Shylock in Germany

This study reexamines the popular conception of Germans as always following orders, and the equally common understanding of German Jews as always obeying Germans. These orthodox readings of Germans and German Jews are incomplete, and this dissertation shows why. Between 1779 and 1811, The Merchant of Venice emerged as one of the most frequently staged plays in Germany. The first chapter critically examines the secondary literature on Shylock in German literature by liberal intellectuals, such as Hans Mayer. Mayer recognizes the prevalence of Shylock in Germany and sees the Shylock trope as fueled by a fundamental contradiction in the Enlightenment between its liberal promise and conservative norms. This study proposes that he is wrong to see an inevitable development between the liberal portrayal of Jews, as found in Lessing and Wieland, and subsequent racist constructions of Jews. The second chapter explains the growth in popularity of The Merchant of Venice as resulting not from the Enlightenment itself, but rather from a recurrent conservative effort to use art to resolve the social, political and economic consequences of the Enlightenment. This chapter includes an analysis of the Joseph Oppenheimer affair, the work of Johann Gottsched and a discussion of famous productions of The Merchant of Venice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The following two chapters consider the response of German Jews to Germany's Shylock. Chapter three shows how Ludwig Borne, Heinrich Heine and Eduard Gans use Shylock to transform the discourse over the location of Jews in German society from one centered on assimilation to one based on legal rights. Chapter 4 examines the Antisemitism Debate of 1879 and Karl Emil Franzos's 1893 novel Der Pojaz. Though Franzos is traditionally regarded as a German nationalist, his casting of a particular reading of Shylock rather than the Romantic Hamlet as the role model for attaining Bildung shows that he was far more at odds with German culture than critics have admitted.