Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T14:50:27.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Sender Glatteis Reads Lessing and Comes to a Sad End: Some Thoughts on Karl Emil Franzos's Der Pojaz and the Problem of Jewish Reading

from Part II - Reading, Secularization, and Transcendence in the Long Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Eric Downing
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Jonathan M. Hess
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Richard V. Benson
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University
Get access

Summary

Karl Emil Franzos's novel Der Pojaz (The clown of Barnow) was completed in 1893, but was published only posthumously, one year after his death in 1905 by his widow, Ottilie, who explained not what were the reasons for the delay, but what were not the reasons: that he had not revised it in the interim and that “er scheute nicht den Kampf mit den dunklen Mächten, die dies Buch vielleicht wieder gegen ihn aufgewühlt hätte” (DP, 7; Nor did he fear a renewal of the battle with the dark forces which this book might have provoked [CoB, xviii]). There has been some speculation about what these dark forces may have been, but I believe they are likely to have been those of Orthodox, Eastern European Jewry. For Franzos was notoriously, of all German-Jewish writers of the time, the most relentlessly critical of the Orthodox culture of the Eastern European Jews, especially of Hasidism in Galicia. Unlike the sweet-tempered Berthold Auerbach, the kindly Leopold Kompert, or the conciliatory Gustav Karpeles, he was aggressively militant, not only in Jewish matters. His belligerence has been requited by many of the critics with remarkable hostility. We live in an era in which we have been constrained to think well of every ethnic and cultural group, and perhaps with special nostalgia and guilty obligation toward the lost culture of the Eastern European Jews. Franzos has been repeatedly accused of a blinkered insensitivity pandering to his bourgeois German readership; of German nationalism and colonialism; of Kitsch and a ridiculous glorification of the German spirit;of Jewish self-hatred; of a racist anti-Semitism comparable to that of Gustav Freytag, inviting us to laugh at his Jews; or to that of outright Nazis.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×