Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity [Hardcover]

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function.Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identityoffers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

It is . . . with a sense of both relief and exhilaration that one turns to Jonathan Hess'sMiddlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity, a study that is well written, researched, and argued and that has much to say about memory, identity, and middlebrow fiction written for German Jewish audiences. This book opens our eyes to the vast corpus of popular fiction written by Jews for Jews in nineteenth-century Germany, discovering a tradition of Jewish literature that is in many ways still with us today. Carefully researched and clearly written, this book will redefine the field. It brings to light a treasure trove of little known novels, recasting what we thought we knew about German-Jewish identity, and the German-Jewish literary sphere, in the nineteenth century by showing how Jews from across the ideological spectrum eagerly produced and consumed popular literature that promoted Jewish identity to an expanding middle clS4