Precarious Figurations

Shylock on the German Stage, 1920–2010

Zeno Ackermann,Sabine Schülting

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110615593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria tedesca

Precarious Figurations focuses on the reception of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Looking at theatrical practices and critical or scholarly discourses from the Weimar Republic to the new millennium, the book explores why the play has served simultaneously as a vehicle for the actualization of anti-Semitic tropes and as a staging ground for the critical exposure of the very logic of anti-Semitism. In particular, the study investigates how the figure of Shylock has come to be both a device in and a stumbling block for attempts to bridge the fundamental rupture in civilization brought about by the Holocaust. The careful analysis of the German reception of Merchant, and in particular of the ways of doing and reading Shylock in the context of painful German, and German-Jewish, discourses of identity and remembrance, is designed to raise fundamental questions – questions concerning not only the staging of Jewishness, the tenacity of anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Holocaust remembrance, but also the general potentials and limitations of theatrical interventions into cultural conflicts.

1 Figuring Identity: Ruptures and Continuities from the Reinhardt Era to the Early Federal Republic (1905–1957)

During the Second World War, Victor Gollancz strove to bring the extent of the genocide against Europe’s Jews home to the British public.46 Shortly after the war, when his estimations of the number of victims had proved horribly precise, the publisher brought out an important book by a German-Jewish emigrant who responded to anti-Semitism as a theatre enthusiast and literary scholar. In Shylock: The History of a Character (1947), Hermann Sinsheimer, who had been a prolific newspaper critic in Weimar Germany, examined Shakespeare’s dramatic character in order to fathom “the European myth of the Jew.” Interestingly, Sinsheimer attributed a dual function to Shylock as one of the myth’s most significant devices. He treated Shakespeare’s controversial character not only as a mainstay of anti-Semitic ideologies, but also as a staging ground for a resistant Jewish identity.

The position defined by Sinsheimer in the “Epilogue (Written in England)” that he appended to his study seems surprisingly optimistic as well as strangely ambivalent:

In conclusion, I would say to my Jewish readers: let us acknowledge Shylock ‘the Unwise’ as the witness of our past enslavement as well as Nathan the Wise as a witness of our liberation. And let us praise Shakespeare as the genius who has given to the European myth of the Jew, as to many another myth and mystery of our earth, ‘a local habitation and a name.’47

It is likely that when he wrote these lines, Sinsheimer already knew that his brother Ludwig and his sister Eugenie had been killed in the Holocaust.48 The bulk of his book on Shylock, however, had been penned earlier: in Germany, and in German, during the years 1936 and 1937. In a note dated “London, im Jahre 1946,” which introduces the German edition (published in 1960 as Shylock: Die Geschichte einer Figur), Sinsheimer explained:

At that time I was trying to get out of Germany – unsuccessfully. Being besieged from without and troubled from within, I resolved that if I could not get away from that polluted country, I would at least get away from those polluted times. On my ‘flight’ into the adventures of literature and history, I encountered, almost as a matter of course, Shylock: the mirror image of the European Jew as he has never existed, and the counterpoint of everything Jewish in its real form. I resolved to fathom his figure as thoroughly as I could. Thus, while all around the Nazis were staging their bloodthirsty and barbaric Shylockiads, I explored the realms of Shakespeare and of Jewish history.49

As the inverted commas indicate, the idea of fleeing anti-Semitic persecution by delving into scholarship on historical constructions of Jewishness may appear both understandable and strange. Still more startling are Sinsheimer’s pervasive ambiguities. In the first of the two quotations above, the phrase “European myth of the Jew” stresses the constructedness of respective notions of Jewishness. However, there is also a second phrase, which lends weight to the construct as a “myth and mystery of our earth.” Similarly, in the second passage, the solid “realms” of “Jewish history” blend with the more intangible “realms of Shakespeare.” At work in both instances is a double move of foregrounding and simultaneously complicating well-rehearsed dichotomies such as ‘history vs. myth,’ ‘fact vs. invention,’ and ‘reality vs. discourse.’ Emphasizing the history-making power of fictions, Sinsheimer blurs the boundaries between two discrete dimensions of “Jewish history”: on the one hand, as a heritage handed down by Jews and, on the other, as a series of constructions about Jews. The twisted characterization of Shylock as “the mirror image of the European Jew as he had never existed” underlines this dual perspective.

Sinsheimer describes the process of how Shylock, a heterostereotypical figment of Jewishness, has fallen into history, thereby himself becoming a significant figuration of what it means to be Jewish in a world that defines itself in opposition to Jewishness:

Shakespeare created the greatest Jewish character since the Bible. Necessarily, he has thus recorded Judaism – that is to say, he has made and written Jewish history. This book is intended as a tribute to him for this by interpreting Shylock from the Jewish point of view. In doing so, Shylock has to be treated, not only as a fictitious character, but also as a figure in Jewish history. His atmosphere is that of the sixteenth century, but, by virtue of Shakespeare’s genius, he moves within the perennial destiny of the Jewish people from Biblical times down to the present day.50

The way that Sinsheimer slides between Shylock as “a fictitious character” and as “a figure in Jewish history” establishes Shylock as an important reference point for constructions of Jewishness from both the outside and the inside. Consequently, Shylock needs to be rejected and adopted at the same time. This take on the character also includes the possibility of turning him against the persecutors. Sinsheimer does so by addressing anti-Semitic discrimination and murder as a series of “bloodthirsty and barbaric Shylockiads.”51

The precariousness of Sinsheimer’s approach is underlined by the fact that he initially wanted to get his book printed in National Socialist Germany: “This book was to be published in Hitler’s Germany. It had, not without trembling, been submitted to the Nazi Department authorised, or rather presuming, to censor Jewish manuscripts before publication by Jewish publishers for Jewish readers only, and, surprisingly enough, had passed.”52 Eventually, however, the further radicalization of persecution made it impossible to publish. In 1938, the year of the November Pogrom, Sinsheimer escaped to Palestine. From there he reached Britain, bringing his manuscript with him.

The complex perspective on Shakespeare’s Jewish figure as fiction and fact, as myth and history, as a heterostereotypical figuration open to autostereotypical re-figurations is not unique to Sinsheimer. In his 1975 landmark study Außenseiter (Outsiders), the German-Jewish scholar Hans Mayer likewise chose Shylock as a seminal figuration of the socio-cultural positioning of Jews in Europe, specifically as “the phenotype for the Jewish emancipation that failed.”53 Similar to Sinsheimer, Mayer was both perplexed and fascinated by the ways in which the Shylock figure comprised completely different meanings and straddled mutually exclusive epistemologies.54

A related perspective is to be found in the meditations on Shakespeare’s Jewish character that Heinrich Heine smuggled into his essays on Shakespeare’s Maidens and Women (1839). Heine suggested that while the other Venetian characters invoked by Shakespeare were “long mouldered in the grave,” Shylock must necessarily be “ever living.”55 And indeed, desperately seeking Shylock in contemporary Venice, Heine – or the speaker of his Shakespearean vignettes – eventually makes out his voice among the worshippers in a synagogue:

I heard a voice in which tears flowed as they were never wept from eyes. There was a sobbing which might have moved a stone to pity – there were utterances of agony such as could only come from a breast which held shut within itself all the martyrdom which an utterly tormented race had endured for eighteen centuries.56

This imaginary encounter with an invisible yet audible Shylock transports Shakespeare’s character into a twilight zone between fiction and reality, past and present, hetero- and autostereotype. Being appropriated as a Jewish figure of memory, this imaginary Shylock, although himself traumatically powerless, still functions as an agent of empowerment for the assimilated Jew Heine.

The writings of Heine, Sinsheimer, and Mayer demonstrate the special significance that German Jews attributed to the Shylock figure before, during, and after the period dealt with in the present chapter. This is the period from the early twentieth century to the end of the 1950s. The time under investigation thus includes the Second German Empire as well as that empire’s demise in consequence of the First World War; it comprises the attempt to forge a democratic Germany through the institution of the Weimar Republic as well as the destruction of that republic due to the machinations of the far right and due to the imperfect democratic allegiances of the elites; it reaches its nadir in the National Socialist dictatorship, which was backed by a majority of the German people and which culminated in the Second World War and the Holocaust; and finally, the chronological scope of this chapter will take us into the first one-and-a-half decades of the Federal Republic of Germany as one of two separate attempts to reconstruct a German nation that had been devastated not only by war but also by racist ideologies.

The shifting meanings attributed to Shylock within the half century covered by this chapter reflect the devastating developments and horrendous deeds that tore these decades apart. However, it is our proposition that there are also surprising lines of continuity in the cultural workings of the figure. In the following, we will investigate Shylock’s ambivalent potential by focussing on two trajectories:

• 1. Issues of power and powerlessness: General cultural discourse and much of the scholarly criticism on Merchant have repeated, over and over again, the question whether the play should be read as ‘comedy’ or ‘tragedy’ and whether Shylock can be conceived of as a heroic character. Although these discussions are historically significant, the vague concepts of genre that underlie such debates hide another issue: Shylock’s power or lack of power. Is he primarily a figuration of Jewish powerlessness and even a vehicle for disempowering Jews? Or can he be used as a reference point in order to construct resilient Jewish identities? It will be argued that these tricky questions dominated the history of the play’s reception throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
• 2. Figuration vs. identity: As Heine’s, Sinsheimer’s, and Mayer’s fascination with the relationships between history and myth indicates, the reception of Merchant was characterized by continual slippage between figurative and identitarian approaches. On the one hand, discourses and performances stressed both the play’s and character’s allegorical functions; from this perspective, Merchant appeared as a bold fiction, and Shylock as a completely imaginary figuration of Jewishness. On the other hand, and very often simultaneously, Merchant was seen and performed as a breathtaking drama of (Jewish) identity. In consequence, both play and character were inserted into history, and into the sociocultural realities of the day. Most often, the significance of particular contributions to the discourse lies within the specific way the two approaches (figurative or identitarian) were coordinated, confused or played off against each other, rather than in a decision for one of the two.

During the chapter’s investigation of Shylock’s career for the first sixty years of the twentieth century, it will become evident that he functioned as a puzzle picture. Indeed, it is only in connection to specific contexts, configurations, and perspectives that Shylock took on his various meanings. These meanings have proven strangely flexible; they are likely to tilt as soon as the context changes. Of course, this is a general caveat. However, when we are dealing with a period characterized by affirmative conceptions of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ as well as by the mass-murder of Jews at the hand and under the governing responsibility of Germans, it is particularly important to remind ourselves how loaded, complex, and contradictory the Shylock figure really is.

1.1 From the Reinhardt Era to the Rise of the Anti-Semitic Hegemony

“Drowned in a sea of music” – Max Reinhardt’s Integrationist Design

The most influential production of Merchant in German history premiered in Berlin o...