Wilhelm von Humboldt Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeffrey Grossman

Critical Essay by Jeffrey Grossman

SOURCE: Grossman, Jeffrey. “Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Ideology: The Problem of Pluralism and the Absolute Difference of National Character—Or, Where Do the Jews Fit In?” German Studies Review 20, no. 1 (February 1997): 23-47.

In the following essay, Grossman stresses the connection between Humboldt's political and cultural ideas and his theories of language, asserting that this relationship also informed Humboldt's attitude towards Jews in Germany.

In 1918, Max Kohler wrote of Wilhelm von Humboldt: “[It] may well be that, if he had remained in active political life, the reactionary forces would have been unable to check Jewish emancipation in Germany so long and so sweepingly.”¹ Apparently describing a very different figure, Paul Lawrence Rose, who attacks the entire redemptive aspect of German liberal and progressive tradition, concludes that “Humboldt never really disagreed with his wife's hope that ‘in fifty years, the Jews will be exterminated as Jews.’”² Various observers have...
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