#Herr Moses am Alexanderplatz

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so this is what they mean when they say Empfindlichkeit had its own idiom for the expression of homosocial admiration

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symptomatic of my longstanding & somewhat disturbing curiosity that my eyes zoom in on any mention of opticians, such as on pg 17 of the Altmann biography

of all the artisanal goods produced in the 16th-19th century, glasses & other lenses seem to be coded as Jewish in contemporary literature. This pattern is particularly visible in E.T.A. Hoffman's short story "The Sandman," where the antisemitically-coded mad scientist Coppelius (a.k.a. my favorite character) reappears as a seller of magical lenses which deceive the protagonist Nathanael into falling in love with the automaton Olympia.

Within Hoffman's tale the glasses Coppelius handles are associated with the dominant eye-motif of the story & possibly with the alchemical instruments of Nathanael's father, but it doesn't offer an explanation for the broader use of glasses to feminize/racialize/demean Jewish characters in literature. Was optics a field of production not regulated by guilds with restrictive religious covenants? Was it a result of the lingering obsession with Spinoza? Something else entirely?

I know prejudice doesn't "make sense" but I wonder if there's not a term paper in here somewhere. Probably about Knobloch's symbolic inversion of the Coppelius encounters in his descriptions of Dr. Schiff within Herr Moses in Berlin.

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Friedländer making it sound like teenage Mendelssohn just hung out at a road checkpoint waiting for R. Fränkel.

If the story were not appropriately taken apart it would be too funny to believe—would teenage!Moses have run out ahead before the coach departed, and then figured out what to say, or rehearsed his petition & still made it out of town before his parents and/or Fränkel noticed?

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Herr Moses direct ancestor of Madeleine Miller confirmed

Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study, p. 149

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Semianonymous publication in the 18th century is fantastic.

According to Altmann, Mendelssohn writes a criticism of W from Zürich, only to learn that the author was not Wieland, as he had supposed, but someone named Jakob Wegelin. Who had read Mendelssohn's critique and thought it was by his friend Lessing: "only a Lessing could poke fun at so serious a theme" (142)!

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Charmed by the way Altmann's Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical study introduces Nicolai:

Presumably this is because he did not die in his 50s like Mendelssohn and Lessing, but superlative success by default is still success.

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Herr Moses is Mean to French Philosophers

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the main difference between the content of R. Alexander Altmann's Moses Mendelssohn: a biographical study and Heinz Knobloch's Herr Moses in Berlin is not (I think) a result of the authors' different backgrounds or the language of publication, but the form & intention: Altmann's is a biography of one man & Knobloch's is the palimpsest of a city.

Altmann is more thorough, critical and "academic" with his relation of events, whereas Knobloch has the liberty to go on tangents, to take legends as legends, to examine their implications & generally to stroll around. He's occupied so movingly with themes of memory, haunted narratives & what constitutes a public afterlife.

Not that Altmann ignores this entirely

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me translating Herr Moses in Berlin

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Altmann's description of the early Mendelssohn/Lessing friendship dynamic is v. different from Knobloch's

Whereas Knobloch comes from a milieu where Lessing is by far the more prominent figure (read: Arnold Zweig's ridiculous 1929 Nathan-prologue) Altmann is chiefly concerned with Mendelssohn's philosophical education & sees him as the more educated friend, a argument which he can back up with his prior in-depth examination of Mendelssohn's rabbinic & philosophical mentors. Altmann's Mendelssohn/Lessing dynamic is not "extrovert friend gets genius introvert friend to read his favorite books & publishes his writing" but "introvert friend calms extrovert friend down enough to do philosophy"

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same vibe as Victor "what do you mean there are scientists after Albertus Magnus & Paracelsus" Frankenstein.

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New guy to care about!

Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study, p. 21

Senior year of high school I read Brecht's Leben des Galilei and while I remain indifferent to both Bert and Galileo I did become utterly normal about the implications of being an Acolyte to an Apostate. It didn't hurt that I subsequently read Endō's Silence and developed the pet suspicion that the "astronomical texts" translated by the protagonist's apostate mentor were Galileo's treatises.

Anyway I've never heard of del Medigo before but it looks like he got around! NYPL has this bilingual frontispiece ft. a particularly wistful portrait:

I hope R. Altmann keeps up the astronomic history; this topic does not appear at all in Herr Moses in Berlin!

Anyway by now it's pitchdark out so if I don't post again tonight I wish all my observing mutuals a tolerable fast.

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found myself

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finally

(the book is from 1973 it is slightly younger than my parents)

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Oh wait. I have two really long PDFs on my computer. This is not Morrison's recognition of the use of Phaedo and 18th-century progressive imagery. This is Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study by R. Alexander Altmann.

I delude myself yet again.

Thank you Prof. Mobdick and thank you Nobel Prize-winning Prof. Toni Morrison :)

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correction: it will be Herr Moses am Alexanderplatz

alexander altmann mendelssohn biography available through my university

reading material truly is the best birthday present

expect altmann biography liveblogging under the tag #herr moses out of berlin