INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
FREUD, JEWS AND OTHER GERMANS: MASTERS AND VICTIMS IN
MODERNIST CULTURE. By Peter Gay.
Oxford University Press.
$12.95.
A CONFIDENTIAL MATTER: THE LETTERS OF RICHARD STRAUSS
AND STEFAN ZWEIG, 1931- 1935. Translated from the German by Max
Knight. Foreword by Edward E. Lowlnsky.
University of California
Press. $8.95.
"The writing of German history," says Peter Gay, "is laden
with, mainly unexamined, counter-transferences." How right he is,
and how desperately that examination needs to
be
undertaken
I
Gay
begins the task of reexamination in this volume as he in turn takes
Sigmund Freud out of Viennese society and defines him in the German
cultural world, and as he denies a Jewish thrust at the heart of
"modernism" in Wilhelmine German culture and the culture of
Berlin. He also analyzes the self-hatred of Wagner's Jewish conductor
Hermann Levi, defends Johannes Brahms as a "modernist," and
salvages the reputation of Wagner's
bete
noir,
the music critic Eduard
Hanslick. Gay's thesis is defensive-against the no longer relevant
early twentieth-century conservatives, anti-Semites, and the Nazis, who
attributed to the Jews the corrosive forces of socialism, pessimism,
liberalism, expressionist theater and literature. Jews and the cultural
forces they represented were hated and feared by the German right as
symptoms of moral decay. Gay correctly points out, this was a German
"decay" which many non-Jews fostered and most German Jews resisted
rather than welcomed.
Ten years ago Peter Gay published a book arguing that all those
who embodied the rich culture of Weimar, those who created the
modern movement: "Jews, democrats, socialists," were "in a word,
outsiders" of the preceding Wilhelmine Imperial era. Although the
styles, careers and accomplishments of the Weimar Republic had
antecedents in the Empire, they had existed as an opposition. With the
birth of the German Republic the forces of modernism became "insid–
ers" for a brief fourteen years of crisis-ridden cultural flowering.
Weimar was a hothouse of intensive creation and criticism, of new art
forms, theater, literature, architecture, burning at a white heat as
though its participants knew disaster was close- that it was soon to be
consumed forever in an historic catastrophe.
