Freud, Jews and Other Germans, by Peter Gay
Herman, Russell
BOOKS IN REVIEW - Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture Peter Gay / Oxford University Press / $12.95 The "German problem" and the "Jew- ish question" rank among the...
...In short, his account of the position of Jews in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany is oversimplified, because his understanding of assimilation lacks a historical perspective...
...This prejudice, Gay observes, was just one more emblem of their Germanness...
...And many of the Jews who were Modernists were not so because they were Jews...
...His theory of psychoanalysis is commonly believed to be the ideology of a secular Jewish intellectual, but Gay shows it to be nothing of the sort...
...Gay's strategy is to expose common misconceptions of the German-Jewish experience vis-a-vis Modernism...
...those of us born here are constantly amazed by the glamor it seems to hold for the bedazzled or ravenously ambitious newcomer and, one step removed, for thousands of pop-fiction readers...
...As Gay himself notes, German-Jews tended to be only too anxious to prove to themselves that they were good Germans...
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...The Holocaust created a ghastly link between modern German and Jewish history, confounding still more the historical puzzle of German-Jewish experience...
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...According to Gay, the perception of the German-Jew as the archetypal modern in society and the archetypal Modernist in culture is inaccurate because it gives Jews more publicity than they deserve —whether favorable or unfavorable...
...Even the earliest proponents of civil equality for Jews, dating from the late eighteenth century, were ambivalent about the position that Jews, as a group, were to assume in gentile society...
...As for those Jews who participated in Berlin's cultural avant-garde, they were not there because they were Jews...
...Professor Milton Friedman has said of On the Brink that it is "Good economics as well as good reading...
...Indeed, Gay suggests that Freud raised his cultural "empathy...
...To order your TAXES poster, send $3.95 (includes all taxes) to: TAXES Poster 300 W. 19 Terr...
...His specific target is the perception of the German-Jew as a "metaphor for modernity"—that is, as a symbol "to himself, to his admirers and detractors alike, for the profound, often traumatic changes that made Western culture what it is today...
...Jewish assimilation was in truth a largely one-sided affair...
...And he concludes that, although German-Jews were tragically wrong about the viability of assimilation, "they had good reason to believe that they were right," especially before World War I. It is at this point that Gay's interpretation of the German-Jewish experience must be challenged...
...Moreover, we now know that there were pockets of enduring German resistance to Jewish assimilation in virtually all sectors of society, particularly politics...
...Not that even the worst of Washington Novels does not contain a grain or two of truth...
...An example of this was the obsessive and selfflagellatory devotion of Hermann Levi, the conductor, to the Wagners...
...One certainly hopes so, and can commend the Steins for producing, if not a literary triumph, a solid piece of "white" propaganda that may educate readers to a problem about which they would otherwise 32 The American Spectator April 1978...
...On the contrary, Gay points out that German-Jews gravitated towards the mainstream of German culture as much as they were permitted to do so...
...64108 The American Spectator April 1978 31 cultural life of the city...
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...Unbridled monetary expansion has had and can have the tragic effects that the Steins portray so dramatically...
...In order to correct the historical picture, Gay attempts to rediscover German-Jews "at work in the world from which they came and on which they acted...
...You'll find it makes a wonderful conversation piece and serves as a handy reminder of the multitude of government programs your dollars support...
...Six of Gay's essays on this sub}ect are collected in Freud Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, which is but the first fruit of a cultural history of Imperial Germany on which the author is presently at work...
...He sees the "intermittent civil war" among the Jews themselves as evidence of this...
...Judged by this standard, Ben and Herb Stein's On the Brink is a work of redeeming political merit and deserves- serious consideration...
...Gay, however, does not address himself to the crucial problem of Jewish group survival, despite the fact that it was to become the bane of Jewish fortunes in Germany...
...but it is a chilling and economically convincing warning of what could happen in the worst of all political worlds, with the OPEC cartel plunging the industrial West into chaos and liberal politicians deepening the crisis by mindlessly cranking out reams of worthless paper currency, thereby creating a wave of Weimar-style hyperinflation and its attendant political and social nastiness...
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...Much of the criticism such works receive for their wooden characters, trite dialogue, and cockeyed plots is unfair...
...This ambivalence continued in the late nineteenth century with the anti-Semitic German historian, Treitschke, and his ideological heirs...
...And Berlin Jews made significant contributions to the FEELING TAXED...
...Sigmund Freud, for example, is persistently misunderstood...
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...There were many Modernists who were not Jews, many Jews who were not Modernists...
...Russell Herman had experienced the same objections and hesitations himself...
...Berlin, to be sure, was the center of German-Jewish culture, as it was for German culture as a whole...
...BOOK REVIEW Against All Enemies Ervin S. Duggan & Ben Wattenberg / Doubleday / $10.00 Full Disclosure William Safire / Doubleday / $10.95 On the Brink Benjamin Stein & Herbert Stein / Simon & Schuster / $8.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Only in the eyes of true power-junkies, of whom there are many, and the occasional bemused history buff, do the monotonous and frequently sordid everyday workings of political and social Washington take on a lurid glitter...
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...Perhaps this fictional episode will help us to avoid a real episode...
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...Above all, most politicians are shrouded by an overpowering banality...
...Hence the Washington Novelist's dilemma if he happens to be a writer of talent, taste, sensitivity, or depth: There are few genuine Washington characters or situations which lend themselves to deep, sensitive, or tasteful treatment...
...Gay next attacks another tenacious misconception: the belief that there was a distinctly Jewish element in the culture of Imperial and Weimar Berlin...
...His purpose is to restore complexities and contradictions that have been lost with the passing of time...
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...Marshalling an impressive array of German-Jews of widely divergent religious commitments, socioeconomic backgrounds, and artistic styles, Gay concludes that "just as there was no Jewish way to cut furs, there was no Jewish way to paint portraits, play Beethoven, produce Ibsen, or fence in the Olympics...
...It was (and is) an illusion—and a revealing one—to perceive something "Jewish" in their contributions to German and western culture...
...Gay's rejection of the perception of the German-Jew as a "metaphor for modernity" is predicated on the assumption of an advanced state of Jewish assimilation, a condition in which German-Jews could make contributions to German culture as Germans, not Jews...
...Dullsville- on - the - Potomac has become a stock setting for potboiler novels and a shabby flag of convenience for scripts that pass in the night...
...BOOK REVIEW Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture Peter Gay / Oxford University Press / $12.95 The "German problem" and the "Jew- ish question" rank among the most perplexing issues of the recent past...
...But among its many postwar interpreters, only Peter Gay has placed that experience in the context of German Modernist culture...
...Listed are the majority of all Federal, State and local taxes...
...Freud was a man of cosmopolitan intellect, thoroughly committed to science...
...into a principle of style...
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...When Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, he received it with enthusiasm, delighted in being connected with the quintessentially cultivated German...
...when sincere, tend to shallow fanaticism and, when ambitious, tend to blind amorality...
...Native German-Jews often held anti-Semitic stereotypes of East European Jews who had immigrated to Germany, and especially to Berlin...
...s essays and criticism appear frequently in The American Spectator, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, History Today, and other American and European periodicals...
...For, despite what you may have been told, politics generally makes for dull bedfellows—plodding, plotting drones who, Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...The result—with infrequent exceptions such as Henry Adams' Democracy and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children (despite its title, not a biography of Roman Polanski)— is usually a specialized, narrower version of the late Jacqueline Susann's revolting regimen of scandal, topicality, and hackneyed corn/porn, only worth noticing when an interesting political principle is injected between bedroom, barroom, and Oval Office...
...At such times the Washington Novel ceases, strictly speaking, to be a novel and becomes a propaganda tract—clever or dull, good or bad, depending on one's own tastes and opinions...
...Often they are realistic reflections of Washington and its inhabitants—as anyone who has ever managed to stay awake through an entire State of the Union address or a typical Capitol Hill reception can attest...
...In Gay's felicitous phrase, the "Berlin-Jewish spirit" is a "dogma in search of some doubts...
...It could happen here...
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...By debunking this and many other myths surrounding German-Jews and Modernist culture, Gay has produced a valuable and informative book...
...Their contributions, however, were neither specifically Jewish nor typically Modernist...
...On the Brink is no great shakes as literature...
...In fact, by participating in the literary culture and sharing the moral values of the German-speaking world of his day, Freud was able to anticipate many of the objections to his theory of psychoanalysis, for he Russell Herman is a student in history at McGill University in Montreal...
...o the native, Washington often seems a bloated, one-company town...
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...And there was a historicalprecedent for this resistance...
...Still, the questionableness of Gay's judgments does not detract from the validity of his central argument: that the view of the German-Jew as a "metaphor for modernity" is grossly inaccurate...
...This 22" x 28" collector's item is printed in Money green and Harsh-Reality black, and is suitable for framing...
...He was at most ambiguously committed to Judaism...
...This view is very much alive at present, having received its most recent (and ludicrous) formulation in John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, a book which Gay treats in the appropriate manner: He ignores it completely...
...In such company, even power can be more of a sedative than an aphrodisiac, Henry Kissinger's assertions to the contrary...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
