Jewish Participation and Antisemitic Exclusion

The intimate relationship of German-speaking Jews to art and culture – literature, theater, and music – is a trope in commemorative literature and historiography alike. What is less known is that this topic has also elicited repeated political debates since the nineteenth century. These reached from inner-Jewish self-understandings to anti-Jewish attacks, for example in the controversy surrounding Richard Wagner’s pamphlet »Das Judentum in der Musik« (1850/1869). In such publications, art and culture always served for engagements with fundamental questions of participation, belonging, and exclusion. These debates consequently act as a gauge both of the situation of Jews in society and of changes in Jewish self-understandings in the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. This seminar is dedicated to characteristic debates and concepts regarding the place of Jews in German-language culture, for example on the »Jewish Renaissance« (a term coined by Martin Buber in 1902), the »Parnass« debate (1912), or the constantly recurring controversies surrounding Jews and theater. The seminar will address the intellectual historical origins, sociopolitical significance, and impact of these debates.

Literature: Steven E. Aschheim, Zwischen Kultur und Katastrophe. Konfrontation, Krise und Kreativität als deutsch-jüdische Erfahrung, Hamburg 2024 [engl. Orig.: 1996]; George L. Mosse, Jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland. Zwischen Religion und Nationalismus, Frankfurt a. M./New York 1992 [engl. Orig.: 1985]; Shulamit Volkov, Antisemitismus als kultureller Code, in: dies., Antisemitismus als kultureller Code. Zehn Essays, München 1990, 13–36; Peter Gay, Freud, Juden und andere Deutsche. Herren und Opfer in der modernen Kultur, Hamburg 1986 [engl. Orig.: 1978].