SOURCE: Sagarra, Eda. “Jewish Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Stereotyping of the Jew in Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855).” In The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, edited by Tom Dunne, pp. 160–76. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Sagarra examines Freytag's treatment of the Jew in Soll und Haben, suggesting that the author was influential in the formation of German anti-Semitism in the second half of the nineteenth century.]

Gustav Freytag's best-selling novel has frequently been the object of critical attention both in Germany and abroad, particularly since George Mosse's brief article in an early number of the Leo Baeck Yearbook drew attention to its significance as a formative influence on popular attitudes to the Jew in nineteenth-century Germany.¹ The text of Soll und Haben can still serve as a useful introduction to background courses for students of both German literature and history, confronting the modern reader as it does with once widely held views among the nineteenth-century German middle classes on such matters as nationalism, liberalism, the military, nobility and bourgeoisie, attitudes to women, to other races, and, in particular, to the Jews in Germany. The present paper attempts to provide a more specific location for Freytag's novel in the history of German Jews and their relations to their non-Jewish environment than has hitherto been done. It also suggests that Freytag not only exercised a formative influence on the evolution of antisemitic attitudes among his fellow countrymen, but was also widely representative of ‘middle-class liberal’ opinion on these and other matters in the years between the Revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second Empire.

I. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN PRUSSIA AND GERMANY 1800-1900

POPULATION

A widely held view among Germans in the nineteenth century assigned problematical character to the Jews in their midst, based on the misapprehension that Jewish numbers were ‘too large’ and that they were increasing out of proportion to the rest of the population. Yet at no time between 1800 and 1900 did the Jewish population in Germany—which the statistics of the time and, until the 1870s, society, understood to mean unbaptised Jews—reach even 1·5٪ of the total population. An estimated 270,000 Jews lived in Germany in 1820, a generation later in 1848 they numbered 410,000 or 1·23٪ of the total, rising to 512,153 or 1·25٪ in 1871 (this last figure including some 40,000 Jews from Alsace-Lorraine). By 1910 the percentage had fallen to less than 1٪, though the numbers now stood at 615,000.² Lower infant mortality rates (the latter linked, it seems, with much lower illegitimacy rates among Jews than non-Jews) and greater longevity, did achieve higher population growth rates in the German Jewish community between 1825 and 1861, but contrary to popular opinion, Jewish marriages were less fertile than non-Jewish over the century as a whole, and emigration as well as conversion to Christianity took their toll. Mass immigration into Germany was not a particularly significant factor in Jewish demographic history at that time. Certainly received opinion thought otherwise: Treitschke's often reiterated image of the ‘hordes of trouser-selling Jewish youths streaming across the border from Poland’ had been anticipated by his friend and former associate Freytag in an essay of 1849.³

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

Vital factors influencing the relationships between German Jews and their Christian neighbours in the nineteenth century were population distribution and changing patterns of settlement. Here both internal migration and emigration of Jews played a significant role.

Prussia was and remained the state with the largest population of Jews, with some 50٪ of German Jews according to the 1843 census; by 1867 this figure was 62٪, including the recently annexed city of Frankfurt, 11٪ of whose inhabitants were Jewish. By 1910 the percentage of Germany's Jews living in Prussia had reached 70٪. In Prussia itself the Jewish population was concentrated mainly in the Polish provinces, approximately one half of the total living here in 1843.⁴ The Jews had not integrated with their Polish neighbours, but continued to speak their own language, Yiddish, a dialect of Middle High German, mixed with Hebrew and Slav words. Pinkeles, the pedlar in Soll und Haben, is an example of this type of Jew, and Freytag as a programmatic realist writer attempts to reproduce the characteristic word-order and syntax of the native Yiddish speaker in German. Within the Polish provinces of Prussia, the Grand Duchy of Posen was particularly significant in terms of its high percentage of Jews—in some towns they actually outnumbered the Christian population: the town where Itzig comes from, Ostrau, is on the border between Posen and Silesia. The Austrian Empire was similar in this to Prussia, having the majority of its Jewish population in East Galicia and the Bukovina, with very high concentrations in some towns—thus 76·3٪ of the population of the town of Brody in Galicia in 1880 was Jewish.⁵ Just as the Polish provinces of Prussia provided the bulk of the immigrant Jewish population to the big towns of Prussia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, so too Galicia and the Bukovina accounted to a large extent for the huge increase of the Jewish population in Vienna between 1800 and 1900.⁶ At the time Freytag was writing his novel in the early 1850s, most Jews did not live in cities or larger towns; approximately 80٪ of the Jews of Central Europe lived in fact in rural areas, the bulk of them poor; many, again contrary to received opinion, in dire poverty.⁷

OCCUPATION

However already by this time significant changes had taken place in the economic situation of the Prussian Jews. Freytag's Jewish protagonist Veitel Itzig exemplifies two important developments in Jewish life in mid-century, one being the beginning of a movement away from villages and small towns to the provincial capital, in particular to Breslau in Silesia, to Königsberg in East Prussia, and of course to Berlin. This trend was also characteristic of the Gentile population; Freytag's other protagonist, the German Anton Wohlfart, goes to the provincial capital Breslau from his home in Ostrau to seek his fortune. However, the proportion of Jews in this migratory movement was considerably greater.⁸ The second development which Freytag documents in the novel is the move by Jews from their traditional occupations into those of their Gentile neighbours. Thus while Itzig's father was a Trödler, a secondhand dealer, legal disabilities on Jews excluding them from direct access to the markets, Itzig can aim to make his career in commerce, and indeed gets a grind in law (from a lawyer struck off the register) to equip himself for the task. This within the span of a single generation, between that of Itzig and his father, a radical redistribution in the occupation of Jews had occurred. Where before 1812 an estimated four-fifths of Jews earned their living in peddling and secondhand goods dealing, by mid-century the figure was less than one-fifth.⁹

The diversification was consolidated in subsequent decades: between 1861 and 1925 some 50٪ of Jews worked in commerce and banking, on average, 20٪ in industry and crafts and 10٪ as domestic servants and day labourers. Their representation in the civil service and the professions grew steadily, from 2·9٪ in the 1860s to 4٪ in 1882 and 6·7٪ in 1907.¹⁰

The prerequisite for Veitel's success must be seen to derive not alone from his more favourable legal situation, but also from the education he has enjoyed. Veitel Itzig, like his German counterpart Anton, has been to the local school. Freytag records in his novel a key feature of Jewish life in the nineteenth century: the value that Jews placed on education. From the 1850s onwards their representation in secondary and tertiary education grew rapidly, being 3-4 times higher than that of their percentage of the population as a whole in Prussia; in Berlin as many as 10٪ of students of grammar schools and universities at the end of the century were Jews.¹¹

LEGISLATIVE REFORM

Internal migration and radical changes in the regional distribution and occupation of the Jewish population were associated with the rapid modernisation of the economy. This in its turn was the direct consequence of far-reaching legislative reforms in Prussia between 1780 and 1815. In Germany as a whole, the widespread regional variations in the condition of German Jews before 1871 were thus to a large extent linked with the presence or absence of similar liberalising measures.

In Prussia the most important measures affecting Jews were the Stein Municipal Ordinance of 1807, which gave civic rights to Jews in towns, and the application to them in the 1812 Ordinance of the benefits of the government legislation abolishing restraints on trade and on mobility. Although in practice, and particularly in rural areas, popular resentment of the Jews might even now prevent their entry into trades and crafts hitherto closed to them, in the long term the geographical and economic mobility of Prussian Jews, and their major contribution to the modernisation of the economy in the nineteenth century, derive to a large degree from this initiative. The 1812 Ordinance was largely the work of Wilhelm v. Humboldt, as minister of cults and public instruction: it extended civic and political rights to Jews in the Prussian provinces not annexed by Napoleon, though with certain exceptions (Jews might not be officers or be employed in the judiciary or government administration). This was the most important German emancipatory measure of the first period (i.e. 1780-1815) in the history of Jewish emancipation and represented a major breakthrough for Prussian and ultimately German Jews.

However, as so often in German Jewish history, the law was one thing, the administration of the law another. The 1812 provisions were not extended to the areas of Prussia regained or acquired in 1815, in consequence of which some twenty-one different ordinances now governed the Prussian Jewish community, a situation rightly described as ‘chaotic’.¹² Particularly hurtful to educated Jews was their exclusion from the teaching profession, notably university posts in the humanities and law. A notorious case in the 1820s highlighted their position, namely that of the jurist Eduard Gans, whose appointment to the chair of law in Berlin university was blocked by a senior bureaucrat in the ministry of cults and public instruction, v. Altenstein. It was Gans's subsequent baptism and appointment to the chair which prompted Heine's celebrated remark that baptism was ‘the entry ticket to European culture’.¹³ Bernhard Ehrenthal, the ‘good Jew’ in Freytag's novel, makes this explicit in a conversation with Anton: he is forced into the solitary life of a scholar, since Jews cannot aspire to a university post.

JEWISH EMANCIPATION

In 1847 a new Ordinance relating to the Jews made the exercise of political rights independent of confessional allegiance in Prussia, and the constitutional legislation of 1848, 1849 and finally of January 1850 made all Prussians equal before the law. However, once again administrative practice blocked certain key posts, in education and the judiciary. It was not until the 1850s that the first unbaptised Jews could enter university teaching and the public service in Germany, 1871 before a Prussian university chair was filled by one. Their numbers increased rapidly thereafter in the lower ranks, but it remained very difficult for a Jew to achieve full professorial status in Prussia. (It was not easy for a Catholic either.) From the 1880s onwards discrimination against Jews in the army, civil service and judiciary became increasingly overt.¹⁴

Yet despite the evidence of antisemitic prejudice among government executives throughout the century, and open discrimination in the last decades, it remains a fact that Jewish emancipation both in Prussia and in Germany in general was the work of government initiative and not popular representation. The 1860s saw the ending of legal disabilities against the Jews—embodied in the legislation of 1862 for Baden, 1861-4 for Württemberg, 1867 for Austria, 1869 for the North German Confederation, and finally, by extension of the North German Confederal constitution to the Second Empire, for the whole of Germany in 1871. But such legislation did not enjoy the full support of society. Even in the so-called liberal era a supporter of emancipation, the parliamentary deputy Ludwig Häusser, could state categorically in the Baden chamber in 1862 that a plebiscite on the subject of Jewish emancipation would not win majority support.¹⁵

In contrast with the history of Jewish emancipation in Western European countries, proponents of emancipation in Germany favoured a gradualist approach, partly because they feared an adverse reaction among the populace, partly because German liberals believed in ‘educating’ the Jews for emancipation and ‘educating’ the population for Jewish emancipation. Whether we are talking of Prussian liberal bureaucrats in the reform era or of liberal deputies in the lower houses of the South German or Prussian chamber in the 1860s, the discussions about civic and political rights for the Jewish community exemplify the contradictions in German liberal ideology. Freytag, who always regarded himself as a liberal and was so regarded by his countrymen, is a particularly interesting example of these contradictions, both in his life and in his writings. Essentially German liberals did not accept the idea of a pluralist society. They believed that Jewish emancipation was not so much the rightful condition of all Jews, but rather a kind of prize to be gained by assimilated Jews.¹⁶ When Freytag depicts the career of Veitel Itzig, and shows him to retain the manners and morals of the ghetto Jew, he is effectively offering a warning example, a kind of morality tale, of what must happen if the German Jews do not assimilate. Unlike the racial antisemitics of a later generation, a position he was to oppose, Freytag did not believe that Jewishness was, as it were, an ‘inalienable condition’ but was confident that it could be ‘expunged’ by the Jews assimilating to German bourgeois culture as he and his kind understood it. Emancipation from the ghetto was what Freytag strove to promote; he did not advocate, as conservatives did, conversion to Christianity, though in fact conversions were highest in the provinces which attracted Jewish migrants, East Prussia, Silesia, and Brandenburg, where Berlin is situated.¹⁷ However Protestant liberal theology in Prussia in the mid-nineteenth century was deeply suspicious of the Judaic traditions in Christianity, and Freytag's own proud acknowledgement, expressed in his memoirs and correspondence and reminiscent of the pirate king in Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore, of ‘my good fortune in being born on the Polish frontier—a Prussian, a Protestant and a Silesian’¹⁸ suggests that assimilation in his view would include the embracing of so enlightened and national a faith.

In the view of a leading authority on the subject, Reinhard Rürup, Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany suffered from the failure on the part of the German state and its population to develop and implement a coherent view of society in a time of major social, economic and political change. Ultimately the inability of government and society in Germany to accept Jewish emancipation, a fact which became increasingly evident in the years after 1878-9, was bound up, in Rürup's view, with the failure of the German middle classes to gain, or even to seek, their own emancipation in any real sense of the word.¹⁹

II. SOLL UND HABEN IN THE CONTEXT OF FREYTAG'S LIFE AND WORK

Freytag's novel, Soll und Haben (English translation: Debit and Credit, 1857) was published in 1855, just before the final volume of Count Gobineau's seminal work on the history of antisemitism, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (4 vols, 1853-6). The novel was an instant success. By December of that year it had been reprinted three times. Two years later three separate English translations had been made, one of them with an introduction by the then ambassador to the Court of St. James, v. Bunsen.²⁰ Freytag's work enjoyed considerable success in Britain subsequently, in his latter years partly through his friendship with the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, afterwards Emperor Frederick III, and his English consort Empress Victoria. When Freytag died in 1895 the Times obituary was half a column long, and both the Athenaeum and the Illustrated London News carried a report. The success of Soll und Haben and many of his other works thus seems to have borne out the categorical statement of the Oxford historian J. J. Seeley, who declared in 1867 ‘as a rule good books are in German’.²¹

At the time of its publication, Freytag was an established writer on the eve of his fortieth birthday. He had been born the son of a doctor and mayor of the Silesian border town of Kreuzburg, had studied both in Breslau and in Berlin under the great philologist Karl Lachmann, returning as a lecturer to his home university in 1839. Here he worked under Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of the German national anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, who lost his chair in 1842 for political activities. Like the majority of young German academics of his generation Freytag took an active interest in the 1848 Revolution, believing it would at last effect the transfer of political power from the feudal estates to the middle classes. The defeat of the German army in Schleswig-Holstein in the summer of 1848 and the outbreak of street violence in the autumn convinced Freytag, as it did many other middle-class German liberals, that the threat to the new political and social order in Germany came, not from the princes, but from the ‘radical elements’ or, as he put it in a subsequent essay, ‘die Stimmführer einer wüsten Demokratie’.²² The ‘betrayal’ of the Revolution by these elements was subsequently transformed by him and his kind into an abhorrence of the very idea of revolution as a force for change. In Soll und Haben the German settlers in the Polish provinces, professional men, artisans and farmers, aided by Prussian troops called in by them, put down an abortive revolution by the Poles: the revolution is represented by the narrator as being the work of malevolent agents provocateurs, its consequence chaos and suffering. The contrast between such attitudes and the emotive support given by German academics and artisans to the Polish revolution of 1830-1 is striking. Freytag had already left the academic career before the Revolution to become a journalist and writer. In 1849 he became the editor, with Julian Schmidt, of a recently founded periodical, significantly called Die Grenzboten. The new editors aimed at using their journal to consolidate support among the German middle class for what they understood as progressive opinion. With unconscious irony they presented the editorial position as being ‘democratic’ in terms of their relationship with the governments of the day, but in their resolute confrontation with the ignorance and fickleness of the masses, they declared their concern to be to promote an ‘aristocracy’ formed from among the educated members of German society. Here they in effect outlined the dilemma and the self-contradictions of the German right-wing liberal position in the post-revolutionary period. With initial reluctance and then growing confidence, Freytag gradually transferred in subsequent years his belief in the primacy of law to that of state power, as incorporated in the 1850 Prussian constitution. Soll und Haben was to contain a positive view of the Prussian army, if not of all of its aristocratic officers, as the guardian of law and order and hence of progressive commerce and an enlightened agricultural policy, based on colonisation of the East. Freytag was a founder member of the liberal organisation, the Nationalverein (1859) under the patronage of Prince Albert's brother, Ernst of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to whom the novel is dedicated. Freytag became a member of parliament of the North German Confederation, but did not seek re-election to the Reichstag after 1871. Most of his other writings went into several, even dozens of editions during his lifetime, though none was to enjoy the extraordinary success of Soll und Haben. He wrote two imaginative multi-volume cultural and social histories of the German people, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (1859-1867) and Die Ahnen (1872-1880) in the form of a novel, both of which were based on his own massive collection of early modern pamphlets, now housed in Frankfurt, and on memoirs. Despite their ideological tone they still make very informative reading today, and contain a substantial body of primary material. They formed part of the ‘furniture’ of the self-respecting German bourgeois household from the later nineteenth century up to the Second World War. Both present German history in terms of the progressive emancipation of the German bourgeoisie. Both end, symptomatically, with the year 1848.

To those who know the text of Soll und Haben, or even simply its justly deserved reputation as a major document in the history of antisemitism in Germany, it may come as a surprise to learn that Freytag was on terms of warm friendship with many Jews, as for example Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882),²³ that he married a Jewess, and that he made a spirited attack on Wagner's Über das Judenthum in der Musik in 1869 in the very journal, Die Grenzboten, where twenty years earlier he had voiced such violent opinions on Jewish radicalism. Towards the end of his life he became a member of the association set up in 1890 to counter antisemitism in German public life, the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus.²⁴ To some extent it could be said in Freytag's defence on a charge of antisemitism that he was writing within a European literary tradition which had stereotyped the Jew as parasite and comic figure for centuries. After all, English literature in the age of Enlightenment included such negative stereotypes as Isaac Rapine in Smollett's History of Peregrine Pickle (1751) or the fool in R. B. Sheridan's The Duenna (1775), not to speak of the lascivious Jew in Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress (1731), a figure quite absent from Freytag's galaxy of Jewish rogues. But it has to be said that, as a man of wide reading and indeed erudition, Freytag was quite aware of the opposite tradition in German literature since the eighteenth century, one which was closely associated with German classical idealism and to which he himself subscribed. This was the ‘counter-stereotype’ of the good Jew, first recorded in Gellert's novel, Die Geschichte der schwedischen Grafin von G. (1747), in Lessing's comedy of 1749 Die Juden, and above all in the same author's great drama of religious tolerance, with a Jew at its hero, Nathan der Weise (1779). The existence of such radically opposite Jewish types in German literature, and their descendants, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Jews in the mid- and late-nineteenth-century novels of Auerbach, Reuter, Raabe, and Fontane and others, indicates the programmatic character of the portrayal of the Jew in nineteenth-century German literature, especially in fiction. It would seem to corroborate David Landes's whimsical remark in his essay on the Jewish merchant in nineteenth-century Germany, that ‘typology is in the eye of the beholder’.²⁵ One could add: ‘stereotypology also’. One further traditional Jewish figure in European literature of the modern period should be mentioned, since it came to enjoy a renewed popularity at the time of writing of Soll und Haben, and because it was widely interpreted, even in the area of emancipation, as representing Jewish rootlessness as an inalienable condition. This was the legend of Ahasverus, the first known account having been published in Latin in Leyden in 1602 and immediately translated into German. In the nineteenth century such diverse figures as Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Shelley, H. C. Andersen, Edgar Quinet, and most importantly, Eugène Sue, made Ahasverus or the wandering Jew the subject of a literary work.²⁶ Sue's novel Le juif errant appeared in France in 1844-5 and was very soon translated into German (1848) and widely read. Whereas the older portraits of the Jew in European literature as parasite or funny man reflected rather than promoted popular prejudice, and in terms of literature as historical evidence are less complex than later works, a programmatic character would seem to be evident in the portraits of the Jew in German literature since Lessing.²⁷ The self-consciousness of the author, elicited through modern methods of literary analysis, is thus a principal claim of such works to our interest in the present context. The other source of interest of Freytag's Soll und Haben, and a number of other similar works, such as Raabe's novel Der Hungerpastor, is in the incongruence between intention and effect.

The story of the 700-page long novel, Soll und Haben, is that of two former schoolmates, Anton, the German burger's son, Veitel, the Jewish dealer's son from a small town on the border of Silesia, who meet again on the high road to the provincial capital Breslau (Wroclaw). Anton is on his way to a clerical post in the office of Schröter, a wholesale merchant, Veitel is hoping to find employment in some menial capacity in a Jewish businessman's household. Veitel duly finds himself work as servant and messenger to Ehrenthal, a shady dealer who hopes to ensnare a local Junker, von Rothsattel, into debt, so that he can foreclose on his estate. In this way, Ehrenthal plans, his own son, the Orientalist Bernhard, will live like a gentleman fully emancipated, both physically and morally, from the ghetto. In due course Anton gets involved in the affairs of the v. Rothsattels, goes to manage their estates in Poland, where he encounters the full horror of Polish corruption and moral laxity, and where his bourgeois integrity contrasts with the hedonism of the German aristocratic family. Meanwhile Itzig, living on his wits, gains through doubledealing and blackmail control of Ehrenthal's fortune—and many others' besides. He is finally unmasked, not least by Anton's tenacity and bravery, and meets his fate by drowning in the river Oder while trying to escape from the police through the back alleys of the Jewish quarter of the city. Anton returns from the temptations of life with the nobility to the ‘authentic world’ of bourgeois work. He will take no more part in politics but devote himself to commerce, rewarded with a partnership and the hand of the boss's sister.

Virtually all the Jewish figures in the book—which include, besides Veitel Itzig, the four members of the Ehrenthal family, (vulgar wife and daughter, studious son), Pinkus, the shady innkeeper and fence, Schmeie Pinkeles, the pedlar, whose Yiddish German makes everyone laugh and whose fawning servility makes even the most minor German clerk feel superior. In every case but that of Bernhard Ehrenthal, each Jewish figure has a Gentile counterpart, who is generally represented as his or her moral superior. Unconsciously Freytag is expressing the current view, not just of conservative Christian opinion in Germany at the time, but also of the body of liberal opinion that the ‘emancipators believed Jews to be morally and socially inferior’ (to their Gentile counterparts).²⁸

When the narrator opens his account with a description of Anton, he concentrates on parentage and home (Book I, Ch. 2); he does not describe him physically, apart from references to the cleanness and neatness of his dress. Veitel on the other hand, whom we never see in his home, is described (also Book I, Ch. 2) physically as lean, sallow, and dirty, his mien and gait associated immediately with his character. Veitel's hair is described as reddish, in conformity with the traditional notion that Judas's hair was so coloured, but also with the literary tradition of mid-nineteenth-century literary Biedermeier that the devil in human form and his associates could be recognised by their reddish hair. One of the key features of negative stereotyping of Jews in fiction and in iconography was the association of physical appearance, and in particular what were regarded as characteristic Jewish facial features, with their ‘moral’ character.²⁹ The narrator in Soll und Haben makes some effort to account for Veitel's character in terms of his social environment, the poverty of the schoolboy, with whom the kindly Anton occasionally shared a sandwich, and the bullying to which he was submitted—having pork stuffed into his mouth (18 f.), from which again the brave Anton is described as having attempted to save him. The narrator would also persuade the reader that the shifty Ehrenthal is not without his good side: he proves himself prepared to sacrifice his fortune for his sick son, demonstrating to the reader that paternal affection can in his case transcend money-grubbing. But it is in the figure of Bernhard that Freytag hoped to embody his ‘message’ to his projected Gentile and Jewish public: Bernhard, who anticipates in some respects George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), self-consciously rejects Jewish business morality and seeks his ideal in the study of classical literature. He demonstrates Freytag's thesis that assimilation is possible if the Jews are prepared to abandon their religious and cultural traditions, and adopt those of their German bourgeois neighbours. In the process their knowledge of the origins of civilisation in the Oriental world can deepen and enrich German culture. That Freytag was convinced that this would come about seems clear from his later writings, at least those of the 1860s such as the essay attacking Wagner, already referred to, and in the fascinating eleventh chapter of his Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, entitled ‘Jesuiten and Juden’. In the latter work he represents the sinister machinations of the Counter-Reformation Jesuits who attempt by fair means and foul to ensnare Jewish boys into conversion to Catholicism. But while the Jesuits continue even in the modern world to be what ‘they always were’, the Jews by contrast have been transformed by ‘the new education’, they have left fanaticism behind them, since Christians have ceased to persecute them. The chapter ends with the evocative and revealing statement: ‘Und die Enkel der asiatischen Wanderstämme sind unsere Landsleute und brüderliche Mitstreiter geworden’³⁰ (and the grandsons of those Asiatic Nomads are now our fellow-countrymen, our brothers in the common struggle).

Was Freytag illogical or merely naive in overlooking the contradictions between his liberal philosophy and the extremely antisemitic tenor of his novel? The answer lies in the distinction he believed himself to have made between the ‘Schacherjude’, the huckstering or eastern Jew, and the westernised Jews of his own circle. Bernhard clearly belongs potentially to the latter, despite the recent date of his emancipation.³¹ It is noteworthy that the narrator shows Anton in conversation with Bernhard over his (Bernhard's) exclusion from a university career as having a sense of shame and shared grievance (283). Veitel, on the other hand is the embodiment not just of the Schacherjude: he is the prototype of the rootless and feckless proletariat which Freytag as a bourgeois liberal feared, and had learned to fear during the Revolution of 1848. The 1849 essay, “Die Juden in Breslau,” conjured up a vision of chaos, which not only threatened the transfer of power from the aristocratic feudal order to the bourgeoisie, but also imperilled the prosperity of the Prussian state. The identification of the Jew with both capitalism and with the revolutionary proletariat, and thus with the pains of modernisation, was an important ingredient of antisemitic thinking in Germany as elsewhere.³² The anachronistic as well as self-contradictory attitude of bourgeois liberals in Germany towards the economic development of the age is well documented in Soll und Haben, which purports in its famous motto to represent the ‘German people at work’, but yet contrasts adversely the ‘capitalist’ methods of Jewish businessmen with the old-fashioned paternalism of the Gentile Schröter and Co. The tacit rejection, not just of capitalism, but of the industrial revolution and modern society is clearly evident in the utopian social order in this ‘modern novel’ and has been widely remarked on by modern critics. This feature was an important ingredient of its sustained success. A further point should be made in distinguishing intention from effect. However sincere Freytag's concern may have been—as later Jewish admirers of his work would have it³³—to demonstrate in his novel the way forward for Jewish emancipation and assimilation, given Jewish goodwill and Gentile support, the fact that he presented the successful and ‘moral’ career of the ‘good German’ Anton in graphic opposition to the depraved and sordid life of the Jew Veitel Itzig, kept alive the tradition in Germany that the Jew was ‘different’. Above all it reinforced the view that the political and social emancipation of the German bourgeoisie was something apart and distinct from the emancipation of their Jewish fellow-countrymen. Anton's steady progress through reliability and thrift to being a successful business man, who invests his gains in the firm, is contrasted with Veitel's manic pursuit of money for its own sake, a neat anticipation of the terminology coined by the antisemitic Reichstag deputy Liebermann in the 1890s of ‘nützliches und schädliches Kapital’ (useful and harmful capital), or ‘raffendes und schaffendes Kapital’ (grasping or productive capital) in Nazi parlance.³⁴

The presentation of the Jewish stereotype which both reflects and reinforces antisemitic prejudice in Freytag's novel would be of interest only to a narrow literary historical public were it not for the exceptional character of the book's commercial success. While it is impossible to quantify its influence in sociological terms, the demand for a new edition every two or three years between 1855 and 1917, the fact that by 1920 over one hundred editions of the work had appeared, that it was in fact, in the words of the by no means adulatory Franz Mehring in the 1890s ‘der meist gelesenste aller deutschen Romane’ are indicators of its impact. (There was even an early stenography textbook of Soll und Haben.)³⁵ Moreover, it was a preferred confirmation present, particularly for boys, and in the latter years of the century, surprisingly, a common barmitzvah gift. So readily had emancipated Jews identified themselves with the German nationalist culture which Freytag helped to promote. Originally Jewish reception had been understandably hostile to the work, but the favourable view recorded in the Bilder and particularly the cultural and emotive distancing of themselves by liberal Jews from the orthodox ‘Schacherjude’ identified with the ghettos of Posen and Silesia, changed this. When Freytag celebrated his 70th birthday, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums carried a eulogy of Soll und Haben by a Breslau rabbi, although the editorial comment remained negative.³⁶ In fact the Jewish reception of the novel, which space does not permit elaboration here, is an illuminating example of the contradictions and problems of identity of the German Jewish community in the last decades of the Wilhelmine Empire.

In attempting to correlate the reception of Freytag's novel and developing prejudice against ‘the Jew’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society, the key element was Freytag's persuasive promotion of the Jewish stereotype. The association in the novel between ‘German’ and ‘patriotic, national, moral’ values, and the labelling of the Jew as the antagonist of the German, morally inferior, unpatriotic, hedonistic; the fact that Anton is a rounded (if not very convincing) character, whereas Veitel is a clever caricature, all this influenced the adolescent reader and surely helped shape his perceptions in later life. That it should have been written and have established its reputation at a time when the legal emancipation of German Jews was at last being attained, is one of the many tragic ironies of German Jewish history. Rürup has rightly observed that in order “to assure a lasting settlement of the “Jewish Question” in the spirit of emancipation it would have been essential—indeed one of the most important prerequisites—to break down the traditional negative stereotypes among the Christian population’.³⁷ Freytag's most popular work achieved the reverse. The novel Soll und Haben, and its reception in Germany up to the time of the Holocaust thus exemplify with particular force Landes's comment that, while the Jewish type constantly changed and adapted in the course of nineteenth-century history, the stereotype in contrast ‘clinging like a shadow, inconstant like a shadow, never really died’.³⁸

Notes

1. G.E. Mosse, ‘The image of the Jew in German popular culture’ in Leo Baeck Yearbook (=LBYB), 2 (1957), pp. 218-227.

2. Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevölkerungs- und Berufsverhältnisse im deutschen Reich i (Berlin, 1930), cited in Jakob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1848-1871. Zwischen Revolution, Reaktion and Emanzipation (Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, Universität Tel Aviv 2) (Dusseldorf, 1977), p. 9; cf. also his ‘Der Eintritt der Juden ins deutsche Bürgertum’ in Juden in der deutschen Umwelt 1800-1850. Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Emanzipation, ed. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen, 1977), p. 139 ff.; for Austria see ‘Die Völker des Reiches’ in Die Habsburger Monarchie 1848-1918, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch. (Kommission fur die Geschichte der österreich-ungarischen Monarchie 1848-1918) (Vienna, 1980), vol. III/2, p. 881.

3. Treitschke: (Unsere Aussichten) ‘Über unsere Ostgrenze aber dringt Jahr für Jahr aus der unerschöpflichen polnischen Wiege eine Schar strebsamer hosenverkaufender jüdischer Jünglinge’, quoted in W. Boehlich, Der Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 3. Freytag's essay was published anonymously in the Grenzboten, 3 (1849); here he speaks of ‘the Jewish element’ as ‘a disease in the life of the Eastern portion of Prussia which can only be cured by rigorous means’. Earlier in the essay he outlined the problem as he saw it: ‘The position of Silesia on the frontier of Poland and Galicia favours a continual influx of Polish huckstering Jews, and this Jewish element that comes from the East begins the process of development in the first generation with us. The second generation goes to Berlin, the third to Frankfurt. Since it is here that the distillation begins, it follows that most of the filth remains with us’. I quote here Bramsted's translation from his pioneering study, originally published as his doctoral dissertation under Karl Mannheim in the London School of Economics, cited in Ernst Kohn-Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the middle classes in Germany; social types in German literature 1830-1890 (London, 1937), pp 135 and 134. (2nd ed., 1964 under Kohn Bramsted).

4. Ernest Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands. Regierungsmitglieder, Beamte und Parlamentarier in der monarchischen Zeit 1848-1918 (Tübingen, 1968), p. 7.

5. Gerald Stourzh, ‘Galten die Juden als Nationalität Altösterreichs?’ in Prag-Czernowitz-Jerusalem. Der österreichische Staat und die Juden vom Zeitalter des Absolutismus bis zum Ende der Monarchie (Studia Judaica Austriaca X), ed. Anna M. Drabek, Mordechai Eliav and G.S., (Eisenstadt, 1984), p. 74.

6. Toury, Geschichte, p. 37. Where in 1840 40٪ of Prussian Jews lived in Posen, by 1910 43٪ lived in the Greater Berlin area: cf. Hamburger, Juden, p. 29 and Julian Barty's, ‘Grand Duchy of Poznan under Prussian rule. Changes in the economic position of the Jewish population 1815-1848’, LBYB, 17 (1972), p. 202. The increase in Vienna's Jewish population was even more significant; it grew by some 2800٪, from under 0·3٪ to c. 10٪ of the total population, between 1800 and 1900, Wandruszka, Habsburger Monarchie, vol. II/1, p. 47.

7. Cf. R. Rürup in discussion of: Werner J. Cahnman, ‘Village and Small-town Jews in Germany. A typology’, LBYB, 19 (1974), p. 133.

8. D.S. Landes, ‘The Jewish Merchant. Typology and Stereotypology in Germany’, LBYB, 19 (1974), p. 15; also Hamburger, p. 19.

9. R. Rürup, ‘Judenemanzipation und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland’ in Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 15) (Göttingen, 1975), pp. 14, 26 f.

10. Landes, op. cit., p. 15.

11. Hamburger, op. cit., p. 30 and his note 14.

12. Marjorie Lamberti, ‘The Prussian government and the Jews. Official behaviour and policy-making in the Wilhelmine era’, LBYB, 17 (1972), p. 6.

13. Cf. Carl Cohn, ‘The Road to Conversion’, LBYB, 6 (1961), pp. 259 ff.

14. Peter Pulzer, ‘Religious and Judicial Appointments in Germany 1869-1918’, LBYB, 28 (1983), pp. 185 and 201 f.; cf. also Rürup, ‘Emancipation and Crisis—The “Jewish Question” in Germany 1850-1890’, ibid., p. 25.

15. Rürup, ‘German Liberalism and the Emancipation of the Jews’, LBYB, 20 (1975), p. 59.

16. Rürup, Emancipation und Antisemitismus, p. 18.

17. Jakob Katz, ‘The German-Jewish Utopia of Emancipation’ in Emancipation and Assimilation. Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough, 1972), pp. 92 and 102-110.

18. Reminiscences of my life, transl. by Katherine Chetwynd, vol. i (London, 1890), p. 3.

19. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, p. 36; Rürup also draws attention in the same volume to Marx's point in his Zur Kritik der hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie that the German bourgeoisie failed to see their own emancipation in terms of the universal emancipation of man, in ‘Anhang: Emanzipation—Anmerkungen zur Bergriffsgeschichte’, p. 130.

20. Debit and Credit. A novel, transl. by Mrs Malcolm (London, 1857); Debtor and Creditor. A Romance from the German of Gustav Freytag by William Stewart (London, Blackwood's London Library, 1857); Debit and Credit, transl. by Lucy Caroline Cumming, with a preface by C.C.J. Bunsen, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1857).

21. Quoted in: Paul M. Kennedy, The rise of the Anglo-German antagonism 1860-1914 (London, 1980), p. 114 (ch. 6 of Kennedy's book, Religious and Cultural Connections, provides useful background to Freytag's reception in Britain in the nineteenth century).

22. ‘Der Streit über das Judentum in der Musik’ (Grenzboten, 22, 1869) in Gesammelte Werke, 16 (Leipzig, 2nd ed., 1897), p. 321. Ironically Die Grenzboten was founded by a Jew, Ignaz Kuranda (in 1841).

23. Auerbach refers to Freytag as a man ‘den ich sehr liebe’ (1851), ‘der mir ein wirklicher Freund ist’ (1859), B.A. Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach. Ein biographisches Denkmal (Frankfurt, 1884), vol. I, pp. 84, and 115.

24. On the association cf. Barbara Suchy, ‘Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (I). From its Beginning to the First World War’, LBYB, 28 (1983), p. 202 f.; Landes, op. cit., p. 11.

25. Landes, op. cit., p. 11.

26. Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism (London, 1966), vol. i, p. 242. Useful introductions to the stereotyping of the Jew in literature: Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali (Stanford, California, 1960) and Pierre Angel, Le personnage juif dans le roman allemand 1855-1915. La racine littéraire de l'antisémitisme de l'Outre Rhin (Montreal, 1973), which also treats of Freytag.

27. It would be interesting to make a comparative study of genres in the presentation of the Jew in nineteenth-century German literature. Popular comedy—including Nestroy—tended to retain the traditional notion of the Jews as funny man in the mid-century at a time when prose fiction was already consciously striving to promote a positive counter stereotype. Kauffmann, Der Dorfjude, 1841, Auerbach, etc.

28. Fritz Stern in the discussion of papers by L. Cecil, Reinhard Rürup and Monika Richarz in LBYB, 20 (1975), p. 80.

29. Cf. Henry Wassermann, ‘The Fliegende Blätter as a Source for the Social History of German Jews’, LBYB, 28 (1983), pp. 93 ff.

30. Gustav Freytags Werke (Hamburg, n.d.), vol. 7, p. 60. Compare his statement in Der Streit über das Judentum in der Musik (op. cit., p. 321): ‘wir halten einen ernsten Angriff auf die jüdischen Menschen unter uns nach keiner Richtung für zeitgemäss, nicht in Politik, nicht in Geschichte, nicht in Wissenschaft und Kunst, denn auf allen diesen Gebieten sind unsere Mitbürger israelitischen Glaubens werthe Bundesgenossen’, though he adds ‘es hat Jahre gegeben, in denen die Stimmführer einer wüsten Demokratie zum grossten Teile junge Männer jüdischen Glaubens waren’. The different values implicitly ascribed to ‘israelitisch’ as against ‘jüdisch’ are perhaps worthy of note.

31. But of course Bernhard is a physical cripple and dies, symbolically, in the course of the story.

32. Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism. Its history and causes (London, 1967), p. 162. Lazare points to the currency of ‘an exaggerated conception of the role which Jews have played in the development and organization of industrial society, a conception in which the Jews appears as the representatives of the revolutionary spirit against the spirit of established order’.

33. Hans Otto Horch has drawn attention to the anomalies of Jewish reception of the novel, as documented in the columns of the liberal Jewish paper, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, edited from 1837-1889 by Ludwig Phillipson. I am grateful to Dr Horch for allowing me to see part of the manuscript of his Habilitationsschrift: Conditio Judaica. Juden und Judentum im Spiegel liberaler Erzählliteratur und liberaler jüdischer Literaturkritik (Aachen, 1984), p. 392 f. (to be published shortly).

34. Bartys, op. cit., p. 202.

35. The 8th edition of the stenography text appeared in 1920. For details of editions cf. Heinsius, Allgemeiner Bücherlexikon, Leipzig, 1852 ff., vols 12-19; Hinrichs, Fünfjahrs-Katalog, Leipzig, 1891 ff., vols 9-13; Deutsches Bücherverzeichnis, Leipzig, 1916 ff., vols 1-4; cf. also Michael Kienzle's study, Der Erfolgsroman. Zur Kritik seiner politischen Oekonomie bei Gustav Freytag und Eugenie Marlitt (Stuttgart, 1975).

36. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 50 (1886), pp. 547-50. (‘Die Juden in Gustav, Freytags Dichtungen’, zu seinem 70. Geburtstag von G. Deutsch).

37. Rürup, ‘Emancipation and Crisis’, op. cit., LBYB, 28 (1983), p. 17.

38. Landes, op. cit., p. 23.

The text of Soll und Haben used is that of Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, edited by Hans Mayer (Munich, 1977).