The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749--1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents.(Review)

The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749--1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents. By Ritchie Robertson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 534 PP.

Ritchie Robertson, author of the seminal 1985 study Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, now offers a masterful introduction to what he calls the "Jewish presence" in German literature. Despite the disclaimer that it is not a comprehensive survey, Robertson's book presents a breathtaking synthesis of literary expressions of the "Jewish question" in the German-speaking world, neatly positioning them alongside political, theological, philosophical, racial, and medical discourses from the period. The book's great strength is that it avoids teleological views of German history as a prelude to the Holocaust. It thereby challenges studies like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) with a much more subtle, differentiated analysis of German cultural attitudes toward Jews and Judaism. In The 'Jewish …