Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Patriotic Pantheism { 235

about the reception his debut as a German and a Jewish author would receive,

it had little reception at all.^152

Spinoza would continue for years to shape Auerbach’s evolving vision of

a German culture and politics, though Spinoza’s place in Auerbach’s fiction

would become less direct. The philosopher appears as an explicit topic of con-

versation in one of the stories of Auerbach’s abortive Spinozan novella cycle,

Deutsche Abende, but it is only implicit in the other. Even as he continued to

envision the reconciliation of particularity and universality in a liberal Germany

according to ontological and ethical ideas he considered Spinozan, Auerbach

found it most effective to efface Spinoza as a historical Jewish figure. With Au-

erbach’s eventual achievement of a politically and commercially viable form of

literary nostalgia, directed toward the idealized provincialism of the Black For-

est village, Spinoza recedes from view almost completely and remains detectable

only in the shape of the cultural and political space that Auerbach’s various at-

tempts at Spinozan patriotism had prepared.

Auerbach’s Abortive Spinoza Cycle

In a letter to his cousin Jakob Auerbach on February 27 , 1842 , the day before his

thirtieth birthday, Auerbach related the projects on which he recently had been

working: “I’ve written ‘German Evenings,’ a sort of new Platonic dialogue. In

Kuranda’s journal ‘Grenzboten,’ in this year’s November issue, you will find the

first: ‘Who Is Happy?’ In ‘Europa’ soon the second, called ‘Liebe Menschen.’

I’ve also written Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (three so far), which are giving

me a lot of pleasure. I’m working now on a popular philosophy for the com-

mon man [für den schlichten Bürgersmann] .”^153 Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten

would eventually prove to be Auerbach’s ticket to literary success. An adapta-

tion to the German context, according to Auerbach’s own cultural and political

proclivities, of the American Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing’s Self-

Culture—the “popular philosophy” to which Auerbach refers—would appear

as Der Gebildete Bürger: Buch für den denkenden Mittelstand (The cultivated

citizen: book for the thinking middle class) in 1843. Auerbach’s description of

the third project, Deutsche Abende, as “a sort of new Platonic dialogue” aptly

conveys the cycle’s philosophical thrust but omits that it is Spinoza, not Plato,

whose ideas Auerbach projects onto his vision of Germany. Auerbach’s letter

gives no indication that he saw these various projects as incompatible, or that

the first village stories dramatically broke with the concerns of his Spinoza cycle.

Rather, these appear to have been parallel projects on which Auerbach worked

after he completed his Spinoza translation and before the Dorfgeschichten took