Felix Mendelssohn - Gustav Mahler: Two Borderline Cases of German-Jewish Assimilation

This essay intends to examine two individual cases of the German-Jewish symbiosis, two borderline cases of attempted assimilation, whose protagonists have given us universally acclaimed works of art. They are extreme - or borderline - cases, because both men attempted integration, through assimilation, with German culture, not the German nation, for Mendelssohn was Prussian and Saxon, Mahler was Austrian - and both came close to the realization of it. In the case of Mendelssohn, the attempt succeeded as far as the Germans would ever permit it to succeed; in Mahler's case it failed, despite goodwill on both sides. In Mendelssohn's case we find typical as well as atypical elements. He belonged to a fairly homogeneous social elite of North-German bankers and their descendants; yet his own descent from Moses Mendelssohn - who had certainly never been considered an apostate was rather a retarding circumstance. Mahler's background was that of a petite bourgeoisie, ethnically and religiously quite separate from a society that itself was many faceted in its religious beliefs and its everyday language, in a country that, like all of old Austria, was anything but homogeneous and that showed no particular desire for harmonious mutual understanding.