Читать книгу Zwischen Orient und Europa - Группа авторов - Страница 9

Maria Carolina Foi

A fascination with the East permeates all the literature of the Goethezeit starting from Lessing’s eighteenth century masterpiece Nathan der Weise. In the age of Romanticism, the imagination of many German poets and writers (Novalis, Wackenroder, Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Hoffmann – to mention just a few) veers decisively towards the East or, rather, to the many different Orients working in parallel in the fields of philology, linguistics and translation, with Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp in the forefront.1

With regard to the particular interest in the Orient in German-speaking countries – an interest which at that time was not sustained by colonial interests nor fuelled by direct contact with the Other – Eduard Said assigned to this singular German imaginative fascination with the Orient a kind of intellectual authority.2

Another German author who shared this fascination with the Orient and bowed to its intellectual authority was Heinrich Heine, who was writing in the wake of, arguably, the greatest poetic achievement of that period, Goethe’s West-östlicher Diwan: “Unbeschreiblich ist der Zauber dieses Buches”; as Heine himself was to declare in his essay Die romantische Schule: “es ist ein Selam, den der Okzident dem Oriente geschickt hat.”3 As has been authoritatively pointed out, in all his poetic works Heine makes a “wise but also quietly shameless”4 use of the themes, motifs and topoi of various aspects of the Orient, indulging in a dizzyingly ironic exploitation of their evident cliché-status.

Experiments with the East, however, are striking features of Heine’s early literary production. And I am not referring to famous poems such as Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Die Lotosblume, or Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam, published in Buch der Lieder,5 but rather to his tragedy Almansor, published in 1823. It is well known that Herder and the early Romantics had assigned a fundamental role to Spanish literature in the modern canon. In the years of the Restoration, this drama on which the young Heine had been working between 1820 and 1822 can be inserted into the rediscovery of Moorish Spain and the epoch of the Reconquista cultivated by the Spätromantik. The young Almansor, an Arab nobleman who, after the victory of the Christians had refused to renege his faith and chosen to go into exile, returns to his homeland of Granada to see again his one-time beloved who at this point has been converted and is about to be married. Their love is rekindled but the story ends tragically when the young lovers choose to die. But is Heine’s Almansor really a tragedy inspired by an attentive study of the Islamic world or simply a key drama, an allegory of the problematic Jewish-German identity of Heine himself?

Considered in these terms, the alternative on which the scholars have worked so exhaustively,6 is perhaps simply insoluble or ill-placed. In the first place, Almansor is only the first and, artistically speaking, the least successful of a whole series of experiments that hinge on relocations, plots and echoes of Oriental themes and motifs that were to be decisive in both the poetic and intellectual development of the young Heine. In his writings, in fact, there is an East at work that is specifically linked to Judaic culture in its various aspects. It is an East relocated both in Spain and in Eastern Europe: in both cases it is an Orient that should be investigated in the light of a recognition of the Jews as an Eastern people and of the Bible as a poetic text – a recognition that had already been formed in the eighteenth century,7 and that was to gain a firm hold in the early nineteenth century when it became a turning point in Jewish thought and self-representation. The East-West experiments of the young Heine on which I would like to focus took place, in fact, between 1821 and 1824 and they can be defined through his enthusiastic discussion of the themes of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and then with the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums, to which they provide a kind of literary countermelody. Heine’s dual concept of the East moves from West to East and from East to West and creates singular poetic concretions involving a hybridization of themes and motifs that interact within the context of the German and Romantic culture of the time. In order to understand how this comes about, I would like to concentrate on Heine’s prose of that period and to analyze in particular relevant passages taken from the travelogue Über Polen and from Die Harzreise, concluding with some observations on Der Rabbi von Bacherach. My intention, in short, is to establish whether and to what extent the historical-conceptual categories introduced by the Verein into research on Judaic identity in modern times were reworked and represented by Heine in a literary medium and what meaning the various Eastern motifs they evoke may have.

To this end, it is necessary to briefly recapitulate on some of the objectives pursued by a group of young Jewish intellectuals who got together in Berlin in the Twenties. Under pressure from the political Restoration and growing anti-Semitism, they again asked themselves the question that had been posed by Moses Mendelssohn and the Maskilim: what does it mean for the followers of a modern culture to be Jews and, indeed, what makes a Jew a Jew? Fidelity to the laws or observance of the practices of the reformed Judaic faith seemed to be too centered on the individual and to now require a further, alternative justification.8

Many of the members of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden had had access to the excellent education guaranteed by the university system, which had been modernised in line with the ideals of the Wissenschaft as defined by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Undisputed stars of the German academic firmament, such as the jurist Savigny and the philosopher Hegel together with the great philologists Wolf and Boeckh, were teaching, in Berlin in those years. And their lessons left their mark. This was true, above all, in the case of Leopold Zunz9, who followed the great philologists but also to a certain extent the positive-historical approach to law of Savigny and the Historical School, when he grasped the importance of reconstructing the textual tradition of the Middle Ages. This can be deduced from his pioneering work of 1818, Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur. According to Zunz, the period in which he was living and the process of emancipation that at that time marked the end of the Rabbinic tradition in the history of the Jews also offered a unique opportunity to gather and organize post-biblical Judaic literature as a whole. From a religious and theological point of view, detaching oneself from the Talmud and the Rabbinic tradition, as indeed Mendelssohn had done, now signified being able to rediscover that tradition in the sign of a scholarly interest. In this respect philology represented the reference science. “Hier“ we read in the above-mentioned essay “wird die ganze Litteratur der Juden, in ihrem größten Umfange, als Gegenstand der Forschung aufgestellt, ohne uns darum zu kümmern, ob ihr sämmtlicher Inhalt auch Norm für unser eigenes Urtheilen soll oder kann.”10 Only a scientific comparison with the post-biblical Judaic past can help provide an accurate image of the nature of the Jews and Judaism and of the significance of their history. Only careful philological research will make it possible to recognize and separate “das Alte brauchbare, das Veraltete schädliche, das Neue wünschenswerthe”11 in the historical documents.

While Zunz is looking to philology and the methods of the Historical School,12 the president of the Verein, the jurist Eduard Gans is very far from Savigny’s systematic framework.13 The three talks that Gans delivered for the Verein attribute the aspirations of that small intellectual avant-garde to Hegel’s philosophy of universal history and to his dialectics.14 It is a question of vindicating now, from a non-confessional standpoint, the role that is due to Jewish Nationalität in modern times. In the face of the risk that within Hegel’s philosophical-historical framework Judaism would prove to be a great event belonging only to the past, Gans is only able to offer an evocative natural metaphor: “in die grosse Bewegung des Ganzen soll [das Judentum] untergegangen scheinen und dennoch fortleben, wie der Strom fortlebt in dem Ozean.”15 The apologetic intention of the Verein, although it is in contrast with the desire for an objective study, is expressed in the mythologizing of a specific segment of the historical Diaspora: it glorifies the Golden Age of the Sephardic Jews in Spain.16 The young Jewish scholars of Berlin celebrate this era as a great model that unites autonomous culture and social integration, a model that could and should be re-proposed for the present. But how and under what circumstances?

The Verein, Heine would write in an affectionate and melancholy obituary in 1840, aimed high and followed “eine hochfliegend große, aber unausführbare idee” (HB 9, 179).

[Der] esoterische Zweck jenes Vereins [war] nichts anderes als eine Vermittlung des historischen Judentums mit der modernen Wissenschaft, von welcher man annahm, daß sie im Laufe der Zeit zur Weltherrschaft gelangen würde. (HB 9, 183)

As to the militancy of the young Heine in the Verein, especially in its last decade, there is no lack of studies,17 starting from the scrutiny of the numerous accounts of the two years spent in Berlin between 1821 and 1823: the many letters sent to Moses Moser, whom Heine referred to as the “eigentliche Seele” (HB 9,180) of the group; the respect and admiration he expressed for Zunz, from whose teachings in the Synagogue he expected “freylich keine Erbauung und sanftmüthige Seelenpflaster; aber etwas viel besseres, eine Aufregung der Kraft“ (HSA 20, 72-73); and the attention he devoted to the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums – he advised Zunz to insist on its cultural aspects and style with a view to making it more appealing to a wider audience (HSA 20, 102-103).

Nevertheless, a critical reappraisal of Heine’s experience with the Verein in parallel with the publication and genesis of his other works of the same period may reveal a few surprises especially if we consider what Heine managed to achieve through the east/west dichotomy. His indirect response, through the medium of literary essays, to the possibility of a new Jewish identity, vital and integrated in the present and, hence, his response to the suitability of the Spanish model for the Verein, consists in an inversion of that tendency or, in other words, a dislocation. The model Eastern Jew is no longer the Sephardic Jew of medieval Spain, but the kind of Jew he would meet when he left Berlin and travelled east. In his account of a journey he made to Poland in 1822 he tells of his first encounter, as a cultured Jewish intellectual from the German world, with the world of the shtetl.

“Das Äußere des polnischen Juden ist schrecklich. Mich überläuft ein Schauder, wenn ich daran denke, wie ich […] zuerst ein polnisches Dorf sah, meistens von Juden bewohnt.” (HB 3,75) At the sight of that community made up of “zerlumpten Schmitzgestalten”, Heine is overcome by a feeling of nausea. “Ihre Sprache ist ein mit Hebräisch durchwirktes, und mit Polnisch façonniertes Deutsch” (HB 3, 76) that grates on his ears. But – he goes on – that disgust “wurde […] bald verdrängt von Mitleid, nachdem ich den Zustand dieser Menschen näher betrachtete, und die schweinstallartigen Löcher sah, worin sie wohnen, mauscheln, beten, schachern und – elend sind” (HB 3, 76). In short, the Eastern Jews – Heine continues – “sind offenbar mit der europaischen Kultur nicht fortgeschritten und ihre Geisteswelt versumpfte zu einem unerquicklichen Aberglauben, den eine spitzfindige Scholastik in tausenderlei wunderlichen Formen hinein quetscht.” (HB 3, 76)

In this judgment of the religious tradition of Jews from the East there can doubtlessly be traced some of the criticisms already leveled by the Haskalah, the Judaic enlightenment, at the Rabbinic tradition. And the remark on superstition might well lead us to believe that these observations also involve the Hasidic movement, which was considered a serious obstacle to the renewal of Judaism. There is a plethora of polemical writings by the Maskilim in which the mystic irrationalism and cultural practices of the new religious current (or, rather, neo-Hasidism) that had sprung up in Eastern Europe were unreservedly condemned. Regarding the situation of the Polish Jews in general, in his Polish travel memoir Heine confines himself to mentioning only Über die Verbesserung der Israeliten im Königreich Polen, a government report by David Friedländer, published in 1819 from which, in fact, he garnered a wealth of information. His praise of the report, however, is tempered by the critical reservation that the merits and moral standing of the Rabbis has not been fully understood. (HB 3, 74)

In Über Polen, however, a few lines after the realistic description that introduces for the first time a large number of typical, albeit negative, features that would recur in a long series of literary portrayals of the Judaic world of Eastern Europe, a singular re-evaluation emerges:

Dennoch, trotz der barbarischen Pelzmütze, die seinen Kopf bedeckt, und der noch barbarischen Ideen, die denselben füllen, schätze ich den polnischen Juden weit höher als so manchen deutschen Juden, der seinen Bolivar auf dem Kopf, und seinen Jean Paul im Kopfe trägt. (HB 3,77)

How best to interpret such an explicit appreciation of a Judaic identity that has remained resolutely true to itself? Is it a criticism of the illusions of the advocates of a reformed Judaism?18 Is it a reiteration of the critical reservations he had expressed concerning the Friedländer report? If so, is it an indirect denunciation of the consequences of a model for emancipated Jews which, for the Western Jews, among whom Heine is also to be numbered, was taking shape within the distorting mirror of anti-Semitism? Another passage in the travelogue would lead us to think so:

In der schroffen Abgeschlossenheit wurde der Charakter des polnischen Jude ein Ganzes […]. Der innere Mensch wurde kein quodlibetartiges Kompositum heterogener Gefühle und verkümmerte nicht durch die Einzwängung frankfurter Judengemauern […]. Der polnische Jude mit seinem schmutzigen Pelze, mit seinem bevölkerten Bart und Knoblauchgeruch und Gemauschel, ist mir noch immer lieber als mancher in all seiner staatspapiernen Herrlichkeit. (HB 3,77)

A century later, Joseph Roth in Juden auf Wanderschaft, another East European travel memoir, was to celebrate, in almost the same words as Heine, the virtues of the Eastern Jew who has remained “echt und unberührt”,19 authentic and intact. It would seem that Heine’s writing inspired the great rediscovery of the world of East European Judaism, in its turn a new form of mythologizing promoted by the Zionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which arguably found its most famous literary celebration in the rewriting of the Hasidic legends by Martin Buber.20

The question is, did Heine manage to express himself on the Ostjuden in these terms simply by virtue of an inspired and farseeing intuition? It is true that in those years there began to appear in print the first written examples of Hasidic literature21 but it is highly unlikely that he was able to consult them nor can he have been inspired to express such a positive opinion by the contributions in the Zeitschrift that were published by the Verein. It is known that in the course of the nineteenth century the Wissenschaft des Judentums, which was more sensitive than the Maskilim to expressions of the popular Judaic spirit, was to judge the Hasidic phenomenon less severely. But in 1822, on the basis of what presuppositions did Heine view the opposition between Eastern and Western Jews? The reply to this question might, at first glance, be surprising: the interpretative categories which Heine uses to reappraise the authentic and integral life of the Ostjuden are, in fact, the same categories that he used to evaluate the tradition of popular German poetry as an expression of authentic life.

In order to understand this, it is enough to turn to the Harzreise, the first and highly successful of the Reisebilder published just two years after his Polish travelogue and reread the pages that describe the encounter of a cultured, carefree law student with the miners of the Harz. As happened in the case of the intellectual narrator in the Polish travelogue, here too the first-person narrator visits a community that is a world unto itself, on the margins of social and cultural development, a world where the people are outsiders who still live and work according to the ancient customs.

As in Über Polen, the narrator describes in realistic terms the extremely hard living conditions. But, exactly as it did with the Ostjuden, at a certain point, the narrator’s admiration becomes evident. The miners and their families, in fact, live a life that is completely justified in itself: “So stillstehend ruhig auch das Leben dieser Leute erscheint, so ist es dennoch ein wahrhaftes, lebendiges Leben” (HB 3,118). The narrator goes so far as to stay with the miners and take part in their community life, which is punctuated by the singing of Lieder, and the telling of legends and stories that have been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, a poetic heritage that nourishes and preserves a common identity.

The re-evaluation of the Ostjudentum is couched in the same terms that are used to evaluate the tradition of popular Germanic poetry.22 Heine’s East-West experiments are experiments that were made possible by the categories of German historical-philological science understood within a wider spectrum such as Wissenschaft des deutschen Volkes, which was born from the rib of the Historical School of Savigny and took its first steps alongside the studies initiated by Jacob Grimm on old popular German poetry.23 Grimm believed that he could rediscover the most authentic traditions of the people in the Lieder, the fairytales, the sagas and legends and in poetry understood as a choral and collective expression in the marginal poetry of uncultivated people.

His philological-cultural work served an identity function: recovering accounts of the German past meant being able to construct the future of the nation on that rediscovered and revitalized past, and to set it on the road to unification.

In this context it is possible to note certain features in common with the search for Judaic identity pursued by the Verein. I will confine myself to pointing out a series of parallels: in the Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft of 1814 Savigny had recommended the study of the juridical heritage of the Holy Roman Empire – in contrast to Thibauts’s suggestion it be abolished – so that the scientia iuris could distinguish what is vital from what is no longer relevant in the collective juridical consciousness. 24 In the same way Zunz, as mentioned earlier, set out to recognize “das Alte brauchbare, das Veraltete schädliche, das Neue wünschenswerthe”.25 The idea that the testimonials of the medieval Rabbinic tradition should be studied in a new way at a time when it was recognized that the sun of that tradition had set, brings to mind the urgency with which Jacob Grimm turned his attention to popular German poetry, sagas and fables because, as he was to say to Savigny in 1814: “Zeit zu sammeln ist jetzt noch, vor Jahrhunderten hätte es kräftiger geschehen können” and “wir [sammeln] kurz vor dem einbrechenden Untergang und dagegen”.26

As the prose of the Reisebilder and his great essays of the Thirties demonstrate, Heine would be able to question the regressive and nationalistic tendencies of that Wissenschaft des deutschen Volkes which he had known intimately from its inception when he was studying in German universities. Already in the prose of Die Nordsee. Dritte Abteilung there is a distance from all forms of the mythologizing of identitarian compactness. The fishing community of the Island of Norderney described in that text is, in fact, also a tight-knit community that lives in an authentically poetic dimension like the Ostjuden and the miners of the Harz.

But now, within a philosophical-historical perspective, Heine confines himself to noting the great pain, “[den] große Schmerz über den Verlust der National-Besonderheiten, die in der Allgemeinheit neuerer Kultur verloren gehen, ein[en] Schmerz, der jetzt in den Herzen aller Völker zuckt” (HB 3, 326).27 This affirmation also sums up for him the final sense of the discussions of the Verein about the position to be assigned to the Judaic people and the Judaic spirit in the vicissitudes of World history. The great pain pulsating in the heart of all peoples also concerns the meaning and fate of Judaism in modernity that the Verein had tried in vain to recover and redefine.

That attempt had also pursued Heine himself in Der Rabbi von Bacherach, the novel he conceived as a powerful historical fresco that would reckon with that great, specifically Jewish pain and that was also to include a re-elaboration of the myth of the Sephardic Jews in the Spanish Golden Age. The project – unsurprisingly, given its premises – was to remain uncompleted. The Rhine Rabbi, although educated in the highly cultured and tolerant school of Toledo, would never manage to return to the liberal Spain of the three cultures. In the last pages of the first chapter, where the writing proceeded in parallel with the writing of Harzreise, there is an implicit acknowledgement: the esoteric goal of the Verein, “die Vermittlung des historischen Judentums mit der modernen Wissenschaft” (HB 9,183) was not, in fact, achievable. Poetic creation can follow other paths. Here no mediation can be envisaged nor can there exist a plausible symbiosis between the world of the Rhine Father with its Nibelung treasure and the Judaic melodies of the Haggadah that rise to the lips of the beautiful Sarah in flight with her Rabbi husband as the umpteenth pogrom is under way in the community of Bacherach. As has been convincingly demonstrated,28 it is here that the ‘third space’ of poetry emerges, a hybrid place in which over-sharply defined dichotomies and opposites interact in a play of perspectives that follow at the same time the fracture lines of the former. The last image that comes to the mind of the Rabbi’s wife as she is rocked by the waves of the Rhine is an Oriental fatherland that exists nowhere except in the individual and collective Jewish memory: “es zeigte sich oben die heilige Stadt Jerusalem, mit ihren Türmen und Toren; in goldner Pracht leuchtete der Tempel; […] im Allerheiligsten kniete der fromme König David, […] und lieblich ertönte sein Gesang und Saitenspiel, – und selig lächelnd entschlief die schöne Sara” (HB 1, 474). The Eastern fatherland in which the harp of David rings out is the ideal poetic space that Heine claims for himself and his vocation as a Jewish and German writer.29 The poet, to borrow from the phantasmagorical genealogy of a poem in Romanzero, the summa of Heine’s East-West imagination, is undoubtedly a pariah, a Schlehmil, but, above all, he is “der absolute Traumweltherrscher” (HB 11, 136).