German-Jewish Cultural Identity from 1900 to the Aftermath of the First World War: A Comparative Study of Moritz Goldstein, Julius Bab and Ernst Lissauer

A great deal of the contemporary discussion on the role of Jews in Germanywas via culture, particularly literature. In the period concerned in this thesis,definitions of Jewishness in German literature were not only a personal concern of individual writers, but also the subject of academic investigation by contemporary scholars and critics.Attempts to categorise or define literature written by Jews in German appear often to follow a set of agenda of one kind or another. They either seek to illustrate the progressive integration of Jews into German culture by demonstrating their contribution to the latter, as with Ludwig Geiger's Die deutsche Literatur und die Juden (1910), or, while notable to disprove this development, aim to show that all efforts by Jews to become part of German literary culture have a >natural< limit due to their lack of German >Geist<, >Wesen<, or >Gemiit<. This much less tangible or concrete, but nevertheless, or perhaps even for that reason, hazardous criterion of Jewish or >un-German< literature was based on the notion of a quasi-genetic deficiency responsible for the inability of appreciating and producing >authentic< German literature. Secular German-Jewish writing has no obvious intrinsically Jewish features. German-Jewish works are German literature, whose >Jewishness< emerges in the  response to a non-Jewish environment, especially under the pressures of anti-Semitism. (...)Yet in the time under investigation few aspects of life have  shaped the lives ofarticulate members of German Jewry more than the suspicion that  their  work poses a threat to the very culture in which they operated

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