Ernst Toller’s Transformations: The Performance of a German-Jewish Identity

Published in: Jewish Theatre: Tradition in Transition and Intercultural Vistas. Ahuva Belkin, ed. Tel Aviv: Assaph Book Series, 2008: 131-145 Ernst Toller’s Transformations: The Performance of a German-Jewish Identity Jeanette R. Malkin Hebrew University of Jerusalem Looking back on his life from the distance of his 1933 exile, playwright and political activist Ernst Toller ends his autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland (A Youth Spent in Germany) with these thoughts on the forces that shaped him: I think of my childhood, of the pain of the boy whom the others cursed as a “Dirty Jew!”; of my childish appeal to the image of Christ; of my terrible joy when I managed to “pass” and not be recognized as a Jew; of the first days of the war and my passionate wish to prove that I was a German, nothing but a German, by offering my life to my country. From the Front I wrote to the authorities to request that they strike my name from the list of members of the Jewish community. Was it all for naught? Was I mistaken? Do I not love this land with all my heart? Had I not stood in the rich beauty of the Mediterranean landscape and longed for the austere pine-woods, for the still, secret lakes of North Germany? Was I not moved to tears by the poetry of Goethe and Hölderlin that I read as a youth? Is not the German language my language, the language in which I feel and think, speak and act, a part of my very being, the Homeland that nourishes me? But am I not also a Jew? A member of that race which for centuries has been persecuted, harried, martyrized and slain; whose Prophets called the world to righteousness, who exalted and cared for the wretched and the oppressed, then and for all time, whose bravest never bowed their heads to their persecutors, and preferred death to dishonor. … If I were asked: where are your German roots? And where are your Jewish ones? – I would not know how to answer. … And if I were asked where I belong, I 1 would answer: a Jewish mother bore me, Germany nourished me, Europe educated me, my home is the earth, the world is my fatherland.1 (Toller, Jugend 161-62) This portrait of a painfully bifurcated identity can be read as the profile of a cosmopolitan Universalist, everywhere at home; or as the self-image of an eternally rootless wanderer, Ahasuerus, the German term for the Wandering Jew. This is what Toller’s alter-ego Friedrich, in his autobiographical play, Die Wandlung [Transformation] (1919), calls himself early in the play, until he rejects his Judaism in favor of a Universalist identity. Insider and outsider; Universalism and Jewish particularism: this article hinges on the tension within and between these terms, terms that Toller uses and probes in his first play. These are also the terms, or the psycho-social poles, between which his troubled sense of identity navigated. Toller, the socialist revolutionary and activist for universal human rights – rejects his particularist identity as a Jew. Toller, the outcast and exile who wandered for much of his life and never owned his own home – led a life whose path was to a large extent determined by his identity as a Jew. Ernst Toller was a German playwright whose dramatic prose is often an extension of his lyrical poetry – reminiscent of Rilke and Stramm – and whose subjects are steeped in contemporary (mainly) German history. In the above quote, Toller speaks of his “Germanness” in terms of language, landscape, and the general ‘spirit,’ or Bildung (education, culture) he received from Germany. He speaks of himself as a Jew whose sense of profound alienation led to his youthful decision to step out of the Jewish community and transform into a German – “nothing but a German” – by having his official affiliation struck from the records. But in 1933, in retrospect, and with hindsight, Toller presents his connection to the Jewish people as grounded both in the pain of persecution, and in the Jewish Prophets’ ethical teachings of righteousness and social conscience – teachings, I will claim, which form, albeit indirectly, the foundation of his plays and of his political activities. I shall contend that Toller’s self-presentation in his autobiography – as both German and Jew – represents the (probably largely unconscious) culmination of a cultural process. His biography shows him as a German Jew who disassociated himself first from Judaism, then from German nationalism, and finally realized his indelible link to both. His connection to Germany is biographically clear: he struggled to reform – or rather, transform – its political 2 system, preached to its people, sat in German prisons, and wrote, in German, poetry, essays, and plays which made him one of the most famous artists, in Germany and abroad, of his generation. But his connection to a Jewish identity is far less clear. Having rejected the world of his parents and then cut himself off from any official connection with the Jewish community, Toller rarely referred to Jewish themes or characters except in his first autobiographical play, Transformation. I will claim, however, that whether consciously or not, Toller’s path as an anarchist-socialist revolutionary, his activist engagement for Human Rights and universal justice, his messianic dream of a utopian world in which “God, who is spirit and love and strength, God… lives in mankind… in humanity,” (Toller, Transformation 92) – that these Universalist strivings, and their inscription in the themes and style of his plays, would all have identified him to his contemporary audiences in the Weimar Republic as a secular, socialist, Jewish intellectual. What, I will ask, are the connections between Toller’s formation as a dissident Jew and outsider, the conditions existing in the Germany in which he matured, and the sources of the ideas with which he later identified – sources that ‘transformed’ him into a utopian revolutionary, led to his imprisonment, and became the inspiration for his theatre? To use sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term, I am interested in Toller’s habitus, his ‘life-world’. Bourdieu defines “habitus” – somewhat hazily – as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that function as “principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations.” These dispositions serve the individual as “a strategy-generating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations” (Bourdieu, Outline 72). More simply put, habitus refers to the deep-rooted dispositions acquired in the individual’s ‘life-world’ through socialization, education, and the absorption of basic or residual values (that is, values that are no longer in ‘use’ or ‘active,’ but remain in the substructure of a value system – such as Messianism, discussed below). A habitus, according to Bourdieu, is an internalized mental or cognitive structure through which the world is perceived and acted upon; it is a set of learned dispositions which the individual applies within an appropriate social context or “field.” Habitus is a limiting term, since it challenges the idea of absolute free will; the social, or ‘life-world’ forms the structures of our behavior, of our cognition, and thus both defines and limits us. But it is not a deterministic term. Bourdieu proposes that our habitus inclines us toward certain patterns of behavior and thought, but they are not predictable. Habitus comprises a way of being-in-the-world which is not necessarily self-reflexive and is 3 thus, at least in part, unconscious.2 This concept is useful here because it has the advantage of directing our attention to the intersections between social structures and individual mentality, between biography (class, race, psychological and intellectual dispositions), and societal constructions and constrictions. Using this socio-cognitive concept of personal formation as a heuristic device, I will look at Toller’s development within his world in order to show how his conflicted identity as a Jew was both personal and generational, and to ask whether it was relevant to his artistic creativity. Biography and Symbolic Reproduction Ernst Toller was born in 1893 into a prosperous religious Jewish family in Samotschin, in the eastern Prussian province of Posen (previously and subsequently Poznań, in Poland). Posen was a small market town of three-thousand inhabitants – ethnic Catholic Poles, Protestant Germans, and a small community of German-cultured Jews. Toller attended a Jewish elementary-school and private high-school. In his autobiography he speaks movingly of the guilt he felt over his economic privilege, of the lack of any meaningful Jewish content in his home, and of the crass anti-Semitism directed at him by both Poles and Germans. His alienation from his family and religion – a subject he never analyzes but often declares – and the sting of rejection by the Germans to whom he longed to belong, is dwelt on in his autobiography, and is powerfully imaged in the opening scene of Transformation in which Friedrich [Toller] is introduced to us in a state of almost unbearable isolation. Staring out of his bedroom window at the Christmas trees lit and glowing in all the other houses, he interprets his exile from this “happiness” and rootedness as a punishment to be suffered by the Jewish “outcast.” Friedrich longs for Gemeinschaft, for community and acceptance, and imagines – initially – that it can be found in the warmth of Christian German tradition. Toller imbued Friedrich with much of his own discontent and confusion. “Where were you all day?” the mother asks Friedrich as he stands at the window. “Wandering, Mother. Wandering. … As always. . . . Like Him, Ahasuerus, whose shadow creeps through chained up streets, who hides in pestilential cellars … . . . Him, the eternal homeless one” (Toller, Transformation 62). Friedrich leaves the window of alienation in order to volunteer to fight in the First World War, as did Toller – who wanted to prove that he was “a German, nothing but a German.” 4 Transformation is set in pre- and post-World War I Germany and Friedrich’s story is embedded in oblique but crucial references to the revolutionary situation of Germany after four years of war, civil uprisings, economic collapse, and defeat. Toller’s play takes us, via thirteen hallucinary scenes, on a journey in the process of which the young Jewish protagonist transforms from a discontented outsider and son into a soldier in the trenches, a wounded, decorated war-hero, an artist, a seeker, a political activist, and finally into the Nietzschean New Man himself who rejects all nationalism and religious exclusivity, aiming instead to transform a corrupt world into a utopian brotherhood. In the final scene of the play, standing on the stairs outside a church, Friedrich calls to his followers: “Wäre Menschen!” – “Be humanity!” He calls on the soldiers to beat their “swords into ploughshares.” He calls for Love and Revolution of the Spirit. Thus the play ends with Friedrich, who had so fervently wished to be rid of his Jewish identity, becoming that most famous of Jews, the utopian activist Christ the Messiah. The war changed Toller, as it did many. He suffered the consequences of the gap between ideal and reality: disillusionment, wounds, a nervous breakdown, half a year in hospitals and sanatoriums, and in 1916, a discharge from the army as “unfit” to serve. Like many young intellectuals, Toller’s experience of war in the trenches turned him into a pacifist deeply suspicious of authority. Two young men of Toller’s generation whose life experiences were similar to his – Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, both of Jewish origin, one Czech, the other Austrian – wrote a film script that gave powerful voice to this suspicion, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.3 In that canonic Expressionist film (released the same year as Toller’s first play) the authority figure – the head doctor of a mental institution – turns out to be a madman who wreaks murder and chaos through his control and abuse of a young somnambulist. The sleep-walker (played with electrifying tension by the emaciated-looking Conrad Veidt) is a stand-in for an entire younger generation who had been sent out to kill and die in the name of some mad higher authority. The film’s Expressionist style, like Toller’s own, conveys a world alive with anxiety, and a generation who suffer from a sense of isolation and homelessness. Indeed, isolation and homelessness are, according to Egbert Krispyn, “the central experiences in the life of the Expressionists’ generation” (Krispyn 16) – a generation caught between the unbending authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany, and modernization’s implicit promise of greater freedom and personal autonomy. This sense of alienation also reflects the distress of pre- and post-World War I Europe, itself on a course of radical upheaval, of social, economic, 5 and technological transformation. Jewish intellectuals and artists, such as Toller, had good reason to share in this Angst, being doubly isolated – as Germans of their generation, and as Jews in Germany. Like Janowitz and Mayer, Toller returned from the front seeking a substitute for his lost personal and national faith. Like his alter-ego Friedrich, Toller found his answer in a spiritual, but activist, form of Socialism; but unlike Friedrich, Toller was not a lone leader. At age twenty-five, Toller joined the radical anti-war Independent Socialist Party (USPD, the pacifist splinter-group of the Social Democratic Party, SPD) and followed socialist Kurt Eisner to Munich where they, together with a small group of mainly Jewish leftist intellectuals and artists, staged a Bolshevik-inspired, and supported, Workers’ Revolution which gained them control of the Bavarian government for a short while. Most of the activists in this 1919 Socialist civil-war were killed in the chaos that followed – Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer – but Toller got away with five years’ imprisonment, during which time he wrote his most important works: plays, poetry, and political. He left prison in 1924, at age thirty, with the goal of continuing to fight for “a world of justice, freedom, humanism; a world without fear and without hunger. I am thirty years old,” he writes in the last lines of his autobiography, “My hair is graying. I am not tired” (Toller, Eine Jugend 167).4 For the remaining years of his life, Toller dedicated himself to humanitarian and socialist activity in Germany and abroad, to writing and lecturing and endless travel, always on the move, never owning a home: truly the image of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. The Jewish Matrix In his book Appell oder Resignation (which could be translated as Activism or Submission), Carel ter Haar seeks the Jewish sources of Toller’s work beyond Toller’s parents’ home and formal Jewish education, and despite Toller’s assimilation and selfproclaimed alienation from Judaism.5 Toller, like many young German-cultured Jews of the time, felt that the Jewish heritage he had been given by his parents was a sham, virtually empty of meaning. Many of the sons (and daughters) of parents who had left Jewish ghettos in the East a generation earlier to become assimilated and often wealthy burgers of the German and Austro-Hungarian realms, found in their bourgeois Jewish homes only the crust of Jewish tradition, without any inner meaning. “You still brought 6 along, from your small ghetto-like village, a tiny bit of Jewishness,” Kafka writes in “The Letter to his Father”. “It was not much and some of it got lost … Still those impressions and memories of your youth sufficed for a bare minimum of a Jewish life, especially for you.” It was not enough, however, to transmit to his son. Kafka felt alienated (Kafka 49). Here we have Toller, via Friedrich, responding to his mother’s request that he go to “Services” in the synagogue so that people wouldn’t talk (from scene one of Transformation): People! Oh, why not call it Services for people instead of Services for God, whom you’ve turned into a fossilized, narrow-minded judge … They disgust me, your people Services which I cannot call divine … it suffocates me. … Oh, Mother… I could cry when I think about it. … You took care of me with money … yes, my material existence was secured. But what did you do for my soul? (Toller, Transformation 64) Although there are no obvious Jewish sources for Toller’s work, ter Haar finds two decisive elements in Toller’s personality and habitus which can be clearly associated with his Jewishness: Toller’s messianism, expressed both in his political ideology and in his writing; and Toller’s acute sense of marginality, both as a Jew and as a radical socialist. The claim that there is a connection between the Jewish attraction to utopian ideologies such as socialism (not only in Germany) and Jewish messianism, is hardly news.6 In the midnineteenth century, the German-Jewish philosopher and socialist activist Moses Hess was central to the infusion of Jewish messianic ideals into German socialism, especially through his proto-Zionist book Rom und Jerusalem (1862). For Hess, Judaism’s emphasis on moral action in the here-and-now, combined with its messianic view of history, made it uniquely apt for socialism; and secular messianism became a deep-structure of Marxist discourse. Some historians, such as Jacob Toury, argue that the rendering of Jewish religious messianism into secular political fervor began with Germany’s 1848 revolution and continued uninterrupted. This is a line of reasoning that feeds, of course, from facts on the ground: the fact of an incongruously large number of people of ‘Jewish origin’ who conceived, propagated, 7 theorized, erected, and actively carried out socialist, universalist and revolutionary ideologies – from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century in central Europe and Russia. The entire history of Jewish exclusion and then begrudged assimilation into European modernity, as well as the history of social and economic transformations in Europe and Russia of the time, frame the fact of a certain fit, perhaps an elective affinity, between Jews and utopian ideologies. Sociologists, historians, philosophers, have written abundantly about the connection between Jewish theology, or the remnants of a certain Jewish thought-world, and the development and propagation by Jews of Universalist ideologies of equality and inclusion. In Germany, Jewish hopes of social acceptance were deeply disappointed with the resurgence, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, of fierce anti-Semitism and growing Nationalism. Jews, after all – as the German-Jewish revolutionary and leader of the radical Spartacus movement, Karl Liebknecht, wrote – “are the product of [social] relations, just like everybody else,” and as a consequence of these social relations, voted in disproportionate numbers (compared to other members of their economic class) for socialist parties from the end of the nineteenth century on (quoted in Leuschen-Seppel 71). Jewish supporters of Socialism tended to belong, sociologically, to the stratum of assimilated middle-class intellectuals who had little affiliation with Judaism, either institutionally or in personal practice. Many were indifferent, some even hostile toward Judaism. Some, however, saw their Judaism as an additional element to be integrated into their German lives. This is the approximate profile of the two major intellectual influences on Toller’s mature thinking, Gustav Landauer and Kurt Eisner. Gustav Landauer was a German-Jewish anarchist-socialist philosopher, a literary and theatre critic, a political theorist and activist who, unlike Marxian socialists, believed that social transformation was only possible through the regeneration of the Geist, the Spirit. In his Aufruf zum Sozialismus [A Call to Socialism], Landauer wrote that “Socialism must be built, must be erected, must be organized out of a new Geist” (49-59) – the spirit of the freed individual. Transformation, for Landauer, was to come from below, from among the common people; and from within – the human spirit. It was a mode-of-being in the world, an ideology without an authoritative platform – which would inevitably again usurp individual freedom – but with clear and humane principles. He propounded, for example, an anti-urban return to 8 communal agrarianism with no central authority. Landauer’s ideas were deeply congruent with those of Expressionism both in their mystical appeal to spirit and in their romantic phrasing. They influenced not only Toller, but, equally, the non-Jewish Expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser, whose Gas plays actually unfold Landauer’s program of a return to a pre-modern form of communal life. A Call to Socialism was published in 1911. By 1917, it had become something of a cult text among young intellectuals whose disillusionment with the war was at its peak. Toller’s first political act as an anti-war pacifist (after his release from the army) owes its inspiration to Landauer. During the three months that he spent at the University of Heidelberg – mainly attending the lectures of Max Weber – Toller organized a group of students into a pacifist association called the “Cultural and Political League of German Youth.” He wrote the group’s Manifesto, or “Leitsätze,” which in spirit and intent is almost a restatement of Landauer’s ideas. “Anarchist in its inspiration, Expressionist in its diction, it documents the literary quality of Toller’s early political commitment,” writes Richard Dove, in his biography of Toller (39). Toller called for activism directed by “the unifying idea of true spirit” whose ethical aim was “to overcome the ever-widening gulf between the common people and the intellectuals.” While there were concrete goals set out in the Manifesto – educational reform, abolition of the death penalty, reduction of the voting age, separation of Church and State – the aspirations, Dove claims, “were purely utopian.” “Only through human transformation from within can the community we are striving for grow,” Toller wrote (quoted in Dove 40).7 Landauer wrote little about Judaism per se, but his socialism – which he called “the mosaic [Moses] social order” – was permeated by his Jewish habitus. Unlike Toller, Landauer did not see his Jewishness as mainly a product of anti-Semitism. On the contrary. “I, the Jew, am a German,” he wrote: My Germanness and my Jewishness do each other no harm but much good. As two brothers, a first-born and a Benjamin are loved by a mother … thus do I experience this strange and intimate unity in duality as something precious, and I fail to recognize in this relationship that one is primary and another secondary. I have never had the need of oversimplifying myself or to seek a fictitious unity. I accept my complexity and hope to be a unity of even greater complexities than I am aware of. (Landauer, “Ketzergedanken”) 9 The transformation of the individual through ethical action, rather than the transformation of the means of production and class structure, is the heart of Landauer’s anarchist-socialism. It is through the individual that the messianic moment, Utopia, might be released. Landauer’s humanistic messianism became Toller’s ideological scaffolding; and Landauer’s poetic diction inspired the aesthetics and themes of Toller’s early plays. Toller’s other great influence was Kurt Eisner (originally, Kamonowsky), whom he met in Berlin in 1918 after being expelled from Heidelberg for his subversive political activities. Eisner, a charismatic figure and anarchist who, like Landauer, followed an ethically-based socialism, was both totally assimilated and unapologetic about his Jewish origins. For a time, he was active in the Jewish self-defense league (Der Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus), but then replaced self-defense with parliamentary politics. Eisner was a student of the important German-Jewish neo-Kantian scholar, Hermann Cohen, himself an ethical activist who interpreted Kant’s ethical philosophy as primarily political. Eisner was also a journalist, an editor, a political activist (a militant pacifist), and a writer of socialist lyrics and fairy tales. In addition, and most importantly for Toller, Eisner was the head of the Munich branch of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD). Toller, who had an unusual talent as an almost hypnotic orator, and a fervent desire for political involvement, joined him in Munich and together with a small group of writers and intellectuals led a political take-over of the Bavarian regime, creating the short-live Räterrepublik, the so-called Soviet Republic of Bavaria. I won’t go into this complicated and traumatic (for Toller, but also for Germany) political affair, but it began with Eisner, Toller, and others, leading a demonstration of 200,000 anti-government protesters and ended – three weeks after the revolutionaries had in fact taken over the state government and begun to initiate reforms – with a military crack-down sent from Berlin. In the ensuing street battles, over a thousand communist volunteers died; approximately eight hundred additional men and women were arrested and executed – i.e.: murdered – including Eisner, Landauer, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Poets Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller were arrested and jailed. Toller never forgave himself for the violence he and the other political naïfs had generated, but not anticipated. His sense of guilt over the many civilian deaths that this abortive political action had cost is given powerful, autobiographical, Expressionist form in his 10 second and perhaps most important play, Massemensch [Masses and Man] (1919), which he wrote during his first year in prison. Despite abundant poetic, dramatic, and polemical writings about this formative trauma, Toller never discusses the ‘Jewish’ element of the political action. For him, the takeover in Munich, despite the near monopoly of Jewish activists involved, was a pacifist ideological coup inspired by a Universalist ideology, blind to ethnicity or religion, and applied by this group out of their love for Germany. But the deep Jewish roots of the German-Jewish activists cannot be ignored – nor were they ignored by, for example, Landauer. In February 1919, barely two months before his own assassination, Gustav Landauer delivered a eulogy for his murdered friend and colleague Kurt Eisner, speaking in terms that could well apply to himself, as well as to Ernst Toller: “Kurt Eisner, the Jew,” he said, “was a prophet who wrestled mercilessly with timid, wretched humans because he loved humanity. He was a prophet because he felt for the poor and the downtrodden, and because he saw the possibility, the necessity of putting an end to poverty and slavery” (Landauer, “Gedächtnisrede”). Landauer, with his long black beard, thin, gentle face, and round glasses, looked himself like a biblical figure. Whatever role Judaism actually played in his and Eisner’s ideologies, whether or not a conscious secular Jewish messianism animated their thoughts, they clearly felt themselves connected to the Jewish ethical tradition, to the line of reformers that begins with the Hebrew prophets and finds its justification in the biblical text. It was part of their self-imagery and of their habitus. Toller’s early plays are clearly and, to his contemporary audience, obviously autobiographical, retelling, as they did, personal and political facts that were already in the public domain. But the autobiography inscribed in Transformation and Masses and Man reflects not only a life, but a life-world: the structures of thought and emotion, of class and race, the imprint of memory, and the constraints of biography that Bourdieu sums up in his habitus. This life-world is something Toller shared with other Jews of his generation; it is perhaps what drew him to Jewish intellectuals such as Landauer and Eisner, whose formation, and whose dreams, were so similar to his own. The form of Toller’s plays – ecstatic, lyrical, confessional – rendered those plays as a perfect form of communication with his audience. Expressionist dramaturgy was developed by Toller to its mature phase in which subjectivity 11 and self-transformation are political as well as philosophical tools. Toller’s over-riding concern in the early plays is the struggle of the autobiographical ‘I’ (Ich) figure, to change and bring change, thereby giving transcendent meaning to the world. This is especially successful in Die Wandlung and Massemensch since the thematic drive toward personal change as a prelude to Messianic world-change is cogent with the formal properties of the genre Toller adopts and develops. Expressionism is structurally episodic and usually depicts the ‘journey’ of a soul. It is a subjectivist genre whose basic themes are rebellion and regeneration through personal as well as collective transformation. It is interesting that German-Jews were highly prominent in the creation and propagation of this genre – as writers (not only of drama), actors, and directors. The identification of Expressionist art with Jewish artists (which I discuss elsewhere8) was so pervasive that anti-Semites such as Adolf Bartels could write, in a book on Jews and Literature published in 1925, that while some may have exaggerated in claiming that Expressionism could be termed as simply Jewish, still, Bartels insists, the Jewish manner, Jewish excitedness, the shrieking and the stammering (“das Schreierei und Stammelei”) certainly played a central role in creating the Expressionist idiom (Bartels 148). Indeed, this image was so common that the liberal German Jewish theater critic, Julius Bab, had to assure the readers of his 1926 book on actors and acting that despite his nervous energy, intellectual acuity and spasmodic wildness of style, and despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary: Josef Kainz, the great Schillerian Austrian actor, was not a Jew. And this, Bab adds sarcastically, “was for many a sensation” (Bab 176). The important Austrian-Jewish actor, Fritz Kortner, was the original Friedrich in the play’s first 1920 Berlin production (and became famous through the role). Kortner, who documents his own struggles with anti-Semitism in Austria and Germany, wrote, proudly, in his autobiography: “What I played at the time was myself, a young German Jew and rebel in conflict with the world around me” (Kortner 268). Kortner, like many others, saw himself in Toller’s Friedrich. Toller’s style, his ideology, but also the emotion that fed that ideology, and the sources that fed that emotion, are laid bare to the public in these confessional plays; and the public is invited to identify and enter into a spiritual union with the life-world of Toller’s autobiographical protagonist. In Transformation, Friedrich leaves his unwanted Jewish home and unloved Jewish religion in search of a place and faith he can call ‘home,’ a place where he can belong; and he finds that place, finally, in a faith in ‘humanity.’ The play ends with Friedrich leading a 12 multitude of downtrodden ‘humanity’ toward revolution – as Toller himself had done in Munich. “Now, brothers,” Friedrich proclaims, quoting from the words of the Hebrew prophets: Now go to your rulers and proclaim in booming organ tones that their power is only illusion. Go to the soldiers and bid them beat their swords into ploughshares. Go to the rich and show them their hearts which have become muckheaps. … March – march in the light of day. . . . Let revolution stride through our free land, Revolution! Revolution! (Toller, Transformation 118) By this act, I suggest, Toller removes his protagonist, Friedrich, and himself, from one type of Jewish life-world – that of the alienated Jew as outsider; and relocates him in another Jewish life-world – that of the messianic revolutionary, of the passionate Universalist missionary. To express it in another way, Toller’s plays convey the sensibility, aspirations, sufferings and lifeexperiences of many Jews of his time. They are the product of a certain type of bourgeois Bildung combined with a certain exposure to active and residual Jewish values. They are also the product of a widespread sense of ‘outsiderness’ and alienation resulting from anti-Jewish prejudices that often lead to an ideological faith in Socialist and other Universalist – that is, seemingly ‘non-Jewish’ – faiths. Toller’s plays reproduce this world, this habitus, and can be recognized as such even when the plays do not identify as, or with, his Jewishness. Thus, the Jewishness of Friedrich, and of Toller, is not obliterated through the choice of Universalism as opposed to Jewishness; it is rather transformed from one type of Jewish identity to another. Transformation was a cultural sensation in Germany; it was so popular that upon its one-hundredth performance, the Bavarian government, in an attempt to appease critics from the left, offered Toller a political pardon and release from prison. Toller agreed – on condition that all the other political prisoners jailed for their roles in the revolution be released as well. This typically ethical stance resulted in Toller’s continued imprisonment for the full five years of his sentence. 13 In conclusion: That Toller was a German author is beyond doubt. The German language, literature, history, even landscape, are imprinted in his poetry and prose. That Toller was not a ‘Jewish’ author is also clear. He did not consciously engage the wealth of cultural sources used by many other German-Jewish writers to this end, and in fact distanced himself from such cultural particularity. The species of art I have discussed here is both a hybrid and a central furrow of German cultural history: literature (but this can also be extended to performance and other media) created by a German-Jewish sensibility that engaged the problematics typical of a segment of German-Jewish life and thought – of a certain GermanJewish habitus – without necessarily using either Jewish characters or specifying a Jewish milieu. These hybrid creations sometimes combined cultural references from both or many traditions, sometimes created new aesthetic forms in order to express a sensibility that was unique – but without identifying it as ‘Jewish.’ This unique sensibility – and the pressure to ‘erase’ its specific ‘Jewish’ connection – is itself a part of the history and habitus of GermanJewish culture, forged within a given period, and usually recognized by its contemporaries in that light: as Jewish and Universalist; as a central vein of German culture created by a small group of insider/outsiders. While Toller’s plays are today almost forgotten, he was for a time the most famous playwright in Germany. Even before his suicide – by hanging, in a New York hotel in 1939 – his plays had been translated into twenty-seven languages, including Yiddish, and performed on the most important stages in the world. His were among the first books to be burnt by the Nazis, in direct proportion to his popularity and anti-fascist activities. Upon Toller’s death, the poet W. H. Auden, who had known and admired Toller and had translated some of his work into English, wrote an elegy “In Memory of Ernst Toller.” It contains the following famous lines – as though questioning what underlying forces had constructed a life as extraordinary as that of Ernst Toller: We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand. … but existence is believing We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving. 14 WORKS CITED: Ansky, S. The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I. Joachim Neugroschel ed. and trans. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt and Co., 2002. Bab, Julius. Schauspieler und Schauspielkunst. Berlin: Österheld, 1926. Bartels, Adolf. Jüdische Herkunft und Literaturwissenschaft. Leipzig: Verlag des BartelsBundes, 1925. Bodenheimer, Alfred. “Ernst Toller und sein Judentum.” In Deutsch-Jüdische Exil und Emigrationsliteratur im 20. Jahrhundert. Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch, eds. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993: 185-193. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Dove, Richard. Revolutionary Socialism in the Work of Ernst Toller. New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Dove, Richard. He Was a German. London: Libris, 1990. Hess, Moses. Rom and Jerusalem. Meyer Waxman, ed. New York: Block Publishing Co: 1945. Jordan, James. “Audience Disruption in the Theatre of the Weimar Republic.” In New Theatre Quarterly 1/3 (1985): 283-291. Kafka, Franz. Letter to the Father. Karen Reppin trans. Prague: Vitalis, 1998. Kortner, Fritz. Aller Tage Abend: Autobiographie. Munich: Knaur, 1996 [1959]. Krispyn, Egbert. Style and Society in German Literary Expressionism. Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1964. Landauer, Gustav. “Sind das Ketzergedanken?” In Vom Judentum. The Jewish student union Bar Kochba: Prag, 1913. Landauer, Gustav. Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1967. Leuschen-Seppel, Rosemarie. Sozialdemokratie un Antisemitismus in Kaiserreich. Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1978. Linse, Ulrich, ed. “Gedächtnisrede auf Kurt Eisner.” In Gustav Landauer und die Revolutionszeit 1918/1919. Berlin: K. Kramer, 1974. Lizardo, Omar. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34:4 (2004): 375-401. 15 Löwy, Michael. “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe (1900-1933).” New German Critique 20 (1980): 105-115. Ossar, Michael. “Die jüdische messianische Tradition und Ernst Tollers Wandlung.” In Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert. Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörder, eds. Frankfurt/M: Athenäum, 1985: 293-308. Peukert, Detlev J. K. The Weimar Republic. London: Penguin, 1991. Robertson, Ritchie. The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. Robinson, David. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari. London: bfi Publishing, 1997. Roth, Joseph. The Wandering Jews. Michael Hofmann trans. New York: Norton, 2001. ter Haar, Carel. Appell oder Resignation. Munich: tuduv-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977. Toller, Ernst. Eine Jugend in Deutschland. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963. Toller, Ernst. He Was a German: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, Edward Crankshaw trans. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Toller, Ernst. Transformation. In Plays One. Alan Raphael Pearlman ed. and trans. London: Oberon Books, 2000. Toury, Jacob. Soziale und Politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1977. Toury, Jacob. Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland. Tübingen: Schriftenreihe wissenschafticher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, 1966. Turnowsky-Pinner, Margarete. “A Student’s Friendship with Ernst Toller.” Leo Baeck Yearbook XL (1970): 211-222. Weisberger, Adam M. The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 1 My translation. Toller’s Eine Jugend in Deutschland was originally published in Amsterdam in 1933. An English translation was published already in 1934. 2 Bourdieu distinguishes between habitus as a perceptual and classifying structure, and habitus as a generative structure of practical action. For a discussion of this distinction and its implications see: Lizardo. 16 3 See: Robinson 7-24. In Mayer’s case, his biography is possibly invented and thus uncertain. 4 My translation from the German. The English translation is inexact. 5 See: ter Haar. 6 See e.g.: Löwy and Weisberger. Both have been influential to my thinking. See also: Ossar, Bodenheimer, and Turnowsky-Pinner. 7 For a discussion of this see: Dove 37-40. 8 See my article: “Transforming in Public: Jewish Actors on the German Expressionist Stage,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, eds. University of Iowa Press, 2010: 151-173. 17