Goethe in German-Jewish Culture. Edited by Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand. Rochester: Camden House, 2001. Pp. 203. $55.

The Goethe Year 1999 celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Germany's cultural and literary icon, and inspired a substantial amount of publications and scholarly exchange. The thirty-first Wisconsin Workshop, which was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 28 to 30 October 1999, also devoted its energies to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. After the Goldhagen debates and the fervent discussions connected with the building of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, the Madison talks focused in timely fashion on Goethe and his relationship to Judaism and the Jews. The topic has been thoroughly researched by scholars ranging from Ludwig Geiger, founder and long-time editor of the Goethe Yearbook, to Wilfried Barner, Norbert Oellers, and Günter Hartung, among others. But Klaus Berghahn and Jost Hermand, symposium organizers and editors of the volume Goethe in German-Jewish Culture, point out in their preface: "The aim of this collection of essays is to examine the thesis of a universal anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on its greatest author, Goethe, whom both Adolf Hitler and Leon Poliakov have claimed as an enemy of the Jews" (p. ix). Parallel to this, the contributors investigate whether Goethe's concept of Bildung was really as important for the cultural integration of German Jews as George Mosse, respected cultural historian and emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had claimed it to be.

Barbara Fischer
The University of Alabama