Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews"

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Sander L. Gilman

Central to any understanding of Mann's text is the fact that it is a parody of the Siegmund/Sieglinde relationship in Waguer's The Valkyre and its meaning for the Ring cycle. Wagner takes sibling incest as the highest form of sexual expression in the world of his Germanic myth--because of its very transgressive nature. Indeed, the archeological and anthropological claims of the period stressed the suspension of the incest prohibition for cultural reasons. Such exceptions were claimed for brother-sister marriage among the royal families in ancient Egypt as well as among the Inca, and in traditional Hawaiian society (Hopkins, 1980; Bixler, 1982). Sibling incest was the sign of divine transgression and the Wagner cult accepted it as such. Mann's rather comic image of this scene in the opera, with the badly fitting wigs of the protagonists, seems to undermine the Wagnerian claim. But it is undermined only for those who can distinguish between true art (the platonic Wagnerian opera) and the crude commercialism of the Jewish appropriation of Wagner for their own cultural ends-becoming part of the Volksgemeinschaft. Such an appropriation can only take place in the city where the confusion of race and identity (and bastardized high culture) is at home. It is clear that Siegmund and Sieglinde (Aarenhold) are captured by the crude performance they see on the stage, and thus reveal themselves as truly only parvenus.

The Jewish Wagnerites (and this is of course one of the great ironies of nineteenth-century European culture--that it was the Jewish audience that legitimated and furthered Wagner as their entre billet into German avant-garde culture) are seen here as enacting the relationship between the "pure" siblings in a parodic, sexualized, but most importantly parvenu manner (Weiner, 1995). It is the striving for the Bildung and values of the German that dominates the tale. It is the sense of the unconscious mimicry and therefore parody of the "German" and his good taste that is reflected in Mann's tale. Thus economic and social relationships are compressed in the tale of the two siblings and their incestuous act.

The Jews are represented as mad in the same way that the upper classes are traditionally seen as mad. This link is one that is not lost on Protestant German culture. Beginning in the Reformation there is a "critique of the court" that sets bourgeois morals against the decadence and corruption court life (Kiesel, 1979; Gerber, 1990). This corruption, in the life and legend of figures such as Jud Suss Oppenheimer, is linked to the Jews and their incestuous nature. The Jews corrupt the courts; the courts use the Jews as agents of their own corruption; Jews and nobles are interchangeable (when "Jewish" nobles begin to appear with the ennoblement of Jewish converts in Austria during the late-nineteenth century, the "proof" of this argument seems to be made). The madness of the upper classes is paralleled to the madness of the Jews.

I have noted that the theme of Jewish sibling incest in Mann points toward certain turn-of-the century models of imagining Jewish sexual drive as perverse and as analogous to the economic collapse of "real" society. What happens when this theme resurfaces in another culture and with a quite different focus.(7) Certainly modern French literature, beginning with Jean Cocteau's Les enfants terribles (1929), has thematicized incest as well as sibling incest in complex ways. More recently, Michel Tournier's Les meteores (1975) (Gemini in its English translation) is the tale of two identical twins who sleep together until one of them decides to claim an identity for himself (Wilson, 1995; Petit, 1991). Agustin Gomez-Arcos provides extraordinary tale of two incestuous brothers as a model for an understanding of the Spanish Civil War in his L'agneau carnivore (1975) (Gascon-Vera, 1991). Rene Zazzo provides a complex theoretical model for twinning and sibling incest in Reflets de miroir et autres doubles (1993).(8) Recently, in American cultural studies, the theme of sibling incest in William Faulkner's fiction was used by Walter Benn Michaels (1995), to exemplify the sexualization of politics in American writing. As Michaels shows in Anglophone writing, the theme can be keyed in complex ways to discourses of race and class. Martin Amis, in his novel Success (1978), presents quite a striking parallel to Mann's tale in his account of the collapse of a British upper class family (Diedrick, 1995). While incest has continued to be a theme in contemporary Anglophone feminist writing in both the works of Shirley Jackson (Hall, 1992) and Doris Lessing (Sprague, 1985), it is in Amis' novel that sibling incest is the theme that links class and race in complicated ways.