[In the following essay, Gilman traces parallels between Heine's work and the theories of Sigmund Freud.]

Of all the creative writers whom Sigmund Freud read and quoted, none has quite as unique a place in his mental library as does Heinrich Heine. Although when Freud was asked in 1907 to compile a list of “good books,” he did not include any by Heine, he did include Heine as the only German author on his (admittedly short) list of “favorite” books.¹ Freud neither quotes Heine more frequently than Goethe nor does Heine have as central a position in Freud's world of metaphors as do the Greeks. But Freud's reading of his “favorite” German writer, Heinrich Heine, reflects Freud's confrontation with the literary representation of the Jewish cultural voice in a way not paralleled by his reading of any other writer.

The reason for Freud's fascination with Heine's world of words is quite simple: Heinrich Heine was the exemplary cultural Jew for late-nineteenth-century Austria.² And Sigmund Freud works out some of the implications of Heine's fin-de-siècle image as the touchstone for questions of Austrian-Jewish identity through his poetics of quotation. This poetics of quotation reflects Freud's reading of Heine as an encoded response to the “meaning” of Heine in Freud's time.³

Freud's reading of Heine was very much within the late-nineteenth-century image of Heine as the essential erotic and/or ironic writer.⁴ This image was used either as a club to attack Heine as the “Jewish” poet par excellence or as the means of glorifying the poet as not “Jewish” at all, but rather decadent, or European, or …, and here one can fill in the blank, anything but Jewish. Freud's reading of Heine falls within this view and as such forms a natural counter-reading to his Viennese Jewish contemporary Karl Kraus.⁵ Freud's counter-reading is not random. Both Kraus and Freud were Ostjuden transplanted into Vienna, but each attempted to acquire social status through different modes of self-definition—Kraus as a “writer” and Freud as a “scientist.” Freud's quite different perspective on things “erotic” and “Jewish” is to no little degree formed by his self-chosen professional identity as a “physician-scientist.” Freud presents a reading of Heine bound by the sense of “Jewish” identity present in this thought-collective, the shared assumption of nineteenth-century biological science that the biology of race was central to any definition of the human being.⁶ Thus the meaning associated with the erotic and the ironic or sexuality and humor (those global categories which span Heine's late-nineteenth-century image) can be clearly contextualized within the special discourse on race and disease held by late-nineteenth-century Jewish physicians. Sigmund Freud's reading is that of a late-nineteenth-century Austrian-Jewish physician highly attuned to the politics of his own science.

Sigmund Freud's reading of Heinrich Heine reveals the core contradiction of the late-nineteenth-century Jewish scientist-physician. It is how one can simultaneously be “subject” and “object,” how one can be the subject of scientific study at the same time that one has the role of the observer. For the Jewish physician in late-nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, the ability to enter into the sphere of “science” meant acknowledging the truth of the scientific project and its rhetoric. As fine an observer of European Jewry as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch makes this the centerpiece of his tale of Austrian Jewry included in his “ethnographic” account of European Jewry.⁷ In his story we observe the confrontation between the “scientific” Jewish physician and his primitive, miracle-working counterpart. Only science can win and religion must bow gracefully to its preëminence. Sacher-Masoch's tale of science and the Jews reflects the siren song of the Haskalah, which perhaps even more than the general Enlightenment saw science as the path of the escape from the darkness of the ghetto into the bright light of modern culture. It was a modern culture defined very much by D'Alembert's understanding of science and technology as the tools for the improvement of the common man. But science, especially applied science such as medicine, implied the ability to enter into the mainstream of the so-called “free” professions.⁸ It implied a type of social mobility increasingly available to Jews, especially in Austria, over the course of the nineteenth century.⁹ For the late-nineteenth-century Jewish scientist, especially those in the biological sciences, the path of social and cultural acceptance was complex. It entailed, more than in any other arena of endeavor, the acceptance of the contradiction between being “subject” and “object,” since one of the basic premises of nineteenth-century biological science was the primacy of racial difference.

For the physician-scientist the case became even more complex. It is not merely that there was a hierarchy of race, with each race higher (or lower) on a “great chain of being,” but that the very pattern of illness varied from group to group and marked the risk which each group faced in confronting life, especially “modern” civilized life. The Jewish physician was both the “observer” of this form of disease, and also, because he (and he was almost always male until the very late nineteenth century) entered into the competition of civilized society (i.e., the public sphere of medicine), precisely the potential “victim” of exactly these illnesses. The demands of “scientific objectivity” could, therefore, not be met by Jewish physicians, and they were forced to undertake complex psychological strategies to provide themselves with an “objective” observing voice.

Sigmund Freud attempts to resolve this problem of the identity of subject and object not within the context of the biology of race but of gender. And it is this movement from the rhetoric of race to the rhetoric of gender which marks Freud's citation of the “voice” of Heinrich Heine as the exemplary “Jewish” figure of the time. Drawing on earlier work published in 1925 and 1931, Freud wrote about the role of the scientist in resolving the question of gender in his comprehensive New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933 [1932]):

Today's lecture, too, should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with a subject which has a claim on your interest second almost to no other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity—

Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen,
Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett,
Perückenhäupter und tausend andre
Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter. …

[Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets, / Heads in turbans and black birettas, / Heads in wigs and thousand other / Wretched, sweating heads of humans. …]

Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further.¹⁰

For the anti-Semitic Aryan¹¹ Austrian, as well as for the self-styled “Eastern Jew” longing to erase his origins, Heine's references would evoke quite a different set of associations. They would read the oriental turbans, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sweat of ghetto poverty, the wigs of the shaved heads of orthodox Jewish brides, as hidden signs of racial, not merely sexual difference. This argument can be read as part of a rhetoric of race. First, let me translate this problem, which Freud articulates within the rhetoric of gender science, into the rhetoric of racial science: “There is an inherent biological difference between Jews and Aryans and this has a central role in defining you (my listener) and your culture.” The “you” which the “I” is addressing is clearly the Aryan reader, for the Jewish reader is understood as but part of the problem. The Aryan is the observer; the Jew the observed. Upon seeing someone on the street the first distinction “we” (the speaker and his listener as Aryans) make is to ask: “Jew or Aryan?” and that distinction can be made with certainty based on inherent assumptions about differences in anatomy. This biological distinction can be clearly and easily “seen” even through the mask of clothing or the veneer of civilization. As the German ethnologist Richard Andree observed concerning the conservative nature of the Jewish body and soul: “No other race but the Jews can be traced with such certainty backward for thousands of years, and no other race displays such a constancy of form, none resisted to such an extent the effects of time, as the Jews. Even when he adopts the language, dress, habits, and customs of the people among whom he lives, he still remains everywhere the same. All he adopts is but a cloak, under which the eternal Hebrew survives; he is the same in his facial features, in the structure of his body, his temperament, his character.”¹²

The false assumption in Freud's text is that the uniformity of the identity of all “males,” as opposed to all “females,” can be made in terms of the form of the genitalia.¹³ Freud continues his argument to show that this physiological determinant is central in any discussion of the nature of sexual difference. He identifies himself as a male in this text, quoting a male author (Heine), about the impossibility of “knowing” the truth about the “dark continent” of the feminine.¹⁴ The voice in Freud's text is that of a male and a participant in the central discourse about gender science of the scientific thought-collective. In my racial rereading, the voice would become that of the Aryan and part of the Aryan thought-collective. The fantasy of Freud's identification with the aggressor in my retelling of this passage as a passage about race seems to be vitiated when Freud transforms the problem of the relationship between the subject and the object into a question of sexual identity. The “male” is the “worrier” (read: subject) and the “female” is the “problem” (read: object). But this assumes that Freud's definition of the male body as uniform and constant is the norm within his fin-de-siècle scientific thought-collective.

There is an anatomical (read: sexual) distinction which sets the male Jew apart from other “males.” It is the practice of circumcision which defines the body of the male Jew, at least within the discourse of science. Freud replaces the racial perspective inherent in the science of his time with the perspective of gender. But the central problem is the impossibility which the Jewish male has as being both the “object” of study—inherently different in a way marked on his body—and the observer, neutral, identical in form and voice with all other disembodied voices of science. The Jewish male is not quite a “whole” male; he is different and his difference is what marks the entire category of the Jew.

We can find in the work of the Italian physician-scientist Paolo Mantegazza, one of Freud's and the fin-de-siècle's most often cited sources on sexual anatomy, a typical non-Jewish response to the nature of the Jewish, male body.¹⁵ Mantegazza's discussion of the Jews turns into an Enlightenment polemic against the perverse practices of that people out of their correct “space” and “time”:

Circumcision is a shame and an infamy; and I, who am not in the least anti-Semitic, who indeed have much esteem for the Israelites, I who demand of no living soul a profession of religious faith, insisting only upon the brotherhood of soap and water and of honesty, I shout and shall continue to shout at the Hebrews, until my last breath: Cease mutilating yourselves: cease imprinting upon your flesh an odious brand to distinguish you from other men; until you do this, you cannot pretend to be our equal. As it is, you, of your own accord, with the branding iron, from the first days of your lives, proceed to proclaim yourselves a race apart, one that cannot, and does not care to, mix with ours.¹⁶

It is circumcision which sets the (male) Jew apart. In his dissertation of 1897 Armand-Louis-Joseph Béraud notes that the Jews needed to circumcise their young males because of their inherently unhygienic nature, but also because the “climate in which they dwelt” otherwise encouraged the transmission of syphilis.¹⁷ The Jew in the Diaspora is out of time (having forgotten to vanish like the other ancient peoples); he is out of his correct space (where circumcision had validity). His Jewishness (as well as his disease) is inscribed on his phallus.

But what does circumcision mean for a Viennese Jewish scientist of the fin-de-siècle such as Sigmund Freud? The debates within and without the Jewish communities concerning the nature and implication of circumcision surfaced again in Germany during the 1840s. German Jews had become acculturated into German middle-class values and had come to question the absolute requirement of circumcision as a sign of their Jewish identity. Led by the radical reform rabbi Samuel Holdheim in Germany and responding to a Christian tradition which denigrated circumcision, the debate was carried out as much in the scientific press as in the religious one. There were four “traditional” views of the “meaning” of circumcision since the rise of Christianity.¹⁸ Following the writings of Paul, the first saw circumcision as inherently symbolic and, therefore, no longer valid after the rise of Christianity (this view was espoused by Eusebius and Origen); the second saw circumcision as a form of medical prophylaxis (as in the writing of Philo but also in the work of the central German commentator of the eighteenth century, Johann David Michaelis); the third saw it as a sign of a political identity (as in the work of the early-eighteenth-century theologian Johann Spencer); and the fourth as a remnant of the early Jewish idol or phallus worship (as in the work of the antiquarian Georg Friedrich Daumer—this view reappears quite often in the literature on Jewish ritual murder).

In the medical literature during the course of the fin-de-siècle two of these views dominated. They were the views which bracketed the images of “health” and “disease.” These views saw circumcision either as the source of disease¹⁹ or as a prophylaxis against disease.²⁰ Mantegazza notes that “the hygienic value of circumcision has been exaggerated by the historians of Judaism. It is true enough that the circumcised are a little less disposed to masturbation and to venereal infection; but every day, we do have Jewish masturbators and Jewish syphilitics. Circumcision is a mark of racial distinction; … it is a sanguinary protest against universal brotherhood; and if it be true that Christ was circumcised, it is likewise true that he protested on the cross against any symbol which would tend to part men asunder.”²¹

The opposing view of circumcision in the scientific literature of the time saw circumcision as a mode of prevention which precluded the spread of sexually transmitted diseases because of the increased capacity for “cleanliness.” It is classified as an aspect of “hygiene,” the favorite word to critique or support the practice.²² This view is closely associated with the therapeutic use of circumcision throughout the nineteenth century as a means of “curing” the diseases caused by masturbation, with, of course, a similar split in the idea of efficacy: circumcision was either a cure for masturbation as it eliminated the stimulation of the prepuce and deadened the sensitivity of the penis or it was the source of Jewish male hypersexuality. Circumcision became the key to marking the Jewish body as different within the perimeters of “healthy” or “diseased” and Freud eventually responded to this label of difference.

Let us turn to Freud's discussion of the nature and meaning of circumcision in Moses and Monotheism (1939 [1934-1938]). Here circumcision becomes one of the signs which marks the Egyptian body. The Jews, in order to acquire the higher status of the Egyptian, incorporate the act of male infant circumcision into their newly evolving religious practices. Freud states the case in the following manner:

On no account must the Jews be inferior to them. He [Moses] wished to make them into a “holy nation,” as is expressly stated in the Biblical text, and as a mark of this consecration he introduced among them too the custom [circumcision] which made them at least the equals of the Egyptians. And he could only welcome it if they were to be isolated by such a sign and kept apart from the foreign peoples among whom their wanderings would lead them, just as the Egyptians themselves had kept apart from all foreigners.

Freud footnotes the following to document and explain his comments on the sexual self-selection and isolation of these newly defined Jews:

Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.C., enumerates in his account of his journey characteristics of the Egyptian people which exhibit an astonishing similarity to traits familiar to us in later Jewry: ‘They are altogether more religious in every respect than any other people, and differ from them too in a number of their customs. Thus they practise circumcision, which they were the first to introduce, and on grounds of cleanliness. … They look down in narrow-minded pride on other people, who are unclean and are not so close to the gods as they are’. … And, incidentally, who suggested to the Jewish poet Heine in the nineteenth century A.D. that he should complain of his religion as ‘the plague dragged along from the Nile valley, the unhealthy beliefs of Ancient Egypt’?²³

The act of circumcision sets the Jewish male apart (in that he is no longer fully a male). This becomes part of the discourse of biological difference. For Freud, the symbolic context of the sexual organ—the difference in the biological construction of masculinity and femininity—is the basis for the basic symbolic language of difference:

In the antithesis between fire and water, which dominates the entire field of these myths, yet a third factor can be demonstrated in addition to the historical factor and the factor of symbolic phantasy. This is a physiological fact, which the poet Heine describes in the following lines:

Was dem Menschen dient zum Seichen
Damit schafft er Seinesgleichen.

[‘With what serves a man for pissing / he creates his like.’]

The sexual organ of the male has two functions; and there are those to whom this association is an annoyance. It serves for the evacuation of the bladder, and it carries out the act of love which sets the craving of the genital libido at rest.²⁴

Here again it is the image of the “male” as a uniform category. The circumcised phallus has, as we have discussed, another function, at least within the scientific discourse of the nineteenth century: a prophylaxis against disease. Freud presents his discourse as a unified, univocal discourse of “male” sexual difference with reference to the poetry of Heinrich Heine.

In all of these cases, it is the poetry of Heine which links the ideas of sexual difference and the discourse of psychoanalysis. It is in the poetry of Heine that the “appropriate” words of difference are to be found which encapsulate, for Freud, the difference between subject and object, between the male body and that of the female. It is evident that in quoting Heine, especially in these contexts, Freud is not merely evoking any poetic voice of the nineteenth century. He is citing the exemplary Jewish (and therefore, erotic) writer of his time. Hidden within the poetics of quoting Heine is the distinction made by Freud's contemporaries between the Jewish body and the body of the Aryan. Freud's citation of Heinrich Heine in these contexts provides a key to reading Freud's repression of the implications of the biology of race. Heine is cited as an authority, a voice of culture which speaks to the universality of the truths which Freud presents. Freud merges Heine's voice into his own text. The confusion between the roles of “observer” and “observed” is eliminated. And Freud, like Heine, becomes a commentator. His role as the object of study, as the pathological specimen under the microscope, is eliminated.

It is within the “voice” of the poet, the texts cited by Freud, that the authority of culture is evoked. The ironic tension in Freud's reading of Heine is generated by the conflict between the universal claims of German culture and the parochial, “Jewish” role attributed to Heine.²⁵ The shift from ironic observer to the object of analysis, from the “Aryan” to the “Jew,” is reflected when Freud confronts this transformation. The distanced, ironic poet who is at the same time the subject of his own poetry becomes for Freud the voice which marks the movement of the category of race into the category of gender.

But it is important to note that the representation of Heine is not only that of the “Jewish” and “erotic” poet, but also that of the “diseased” poet. There is rather a complex interrelationship between ideas of disease (Heine's image of the Jewish disease, Judaism, which Freud evokes in Moses and Monotheism), the nature of the Jewish (male) body and the discourse about all of these present within Freud's thought-collective. These representations are linked within Freud's work by the quotation of Heine's ironic voice in his texts, as from Freud's “favorite” work of Heine, the section of the Romanzero called “Lazarus,” which directly evokes Heine's own disease and decay. The image of Heine as an “ill” poet is linked in the nineteenth century to the idea of Heine as the syphilitic, as the unclean figure whose eroticism is spoiled by his dangerous, pathological state.²⁶ The debate about the “meaning” of circumcision and its relationship to syphilis is evoked by the image of the dying Heine. Freud's quotation from Heine in Moses and Monotheism is taken from Heine's poem on the dedication of the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg, a hospital supported by Heine's uncle Solomon (with whom Freud was evidently related).²⁷ Heine's image of the threefold Jewish disease—poverty, illness, and Jewishness—comes to reflect Heine's own status as the syphilitic Jew. For syphilis, like the leprosy which the Jews brought back from Egypt along with monotheism, is a marker of the sexual difference of the Jew.²⁸ This image of the syphilitic becomes one with that of the poet. The association between the image of corruption, especially sexual corruption, and creativity dominates the late-nineteenth-century idea of the poetic.²⁹

In his work Sigmund Freud evokes the image of disease as the concomitant to the image of the creative. He stresses the centrality of the link between the pathological and the creative which haunted the late nineteenth century:

A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love. This follows somewhat on the lines of Heine's picture of the psychogenesis of the Creation:

Krankheit ist wohl der letzte Grund
Des ganzen Schöpferdrangs gewesen;
Erschaffend konnte ich genesen,
Erschaffend wurde ich gesund.

[Illness was no doubt the final cause / of the whole urge to create. / By creating, I could recover; / by creating, I became healthy.]

We have recognized our mental apparatus as being first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects.³⁰

The link between the creative and the corrupt is found in Heine's “god-like” voice. Here, too, there is a rationale for the disassociation between the “subject” and the “object” of scientific study. In common discourse about Heine in contemporary, anti-Semitic commentators such as Adolf Bartels, there is the link between Heine's corrosive style and his racial identity.³¹ By implication this identity is manifest in Heine's corrupt and corrupting sexuality. This is clearly labeled as degenerate, as not real poetry, but rather a pathological sign of the Jewishness of the poet.

Freud attempts to undermine this association between “Jewish” creativity and disease in his own studies of creativity (from his study of Leonardo through to that of Schreber). In all of these cases, the wellspring of creativity is the pathology of sexuality, not of race, and none of his “subjects” are Jews. There is neither a study of Heine nor one of Spinoza. Freud manages to avoid this association completely, for he sees Heine not through the lens of the biology of race but rather as a Jewish anti-Jew, a fellow unbeliever:

Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: “Den Himmel überlassen wir / Den Engeln und den Spatzen.” [‘We leave Heaven / to the angels and the sparrows.’]³²

The appropriate voice in this context is that of Heinrich Heine, who becomes here “one of our fellow-unbelievers.” The very term as well as the quotation is from Heine. Heine had coined it in his discussion of Spinoza. Freud's own oppositional position to religion is well known. Indeed, Peter Gay can evoke Freud's self-categorization as a “godless Jew.”³³ This seems to be a contradiction until we understand that the term “Jew” is neither a religious nor a social label but a biological one for the late-nineteenth-century scientist. What Freud (and Gay) cannot do is to remove Freud from the category of the biological and, therefore, potentially diseased Jew. And here the fellow disbeliever, Heine, the diseased Jew, becomes the double of Freud. The disease which Heine is reputed to have (syphilis) is not the disease which Freud develops (cancer of the jaw), but the idea of the disease of Judaism, the biological definition of the Jew, as the shared disease of the Jews, links both.

Having set the context for the function which Heine's poetic citation performs in determining the link between sexuality and race in Freud's text, let us turn to a still more complicated reading of this association. It is one of the few quotations from Heine to serve as the focus for an analysis on Freud's part.³⁴ This passage is to be found in his 1904 study of Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious.

In the part of his Reisebilder entitled Die Bäder von Lucca [The Baths of Lucca] Heine introduces the delightful figure of the lottery-agent and extractor of corns, Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg, who boasts to the poet of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild, and finally says: ‘And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal—quite famillionairely.’³⁵

This punning quotation delivered in Yiddish-accented German by the parvenu convert Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg is, however, not our initial introduction of this text in Freud's study of humor. And it may be surprising to note that Freud evokes this joke not out of his own reading (and there are certainly sufficient examples of his own reading of Heine noted in this very volume) but because it is one of the central jokes—so central that it can be referred to without quoting it—in the psychological discourse about humor in the 1880s and '90s.³⁶ Freud cites it from an 1896 essay by G. Heymans on Theodor Lipps' theory of the comic.³⁷

Heymans refers to Lipps' use of this joke as an example of a meaningless error or malformation, which suddenly reveals itself as having a double meaning. It is the sudden awareness in the reader of the hidden double meaning which generates the comic response. This Kantian reading of the text goes against the initial reading of this passage by Lipps.³⁸ For Lipps the form of an expression and its content are inherently bound together. The comic in Heine's text stems from the masking of this structural relationship and our sudden awareness of the external form of meaning as an absolute reflex of its content. The psychological power of this association remains for Lipps even when the external form (as in Heine's joke) becomes trivialized. What is striking is that Lipps, in his 1898 publication of his earlier essays on the theory of humor, can respond to Heymans without ever citing the passage from Heine. He comes to agree with Heymans, but places the moment of the awareness of the disparity between the “meaningless” word and its hidden meaning at a mid-point in the process toward the comic realization. The impact of the humor is the result of the hidden presence of the relationship between the form and the content of the expression, a relationship masked and then revealed by the pun. Lipps notes that “no one can doubt that Heine's joke is comic, only because we are aware or ‘understand’ that this word [“famillionairely”] should have this meaning, or more precisely, because it truly has, in our eyes, this meaning at that moment.”³⁹ For Sigmund Freud, Theodor Lipps' study of the comic is the prime focus of his own work on humor. Indeed, except for his own publications, Lipps is the most frequently cited “authority” in Freud's study of the comic. Freud's own reading of the Heine passage incorporates Lipps' reading and departs from it.

What is striking is that when we closely read Lipps' entire study of the comic, as Freud did, our focus is not the Jewish lottery-agent Hirsch-Hyacinth whose mangled, Yiddish-tinged speech reveals him as a marginal Jew attempting to infiltrate Western cultural traditions. Lipps cites him and his discourse only in passing (unlike Freud, whose approach is truly a study of the Jewish joke constructed around material from and about Heine.⁴⁰) And, indeed, in the book version of his essays, Lipps does not even reproduce in full Heine's punning reference to the Rothschilds. Rather there is quite another leitmotif in Lipps' work which Freud never mentions in his own study on humor. The “joke” or, in this case, the proverb, which ties Lipps' volume together is initially found early in his text and is used over and over again throughout it: “The peasant laughs about the black when he sees him for the first time.” Lipps' proverb stresses the role of the “subject” and the “object” in generating the comic.

Let me summarize Lipps' view of the nature of the comic as it is represented in this proverb. It is the awareness of sameness in difference, the hidden essence of the humanness of the black hidden within his different colored skin, which Lipps stresses. For Lipps, it is the color of the skin which gives the human being special value. It is not that this value is intrinsic to the color of the skin, but rather that society gives skin color value. “We” (Lipps and his educated reader) associate human form with white skin color. And, therefore, we assume the color of the black skin not only to be comic but also ugly. It is in the sudden awareness of the similarity between the black's body and its association with “our own body” which creates the comic. The disparity which creates humor is the awareness that what seems to be different (the essence of the body and its relationship to the idea of “humanness”) is indeed no different. Blacks are people just like—the peasant. But it is only the naïveté of the observer of the body of the black which creates this comic awareness. The observer who is directly amused by the body of the black is either a child or a primitive. But the true observer (Lipps) “knows” that the body of the black and the body of the Other are identical and is amused only by the peasant's laughter at the black.⁴¹

All of Lipps' comments about the aesthetics of blackness reflect his sense that these qualities are those of the “primitive” observer. The scientist is interested in the response of the observer and he is himself neutral in his response. At least, he does not find the body of the black comic. The “we” in Lipps' text distinguishes between the scientist-observer, who is neutral and objective, and the child-peasant, who is the object observed as it observes. This distance is clear in Lipps' writing.

When we turn to Freud's reading of Lipps, this metaphor of the biological basis for the comic, the perception of the body as the locus of difference, is displaced. It is not the body—either of the Jew or of the black—which is the seat of the idea of difference. Given the view in the scientific thought-collective in the nineteenth century that the Jew was black,⁴² Lipps' placing of the locus of the comic in an understanding of the black body as the object of the comic gaze has specific meaning for the Jewish reader. Just as the black is not quite a “whole” human being because of his black skin (in the eye of the child and the peasant), the male Jew is also not quite a whole human being because of his circumcision (in the eye of the scientist). The “damaged” Jewish phallus becomes the Jew. The relationship between the “body” and the “phallus” is not a post facto analogy. The thesis of the “body-as-phallus” within the symbolic language of psychoanalysis was put forth by Victor Tausk and was used by him to counter the rather simple reading of Heine's “Lorelei” presented by Hanns Sachs to the Wednesday night circle on February 15, 1911. In Tausk's reading the phallus is represented by the body of the boatman swallowed by the waves. This image “could convey the notion of the whole body engulfed by the organ of the superior female.”⁴³ The link between the black and the Jew can be found throughout Viennese culture in Freud's day. The Austrian exile novelist Jakov Lind puts into the mouth of his father in the 1930s: “‘Vienna is Vienna and Jews are Jews. Black is black and Jew is Jew because we could not afford to be anything else.’”⁴⁴ Freud's revision of this association is highly sublimated, but is also to be found in the joke book in the context of his reading of Heine (and Lichtenberg):

‘My Fellow-unbeliever Spinoza,’ says Heine. ‘We, by the ungrace of God, day-laborers, serfs, negroes, villeins …’ is how Lichtenberg begins a manifesto (which he carries no further) made by these unfortunates—who certainly have more right to this title than kings and princes have to its unmodified form.⁴⁵

Freud separates the Jew and the black into two parallel textual worlds: the Jew Spinoza within the discourse of the Jew Heine; the black within the Enlightenment rhetoric of Lichtenberg. For Freud, the similarity between Jews, especially unbelieving Jews, and blacks as the object of study is eliminated through this device of citation. But for his thought-collective, Jews and blacks are identical because of their biology, which no subterfuge can alter. And Heine becomes the marker for this sense of a difference which should not be a difference. Heine, about whom one laughs, with whom one laughs, is seen as the epitome of both subject and object, both the means of analysis and the object of study.

Freud displaces the idea of the difference of the Jew into the realm of sexuality, evoking Hirsch-Hyacinth's essential Jewish voice in the joke discussed earlier in the text. But not the sexuality of the Jew. The question at the very center of the references to Heine is the placement of sexuality, deviant sexuality or the sexuality of difference outside of the world of the Jew as the object of study. In Heine's world this image is projected upon the figure of the arch-Aryan as anti-Semite, the image of the homosexual August, Count of Platen (1796-1835), as Freud notes:

Heine's Bäder von Lucca contains a regular wasp's nest of the most stinging allusions and makes the most ingenious use of this form of joke for polemical purposes (against Count Platen). Long before the reader can suspect what is afoot, there are foreshadowings of a particular theme, peculiarly ill-adapted for direct representation, by allusions to material of the most varied kind,—for instance, in Hirsch-Hyacinth's verbal contortions: ‘You are too stout and I am too thin; you have a good deal of imagination and I have all the more business sense; I am a practicus and you are a diarrheticus; in short you are my complete antipodex.’—‘Venus Urinia’—‘the stout Gudel von Dreckwall’ of Hamburg, and so on. In what follows, the events described by the author take a turn which seems at first merely to display his mischievous spirit but soon reveals its symbolic relation to his polemical purpose and at the same time shows itself as allusive. Eventually the attack on Platen bursts out, and thenceforward allusions to the theme (with which we have already been made acquainted) of the Count's love for men gushes out and overflows in every sentence of Heine's attack on his opponent's talents and character. For instance:

“Even though the Muses do not favour him, he has the Genius of Speech in his power, or rather he knows how to do violence to him. For he does not possess the free love of that Genius, he must unceasingly pursue this young man, too, and he knows how to capture only the outer forms, which, despite their lovely curves never speak nobly.”

“He is like the ostrich, which believes he is well-hidden if he sticks his head in the sand, so that only his behind can be seen. Our exalted bird would have done better to hide his behind in the sand and show us his head.”⁴⁶

Here Freud moves with Heine from the Jew to the homosexual, from Hirsch-Hyacinth and his accented German to the gay poet Platen and his Romantic poetry, to locate the idea of the sexually different as the object of study. The voice is that of the observing poet Heine as Hirsch-Hyacinth, the covertly observed “object” the gay poet von Platen. What Freud “hears” in Heine's description of von Platen is a series of anal images, all of which refer to von Platen's homosexuality. The tables here are turned: it is the Jew (Heine-Freud) who sees the “pathology” of the Aryan, his homosexuality. (Heine's own homophobia⁴⁷ is translated here into the reification of the early Freud's view [best expressed in his analysis of the Schreber autobiography] that homosexuality is a “disease” or at least, a pathological error in development.)

In a real way Heine's position in late-nineteenth-century thought parallels that of Freud within the scientific thought-collective of his time. And Freud sensed that doubling. He writes, calling upon Heine's Gods in Exile, to describe the “uncanny” nature of the double, the sense of sameness in the concept of difference:

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a ‘double,’ we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted—a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.⁴⁸

Heine's text functions for Freud as his own rhetorical double—the object of his study as well as the voice into which he can slip. What is uncanny in Freud's text is the regularity with which Heine's voice appears in this manner. Freud's poetics of quotations reveal themselves to be a politics of quotation. His appropriation of Heine's voice in the “scientific” context of psychoanalytic theory reveals itself to be a dialogue with the voice of the Jew within a discourse initially labeled as scientific but also understood by Freud and his thought-collective as Jewish as well. Heine remains for Freud the sign of the double bind of being both the authoritative voice of the observer and the ever suspect voice of the patient, a voice which remains one of the signs and symptoms of the disease from which both Heine and Freud suffered, their Jewishness.

Notes

1. All of the Freud references are to Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by J. Strachey, A. Freud, A. Strachey, and A. Tyson. 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1955-74), hereafter SE. Here “Contributions to a Questionnaire on Reading” (1907), 9:245: “You did not even ask for ‘favorite books,’ among which I should not have forgotten Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus.” For the general context see Ernst A. Ticho, “Der Einfluss der deutschsprachigen Kultur auf Freuds Denken,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 19 (1986), 36-53, and Renate Böschenstein, “Mythos als Wasserscheide. Die jüdische Komponente der Psychoanalyse: Beobachtungen zu ihrem Zusammenhang mit der Literatur des Jahrhundertbeginns,” in Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler, eds., Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), 287-310.

2. See Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Oxford University Press, 1989), 181.

3. On the complexity of reading Freud reading see Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985) and on the general parallels which make Freud's reading of Heine more than superficial see the first-rate dissertation by Michael G. Levine, “Writing Between the Lines: Heine, Freud and the Effects of Self-Censorship,” diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1986.

4. On the overall history of Heine's reputation in the nineteenth century see Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk (Stuttgart Metzler, 1987).

5. See my “Karl Kraus's Oscar Wilde: Race, Sex, and Difference,” Austrian Studies (Cambridge), forthcoming.

6. William F. Bynum, “The Great Chain of Being after Forty Years: An Appraisal,” History of Science 13 (1975), 1-28.

7. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Zwei Ärtze,” in his Jüdisches Leben in Wort und Bild (Mannheim: J. Bensheimer, 1892), 287-298. On the context see Hans Otto Horch, “Der Aussenseiter als ‘Judenraphael,’ Zu den Judengeschichten Leopolds von Sacher Masoch,” in Horch and Denkler, 258-286.

8. See Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademische Berufe (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974).

9. On the social history of the Jews in this context see George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880-1980s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Abt / Madison, 1988); William O. McCagg, Jr., A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989); Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, Gerhard Botz, editors, Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, revised edition (London: Peter Halban, 1988); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 189.

10. SE, 22: 113.

11. I am using the self-consciously ethnological term “Aryan” as the antithesis to “Jew” rather than the more evident term “Christian.” What I am stressing is the racial definition of the “Jew” in the nineteenth century. It is clear that the terms “Jew” and “Christian” take on racial as well as religious significance during this period.

12. Richard Andree, Zur Volkskunde der Juden (Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1881), 24-25, cited by Maurice Fishberg, “Materials for the Physical Anthropology of the Eastern European Jew,” Memoires of the American Anthropological Association 1 (1905-1907), 6-7.

13. On the background for this idea of the homologous structure of the genitalia see my Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: Wiley, 1989).

14. SE 25: 212.

15. On Mantegazza see Giovanni Landucci, Darwinismo a Firenze: Tra scienza e ideologia (1860-1900) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1977), 107-128.

16. The relevant passages in the German edition which Freud knew, Anthropologisch-kulturhistorische Studien über die Geschlechtsverhältnisse des Menschen (Jena: Hermann Costenoble, [1891]) are on pp. 132-137. All of the quotations from Mantegazza are from the English translation: Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, translated by Samuel Putnam (New York: Eugenics Publishing Co., 1938), here p. 99.

17. Armand-Louis-Joseph Béraud, Étude de Pathologie Comparée: Essai sur la pathologie des sémites (Bordeaux: Paul Cassignol, 1897), 55.

18. There is no comprehensive study of the German debates on circumcision. See J. Alkvist, “Geschichte der Circumcision,” Janus 30 (1926), 86-104; 152-71.

19. See for example the discussion by Em. Kohn in the Mittheilung des Ärtzlichen Vereins in Wien 3 (1874), 169-172 (on the Jewish side) and Dr. Klein, “Die rituelle Circumcision, eine sanitätspolizeiliche Frage,” Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung 22 (1853), 368-369 (on the non-Jewish side).

20. See the discussion by Dr. Bamberger, “Die Hygiene der Beschneidung,” in Max Grunwald, Die Hygiene der Juden. Im Anschluss an die internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung (Dresden: Verlag der historischen Abteilung der internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung, 1911), 103-112 (on the Jewish side) and W. Hammer, “Zur Beschneidungsfrage,” Zeitschrift für Bahnärzte 1 (1916), 254 (on the non-Jewish side).

21. Mantegazza, 98-99.

22. Alfons Labisch, “Die soziale Konstruktion der ‘Gesundheit’ und des ‘Homo Hygienicus,’” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3/4 (1986), 60-82.

23. SE, 23: 30-31.

24. SE, 22: 192-93.

25. Heine's own awareness of this problem complicates this question. See Norbert Altenhofer, “Chiffre, Hieroglyphe, Palimpsest. Vorformen tiefhermeneutischer und intertextueller Interpretation im Werke Heines,” in Ulrich Nassen, editor, Texthermeneutik: Aktualität, Geschichte, Kritik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979), 149-93.

26. See Manfred Windfuhr, Heinrich Heine: Revolution und Reflexion (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), 109 and Gerhard Höhn, Heine-Handbuch: Zeit, Person, Werk (Stuttgart Metzler, 1987), 114.

27. Freud presents an image of Heine in the context of his family and relates this to Freud's own family to document the context of the Hirsch-Hyacinth “pun” which will be discussed later in this essay. What he does not note is that his wife's family, the Bernays, were also related to the Heines (See David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition [New York: Van Nostrand, 1958], 196). Thus the story about “family” is also a narrative which reflects the medical view that “inbreeding” (read: incest) was the source of madness among the Jews: “I recall a story told by an old aunt of my own, who had married into the Heine family, how one day, when she was an attractive young woman, she found sitting next her at the family dinner-table a person who struck her as uninviting and whom the rest of the company treated contemptuously. She herself felt no reason to be any more affable towards him. It was only many years later that she realized that this negligent and neglected cousin had been the poet Heinrich Heine. There is not a little evidence to show how much Heine suffered both in his youth and later from this rejection by his rich relations. It was from the soil of this subjective emotion that the ‘famillionairely’ joke sprang.” Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE 8: 141-42.

28. See my Sexuality: An Illustrated History, 258-60.

29. See Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989).

30. SE, 14: 85.

31. This is clearest in Bartel's programmatic pamphlet on the nature of criticism: Kritker und Kritikaster: Pro domo et pro arte, mit einem Anhang: Das Judentum in der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1903), see esp. 103-15.

32. SE, 21: 50.

33. See Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press [in Association with Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati], 1987), as well as the discussions throughout Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988).

34. On Freud and humor see Elliott Oring, The Jokes of Sigmund Freud: A Study in Humor and Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); on the role of Heine quotations in Freud's study of humor see Peter Brask, “Rebecca, er det mig so taler?” Kritik 36 (1975), 103-126.

35. SE 8: 16.

36. “Heymans (1896) explains how the effect of a joke comes about through bewilderment being succeeded by illumination. He illustrates his meaning by a brilliant joke of Heine's, who makes one of his characters, Hirsch-Hyacinth, the poor lottery-agent, boast that the great Baron Rothschild had treated him quite as his equal—quite ‘famillionairely.’ Here the word that is the vehicle of the joke appears at first sight simply to be a wrongly constructed word, something unintelligible, incomprehensible, puzzling. It accordingly bewilders. The comic effect is produced by the solution of this bewilderment, by understanding the word.” Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE, 8: 12-13.

37. G. Heymans, “Ästhetische Unterschungen in Anschluss an die Lipp'sche Theorie des Komischen,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 11 (1896), 31-43; 333-52.

38. Theodor Lipps, “Psychologie der Komik,” Philosophische Monatsheft 25 (1889), 139.

39. Theodor Lipps, Komik und Humor: Eine psychologisch-ästhetische Untersuchung (Hamburg / Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1898), 95.

40. See the following passages: Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, SE 8: 12-13, 16, 25, 36, 39, 41, 47-48, 50-51, 69, 77, 78-79, 85, 87, 90, 114-15, 141-42, 145, 211, 212.

41. Lipps, Komik und Humor, 56, 58, 68, 70, 153, 158. On the function of the idea of Blackness and the body of the black as a marker within German aesthetic theory see my On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany. Yale Afro-American Studies (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

42. See my Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29-35.

43. See the commentary with quotations by Mark Kanzer, “Pioneers of Applied Analysis: Vol. III of the Minutes,” American Imago 32 (1975), 59-76, here 66.

44. Jakov Lind, Counting My Steps: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1969), 55.

45. SE 8: 77.

46. SE 8: 78-79.

47. See Robert C. Holub, “Heine's Sexual Assaults: Towards a Theory of Total Polemic,” Monatshefte 73 (1981), 415-28.

48. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” SE 17: 236. On Freud and Heine see J. M. R. Damasmora, F. A. Jenner, S. E. Eacott, “On Heutoscopy or the Phenomenon of the Double: Case Presentation and Review of the Literature,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 53 (1980), 75-83.