Writing Indigenousness: The Cityscapes of German-Jewish Literature

When Central European Jews underwent massive urbanization during the nineteenth century, their German-language narrative fiction retold this experience in a historical garb.Based on six literary examples, this article argues that during the 1850s, Jewish writing radically changed from an outsider to an insider perspective, while nonetheless emphasizing the precarious position of Jews in the city. The first three examples, The Rabbi of Bacharach (c.1825) by Heinrich Heine, “Letters and Walks of a Jewish Student” (1850) by Ludwig Philippson, and “Franzefuß” (1855) by Leopold Kompert, retrospectively evoke the anguish of Jewish migrants in the urban labyrinth. Three later novels, The Girls of Khaybar (1859) by Salomon Wassermann, The Y Aguilar Family (1873) by Markus Lehmann, and Jettchen Gebert (1906) by Georg Hermann, imagine Jewish elite families rooted in idyllic cityscapes of the Arabian, Spanish, and German historical pasts, where they must confront the threat of barbarous invaders.