Jewish Encounters with Buddhism in German Culture by Sebastian Musch

Author:Sebastian Musch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030274696
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Jakob Wassermann and the Quest for Justice

Jakob Wassermann has served as the perfect example of Gershom Scholem’s assertion that the German-Jewish symbiosis was “never anything else than fiction.”132 In his famous treatise Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude from 1921, Wassermann voiced his disillusion with his fellow Germans’ refusal to accept him as one of their own. His deep immersion in German culture, his ensuing success as an author of novels in the German language, his patriotism, and even his disdain for Judaism could not liberate him from being seen constantly as a Jew: “It is in vain to live for them and die for them. They say: he is a Jew.”133

Wassermann ’s paradigmatic status, due to his desire for acceptance by the non-Jewish majority and his disillusion with their contempt for his Jewishness, has been aptly discussed in the secondary literature.134 What has been ignored so far is his interest in Buddhism and its intersection with his struggle to be German and Jewish.

For the sake of offering an overview, a short summary of his life will be worthwhile. Wassermann was born in Fürth in 1873. He grew up in an assimilated, petty-bourgeois family. Judaism did not play a prominent role. His literary ambitions were discouraged. Despite resistance from his family, Wassermann was able to publish his writing. His first success was built on a Jewish theme: His Die Juden von Zirndorf tells the story of a Jewish community, their messianic hopes, disappointments, and struggles for a decent life in Germany. A variation on the story of Sabbatai Zevi, Wassermann’s sympathetic depiction of a German-Jewish community and, in the eyes of most Germans, their idiosyncratic manners, brought him many plaudits. Yet, in the ensuing years, he wrote less about Jewish themes, and his novel about Caspar Hauser proved to be his most successful endeavor.135

An important crossroads was reached in 1913 when Wassermann addressed an open letter to Martin Buber titled Der Jude als Orientale. This letter, published in the famous volume Vom Judentum, which brought together an astonishing array of Jewish thinkers (next to Wassermann and Buber, it included Hans Kohn, Karl Wolfskehl, Hugo Bergmann, Margarete Susman, Erich Kahler, Max Brod, Arnold Zweig, and others), recycled ideas that Wassermann had already proposed as early as 1904.136 Back then, in the article “Das Los der Juden” and, in 1909, in “Der Literat oder Mythos und Persönlichkeit,” Wassermann had established several concepts that he would now, in the open letter to Buber, bring to fruition. Two lines of thought stand out: First, the idea, already suggested in the title of the open letter, of the Orientalization of the Jews. Wassermann distinguished between the Jew as a European and the Jew as an Oriental. The former is associated with literature and cosmopolitanism. “It is the contrast between withering and fertility, between isolation and belonging, between anarchy and tradition.”137 The European Jew turned away from tradition and became a rootless individual in his eternal quest for being the other (assimilation to the majority). Wassermann referred to antisemitic stereotypes, which he apparently granted a grain of truth.

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