THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents The Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Chase Richards and Louise Hecht

Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 5:00 pm
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, 3401 Walnut St.,
Room 329, A Wing
(entrance next to Starbucks)

"From Woodcut to Wood Engraving: Seeing with the Family Papers."

Chase Richards, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania

Like many a popular book or periodical, the Familienblätter, or “family papers,” emerged from a broadening nineteenth-century print market. As general-interest magazines produced for domestic consumption, they emphasized variety and accessibility enhanced by wood-engraved pictures, a successful formula in the competitive publishing environment of the 1850s and 1860s. What most distinguished the family papers from their analogs in Great Britain, France, or the United States, however, were the aims of their creators, namely post-1848 liberals who shared the assumption that reading could pick up where legislating had left off. By bringing a subtle mixture of education and entertainment into the home, the family papers were initially intended not only to turn a profit, but also to galvanize civil society at its putative core and so complete the work of an abortive revolution, even in the midst of a harsh reaction. Harnessing the popular press to a wary crypto-liberalism, their pioneers sought to mold the politics of German readers without getting into trouble. Perhaps the most striking feature of the family papers was their rich and evocative illustration. Technologically impossible anywhere before the 1820s and realizable in Germany only from the mid-1840s, wood-engraved imagery (not the older woodcuts) adorned the pages of successful family papers on a scale and with a degree of textual integration that neither lithography nor metal engraving could match. This paper discusses how the family papers achieved their cohesion as pictorial artifacts and worked to mediate impressions of the world through accessible and lively images, which both dazzled the eye and—perhaps—suggested a political future which need only be comfortably possessed, indeed whose conquest lay in plain sight.

 ~AND~

 “Transfer of Goods – Transfer of Culture The tobacco monopoly and the rise of modern Jewish intellectuals in the Habsburg Monarchy”

Louise Hecht, Fulbright Fellow from the Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

            Was tobacco ‘the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man’ as Adolf Hitler claimed, or did it hold the potential of connecting the Old and the New World, as the historian August Ludwig Schloezer insinuated in a 1778 essay? Like many other Solanaceae, e.g. tomatoes and potatoes, tobacco was unknown in Europe before the discovery of America.

Together with sugar, coffee and tea, tobacco was one of the luxury goods that fuelled the so-called triangular trade between (Western) Europe, (West) Africa and the American colonies. In these transatlantic transactions, manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to Africa, where they were bartered for slaves that were brought to the American colonies and sold to planters. The profits were used to buy labor-intensive (raw) luxury products to be shipped back to European consumers. Thus, Europeans’ growing appetite for tobacco considerably stimulated transatlantic American slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

What, however, was the Jewish share in this transfer? What instigated this ‘strange but powerful association’ between Jews and tobacco that, according to Sander Gilman, shaped the image of Jews as a group in the modern era?

My multidisciplinary research project about the Habsburg Monarchy links the effective organization of the tobacco monopoly by Jewish leaseholders and their network of Jewish subcontractors during the eighteenth century with the rise of modern and secular intellectual elite in the nineteenth century. It thus contests the traditional approach of intellectual history that would look at the first generation of modern Jewish intellectuals as dropouts or graduates from traditional institutions of higher Jewish learning (Yeshivot).