HAIFA, Israel — From 1843 to 1854 the literature of Germany, a country which had been fragmented into 36 states, began to produce unifying folk tales in which the German nation began to crystallize.
The founding father of the new national identity expressed through literature was the writer Berthold Auerbach. He portrayed the inhabitants of southern Germany, especially the peasants of the Black Forest and the Bavarian Alps, in descriptions that are remarkable for their realism, elegant style, and humor. His vivid Tales of Villages in the Black Forest caused a sensation not only in literary Germany but also among the literati of other European countries, and the author of the Tales soon gained European fame. His works were immediately translated into almost all European languages, including Russian.
In 1861 the Russian critic and translator Michael Mikhailov described Auerbach as a writer who has a “deep love for the people, whom no one has depicted in Germany better than him.” Mikhailov went on to praise the importance of the Auerbach stories: “With the appearance of the Tales of Villages in the Black Forest, a revival of narrative literature in Germany began. […] Auerbach has awakened a whole school of novelists, who have turned with sympathy to the people and have begun to study the good and bad aspects of their life, their needs, desires and hopes, their joys and sorrows.”
In Russia, Auerbach’s works were widely studied not only because of their folk coloring, but perhaps also due to the author’s close ties with Russian writers, especially Ivan Turgenev, who compared the German writer to Dickens and wrote his own The Hunter’s Sketches under the influence of Auerbach’s stories. Lev Tolstoy, who twice met with the German writer, was shocked by his stories. Years later he recalled: “I looked down on German peasants. The German peasant is as original as the Russian. They have a lot to learn from him. They have very similar traits to Russian peasants. All people are the same. Auerbach, whom I loved, appreciated above all these traits of the people.”
The Soviet literary scholar Roman Samarin believed that “Auerbach’s place in the history of German literature and, more generally, in the history of European literature of the mid-19th century, is connected primarily to his stories from the lives of the Black Forest peasants. Their appearance must be regarded as the emergence of a new and important literary phenomenon ̶ the story of folk life, similar to the peasant tales of George Sand and Turgenev’s The Hunter’s Sketches.”
The paradox of Auerbach’s creation of German folk tales was that their author was a Jew; thus, a Jewish writer described in vivid depth and detail the life of a Christian peasant in southern Germany. Perhaps, only a Jew could relate with “a deep love for the people, which no one in Germany has portrayed better than he” (Mikhailov’s words).
Berthold (Moses Baruch) Auerbach was born at Nordstetten, in Württemberg, near the Black Forest, in 1812. He received his elementary education in a new type of Jewish school, one imbued with the ideas of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Later he studied traditional Jewish religious disciplines in preparation for hasmakhah, receiving the title of rabbi. In 1829, however, he abandoned his study of Judaism and entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Tübingen. It was in 1837 that Auerbach was arrested on charges of participating in student riots. After his release from prison, he abandoned his studies and began to earn a living as a literary laborer.
One of Auerbach’s first published works was a pamphlet, titled Jewishness and Modern Literature (1836), in which he defended Jews against charges of revolutionary radicalism. Auerbach sought to show that ideas of German Jewish emancipation were compatible with German patriotism in the spirit of the Enlightenment teachings of Moses Mendelssohn. The writer said, “I am German and unable to be anything else. I am a Schwab and I do not want to be anything else. And I am a Jew. It all makes the right mix.” He saw Judaism as an integral part of the religion of humanism, consisting of reason, social love, and progress. As early as 1832 he wrote: “My greatest desire is to fuse the religion of Moses with the philosophy of Hegel. […] The spirit of humanity, previously revealed in Moses, remains eternally the same in Hegel.”
The intention of the writer was to interpret the idea of the German national character in such a way as to harmonize the Jewish and German elements in his own character and in German society: “We rely on the life-giving morality of the German nation. Yes, we respect and love German dignity and the German heart, for it is also our morality and our heart.” Indeed, Auerbach was a fervent German patriot, who sought to combine his ardent love of Germany with an affiliation with Jewry.
However, Auerbach left the Jewish subject matter and published the Tales of Villages in the Black Forest, in which he attempted to show how the German spirit is disposed to brotherly love and religious tolerance towards the Jews living among the Germans. He was born in Nordstätten, a quiet village of about 200 German Catholic and 30 Jewish families, a place where, according to Auerbach’s descriptions, the Jews, mostly merchants, and the Catholics coexisted peacefully. Auerbach’s Tales of Villages in the Black Forest made him well-known and popular, truly a folk author. One of the Brothers Grimm, Jacob, wrote to him in delight: “You have cured me of my prejudices. I had no idea that a Jew could penetrate to such an extent to the very depths of the German soul.” However, despite the immense popularity of Tales of Villages in the Black Forest, his attempts to reconcile Jewry and Germanism were only scorned by antisemites, including Richard Wagner, who nonetheless described Auerbach as a man who was truly “rooted” in German life.
Auerbach ignored the Jewish pogroms during the Revolution of 1848, considering them a secondary phenomenon: “One must consider these silly, accidental antics from a broader point of view. […] The uprising in general is noble and ennobling.” As an ardent German patriot, excited about German unification, he supported the Prussian war against France, seeing in it a “national necessity,” a war of “justice, honor, and right action.” In a pamphlet in which he spoke out in favor of the war, he displayed patriotism to the fullest: “I am a Schwab, but in 1870 I became a Prussian soldier. As a soldier I am ready to become cannon fodder. For this purpose, even a Jew like me will serve.”
After he attended the Prussian victory parade near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the writer was particularly elated: “Messianic aspirations have been fulfilled. Future generations will see us as the lucky ones who happened to live in this great era. It’s a wonderful feeling to join the masses of your people. […] As they passed me, waving eighty and one French flags and trophy gold eagles, a shiver ran through me: it was over. The damned devil, the bloodthirsty French, has been defeated, we must hope, for all eternity.” A Jew calling Prussia’s victory over France “the fulfillment of Messianic aspirations!” in extraordinary indeed, all the more so when one considers how this victory and the capture of Alsace and Lorraine began the tragedy of World War I.
After Germany passed a law in 1874 permitting marriages between Jews and Germans, Auerbach’s hope that the Jewish problem would disappear within a generation or two was strengthened. However, as early as 1876, he wrote to his cousin Jacob: “I am bewildered by the ‘Teutonic attack of rabies”. Nietzsche was not surprised by the outbreaks of German anti-Semitism: “I have not yet met a single German who treats the Jews favorably; and no matter how resolutely all cautious and political people renounce true antisemitism, yet this caution and policy are not directed against the kind of feeling itself, but only against its dangerous excess.”
Even during Auerbach’s lifetime a wave of new, racially-based, not religious, antisemitism began, promoted by Wilhelm Marr, Eugene Düring and historian, Reichstag member Heinrich von Treitschke. Von Treitschke called the Jews “our misfortune” and accused Auerbach of creating peasants who were little more than “disguised Jews.” Increasingly discouraged, Auerbach realized that “the fire had been lit and would continue to burn to the extent that almost every man free of prejudice should be thanked.” According to a friend, he became “sickly, tired, broken, his skin became yellow and dry, and the light disappeared from his eyes.”
On November 23, 1880, Auerbach sat on the guest rostrum of the Prussian Reichstag during a debate on an antisemitic petition demanding a revision of Jewish emancipation, which would include the withdrawal of civil rights from Jews, and the official restrictions on their acceptance into public service, especially in the fields of justice and teaching. Auerbach returned home depressed and the next day wrote to his cousin Jacob in a fit of bitter despair: “I have lived and worked in vain, […] never now will I rid of the awareness of the falsehood lurking in the hearts of Germans and ready to break through at any moment.”
On February 8, 1882, Berthold Auerbach died. In spite of the enormous success of the Tales of Villages in the Black Forest and the European fame of their author, in Germany his work as a folk writer was soon forgotten.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.