BOOKS
465
Simmel has to say about his own and the German- Jewish situation by
reducing it
to
no more than any other of Simmel's commentaries on
culture:
The few pages on the stranger in Simmel's
Soz.iologie
enjoy no
special status; they are among dozens of brief and brilliant forays into
such hitherto despised topics as adornment, conversation, secret
societies, or gratitude.
It
is our generation that has lifted the excursus
on the stranger from its larger context and imposed on it a factitious
centrality.
Georg Simmel's sociology, Gay assures us, "was no more Jewish,
no less German, than Max Weber's. " But Weber did not deal with the
exposed and vulnerable position of the stranger.
It
was not his life
problem, as it was Simmel's. Why does Gay choose to deny the obvious
personal relevance of Simmel's essay, as well as discount its importance
as a contemporary analysis of the anomalous marginal Jewish position
in German society?
Gay vigorously pursues the case that Freud was not, culturally
speaking, a Viennese or Austrian at all. He places Freud squarely in the
larger German culture of Northern Europe. Is there a sense in which
Freud was specifically Austrian? What were the differences between
German and Austrian culture? The culture of Germany is a culture
with many centers and with a non-Jewish core. The culture of Vienna
is
the culture of Austria. Austria had no Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, or
Kant. Viennese culture was an amalgam of Eastern European with
German and Latin influences. The catalyst was the Jewish intelligent–
sia one or two generations removed from the eastern provinces of the
Habsburg Empire. Freud's Jewish wit is not of German culture. It is
influenced by the Yiddish culture of Leopoldstadt, the crowded Jewish
quarter of Vienna where Freud's family lived after their arrival from
Moravia. The triumph of " modernism" and the demographic acces–
sion of Eastern European Jewry to Vienna coincided.
It
is all a matter
of two generations. With few exceptions all the early members of
Freud's circle were Jews, and most had themselves been born in the
Austrian provinces and emigrated to Vienna as children, as had Freud.
It is the element of a meeting of cultures in Vienna that constitutes
the ambiance of Freud's creativity. While some interpreters of Freud
have chosen to emphasize the analogy of his method to Jewish mystical
interpretation and the
p i lpul
of Torah explication, and Peter Gay
stresses his affinity
to
the larger north German culture, both of these
