly if one extracts from it the personality of the author. These ego poets

[Ichspoeten], who speak endlessly of their interesting persons, their true

and fabricated sympathies and antipathies, and regard phenomena outside

themselves [eine fremde Erscheinung] at most through a critical lorgnette.

... M. B. cannot be placed in the first tier of German poets... , but M. B’s

name will still be named when the much-admired and oft- discussed ego he-