Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gilman, Sander L.

Titel

Sibling Incest, Madness, and the "Jews"

Ist Teil von

• Jewish social studies, 1998-01, Vol.4 (2), p.157-179

Ort / Verlag

New York: Indiana University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1998

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Separation is understood as sexual perversion. [Werner Sombart] quotes the well-known passage in Tacitus (certainly no lover of the Jews): "They neither eat nor intermarry with strangers; they are a people of strong passions, yet they withhold themselves from other men's wives" (240). Here Sombart offers a "positive" reading of Jewish "consciousness of kind." He presents a model of sublimation as the mechanism by which sexuality is turned into profit: by the Law of the Father, the Jews limit their sexual contact even with their own wives, so, as a result, "enormous funds of energy were prevented from finding an outlet in one direction and they turned to others" (236-37). This repressed sexual power became economic aggression. Thus the "incestuous" Jews intermarried, divided themselves off from the strangers among whom they lived, and exploited them through usury: "But it may be observed that even in the earliest collection of laws interest was allowed to be taken from `strangers'" (242). And this means that the Jew (or his surrogate in the system of representations) can be unscrupulous: "[T] he good Jew must needs draw the conclusion that he is not bound to be so particular in his intercourse with non-Jews" (245). It is economic intercourse that Sombart means, but it reflects on the transformation of this image that Sombart's repressed Jew becomes the degenerate Jew who is unscrupulous in his sexuality as well as his economic dealings. And these degenerate, modern Jews move easily from the desert to the "modern city," because "the modern city is nothing else but a great desert, as far removed from the warm earth as the desert is, and like it, forcing its inhabitants to become nomads" (334). The city becomes the place of incest, of the corrupted and corrupting modern person. (21) On this story see "'[Wagner] in verjüngten Proportionen...': Wälsungenblut als epische Wagner-Transkription," [Thomas Mann] Jahrbuch 7 (1994): 169-85; Alan Levenson, "Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut in the Context of the Intermarriage Debate and the `Jewish Question,'" in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger, eds. (Detroit, Mich., 1994), 135-43; G. R. Kluge, "Wälsungenblut oder Halbblut? Zur Kontroverse um die Schlusssätze von Thomas Manns Novelle," Neophilologus 76 (1990): 237-55; John Whiton, "Thomas Mann's `Wälsungenblut': Implications of the Revised Ending," Seminar 25 (1989): 3748; Sylvia Wallinger, "'Und es war kalt in dem silbernen Kerzensaal, wie in dem der Schneekönigin, wo die Herzen der Kinder erstarren': Gesundete Männlichkeit -- gezähmte Weiblichkeit in Thomas Manns Königliche Hoheit und `Wälsungenblut,'" in Der Widerspenstigen Zahmung: Studien zur bezwungenen Weiblichkeit in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Sylvia Wallinger and Monika Jonas, eds. (Innsbruck, 1986), 235-57; Bernd M. Kraske, "Thomas Manns `Wälsungenblut' -- eine antisemitische Novelle?" in Thomas Mann: Erzählungen und Novellen, Rudolf Wolff, ed. (Bonn, 1984), 42-66; Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Sang reserve in Deutschland: Zur Rezeption von Thomas Manns Wälsungenblut," The German Quarterly 57 (1984): 363-76; Gail Finney, "Self-Reflexive Siblings: Incest as Narcissism in Tieck, Wagner, and Thomas Mann," The German Quarterly 56 (1983): 243-56; Christine Oertel Sjögren, "The Variant Ending as a Clue to the Interpretation of Thomas Mann's `Wälsungenblut,'" Seminar 14 (1978): 97-104; Peter de Mendelssohn, Der Zauberer: Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann (Frankfurt, 1975), 1: 662-73, and Marie Walter, "Concerning the Affair Wälsungenblut," Book Collector 13 (1964): 463-72.