THE PROBLEM OF “German Literature in the Public Sphere” posed by Ritchie Robertson focuses on two questions where twentiethcentury Jewish critics are concerned. Prawer, Stern, and Steiner, Robertson rightly recognizes, have played a crucial role in engaging a critical reading public with “the wider cultural and historical questions which the study of German literature, especially that of the twentieth century, inevitably raises.” The crucial contrary pull emerges in the appreciation of Steiner, calling our attention to a crucial caution. One might indeed be concerned, as Professor Robertson insightfully pointed out, about the supposed tendency of Jews whose religious Judaism is residual to make the Holocaust instead the cornerstone of their Jewish identity. While critics have articulated this concern in response to Steiner’s landmark essay of 1965, “A Kind of Survivor,” the excessive emotion and questionable judgment they display serves the useful function of making visible the double bind faced by Jewish critics who work with German literature in the public sphere in the late twentieth century.

Such literature, Robertson notes, “inevitably” raises “larger historical questions”: yet the Jewish critics who raise those questions run the risk of being seen as concerned with nothing but “identity,” not history of public, historic dimensions, and an ersatz identity at that. The bind pulls all the tighter by exerting pressure in the opposite direction: Jewishness clearly has an influence on the themes of J. P. Stern’s work, a critic, whom Robertson reminds us, was a Jew by virtue of the Nuremberg laws but whose work seems to stray, in Robertson’s description, from explicitly Jewish themes, like Steiner, whose identification with the victims of Auschwitz seems to produce an “imaginary” Jewish identification in his famous essay, “A Kind of Survivor.”