119th-CENTURY MIDDLEBROW CULTURE AND THE CULTURE OF BILDUNG : REFLECTIONS ON MARGINALITY, GERMAN-JEWISH STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTUREJonathan M. Hess (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)The Meaning of Culture:German Studies in the 21st Century1From the emergence of doctrines of the autonomy of art in the late 18th centurythrough the establishment of Germanistik as a discipline in the 19th-century researchuniversity and the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture in the mid 20th century,the scholarly study of German literature and culture has typically unfolded within arigid opposition between “high” culture and its antithesis. The burgeoning interest inTrivialliteratur in the 1970s, for all its merits, ultimately did little to rehabilitate 18thand 19th-century popular literature as an object of serious scholarly investigation oruncover the complex cultural work performed by those literary texts that, despite orbecause of their popularity, never fared a chance of making it into the canon. Culturalstudies criticism that celebrates the subversive nature of popular culture or studies theprocesses by which marginal voices have been excluded from the ephemeral realm ofhigh culture has certainly broadened the parameters of criticism and contributed to amuch more inclusive sense of what types of cultural forms are worthy of academicstudy. Ultimately, however, it too has done little to conceptualize the field of GermanStudies beyond the dichotomy between an elite high culture striving to maintain itshegemony and a realm of popular or low culture that—however one wishes to evaluatethe situation—follows norms and operates according to models radically different fromhigh culture’s typical quest for distinction, disinterestedness, universality and good taste.Drawing from a current book project on German-Jewish middlebrow fiction in the19th century, this paper contributes to the broader themes of the conference by reflectingon the forms and functions of middlebrow culture in 19th-century Germany. The termmiddlebrow was coined in the United States in the 1920s, and on one level, it may beanachronistic to use it in a discussion of 19th-century German culture. But ultimately, Iargue, the fact that middlebrow has no exact equivalent in German has more to do withthe way German culture has been studied in the academy than with the actual cultural2production of the period. The rapid emergence of a vibrant German-Jewish literaryculture in the mid 19th century, with hundreds of texts produced by Jews and disseminatedin Jewish newspapers, magazines and book series for a largely Jewish readership, providesa perfect case study here. We know from the seminal scholarship of George Mosse justto what extent German-Jewish intellectual elites identified with the secular religion ofBildung and German high culture. But Jewish elites proved equally dedicated to creatingspecifically Jewish forms of German literature in the 19th century, producing hundredsof historical novels, ghetto tales and fictional texts about contemporary life that presentedthe Jewish experience—and often the Jewish religious experience—as the epitome ofGerman ideals of Bildung. Popular in scope, these texts typically lacked the formal orthematic complexity of canonical works of German literature, and they drew heavily onthe generic conventions of serialized fiction, sentimental melodrama and other literaryforms that cultural elites of the period discarded as bereft of aesthetic value. At thesame time, nevertheless, this literature routinely celebrated itself as equal to the best thathigh culture had to offer. It is, I argue, precisely the versatility of German-Jewishmiddlebrow literature—its ability to move between high and low registers, between thesecular and the religious, between the German and the Jewish—that offers the key to thecultural work that it performed in enabling its readers to maintain multiple identities: asGermans, as Jews and as members of a bourgeoisie that placed an unprecedentedimportance on the promise of great literature to function as a vehicle of edification andcharacter-formation.A general study of German middlebrow literature remains to be written. By focusingon a body of literature produced by and for a group that was self-conscious of itsmarginality as it was increasingly orienting itself to the ideals and lifestyles of thebourgeoisie, however, this paper opens up the door for some provisional remarks aboutways we might rethink the way we study culture. German-Jewish middlebrow literaturecomes into being at the same historical moment when bourgeois ideals of Bildung werebecoming increasingly defensive vis-à-vis both social classes and literary forms seeminglyincompatible with its particular conceptions of universality. Against this backdrop, itenacts a model of marginality that, rather than seeking to overthrow dominant culturalforms, concerns itself with mediating between margin and center, underscoring theuniversalist ambitions of high culture at the same time as it acknowledges its debts tothe pleasures of reading types of literature that cultural elites condemned for their3superficiality and escapism. The formal hybridity of German-Jewish popular literature,I argue, is inextricable from the way it was used to promote hybrid forms of identity forits 19th-century German-Jewish readers. In this sense, this body of literature sheds lightnot just on processes of Jewish acculturation but also on the more general concepts ofculture that German Jews adopted and adapted as a crucial part of the way they imaginedtheir entry into the German