Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob
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Sabrina Habel
Abstract
The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy The Snob, the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “Bildung”: Jewish emancipation in Germany stood at the end of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality. The Snob is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “Bildung.”
Funding source: Fellowship of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History
Funding source: Forschungskredit der Universität Zürich
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Special Section: Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation
- Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen
- Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob
- “To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung
- Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung
- „Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel
- Other Contributions
- Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption
- When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews
- The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Special Section: Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation
- Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen
- Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob
- “To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung
- Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung
- „Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel
- Other Contributions
- Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption
- When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews
- The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song
