Janusbilder: Der Diskurs um Frauen und Juden in der buergerlichen Offentlichkeit des deutschen Kaiserreiches (German text)

This dissertation examines discourses on women and Jews at end of the 19th century in Germany with regard to the oft-cited “cultural” or “ideological” crisis of the educated bourgeoisie. With the advent of major social, economical and political upheavals, severe crises threatened the traditional social order, and particularly the claim to power on part of the educated elite. The emancipation of Jews and women was perceived as a signal and harbinger of exactly this destabilizing change. Jews and women threatened to become equal and thus “invisible fellow” citizens, yet by exposing their innate racial and gendered “otherness” their claim to equal representation could be rebuked and the endangered position of power on part of the educated gentile male elite strengthened. To that, the dissertation explores the realm of the so-called “collective imaginary” of the wilhelminian bourgeoisie in which phantasmagoric figurations about groups designated as social “outcasts” worked to re-establish a firm bourgeois identity. Since the arena for the circulation of these imaginary constructs was the bourgeois public sphere, this dissertation thus also probes the thesis concerning the demise of the public sphere in the 19th century in which “otherness” was projected onto social groups in order to cement traditional structures of power. In the all pervasive discourses about questions of race and gender and the position of Jews and women in society, we see, rather than a demise, a fragmentation of the public sphere, whose original unifying emancipatory concept gave way in the 19th century to obsessive and repetitive discourses about categories of social inclusion and exclusion.; In an interdisciplinary approach the dissertation examines in the field of medicine, literature and political writing the imaginary projections of “Jews” and “women” as expressions of a bourgeoisie in crisis and thus of the fragmentation in the bourgeois public sphere of the late 19th century.