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Hesse, von Ossietzky, etc.). Yet, when all this is said, there remains the
problem of
proportion
of Jewish contribution to German and modern–
ist culture
relative to their number
in the population (which in
Germany was less than one percent), and, by contrast, their relatively
large number among the Left, the intelligentsia, and the cultural
leadership. To cite only an example from politics, Donald Niewyk
estimates that roughly 10 percent of the leaders of the Social Demo–
cratic Party had Jewish backgrounds.
Beyond the issue of relative proportion of active agents in cultural
innovation is the lack of awareness that the German- Jewish experience
created a special cultural sensibility, a nuanced and delicate perceptive–
ness
to
matters of language and symbol of which Freud and Gay are but
examples. As Ismar Schorsch points out, "We have hardly begun to
explore the involved interaction between a disturbing but tolerable
level of anti-Semitism and Jewish creativity in modern Germany. "
This is an exploration which Gay not only fails to undertake, but a
premise which he obviously denies. To him there was no special
Jewish creativity in the German cultural world before the Holocaust.
The case that Gay does not meet, and it is the relevant one, is that
Jewish existence in the German Reich was fraught with an ever-present
consciousness of differentness and what Fritz Stern in his study of
Bismarck's banker, Gerson von Bleichroder, terms "perpetual vulnera–
bility." "They lived," says Stern,
in a society that held them inferior, even contemptible. They did not
escape the degradation of the downtrodden, the self-inflicted wound
of assimilating the dominant group's judgment of oneself and one's
kind. Their self-disdain reflected and reinforced their own sense of
inferiority vis-a-vis the Germans.... Ambivalence was a large
component of the psychic cost which German Jews had to pay for
their extraordinary successes.
There was a cultural sensibility among German Jews that was
honed and tempered in the daily grindstone of the awareness of being
the exception, the exposed, the observed, the vilified, the actual or
potential target of opprobrium, slander, and unfair attack, and the
fervent desire to be accepted as equals by a culture they loved. This
sense of separateness and position of cultural vulnerability was poi–
gnantly expressed by Ludwig Bjorne in 1832:
It
is kind of a miracle!
I
have experienced it a thousand times, and yet
it still seems new to me. Some find fault with me for being a Jew;
others forgive me; still others go so far as
to
compliment me for it;
