Jewish Historiography Between Past and Future by Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Author:Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

My journey into the wonderland of Joel Wolff Meyer was to bring to light numerous other notable and strange relatives, who, like Martha Musil and Glückel of Hameln, intersected in a mysterious way with my (intellectual) biography. The philosopher Saul Ascher and the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, cousins of Joel Wolff Meyer, have already been mentioned. The famous art historian Erwin Panofski now became a family member in the Meyer-Mosse coalition. The author of numerous books on Dürer,387 iconography, and perspective,388 this theorist of art389 was married to Dora Mosse,390 daughter of Albert Mosse and Caroline Meyer, and taught at Princeton after their emigration. The Levy clan also gave rise to memorable family members. Thus Emma Jeanette Levy, the daughter Else Meyer and Albert Levy, founder of modern social work, married the well-known classical scholar and historian of medicine, Ludwig Edelstein,391 who taught in Boston after he had emigrated. A new Queen of the Night was to make her appearance on the family stage: the shrill and iconoclastic Nina Hagen, Queen of German rock and punk, whose great-grandfather Carl Levy Hagen was a brother of Elise Levy, and whose grandparents were murdered in Bergen-Belsen. As if reality had taken on another layer, I would at some point discover that many of the personalities I knew and admired actually belonged to the magic family circle of Joel Wolff Meyer.

I would have liked to tell my father, who had no idea of his family history and remained ashamed of his own Jewish ancestry until shortly before his death, something about these legendary ancestors. For a Mischling like my father, the son of a Jewish mother whose own life had no Jewish orientation, Judaism represented infinite vulnerability and impotence, which he on the one hand preferred to bury behind a facade of German normality and a brilliant career as professor of paediatrics at the University of Düsseldorf, and which on the other hand imbued him with a special sensitivity towards other national or religious forms of identity. He was able to turn his “non-identity” into a special cosmopolitan strength, a humble mentality of pluralistic worldliness, which I repeatedly encountered in other forebears, whether they were “Orthodox,” “Reform,” “assimilated” or “converted.”

As a non-historian, I have often asked myself how the history of these families should be told. The common categories of German Jewish historiography, which so often repeat the history of the Jewish Enlightenment, emancipation, secularization, civic education, assimilation, loss of identity, and catastrophe, seem to be in danger of glossing over the glory and glamor of this colorful world, alongside its decay. These common categories, whose repetition suggests evidence, turn these magical pictures into boring, sad black-and-white images on which the dark shadow of historical denouement, the extermination of the Jews, has left its mark. This black-and-white schematization extinguishes the individuality and singularity of these people; they become characters in a pre-programmed historical process.

Figure 17: M. Giacomo Meyerbeer / engraved by D.J. Pound; from a photograph by Mayall. Proof of Origin: Bibliotheque nationale de France.

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