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Chapter Six

Moses Hess

Beyond the Politics of Self-Possession

Auerbach and Hess: Parting Ways

The correspondence between Moses Hess and Berthold Auerbach—of which

we have only Hess’s letters—was at its most intensive during 1840 and 1841 ,

roughly when Hess was at work on his second major work, Die Europäische Tri-

archie (The European triarchy), and Auerbach on his edition of Spinoza. Hess’s

letters to Auerbach of 1842 document the unraveling of their friendship as they

took their engagements with Spinoza in disparate directions.

Both Auerbach and Hess drew on a version of Spinoza to attack egoism (sub-

jectivity, individualism, and personality) and to imagine inclusive wider commu-

nities, but they did so in different ways and for different ends. Spinoza modeled

for Auerbach a way to circumvent association with the specter of Jewish subjec-

tivity and all that this concept connoted in the German cultural politics of the

late 1830 s and early 1840 s. Hess read Spinoza as authorizing a more fundamen-

tal critique of individualism and the position it occupied at the center of modern

identity, religion, philosophy, politics, and commercialized society. Auerbach

sought to construct an idealized German Volk as a suprasubjective ethical col-

lectivity to which he, too, could belong. Hess drew inspiration from Spinoza,

whom he held up (sometimes more and sometimes less) as the quintessence of

an idiosyncratic Jewish tradition, to critique individualism as a Christian legacy

and the chief obstacle to the realization of modernity’s liberating potential.

Hess would move to the vanguard of German radicals, who increasingly saw

Germany as irredeemably narrow-minded, spießbürgerlich (philistine and con-

formist), and politically retarded. (In Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology,

their 1845 – 46 savage reckoning with their erstwhile colleagues in the Young

Hegelian movement, “German” is very much as a term of abuse.) Auerbach, in

contrast, embraced a moderate liberal national position. His chief focus, begin-

ning in late 1841 , became his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten. Though Auer-

bach had difficulty finding a publisher for the first volume of Dorfgeschichten,

when they finally appeared in October 1843 , they were hailed as a major literary