English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

The article explores the connection between enlightenment and comedy, as well as its importance for German Jewry. Following Hegel, whose thoughts on ancient drama as well as modern society have shaped the German discourse on comedy until today, this article demonstrates that questions of self-formation, emancipation, and historical self-location are central to comedy. In Carl Sternheim’s comedy  The Snob , the idea of self-formation resonates with the historic concept of “civic improvement” through “ Bildung ”: Jewish emancipation in Germany stood at the end of an educational project that outlasted Jews’ achieving legal equality.  The Snob  is a comedy about Jewish acculturation and bourgeoisification and embodies Marx’s understanding of comedy as ambivalent: on the one hand, comedy helps people to part cheerfully from their past that was characterized by inequality, but, on the other, it indicates that a world-historic fact like Jewish emancipation may be prone to repeat itself as a farce. Sternheim’s comedy develops a poetic that embraces ambivalence, but also opens the genre of comedy to the question of therapy and healing. It depicts the struggle between autonomy and social formation – the dialectics of German “ Bildung .”

Selbst-Bildungen . The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob