Synopses & Reviews
German Jewry. Among other things—or rather, above all—the term evokes creativity and destruction. Bambi's Jewish Roots: Essays on the Makers and Destroyers of German-Jewish Culture is about both sides of that dichotomy, and also the links between them. It is about the German Jews—such as Heine, Freud, and Kafka—whose accomplishments have played such a significant role in shaping our modern sensibilities. And it is about the figures and forces—e.g., Hitler, Jew hatred, and racism—that effectively wiped out the Jewish presence in Germany.
Bambi's Jewish Roots is also about how the pressures generated by anti-Semitism and the experience of exile helped at a terrible price to drive German Jewry to its intellectual successes. Finally, Reitter reflects on attempts to tell the stories of these makers and destroyers, and the cultural dynamics in which they were enmeshed. Indeed, in large part that, too, is the subject of these reflections—the act of writing about the life and the demise of German Jewry.
Synopsis
An illuminating account of the life and demise of German Jewry.
Synopsis
Paul Reitter has won acclaim as both a scholar and a public critic for his writing on German Jewish culture in the twentieth century.
Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of Reitter's essayistic work, exploring the lives of well-known figures and revealing surprising new perspectives. These include how Felix Salten's Zionist commitments manifest themselves in his most famous work, the novel Bambi; what Gershom Scholem's diaries tell us about his development as a thinker and person; why German-Jewish writers hated Stefan Zweig so passionately; where myth-busting books about Franz Kafka have indulged in myth-building; how Freud's Moses and Monotheism offers a theory of Jewish self-hatred more than an explanation of anti-Semitism; and why Heinrich Heine felt aburning need to distance himself from his fellow liberal Jewish critic Ludwig Borne.
The works collected here, many of which were originally published in forums such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, have earned Reitter his reputation as a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic.
Synopsis
Synopsis
Synopsis
Paul Reitter's scholarship on German-Jewish culture has won acclaim in both specialized journals and forums like the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, and the TLS, which named his study of Karl Kraus one of the best books of 2008. Writing for such publications as The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, Reitter has also produced essays that address topics related to his expertise but written for a wider audience, earning a reputation for being a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic in the popular intellectual arena. Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of his essayistic work, which take on an array of figures and concerns, from the contradictions in Heinrich Heine's self-understanding to the echoes of Zionism in Felix Salten's novel Bambi.
About the Author
Paul Reitter is Associate Professor in German Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University, USA. He is the author of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (2008), which was named in The Times Literary Supplement as one of the best books of 2008, and On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred (2012). He has contributed essays and reviews to Harper's Magazine and The Nation, and collaborated with Jonathan Franzen on The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus (2013).
Table of Contents
Preface I. Self-Reflections 1. The Story of a Friendship Gone Bad: Heinrich Heine on Ludwig Börne
2. Irrational Man: Gershom Sholem's Decisive Years
3. The Text Life of Dreams: Arthur Schnitzler's Nighttime Diaries
II. Legendary Lives 4. Misreading Kafka
5. The Wittgensteins and the Perils of Family Biography
6. Dust-to-Dust Song: Nelly Sachs's Life
7. Sadness in the Mountains: Freud and the Upside of Transience
8. The Middle Way of Erich Fromm
III. Beyond the Canon 9. Bambi's Jewish Roots
10. Appraising the Collector: The Life and Work of Stefan Zweig
11. Fear and Self-Loathing in fin-de-siecle Vienna: Otto
Weininger's Sex and Character
IV. Renderings 12. That Other Metamorphosis: Translating Kafka
13.
The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and the Task of the Retranslator
14. The Poetics and Politics of Hugo von Hofmannsthal
V. Studying German Jewry 15. Kafka's Identity Politics
16. Whose Jewish: Theorizing German-Jewish Culture
17. Rabbis Making Role Models: German-Jewish Middlebrow Literature
18. Schnitzler's Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go?
19. Rereading Freud's
Moses Again
20. Erich Auerbach's Exile and the Motion of
Mimesis
VI. The End 21. Hitler Viennese Waltz
22. The Führer Furor
23. Holocaust Imponderables
24. Racism: Coded as Culture
25. Gender Unbender: Pierre Bourdieu and the Enigmatic Durability of Bad Values
26. The Paradoxes of Holocaust Literature: A Guide for the Darkly Perplexed
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index