Acceptance Speech for the Jakob Wassermann Prize
Fürth, March 12, 2023
Jakob Wassermann and the Diversity of Jewish Positions
By Eva Menasse
Ladies and gentlemen,
One of the secrets of books and of reading presumably lies in the fact that important texts always reach us at just the right time – unlike the few great loves in life, which can arrive too early or too late. A book, an author, that has nothing to say to us at a given moment will be overlooked – but when the time has come, they step into our path. Many of Jakob Wassermann’s great novels – »The Maurizius Case«, »Etzel Andergast«, »Caspar Hauser« – I read when I was young, in my early twenties, at a time when my own life seemed so enigmatic that I preferred not to begin it at all, but instead to escape into these intoxicated worlds of language.
More than twenty-five years passed – Wassermann no longer played any role in my reading biography. I sought and admired a different kind of literature – cooler, terser, more modern – precisely because in my younger years I had so extensively bathed in the vocabulary and syntax of those whom I would now call the bombastics: Wassermann among them, but also Perutz, Zweig, Werfel, and above all my household god, Heimito von Doderer.
A few years ago, the German Academy for Language and Literature offered stocks of older publications at reduced prices; a friend of mine, a member, asked if he should order something for me. From the list I chose a single book: Jakob Wassermann’s speeches and writings, published in 1984 under the title »German and Jew« with a foreword by Hilde Spiel. When the book arrived weeks later, I no longer knew why I had wanted it and placed it on the shelf next to the novels. There it waited patiently for several more years – and then grinned broadly at me when I received the news of this prize and was already myself up to my neck in the subject.
The reading of Wassermann’s essays on the central theme of his life is – there is unfortunately no smaller word for it – shattering. In them he circles, as desperately as hopefully, as incredulously as sarcastically, around the question of whether he was more German or more Jew, what the quintessence of both might be, and why this quintessence obviously neither exists nor may exist. On whose account that is. And above all, why the Germans simply would not accept him as an equal and always wanted to see in him only the stranger, the other – although he himself, precisely as a Franconian writer, felt himself so profoundly German, nourished and grown from German sources and the German language.
In it stand bitter, angry sentences, about poisonous antisemitism that trickled toward him from highly educated interlocutors in the subtlest intellectual derivations. But he also describes the »dull, rigid, almost speechless hatred that has penetrated the body of the people«: »This hatred bears the traits of superstition as well as of voluntary blindness, of fear of demons as well as priestly obstinacy, of the rancor of the disadvantaged, the deceived as well as of ignorance, of lies and unscrupulousness as well as of justified defense, of simian malice as well as of religious fanaticism. In it are greed and curiosity, bloodlust, fear, the temptation and lure of being seduced, delight in secrecy and baseness of self-regard. It is, in such entanglement and profundity, a particular German phenomenon. It is a German hatred.«
Begging from pigheaded racists
One recoils. I recoiled when I read these and other sentences. I wanted to call out to the Jakob Wassermann of that time, who died of a stroke on New Year’s Day 1934 in Austria, his chosen home for many years, spared from witnessing all that was to follow soon after, that it really isn’t like that anymore. One thinks so – and immediately stops short. Yes, but only at the cost of millions of dead. And is it even true? Is it really no longer like that, or is it merely different – and if so, why?
I also wanted to tell Jakob Wassermann that I find his laments about the lack of recognition from non-Jewish Germans a little discomfiting, ingratiating even – a kind of begging from pigheaded racists. Wassermann was a famous writer – so who were they, these people who denied him his Germanness? And at once I felt ashamed, because those were wholly different times, and what the pigheaded racists, soon to be Aryans, would already shortly be capable of, I know today – but Wassermann sensed it. That is far worse. Book-knowledge of history against a lifetime of humiliation and threat. I have no right to instruct Jakob Wassermann from today’s vantage point, even if my own lofty self-confidence does indeed reflect a genuine improvement in circumstances.
The effect of these speeches and essays – not only of the well-known, somewhat long-winded and meandering one entitled »My Life as German and Jew« – is, in any case, immense. After only a few pages one finds oneself in an impassioned conversation with the author and with oneself. Not least, this collection of essays is a kind of time capsule whose impact endures to this day. Had Wassermann lived longer (he was only sixty when he died) – this volume would never have been published in such a form. That still-innocent state of knowledge would have been overtaken. As it stands, it is the testimony of an unusually truthful witness who described the scene with exactness – but missed the crime itself.
From today’s vantage point it becomes rather disquieting when Wassermann goes searching for commonalities, as though Germans and Jews must, almost by natural law, repel one another like the like-poled ends of magnets. He speaks of a »similarity of fate and character«, of »centuries of fragmentation and lack of a center. Foreign domination and messianic hope of victory over all enemies and of unity.« In both, he claims to discern »irreconcilable opposites of individual traits: practical busyness and dreaminess; thrift, acquisitiveness, mercantile instinct, striving for education (…). An overabundance of formulas and a lack of form. A spiritual life without bonds that suddenly leads to hubris, to arrogance and incorrigible stubbornness. Here as there, finally, the dogma of chosenness.«
I believe that this idea of excessive similarities is mistaken – but in a fascinating way not grossly mistaken, merely narrowly off the mark. For in the relationship between a majority and emancipating minorities there are two paradoxes that are often overlooked. First: minorities grow more dissatisfied as their circumstances improve. For as soon as one has tasted even a little of what was previously denied, one wants more. The sociologists Nachtwey and Amlinger call this the »countervailing effects of normative progress«.
This is the situation today for women and for homosexuals in the Western world, who – if you were to ask their fellow sufferers of fifty years ago – are living in paradise, yet who now also address and rightly reject smaller discriminations. Jakob Wassermann too found himself in such a position, reacting with extreme sensitivity, despite all his success, when someone ascribed to him, for instance, an »oriental talent for storytelling«. His ancestors, he wrote, had »lived in Franconia for at least 500 years«. That they and others like them had failed »to merge more deeply with the body of the nation«, he regarded »not exclusively as the Jews’ fault«. That is as clear as it is politely put.
But the second and weightier paradox concerns the majority. Always and everywhere it demands of its minorities adaptation, integration, assimilation. It even persuades itself that this is what it truly desires. It does not want to be constantly reminded of the foreign, to encounter the alien continually within its own country. But heaven help us if that adaptation succeeds! Then the foreigners – whom the majority, deep down, has never truly considered equal – become genuinely threatening. That was never what was meant. Genuine convergence does not feel, to those accustomed until now to looking down from above, like a fusion in love, but like the menace of a fifth column: »If they become like us – then what, in fact, are we?«
What the majority fears and what makes it aggressive
Per Leo will surely remember the stimulating evening years ago in Berlin, when this phenomenon was discussed with reference to the United States and Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama was, from a European perspective, the dream of every mother-in-law – educated, elegant, composed in his demeanor, fit to serve as a role model for all. And yet it was precisely he who provoked in his own country such irrational hatred among his white opponents, a hatred that from here seemed hard to fathom.
Yes, precisely – because he looked far better than George W. Bush, was unquestionably more intelligent than Bush senior, more intellectual than Clinton, and more charismatic than a whole handful of his white predecessors put together. Nothing drives home to a majority, already haunted by fears of decline and loss of power, its own dispensability more forcefully than the presence of a plainly superior representative of the once-despised minority. And nothing rouses its aggression more surely.
The result was called Trump.
That Berlin evening reached its climax when someone, emboldened by wine, neatly summed up the outcome of the discussion: »So Obama is the Heine of America!«
But that brings us, in all seriousness, back to Jakob Wassermann and the question he could not solve – probably only because he was far too close to it: Why do the Germans, in the final analysis, refuse to recognize me? Why do they call me, even when they mean to praise me, an Oriental? Precisely because: a Jew at that time was not allowed to be a better German, nor even as good a one.
Between then and now lies Nazi Germany’s grimly successful attempt to annihilate European Jewry. What Jakob Wassermann – like so many others – sensed, but probably never thought possible, did in fact come to pass: mass murder on a scale of millions. Hannah Arendt wrote of it: »That should never have happened. Something occurred there with which we can never come to terms.« Since then – to say the least – all questions of opposition and equality, of Jews and Germans, have become far more complicated. With the founding of Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians, which in these very weeks is escalating in a way both horrific and, sadly, predictable, the discursive entanglements and moral short-circuits become dizzying. All the more important, therefore, is the obligation – especially in this country – to hold fast to reason and to resist the unsound conflation of past and present, of Germany, of the Jews murdered by Germans, and of today’s Israeli politics.
Between then and now also lies the decades-long effort to establish a German culture of remembrance, integrating the crimes of the forefathers into national identity – an effort unprecedented for any state, as the philosopher Susan Neiman has argued in Germany’s favor. Yet today’s interim balance, at that fragile point on the timeline where we are losing the last eyewitnesses, is mixed at best. The publicist Max Czollek, in his new book, speaks of a »theater of reconciliation« staged by Germans mainly to reassure themselves. Per Leo has analyzed the failures of the so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) much more substantially in his recent book »Tränen ohne Trauer« (»Tears Without Mourning«). What is missing, he writes, is a »double effort, without which such a deed can never be overcome: the elucidation of the crime, and the admission that the victim’s perspective is not at the perpetrator’s free disposal.« And he too, like others, speaks of the tendency to keep National Socialism »permanently at bay through spells and magic names«.
Dealing with history means acknowledging that while it is over, it is never finished being told. When, as a very young student in one of my first semesters, I learned that the exact circumstances of Caesar’s death were not settled, it triggered – as it probably does in many young people searching for truth – the impulse to throw everything down and walk away: »what can they possibly teach me here if they don’t even know that themselves?« But in the very next moment, fascination set in precisely at that point – and it has stayed with me to this day: through serious work and close study of sources one can, especially in regard to the Nazi era, indeed come very close to the truth.
The “lessons of history” and day-to-day politics
Along with Per Leo and other historians, I am convinced that actual factual knowledge stands in glaring disproportion to the popularity with which these themes are negotiated in the German arena – and often enough exploited for self-promotion. The historical facts are far harsher and more uncomfortable than the lofty phrases so readily declaimed. And yet these phrases – and here we return to Wassermann’s lifelong theme – run hot and out of control, especially when it comes to antisemitism and the struggle against it.
To engage seriously with history also means acknowledging that its so-called lessons can be applied to day-to-day politics only in the most limited way. Put as briefly as possible: No, despite all the irrationalism and hatred that sloshes so unbridled through the world, particularly via digital media, we are not truly facing the return of National Socialist conditions. Anyone who says otherwise is not a serious interlocutor – and also knows nothing of history. And yes, antisemitism still exists in Germany, and it will continue to exist, for it is a deeply rooted tradition in the Christian West. Anti-Jewish imagery belongs to the iconography of the Church, and there are far more examples of it throughout the country than just the Judensau in Wittenberg.
It is humanly understandable that the combination of these two things – Germany’s monstrous crimes against the Jews, and the fact of an antisemitism inherent to our culture – leads to shame and despair, and to the burning desire to bring this uncomfortable subject under control by means of maximum volume and aggressive denunciation. Unfortunately, that does not work.
In recent times the accusation of antisemitism in Germany has become inflationary – and that harms everyone, except the real antisemites. Inflation helps them, because they now become invisible in a mass where everything that offends someone, even what is merely tasteless, misguided, uninformed, inept, bad or stupid art, is immediately called antisemitism or a trivialization of antisemitism. Many well-intentioned, quite ordinary people are confused, turn away from these issues, accept taboos, and secretly nurture their resentments.
But above all society risks, through these heated battles on the symbolic fields of scholarship, art and culture, losing sight of the most urgent tasks. Anyone can read, year after year, in the annual report of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution where 90 percent of the danger to the life and limb of Jews in Germany actually comes from, and why synagogues, Jewish institutions such as schools and bookshops must be guarded by the police: it comes from violent German neo-Nazis – remember Halle, remember the murder of Walter Lübcke – whose connections to certain structures within the police and the armed forces are as obvious as they are unresolved. That is frightening, and to me far more frightening than a twenty-year-old Indonesian fabric banner displaying two small but unmistakably antisemitic caricatures, which, disastrously, were shown at the country’s most important art exhibition. Yes, that should not have happened, yes, it had to be investigated. I am not even sure it had to be taken down.
But did that incident really justify months of uproar, all the calls for resignations reaching up to the Minister of Culture, all the overblown demands to shut down the documenta prematurely because of »antisemitism funded by taxpayers’ money«? At the very same time – as we now know – genuine German right-wing extremists, the so-called Reichsbürger, were stockpiling weapons on a large scale in order to stage at least a bloodbath in the Bundestag. Just compare, in your own memory, the scope and tone of the reporting. Here: the greatest antisemitism scandal in decades, brought into the country by primitive and incorrigible Jew-haters from the Global South. There: merely some eccentric German aristocrat in a tweed jacket, ludicrously plotting a coup d’état that could never have succeeded anyway. And then set your memory against the report of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
What is painfully lacking in Germany today is an awareness of the diversity of Jewish positions. In all likelihood that was better even in Jakob Wassermann’s day. The notion that »the Jews« think something, want to prohibit something, or consider something antisemitic is itself, among other things, simply an antisemitic trope. Sadly, some of today’s Jewish opinion leaders contribute to this by seeking to assert themselves through denying others their Jewishness – or their leftism, or alternatively their sufficient Germanness. But perhaps – if I try to be optimistic – we are simply in the midst of a transitional period, with the usual shrill dislocations. A transitional period away from the familiar positions of the currently rather conservative Central Council, and the entertaining bad boys in the mold of a Maxim Biller or Henryk Broder, toward a more differentiated debate in which voices such as Meron Mendel, Omri Boehm, Mirjam Zadoff, Fabian Wolff, Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus, Eva Illouz, Yossi Bartal and Miriam Rürup will also be heard on a regular basis.
Today there are more than twice as many Jews in Germany (225,000) as are organized in the religious communities (92,000). Many of them are Israelis who now prefer to live here. Their perspectives on Germany are different – and enormously enriching. Above all, in regard to these very German debates, such as that about the documenta, they are almost stoic. They have other concerns.
Whom to protect from whom, and in whose name?
At this very moment, while I am speaking here, thousands of Israelis living in Berlin are organizing several demonstrations against Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected on a state visit next week. Their appeal states: »It is insane that a government which calls itself pro-Israel invites a head of state who is accused by his own people of corruption and of attempting a coup.«
Some of my German friends and I have for years had an insoluble conflict: they believe that Germans should not comment on Israel at all. I say that in Germany it must at least be ensured that all Jewish positions are heard on an equal footing. That is no longer the case at the latest when the antisemitism commissioners – who have been sprouting up like mushrooms for only about four years – publicly and harshly attack opinions of Jews and Israelis deemed »too left-wing«, as happens regularly. Whom, in fact, are they trying to protect from whom, and in whose name?
By now, however, one has to go further: as catastrophic as the situation in Israel has recently become, both in terms of the rule of law and of security, the German federal government must also change its dealings with the current Israeli government – for the sake of protecting the rule of law and human rights, which we also demand from other international partners. That is why I will take the occasion of receiving the Jakob Wassermann Prize today – to my great joy and gratitude – to read to you, in closing, a few of those clear and desperate sentences from Jews and Israelis that do appear in our newspapers here, but which have so far failed to pierce this peculiar German indifference to the dramatic developments in Israel. I hope that would be in Jakob Wassermann’s spirit.
The former Israeli ambassador Shimon Stein and Moshe Zimmermann, emeritus historian at the University of Jerusalem, write in Die Zeit: »At the latest since Angela Merkel declared Israel’s security to be part of Germany’s raison d’état, there can be no doubt about the Federal Republic’s solidarity with Israel. But what happens when solidarity comes into conflict with German interests, with the fundamental values of the Federal Republic? Solidarity does not automatically mean solidarity with every Israeli government. It is precisely the memory of the Nazi era that demands a values-based approach to Israel as well (…) According to Germany’s Basic Law, human dignity is inviolable – not the policies of Israel.«
And the young writer Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus, who has lived in Berlin for ten years, writes in the Berliner Zeitung: »If one supports Jews in Israel at their demonstrations, one would have to explain tomorrow why it should be acceptable when the very things they are protesting against are inflicted, just a few kilometers away, on the Palestinians. And why they have been living under military law for more than 55 years, where there is obviously no separation of powers and any protest is illegal. A red thread connects the Palestinian struggle for freedom from illegal occupation with the demonstrations of Israelis against the de-democratization of their country. (…)
Just over a week ago, radical settlers rioted in the Palestinian town of Huwara in the West Bank. They set houses and cars on fire, slaughtered sheep. The next day Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said it was in the hands of the state to wipe Huwara out, not in those of private individuals. The U.S. government then made it clear that Netanyahu should distance himself from Smotrich’s statement. Jewish organizations in the U.S. appealed to the State Department to revoke Smotrich’s U.S. visa. They understand that the connection some draw between them and this government will harm them. And in Germany? Deafening silence.«
I thank you very much for this prize and for your attention.
* Eva Menasse, born in 1970, writer (»Vienna«, »Dunkelblum«) and essayist, spokesperson of PEN Berlin since June 2022, awarded, among others, the Heinrich Böll Prize (2013), the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2017), the Austrian Book Prize (2019), the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book (2022), and the Jakob Wassermann Literature Prize (2022)