In 1829, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was later to write “Das Lied der Deutschen,” published one of the first scholarly articles on what was known as the Gaunersprache (rogues’ language), Rotwelsch. His article included a poem in Rotwelsch he had written himself. Against the backdrop of Hoffmann's nationalist persuasion and participation in the nationalist project of Germanistik, this paper discusses the question of why he turned to writing in a language he portrays in the same article as hybrid and criminal. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of minor literature, this analysis of the poem itself and of its publication context concludes that Hoffmann participates in an older tradition of inverted minor literature in Rotwelsch, that is, a literature that a majority constructs within a minor language. Thus, Hoffmann's poem appears as an attempt at naturalizing Germanness by ascribing the artificial and deterritorializing aspects of any language to the Other.
Starting from existing scholarship on the relationship among masculinity, sexuality, and Jewishness in the German-language cultural sphere, this article analyzes the connection between antisemitism and homophobia in Otto Julius Bierbaum’s fin-de-siècle novel Prinz Kuckuck. By tracing the respective paths of the Jewish protagonist and his male homosexual counterpart, the article elaborates on the specific versions of Jewishness and male homosexuality that Bierbaum’s novel creates. It can be shown that the novel exposes both the Jewish and the homosexual character as deficient and harmful. The novel, however, does not restrict itself to mere parallelization but establishes an intrinsic connection between the Jewish and the male homosexual character by integrating homosexual codes into the Jew’s “parasitic” repertoire. The article concludes by offering an explanation of this connection that draws on Moishe Postone’s critique of modern antisemitism. Antisemitism and homophobia are shown as two complementary and intrinsically connected ways of dealing with two dimensions of the experience of modernity: capitalism and social contingency.
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