Why Was Goethe the ‘Patron Saint of German Jews’? Reconsidering a Central Topic of George L. Mosse’s Oeuvre 30 Years Later

Abstract

George L. Mosse belongs to the extremely productive generation of scholars to whom we owe fundamental insights into general and German-Jewish contemporary history. They fled Hitler in childhood and adolescence and received their academic training not in the country and language of their birth, but in exile. In the context of this generational experience, this essay explores the very real and symbolic significance that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had for this generation throughout their lives. poet “It argues that the poet and his works deeply shaped émigré self-perception, in which one opposed the notion that the hyphen between “German-Jewish” indicated any separation.”. For George L. Mosse, as well as for many of his fellow historians in exile, Goethe was therefore the symbol of the own, the inner, not the acquired knowledge of others. It was a cosmopolitan, almost Jewish Goethe who was defended even after the catastrophe, because culture was not conceived in the fateful category of limited national property.