Romanticism Exhibition

Germania to Her Children

In his Philistine speech to the German Table Society, Clemens Brentano took a satirical look at both Philistines and Jews. According to him, the two groups represented all that was misguided and “half dead” in human beings, and were thus worthy of ridicule. The address, subtitled a “facetious treatise”, compares Jews to “flies left over from the Egyptian plagues” that could be trapped “using mortgage bonds at the stock exchange”. The speeches by Achim von Arnim and Adam Müller also contain traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes, updated and radicalized after the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812, which granted civil equality to Jews.