Fleeing Tradition

...Were German-speaking Austrians real Germans...

...Every Passover, Jews read about the four sons of which the Torah speaks: the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one so foolish he does not even know the right questions...

...The material would be abundant, and the results would correct the widespread and untenable notion that Jews are by endowment more intelligent than other people...

...Reviewed by Robert S. Rosen Associate professor of German and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, CUNY_ Peter Gay acknowledges in the Preface that these sue essays, which begin just before the Wilhelminian Empire, are "deeply personal...

...This stance contrasts sharply with that of Hermann Levi, the subject of an essay subtitled, "A Study in Service of Self-Hatred...

...Neither did Jews play as dominant a role in literary culture as is generally assumed...

...Between the pieces on Freud and Levi lie two essays central to one of the book's major concerns...

...The greatest innovators in art, for example, numbered not a single Jew among them...

...and "What is typically 'Jewish' anyway...

...The boundaries of German culture, Gay rightly contends, extended beyond the frontiers of the German Reich...

...What was the share of " Jewishness" in the "Berlin-Jewish spirit...

...Thus for the cultural historian, all of German-speaking Europe, despite many significant regional differences, is one domain, and someone like Sigmund Freud, "though doubly marginal, both as an Austrian and as a Jew," must be considered "a German...

...The author seeks to explode the myth that psychoanalysis is "somehow characteristically Viennese," or even characteristically Jewish...

...Far from being avant-garde, many German Jews were decidedly conservative...

...Encounter with Modernism: German Jews in Wil-helminian Culture" and "The Berlin-Jewish Spirit: A Dogma in Search of Some Doubts" assess the contributions of Jews to German culture and to Modernism...

...Yet to his everlasting credit, he never denied his Jewishness...

...There are many stories, too, especially in Yiddish, about simpletons and ignoramuses...

...Since Gay was born around the middle of the Weimar period, however, the term "autobiography" is obviously not intended in any narrow, literal sense...

...It brings to mind the letter Gershom Scholem wrote Hannah Arendt about her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, calling attention to the absence in her analysis of what the Jewish tradition refers to as Ahavat Yisrael (love of the Jewish people...

...The charge-or boast-of presumed Jewish hunger for experiment in the arts and thirst for innovation in literature is largely myth, fostered in part by Jews themselves...

...Gay also singles out Freud's courage: "To be the destroyer of human illusions, as Freud was by intention and by results, was to make oneself the target of the anti-Semite...

...And both offer provocative insights into the nature of the creative process-a fusion of past influences and originality-and the role of criticism in the shaping of Modernism...

...principled Moderns...

...In a final blow to supposed Jewish superiority, bound to be much quoted, Gay calls for "a historical and sociological study that desperately needs to be undertaken: that of stupid Jews...

...I find this statement disconcerting, and not because I disagree about the existence of stupid Jews...

...In that chapter we read that Freud felt "his explorations, rigorously and patiently pursued, might provide a master key to the whole range of human experience-to art, politics, and religion no less than to dreams, slips, jokes, and sexual life...

...The painful subject of Jews in German lands, and indeed just about everywhere, calls out for the deep and sensitive scrutiny that a psychoanalytic interpretation can provide...

...Anxious to free Jews from carrying the burden of responsibility for Modernity, he is at pains to show them as having been the same as everyone else...

...The author will be encountered in these pages solely as a chronicler of men and events he strongly identifies with...

...On the contrary, anti-Semitic prejudice led to his referring to himself as a Jew rather than as a German...

...Examining Freud's style (and we know from his Style in History that Gay believes style offers access to a writer's "private, psychological world") for clues to influences, he finds besides Lessing, acknowledged by Freud, allusions to a whole range of literary figures, both German and Austrian...

...Although the perspective from which these questions are raised aspires to be historically objective, it is actually that of an assimilated Jew who no doubt identifies with the "many Jews [for whom] the flight from tradition was not cowardly evasion but a flight into humanity-a flight they undertook in the company of many non-Jews...

...Both pieces are concerned with the changing perceptions of what is modern, the function of the critic and the dangers of generalization...

...Levi, a brilliant conductor and the son of a rabbi, was much tormented by being a Jew...

...It is an intensely rational attitude toward life that we sense as well in the author of these essays...

...a piece of autobiography, part of reckoning with my origins...

...They were not predisposed by cultural heritage, or their social situation, to become "cultural rebels...

...The founder of psychoanalysis, as representative a father figure as one could possibly choose, is the subject of the initial essay, "Sigmund Freud: A German and His Discontents...

...Surely that is freely acknowledged...

...Gay holds, first, that these contributions were "German in form and substance...

...Of all the essays I found the one on Freud most fascinating, perhaps because I, too, am a Jew who was born in Vienna of Eastern European descent...

...What I object to is Gay's tone...

...Second, he asserts it is quite illogical to maintain that Jews were simultaneously wholly like Germans and "notably distinct...

...True, Freud had no religious attachment to Judaism, and considered all religion "an illusion akin to neurosis...

...Nevertheless, it is truly the world of his fathers that we are introduced to here -german Jews of the late 19th and early 20th century, caught in the sweep of assimilation...

...Why not to history as well...

...Reluctantly, since I admire Peter Gay, I have come to sense this lack in his tone, and perhaps in some of his ideas...

...It goes on to explore those who did so in virulently anti-Semitic terms-like Otto Weininger, author of Geschlecht und Charakter, who was driven to conversion and finally to suicide...

...Apart from style, what Gay admires most in Freud are a readiness to revise insights when new information so demands, an exemplary honesty, demonstrated above all in the psychoanalyst's self-analysis, and a commitment to truth...

...Gay ends Freud, Jews and Other Germans with two essays-one on Brahms and one on Eduard Hanslick, a music critic...

...Under pressure, especially from the composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima, he displayed embarrassing obsequiousness...

...But the essay does not stop with Jews who renounced their heritage...

...they were determined by the use of the German language, "the great unifier...

...Gay paid tribute to such qualities of mind and character, and in almost identical terms, in his first book, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx...

...Thus German Jewry's loathing of Eastern European Jews is accounted for not only by the familiar explanation that German Jews feared being identified with those newcomers who were "uncouth, noisy, greedy, truly alien, and distinctly inferior," but also by the fact that German Jews were in fact Germans and wholly shared the German attitudes...

...His real father is mentioned only once, in passing...

...The conclusion is unmistakable: the culture at Freud's command was "German culture...

...In addition, Gay raises some rather dubious questions: "Were German-born Jews German Jews or Jewish Germans...