Darstellungen von Juden in der dänischen Erzählliteratur des poetischen Realismus

Authors

• Stefanie Schnurbein Nordeuropa-institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30752/nj.69608

Keywords:

Jews -- Denmark, Danish literature, Authors, Danish, Antisemitism in literature, Stereotype (Psychology), Jewish literature, Jewish authors

Abstract

Between 1820 and 1850, nearly all major Danish authors (e.g. B.S. Ingemann, C. Hauch, H.C. Andersen, Th. Gyllembourg and St. St. Blicher) chose Jewish characters, mainly “noble Jews”, as protagonists for short stories and novels. This “boom” was on the one hand a direct rejection of the overtly anti-Semitic discussions in the literary jødefejden of 1813 and a reaction to the pogrom like attacks on Jews in Denmark in 1819. It can thus be understood as a favorable contribution to the discussions on Jewish emancipation in Denmark. On the other hand, this article demonstrates how the Jewish literary characters serve as the stereotypical “Other” that has to be assimilated and can prove the integrative and harmonizing abilities of the emerging Danish bourgeois society. A contrasting reading of the Danish-Jewish author M.A. Goldschmidt’s debut novel En Jøde (A Jew, 1845/1852) reveals the inner contradictions of these idealizations and the ensuing irreconcilable and ultimately lethal double-binds a Jewish individual who is willing to integrate.