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History, Self Interest, and Polyphony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2020
Extract
Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the “truth” of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.
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- Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020
References
1 Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (New York: Vintage, 2007), 1201Google Scholar.
2 Lefebvre, Georges, Napoleon, trans. Stockhold, Henry F. and Anderson, J.E. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 As Tolstoy writes: “The ancients left us examples of heroic poems in which heroes constitute the entire interest of history, and we still cannot get used to the fact that, for our human time, history of this sort has no meaning.” Tolstoy, War and Peace, 754.
4 Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1211.
5 Mintzker, Yair, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 5Google Scholar.
6 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 93.
7 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 93.
8 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 95.
9 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 92.
10 Lucian parodies Thucydides to argue that history is closer to poetry than it would like to admit in its vain embrace of writing for posterity. See Lucian, “How to Write History,” in Lucian, VI, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2–73.
11 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 284.
12 A concise description, with examples, of polyphony can be found in the Sonic Glossary of Columbia University (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/sonicg/terms/polyphony.html).
13 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Carly, intro. Booth, Wayne C. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 19.
15 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 278.
16 In addition to his mockery of Oppenheimer, Fassmann wrote, for example, a mocking eulogy of Jacob Paul von Grundling, a historian who had become Frederick William's court fool.
17 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 21.
18 As Mintzker cogently argues, Fassmann's text is homophonic in the sense that, although he allows Oppenheimer to speak much more than Jäger does, his own voice still dominates. See Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, 275.