From the beginning of the twentieth century, the following writers — Jews, half Jews, and quarter Jews (“of Semitic origin,” to adopt the parlance of the Third Reich) — have made their contribution to German literature!
The Viennese Peter Altenberg, a twentieth-century troubadour, a sensitive singer of female elegance and beauty, long vilified as a “decadent pornographer” by the barbarians of racial theory; Oscar Blumenthal, the author of clever comedies without any grandeur but full of taste; Richard Beer-Hoffmann, a noble makar of German, an inheritor and interpreter of the biblical tradition; Max Brod, the selfless friend of Franz Kafka, a storyteller from a great tradition, full of zest and erudition, who brought back to life the great figure of Tycho Brahe; Alfred Döblin, the writer whose contribution to German literature was the character of the lower-class Berliner, one of the most original creations of the intellectual world; Bruno Frank, a conscientious wielder of words, an experienced playwright, pacifist, and singer of Prussia’s history; Ludwig Fulda, a lyric poet and author of comedies full of charm and wit; the tireless Maximilian Harden, perhaps the only authentic German man of letters; Walter Hasenclever, one of the most intense dramatists; Georg Hermann, a plain and truthful novelist of the petit bourgeoisie; Paul Heyse (half Jew), the first German Nobel laureate; Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the noblest writers in verse and prose, the classical heir to the Catholic treasures of old Austria; Alfred Kerr, a theater reviewer of abundant imagination; Karl Kraus, the great polemicist, a master of German letters, a fanatical purist of language, an almost unassailable apostle of style; Else Lasker-Schüler, a poet: what need of an epithet, the word itself is enough; Klaus Mann (half Jew, the son of Thomas Mann), a promising young novelist, with considerable stylistic gifts; Alfred and Robert Neumann, impressive epic writers both; Rainer Maria Rilke (quarter Jew), one of the greatest European poets; Peter Panter, a witty firework of a polemicist; Carl Sternheim, one of the most acute writers of prose and drama; Ernst Toller, the poet of The Swallow Book, a revolutionary dramatist, who, for love of the freedom of the German people spent seven years in a Bavarian fortress; Jakob Wassermann, one of the leading European novelists; Franz Werfel, a lyrical playwright and novelist, and a wonderful poet; Karl Wolfskehl, a great and noble rewriter of myths; Carl Zuckmayer, a powerful dramatist; Arnold Zweig, the author of the splendid Sergeant Grisha and De Vriendt’s homecoming, an inspired novelist and essayist. An inadequate and incomplete listing of those soldiers of the intellect who were defeated by the Third Reich! The reader doesn’t need to take note of each individual name. It is enough if he salutes them, them and other Jewish writers who are among my closest friends, and whom friendship forbids me to labeclass="underline" Stefan Zweig, Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Weiss, Alfred Polgar, Walter Mehring, Siegfried Kracauer, Valeriu Marcu, Lion Feuchtwanger, the deceased Hermann Ungar and the revered seer and prophet, Max Picard.
I hope other German Jewish writers not on my list will forgive me for having omitted them. May those who do appear not be offended by finding their names next to those of some enemy or rival. They have all fallen on the intellect’s field of honor. All of them, in the eyes of the German murderer and arsonist, share a common fault: their Jewish blood and their European intellect.
The threatened and terrorized world must understand that the arrival on the scene of Corporal Hitler does not mark the beginning of any new chapter in the history of anti-Semitism: Far from it! What the arsonists tell us is true, though not in the way they intended: This Third Reich is only the beginning of the end! By destroying Jews they are persecuting Christ. For the first time the Jews are not being murdered for crucifying Christ but for having produced him from their midst. If the books of Jewish or supposed Jewish authors are burned, what is really set fire to is the Book of Books: the Bible. If Jewish judges and attorneys are expelled or locked up, it represents a symbolic assault on law and justice. If authors with European reputations are exiled, it is a way of proclaiming one’s contempt for France and Britain. If communists are tortured, it carries the fight to the Russian and Slavic world, which is always far more that of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky than that of Lenin and Trotsky. By making Austria a laughingstock, it makes a mockery of German Catholicism; and if one sets out to conquer or annex it, that is a threat to the whole of the Adriatic. Mussolini is mistaken; he has failed to understand his Cimbri and Teutoni; ages ago another Roman allowed himself similarly to be taken in by barbarians: Mussolini should have studied his Roman history more closely! By making up to the fascists, one shows one’s contempt for “Roman law.” One day the world will realize with astonishment that it was conquered by a corporal (albeit one who already had a field marshal to do his bidding!). We German writers of Jewish extraction are the first to have been vanquished for Europe. We at least are not guilty of blindness or falsehood. All we have is honor. .!
The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilisation. They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin’s bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the city by day and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis. This theme was almost imposed on the gifted Jewish writers by the urban milieu from which most of them came, to which their parents had been forced to move, and also by their more highly evolved sensibility and their Jewish aptitude for cosmopolitanism. The majority of non-Jewish German writers concentrated on the description of the rural landscapes that to them were home. In Germany, more than any other country, there is a “folk literature” based on region, landscape, tribe, often of high literary value, but necessarily inaccessible to a wider European public. As far as “abroad” was concerned, there was only that “Germany” whose literary mouthpieces were predominantly Jewish writers. It is through them that the French, the English, the American reader gain their sense of German reality. But this precisely is the basis for further accusations from narrow-minded nationalists and historians against Jewish writers. In the most infantile and jejeune manner, they took the subject matter, the setting, for the author’s personal character. A Jewish writer was “remote from the soil” when he wrote about the city; a “café house writer” when he discovered bars; a “traitor to the fatherland” when he depicted the world; a “superficial scribbler” when he found more sensual forms than the dry, abstract language of the German provincial dilettante; a “feuilletonist” if he happened to have charm and lightness of touch; a “joker” if he was witty; and if he happened to take on the description of the countryside, it was straightway objected that “he saw with his head and not his heart.” Jakob Wassermann’s moving testimonial, My Career as a German and a Jew, was vilified; it was forgotten that the one and only German war song was written by an Austrian Jew who died on the battlefield, Lieutnant H. Zuckermann. They forgot the patriotic poems of Ernst Lissauer; they repudiated the Rhenish dramas of the half Jewish Zuckmayer, so popular with the theatergoing public.
Literary anti-Semitism has existed in Germany since 1900. The racist anti-Semite Adolf Barthels, the moderate anti-Semite Paul Fechter, and many others attack the literary works of Jewish writers, often with personal invective. Certainly coarse and tasteless individuals may also be found among Jewish scribblers. But it is always these who are offered as the typical representatives of the Jewish writer! As early as 1918, before putting a book on display in their windows, provincial bookshop owners would ask if an author was Jewish — not even bothering to read it. And never — even though literary anti-Semitism was growing ever more virulent — did a Jewish author say anything publicly against it. There are strong and deep friendships between German Jewish writers and the best of the non-Jewish writers. A fine German stylist like Hans Carossa (not a Jew) was discovered and promoted by an admirable Jewish writer (though not one who wants to be named in this context). Let us remind our readers that Hans Carossa was the only non-Jewish German writer who refused to belong to the academy of the “Third Reich.” The German press was silent about this refusal, so nothing is known about it abroad either.