Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture

Paul Reitter has won acclaim as both a scholar and a public critic for his writing on German Jewish culture in the twentieth century.

Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of Reitter's essayistic work, exploring the lives of well-known figures and revealing surprising new perspectives. These include how Felix Salten's Zionist commitments manifest themselves in his most famous work, the novel Bambi; what Gershom Scholem's diaries tell us about his development as a thinker and person; why German-Jewish writers hated Stefan Zweig so passionately; where myth-busting books about Franz Kafka have indulged in myth-building; how Freud's Moses and Monotheism offers a theory of Jewish self-hatred more than an explanation of anti-Semitism; and why Heinrich Heine felt aburning need to distance himself from his fellow liberal Jewish critic Ludwig Börne.

The works collected here, many of which were originally published in forums such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, have earned Reitter his reputation as a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic.

“Reitter has established himself as a leading authority on German-Jewish relations between the wars.” – Choice

“Paul Reitter preserves the memory of German-Jewish culture in the manner perhaps most faithful to its achievement-through the well-wrought essay. Venerated by a cult of readers who have run across one or another of his entries, Reitter's prose will win a whole new level of esteem thanks to this lovely compilation. Always informative, at times cheeky, ultimately somber, but always elegant, it is less a monument to a lost golden age of the humanities than a showing of how to make an admirable past live on in our own time.” – Samuel Moyn, Professor Law and History, Harvard University, USA

“Bambi's Jewish Roots is a bouquet of elegantly crafted essays evoking seminal but largely overlooked moments in German-Jewish cultural history.” – Paul Mendes-Flohr, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, The University of Chicago, USA

Table Of Contents

Preface
I. Self-Reflections
1. The Story of a Friendship Gone Bad: Heinrich Heine on Ludwig Börne
2. Irrational Man: Gershom Sholem's Decisive Years
3. The Text Life of Dreams: Arthur Schnitzler's Nighttime Diaries
II. Legendary Lives
4. Misreading Kafka
5. The Wittgensteins and the Perils of Family Biography
6. Dust-to-Dust Song: Nelly Sachs's Life
7. Sadness in the Mountains: Freud and the Upside of Transience
8. The Middle Way of Erich Fromm
III. Beyond the Canon
9. Bambi's Jewish Roots
10. Appraising the Collector: The Life and Work of Stefan Zweig
11. Fear and Self-Loathing in fin-de-siecle Vienna: Otto Weininger's Sex and Character
IV. Renderings
12. That Other Metamorphosis: Translating Kafka
13. The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and the Task of the Retranslator
14. The Poetics and Politics of Hugo von Hofmannsthal
V. Studying German Jewry
15. Kafka's Identity Politics
16. Whose Jewish: Theorizing German-Jewish Culture
17. Rabbis Making Role Models: German-Jewish Middlebrow Literature
18. Schnitzler's Vienna: Waltz or Go-Go?
19. Rereading Freud's Moses Again
20. Erich Auerbach's Exile and the Motion of Mimesis
VI. The End
21. Hitler Viennese Waltz
22. The Führer Furor
23. Holocaust Imponderables
24. Racism: Coded as Culture
25. Gender Unbender: Pierre Bourdieu and the Enigmatic Durability of Bad Values
26. The Paradoxes of Holocaust Literature: A Guide for the Darkly Perplexed
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index