ABSTRACT
The examples of popular culture to be addressed in this chapter are the installment (or serial) novels that appeared between 1922 and 1923 in the most widely circulated Jewish newspaper of Weimar Germany, the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Israelite Family Journal). Like other such mass media, the Familienblatt, published weekly in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Berlin between 1898 and 1938, has rarely been analyzed by historians of German-speaking Jewry. This neglect is conspicuous because the Israelitisches Familienblatt was the bestselling Jewish periodical in early twentieth-century Germany. The Familienblatt is also an especially representative source. First, it con-
sidered itself a “family journal” (Familienblatt), part of a tradition inaugurated by Ernst Keil’s Die Gartenlaube (founded 1853), the most popular German-language periodical of the nineteenth century.2 Second, it endeavored to be non-partisan, distancing itself from political Jewish organizations, such as the Zionists and, to a lesser extent, from the more assimilationist Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Third, it was completely financed through advertising and subscriptions. It was thus imperative that it sell itself, and sell itself it did. It found a significant resonance in the German-Jewish community, reaching at least fifteen percent of the potential Jewish market in Germany (ca. 600,000) – a high figure for any mass publication. While purporting to understand German-Jewish lives and mentalities
between 1918 and 1933, scholars have omitted not only the periodicals most popular with Weimar Jewry, but also the installment novels and other
fictions that appeared between their pages. Unlike memoirs, letters, and other more researched sources, representative German-Jewish journal literature provided its targeted constituencies with the illusion of “community,” that is, with a rhetorically constructed “ethnic” Jewish identity. In this fictional but very public sphere of the serial, an overarching consensus was sought. This consensus embraced the broad nature of Weimar Jewish social formations ranging from established upper middle-class to Jewish proletarians and migrants from Eastern Europe. At the same time, the installment novel was a serious response to the
social realities of Weimar-era Jews. No mere pulp fiction (or Trivialliteratur), stories in the Israelitisches Familienblatt engaged dialogically with the world around them. That writers as disparate as Meta Opet-Fuß and Martin Salomonski felt compelled to address similar phenomena – class distinction, refugees, prostitution, and broken families – confirms as much. These serial novels thus demonstrate that the public debates of German Jewry often reflected their interior lives and experiences. For German-Jewish popular culture was not imposed from without or above, but constructed from within and below. As serialized fictions mediate the range of attitudes and fantasies that are acceptable to a collective group in a specific epoch, they add significantly to our knowledge of the social and cultural history of that group. These and other texts found in popular magazines and newspapers reflect the myriad ways in which German Jews understood themselves as both “Jews” and “Germans.” Installment novels such as those of Opet-Fuß and Salomonski are perhaps
more “Jewish” than one is led to expect by the scholarship on Weimar Jewry in which narratives of assimilation predominate. Writing in response to this teleology of decline, Marion Kaplan maintains: “What has become a paradox for historians appeared reasonable and consistent to the German Jews themselves: they were at one and the same time agents of acculturation and tradition and of integration and apartness.”3 Michael Brenner has also recently shown that Weimar Jews, even if they did not identify with Zionist or Orthodox communities, were not nearly as un-Jewish or anti-Jewish as intimated in the work of earlier scholars. To be sure, fictions targeting Jewish middle-class readers and fictions directed at the non-Jewish middle class had much in common. But whereas German middle-class values were prevalent in the Jewish propertied and educated bourgeoisie (Bildungs-und Besitzbürgertum), its members – from daily tea and evening leisure to weddings and holidays – mainly interacted with other Jews. This much was true for those Jews who were highly acculturated or had converted to Christianity.4
