Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Various signs of insecurity in German-Jewish life were linked to these ambiguities. German Jews were more wary than others about making visible their connections to co-religionists elsewhere, for fear of contributing to their own separation. When English and French Jews organized a common defense against a charge of ritual murder in Damascus in 1840 (the “blood libel” had a history going back to the Middle Ages), and later in response to the formation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860, German-Jewish leaders refused to join them. Writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson voiced his resistance to the “political articulation” of Jewish concerns, especially on the international level: “Even the proper name ‘Alliance’ must raise fear in the hearts of thousands of Christians who might be afraid of an organized secret power uniting the Jews all over the world.” Earlier, a sense that they faced common situations and problems had linked French and German Jews; by the mid century the contrast between the civic equality that opened many opportunities to the first and the persisting uncertainties faced by the second fed a sense of estrangement between the two communities.34 The greater pressure felt by the German Jews to present themselves as modern and cultured also underlay the much greater strength of the Reform movement in Germany than elsewhere. And significant numbers of middle-class German Jews responded to the discomfort they felt in their country of birth by moving to England during the nineteenth century (earlier it had been mostly poorer Jews who took this path); among those who contemplated such a move without making it was Sigmund Freud, who “never ceased to envy his two half-brothers in Manchester” after visiting them in 1875. English Jews of German origin exhibited the continuing need they felt to demonstrate their acceptability not just by dominating the small movement of Reform in Britain, but also by becoming Anglicans or Unitarians in markedly larger numbers than those born in the country; the latter, as noted above, experienced an easier compatibility between Jewish identity and participation in society at large.35

  Finally, there was something abstract and impractical about the way German Jews pursued Bildung, making their devotion to it a source of the same ambiguous relationship to the larger society that David Sorkin identifies in their associations. However lofty the tone in which German officials and academics celebrated classical and humanistic Kultur, higher education possessed a supremely practical side for such people, providing entry into prestigious careers and the social status they conferred. Jews could make use of their education in a number of ways to be sure (in medicine, increasingly in law, in journalism and writing), but well into the twentieth century many impediments hindered their pursuit of careers in both state service and academic life (as Max Weber lamented in his famous 1919 lecture on “Science as a Vocation,” the barriers to advancement encountered by his friend Simmel much in his mind), depriving them of the practical advantages Bildung conveyed on others.

  That there was something airy and visionary about the German-Jewish mode of cultivation has been suggested in a different way by George Mosse, who views it as rooted in Enlightenment notions of rationality and individual self-development that grew less relevant and credible as economic and political change gave romantic notions that emphasized the power of passion and symbolic identification greater purchase in an age of nationalism and ideological rivalry. The Jewish commitment to a form of national identity “that no longer corresponded to the realities of German life” isolated Jews from the rest of society. Mosse’s formulation of the problem has only limited validity, since many non-Jewish liberals and social democrats maintained humanitarian visions rooted in the eighteenth century without being marginalized in the same way, and also because, as Shulamit Volkov rightly notes, Bildung was never an exclusively rationalistic conception, making room for feeling and sensibility, and tied up from the start with aspirations for national unity to which Mosse’s perspective gives too little weight. What kept Jews from becoming full members of the nation (in France as well as in Germany) had more to do with those who looked on them as outsiders than with their way of trying to enter in.36

  But the more exclusively cultural quality of the Jewish investment in Bildung was part of the general weakness of their position, and Mosse’s observations accord with other indications that Jews may have contributed to that weakness by looking to cosmopolitanism as a substitute for the increasing fin-de-siècle pressure to organize politics around ethnic and national identity. The most interesting instances come from Austria, but the kind of Jewish orientation they reveal was present elsewhere too. The Habsburg government found its inherited task of overseeing an ethnically and linguistically diverse empire increasingly difficult as nationalistic forces, their self-consciousness deepened and augmented by more effective communication and organization, demanded more autonomy; after 1918 defeat in war would complete the Empire’s dissolution into its component parts. Jews were a kind of “odd-people-out” in this mix, their collective existence relying much less on forms of local autonomy than on the weave of distant connections we have tried to highlight; to them the Habsburg state appeared not as a barrier to their own national aspirations but as a shield against the dangers posed by other people’s. In the age of liberalism and nationalism they became, as Hannah Arendt famously put it, the “state people.” This did not prevent some Jewish Bürger from conceiving the same strong identification with German Bildung as their cousins to the north; in Prague, attachment to German language and culture gave Jews a bulwark against rising Czech national feeling, and in Vienna the young Freud was among a group of students drawn to German cultural nationalism in the 1870s and 1880s. The turn to anti-Semitism among nationalists soon revealed the dangers of such a position, reviving or reinforcing Jewish loyalty to the Habsburg regime for some, while opening a way toward Zionism for others. But such allegiances remained perfectly compatible with devotion to German literature, thought, or music, reinforced by virtue of the aspirations to universal humanism that ran powerfully through it. To intellectuals such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, German in culture but Habsburg loyalists in politics, one of the attractions of the Habsburg system was that it offered a way of “mediating between universal humanity and cultural particularity.”37

  For others, however, the same cosmopolitan impulses could issue in a more one-sided identification with “universality.” Emblematic of this outcome was Karl Popper, the influential logician of science and liberal social thinker. Born in 1902 to parents who had converted to Christianity two years earlier, and who were typical of assimilated German-speaking Jews whose social life was predominately lived in the company of others like themselves, Popper became a strong enemy of every form of national and ethnic identity (and of religion), notably both the German and Zionist ones. Such attitudes had roots in older liberalism, but as Malachi Hacohen notes in his valuable studies of Popper, they were also supported by participation in cosmopolitan networks linking intellectuals and institutions over a wide area, of which the Vienna Circle of logical positivists largely inspired by Popper (although he did not share all their views) was exemplary. “Multinational networks of intellectual exchange gave tangible existence to Central European cosmopolitanism during the fin-de-siècle and interwar years. The Vienna Circle, for example, developed, during the interwar period, an organizational network in central Europe’s urban centers: Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Lwow, Bratislava.” Jews made up the majority of participants in these linkages; and either because of this preponderance or from some sense that there was something peculiarly Jewish about such social relations, even some non-Jewish members of the Circle were widely thought to be Jewish, notably the philosopher Moritz Schlick. Much was accomplished through these structures, but as Hacohen notes, there was something disquietingly “thin and fragile” about them, all the more evident in an age of rising ethnic and national consciousness. “German was their lingua franca, and they critically appropriated German culture traditions. This limited their appeal to non-German intelligentsia, while making them an
athema to German nationalists.”38

  Typical as this situation was of its time and place, it recalls the conditions in which other intellectual reformers, similarly reliant on distant networks and uncomfortable with the existing forms of local life, found themselves. In eighteenth-century Germany the advocates of Aufklärung were recognized as “the actual men of the nation, because their immediate circle of activity is all of Germany,” but they were simultaneously described as subject to a peculiar loneliness (Einsamkeit), brought on by the thinness of the social fabric they were able to cultivate through their distant connections.39 The condition Hacohen sees as exemplified in Central Europe by the Vienna Circle also merits comparison with the role assigned to transnational networks at much the same time by Émile Durkheim, like Popper a Jew whose in many ways thoroughgoing assimilation never succeeded in effacing the marks of his origin.

  Durkheim was moved to value such cosmopolitan connections by a curious tension in his social and moral theory. Animated partly by his need to affirm both his Jewish roots and his French identity, Durkheim sought to locate the source of morality in the “collective consciousness” of society. Groups at various levels had to provide their members with strong moral direction, because as individuals people were driven by self-centered needs and impulses; only an entity that transcended their egotisms could bring firm moral principles into the world. But such a sociological grounding of morality posed a dilemma Durkheim did not overlook, namely that societies can be one-sided too, imparting a limited and self-interested perspective to their members, rather than furthering altruistic and universal goals. “If society is something universal in relation to the individual,” he wrote in 1912, “it is none the less an individuality itself, which has its own personal physiognomy and idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and consequently particularizes whatever it thinks of.” In his time, however, he thought he could see evidence that these narrowing impulses would come to be “progressively rooted out,” thanks to the appearance of a “social life of a new sort,” the “international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs,” and that would go on to engender a universal human morality.40 Durkheim’s position was actually closer to that of people like Zweig and Roth than to Popper, since he felt a strong identification with France, as they did with Habsburg Austria, and he saw the universal forms of citizenship posited by its republican tradition as already implying the wider cosmopolitan universalism to come. All the same he never fully escaped the equivocations that his idealization of society created for him, since the cosmopolitan networks to which he appealed would prove no more able to generate a universal morality than were structures such as the Vienna Circle to provide people like Popper with a secure substitute for national allegiances.41

  Cases such as these bring us back to the relationship between extended networks of means and the abstraction from concrete things and people that operating through them involves and fosters. Alongside the power that such forms of activity can generate there arise dangers and weaknesses, one of which is the temptation to think that people can live wholly or chiefly inside the network itself, no longer constrained by the conditions that obtain at the places from which they enter into it. It is a temptation to which those who operate mostly through cultural networks may be particularly exposed, since in more worldly situations the negative impact of ignoring immediate practical conditions is likely to have quicker and more tangible effects. Whether in general Jews have been more open to such a enticements than others is a question to which no answer may be possible, but the situations in which intellectuals of Jewish origin such as Durkheim and Popper had to operate may have encouraged them to attribute more potency to the cosmopolitan networks they valued than these actually possessed. Ironically, to do so mirrored the image of Jewish networks projected at the same time by those who misguidedly attributed overweening strength to them, a troubling and ultimately tragic parallel, all the more since by 1900 other and more powerful webs of communication and action had come to overshadow those to which Jews owed much of their special compatibility with modern bourgeois life.

  Part III A culture of means

  12 Public places, private spaces

  The transformation of culture: an outline

  The nineteenth century brought a heightened attention to “culture,” both as a particular sphere of life and as a word with varied and disputed meanings. The term now began to take on its two chief modern senses, one referring to the domain of literature and the arts (originally in their “high” rather than “popular” modes, a distinction much weakened today), and the other to the anthropological sense of culture as a “way of life,” what the English Victorian sociologist Edward Tylor called the “complex whole” of values and habits characteristic of some people or group in a given time and place. Many reasons can be cited to account for culture’s new prominence. In a justly celebrated book Raymond Williams showed that “culture” became a point of reference for conservative critics of market society and modern industry in England, who portrayed them as reducing all human relations to what Thomas Carlyle called the “cash nexus,” in contrast to an older, more organic form of life based on humane sentiments and a respect for higher values. The notion of culture also served to distinguish more developed societies from those regarded as closer to nature, and thus to justify the superiority Europeans asserted over peoples in other parts of the world. Tylor used the term in this way, locating particular peoples on a scale of historical development according to how far they had progressed in casting off their original barbarism. Expressed earlier by eighteenth-century writers, this evolutionary view had been challenged by Johann Gottfied Herder, who saw different peoples as possessing a particular spirit that infused all the dimensions of their lives, and argued against claims to hierarchical superiority. But views closer to Tylor’s remained dominant, and Herder’s alternative would only become widespread in anthropological circles after Bronsilaw Malinowski and Franz Boas gave it prominence in the twentieth century.1

  In the chapters that make up Part III of this book I will argue that there was a third and no less important reason for the new prominence assumed by culture, one that lay in the evolution of networks of means and of the kinds of social relations their extension and thickening fostered. Main vehicles of cultural activity such as books and periodicals, museums, and concert venues all grew in number and scale and took on new forms as participants and locations were increasingly linked together by an expanding web of periodicals, correspondence, and travel. These developments made the sphere of culture more concrete and palpable by expanding the reach and presence of cultural objects, while simultaneously changing the relations between writers and readers, artists and viewers, and composers, performers and their publics, making the links between producers and consumers at once more visible and less immediate and personal.

  At the same time, however, these changes altered the conditions under which readers, spectators, and listeners encountered cultural objects: the same developments that made these interactions more public on one level allowed them to become more private on another. People partook of cultural objects in situations less subject to control by traditional authorities; ways of experiencing literature, art, and music were thus liberated to become more individuated, open to forms of feeling and imagination whose intensity and range evaded the limits set by religion, convention, and social expectation. Such experiences could be of great moment to individuals for whom traditional values and assumptions no longer provided reliable guides to conduct and personal formation, but they simultaneously opened up prospects of ungovernability and danger, against which new kinds of shields had to be fashioned. These parallel transformations are the subject of this chapter.

  As culture took on this simultaneously more objective and more subjective character, its history exhibited certain parallels to subjects we considered earlier. As in industry as a whole, it is possible to describe the development of modern forms of cultural producti
on and distribution either in terms of a gradual expansion across the whole of the nineteenth century or as occurring in two distinct phases, with the break coming in the decades after 1850; here too the first perspective captures much but the second highlights important changes that the first tends to veil. Like industry, the forms of organization assumed by literature, art, and music after the mid century acquired a distinctly modern character they had not possessed before. This is a significant parallel, but equally important is one that links cultural development to the pattern we found in gender relations and morality. In both, growing involvement in distant connections at first gave a new kind of solidity and relief to distinctions that had once called less attention to themselves. This was true not just between culture and other spheres of life, but also between “high” and “popular” culture. As cultural networks expanded and thickened, it was elite forms of literature, art, and music that first drew new energy and substance from them, and that acquired an enlarged presence in everyday life.

  Soon, however, as will be argued in Chapter 13, it became evident that the same developments also worked in exactly the opposite direction, undermining the very differentiation they made more prominent. Whereas the cultural producers chiefly favored before the mid century had been those who addressed themselves to an educated public, after that date the growth of literacy and leisure inside growing cities linked by modern transport and communication offered new opportunities to those who could find ways to address less educated audiences and consumers. Traditional genres of popular literature, music, and visual entertainment once largely confined to weakly linked local audiences were energized and transformed as they were drawn into more distant and mediated connections. Mass-market newspapers and books were the earliest and most striking examples, accompanied by an expanding world of music-hall performance. The availability of the audiences these forms of popular culture addressed was a chief inspiration for the innovations that turned already-existing visual entertainments common at fairgrounds and market-days into the first “moving pictures.” Out of them would arise the modern cinema, the first cultural form rooted in popular entertainment to become also a medium of serious artistic ambition. All these developments contributed to making the boundaries between “high” and popular culture that had visibly hardened earlier grow softer and more permeable by the end of the century. Like the world of politics, the universe of culture that was emerging by the onset of World War I was far more diverse, more unwieldy, and in an important sense more democratic than had seemed possible half a century before.