Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

230 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

bach writes, for a pogrom! Hugo saves Rahel, who confesses her love to him.

Poetic license, Auerbach quips, permits Rahel (who would not have been able

to write German) and Hugo (who would not have been able to write) to exchange

the most tender of letters: “Philomela’s strains are no more tender in Werther than

in these letters.” Alas, however, Knight Hugo grows weary of and abandons the

beautiful Jewess and joins a crusade to the Holy Land. Rahel wanders barefoot

in the Judengasse. Her father has died of grief, and no one gives her refuge.

As he weighs his options for concluding the narrative, Auerbach apostro-

phizes imaginary readers and imagines how Menzel would react: “Weep, weep

with me, you tender-hearted grisettes, Friederikas, Emilias, Katharinas, where

shall I accommodate my Rahel? I can let her wander about as a harlot, kill

herself. But you turn away from me; I have ruined your Sunday reading; I am

declared a French Kraftgenie; and Herr Menzel hurls his lightning bolt at me.

Thus stay just a moment, I have a better alternative. Rahel enters a convent.”

Rahel, now Ursula, spends her nights bewailing her sorrows and her days tend-

ing sick knights. One day she dresses the wounds of—“Help! Help! Bring eau

de cologne; she’s fainting”—her beloved Hugo. Auerbach considers letting

Rahel die before regaining consciousness but dismisses this ending as too hard

on the nerves, and instead he has Hugo awaken her with kisses. Rather than

running off together, Hugo and Rahel renounce each other: “They speak so

beautifully that one must weep. Rahel dies of a broken heart. As Knight Hugo

leads his bride to the church he hears the bells from the convent. Rahel is being

laid to rest.”

Despite the near horror he feels in the face of wit and irony, and his consistent

calls for authorial straightforwardness, Auerbach here speaks from anything but

a single and stable position. Why this resort to irony? In presenting himself

to a reading public, Auerbach feels himself already interpolated as a Jew. Alien-

ated from himself by the imagined gaze of an Other, neither subjective unity nor

self-invisibility is an option. Instead, Auerbach tries to subvert through parody

the fantasy he imagines his audience has of him as a Jewish writer. Thus the sus-

tained tongue-in-cheek staging of himself as a purveyor of a falsified, exoticized,

and eroticized version of Jewish life that was in demand.^136

Auerbach presents the ready-made authorial role the literary market proffers

to the Jewish writer as something between that of a pimp and that of a prosti-

tute. The Rahel whom Auerbach trots out would feed the voracious readerly

appetite of Gentile grisettes (interestingly, but not surprisingly, women readers

are held to blame for the titillating Rahel). Auerbach imagines that this mode of

Jewish writing would also find favor with critics like Menzel, whose labeling of

the Young German writers as “Young Palestine” had so vexed Auerbach in his