Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

242 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

event, and Auerbach was transformed overnight from an obscure author of Jew-

ish novels to the authentic voice of the German Volk. Hess devoted his energies

in the second half of 1841 to launching the Rheinische Zeitung, among the most

liberal papers in Germany from its appearance in January 1842 until—under

its last editor, Marx—it was terminated by the Prussian government in March

1843. Hess encouraged Auerbach to write for the paper but repeatedly had to

defend accepting his friend’s contributions, which were out of step with the

paper’s political orientation, to members of the editorial board. In a letter of

March 12 , 1842 , Hess asks Auerbach to contribute more regularly and, above all,

to be more oppositional. In a letter of March 27 , 1842 , he complains that Auer-

bach’s contributions “smell like modern Deutschtum” and goes on to vent his

exasperation at Germany’s political backwardness and cowardice in a scathing

assessment of the Vaterland. Hess insists that one must not any longer flatter

Germany and that only “bitter medicine à la Börne” will help, and he explicitly

rejects the strategy of Germany’s “apologists.”^1 Roughly two weeks after receiv-

ing this letter, Auerbach’s first Dorfgeschichte (“Des Schloßbauers Vefele”) ap-

peared in print.

In November 1843 the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath lionized Auerbach for his

achievement in a twelve-verse poem, “Dorfgeschichten,” in the Kölnische Zeitung

—the Rheinische Zeitung’s archadversary—and Auerbach became a much-

sought-after literary celebrity in 1844 and 1845. Whereas Hess would spend

1844 in Paris with Heine, Marx, Engels, and other exiled radicals, Auerbach

would spend the year in Karlsruhe editing and writing German Volkskalender

(popular almanacs) and further Dorfgeschichten.^2 In fall 1844 he began a cel-

ebrated tour throughout Germany following his many invitations from writers

and socialites—whom, according to the influential novelist and literary critic

Gustav Freytag’s memoirs, he frequently struck as a character who had stepped

out of one of his own Black Forest Village Stories.^3

Auerbach looked to Spinoza for a model for negotiating the charge of egoism

in general and Jewish egoism in particular, and Auerbach constructed an ideal-

ized, liberal-humanistic version of the German Volk as the higher totality into

which the problematic, divided modern self should be resolved. Hess attacked

modern society’s commitment—or enslavement—to the institution of the sover-

eign self and saw in Spinoza the key to liberation. The fact that Hess at least at

times saw his ethical project as a Jewish obligation and viewed Auerbach’s more

conservative political and esthetic adherence to the German Vaterland as a be-

trayal of a Jewish ethical responsibility is evident from a remarkable passage in a

letter Hess sent Auerbach in February 1845 , on the back of the prospectus for a

new socialist journal he was launching (and would edit with Friedrich Engels).^4