In the face of the irresistible rise of capitalism and the invasive development of scientific and technical civilization, of large industrial production and the universe of commodities and market values, there was a cultural reaction – now desperate and tragic, now resigned – in various social milieux, but particularly in the traditional intelligentsia. This reaction could be described as romantic anti-capitalist.
Anti-capitalist romanticism – which, we repeat, must not be confused with Romanticism as a literary style – is a world-view characterized by a (more or less) radical critique of industrial/bourgeois civilization in the name of pre-capitalist social, cultural, ethical or religious values.2 In Central Europe, and especially in Germany, this Weltanschauung was, at the turn of the century, the dominant sensibility in cultural and academic life. The academic mandarinate, a traditionally influential and privileged social category, was one of its primary social foundations. Threatened by the new system that tended to reduce it to a marginal and powerless position, it reacted with horror to what it considered a soulless, standardized, superficial and materialistic society.3 One of the principal themes of this critique, recurring like an obsession among writers, poets, philosophers and historians, was the conflict between Kultur, a spiritual universe of ethical, religious or aesthetic values, and Zivilisation, the materialistic and vulgar world of economic and technical progress. If, to use Max Weber’s implacably lucid expression, capitalism is disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt), anti-capitalist romanticism must be considered first and foremost as a nostalgic and desperate attempt at re-enchantment of the world, one of whose main aspects was a return to religion, a rebirth of various forms of religious spirituality.
The romantic anti-capitalist world-view was present in an astonishing variety of cultural works and social movements of this period: novels by Thomas Mann and Theodor Storm; poems by Stefan George and Richard Beer-Hoffmann; the sociology of Tönnies, Simmel or Mannheim; the historical school of economics; the Kathedersozialismus of Gustav Schmoller, Adolph Wagner or Lujo Brentano; the philosophy of Heidegger and Spengler, the Youth Movement and the Wandervogel, Symbolism and Expressionism. United in its rejection of capitalism in the name of nostalgia for the past, this cultural configuration was totally heterogeneous from a political point of view: reactionary ideologues (Moeller Van der Bruck, Julius Langbehn, Ludwig Klages) as well as revolutionary utopians (Bloch, Landauer) could be characterized as anti-capitalist romantics. It might be said that the main part of literary, artistic and social-scientific (in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften) production in Germany and Central Europe occurred in the magnetic field of this movement.
What consequences did these economic, social and cultural developments have for the Jewish communities of Mitteleuropa? The flourishing of capitalism created a favourable environment in which the Jewish bourgeoisie could blossom. The Jewish population left the ghettos and villages and quickly became urbanized: in 1867, seventy per cent of Prussian Jews lived in small villages; by 1927, the figure had dropped to fifteen per cent.4 The same phenomenon occurred in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Jewish population was concentrated in Budapest, Prague and, above all, Vienna. (I can even cite my own family as an example: towards the end of the nineteenth century, my grandparents left their respective villages in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and settled in the capital of the Empire.) An upper and middle bourgeoisie formed in the cities and took a larger share of business, trade, industry and banking. As this ‘Jewish middle class’ grew richer, and as civil and political restrictions on it were lifted (between 1869 and 1871 in Germany), it set itself only one goal: to be socially and culturally assimilated into the German nation. A letter written in 1916 by the Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau (who was to become a minister in the Weimar Republic) typified this mentality:
I have – and I know – nothing but German blood, German ethnicity, and German people. If I were to be driven from my German land, I would continue to be German, and nothing would change that… My ancestors and I have been nourished of German soil and of the German mind … and we have had no thoughts that were not German or for Germany.5
This example, of course, represents virtually the outer line, but even for those who continued to think of themselves as Jewish, German culture was the only valid culture. All that remained from Judaism were some ritualistic hangovers (such as a trip to the synagogue on Yom Kippur) and biblical monotheism. The examplars of wisdom were no longer Moses or Solomon, but rather Lessing and Goethe, Schiller and Kant. Schiller in particular was truly venerated: his Complete Works were required in the library of every self-respecting German or Austrian Jew (when my parents left Vienna in 1935, they took their copy with them). In Germany, the most resolute assimilationist current was the Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens [Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Denomination]. Describing this social milieu (to which his own family belonged), Gershom Scholem noted:
Education and readings were oriented exclusively to Germany, and in the majority of cases, any dissidence, notably in the direction of a return to Judaism, was met with decided opposition. Assimilation ran very deep. Each time, they emphasized over and over, albeit with slight differences, that we belonged to the German nation, at the center of which we formed a religious group, like the others. What was even more paradoxical was that in the majority of the cases, the religious element – which was the only difference – did not exist nor did it exert any influence over how they conducted their lives.6
None the less, it would be wrong to regard this thirst for cultural integration as mere opportunism: it could also express sincere and authentic convictions. Even as profoundly religious a Jew as Franz Rosenzweig wrote in 1923, shortly after the publication of his great theological work, Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption):
I believe that my return to Judaism (Verjüdung) made me a better and not a worse German… And I believe that Der Stern will one day be duly recognized and appreciated as a gift that the German mind owes to its Jewish enclave.7
Assimilation was successful to a certain degree, but it came up against an insurmountable social barrier. According to Moritz Goldstein’s famous lament of unfulfilled love, which he wrote in 1912 (‘Deutsch-Jüdischer Parnass’),
in vain we think of ourselves as Germans; others think of us as completely un-German [undeutsch]… But were we not raised on German legends? Does not the Germanic forest live within us, can we too not see its elves and its gnomes?8
Assimilation also came up against de facto exclusion from a series of areas: State administration, the armed forces, the magistrature, education – and after 1890 in particular, against growing anti-Semitism, which had its ideologues, activists and press. For all of these reasons, the Jewish communities in Central Europe did not truly integrate into the surrounding society. To use Max Weber’s classic definition, they shared several of the hallmarks of a pariah people: ‘a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization’, and characterized by endogamy on the one hand and by negative privileges, both political and social, on the other.9 Of course, their condition could not be compared to that of the castes in India, or of the Jewish ghettoes in the Middle Ages: economic security and (formal) equality of civic rights had been won through emancipation. But socially, the Jew continued to be a pariah and realized, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘how treacherous was the promise of equality which assimilation held out’.10
In Germany and in Central Europe, the university was the royal road to respectability and honour. As Friedrich Paulsen, the neo-Kantian philosopher, wrote, in Germany citizens with a higher education made up a type of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; not to hold a university degree was a ‘shortcoming’ that neither wealth nor prestigious birth could fully make up for.11 The logic of cultural assimilation