Heinrich Schenker’s Identities as a German and a Jew

During his lifetime the music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) was confronted with a variety of different cultures. After attending a Polish school in the eastern province of Galicia, he moved to Vienna, where he faced a cultural environment dominated by Catholicism, opening up for him, as a Jew, different options of assimilation. After the First World War he stayed in Austria, the small remnant of the Habsburg Empire, while considering himself a German. In the cultural studies perspective, the constructive character of identity is essential: people adopt different identities and develop them contingent on public perception, professional aspirations, and private traditions. This essay focuses not so much on Schenker’s discourse of Jewishness as on the traces and representations of identity in the practice of everyday life. Such an examination is now possible, as large parts of Schenker’s diaries are available. Pointing out the ambivalences, tensions, and perhaps even contradictions in Schenker’s construction of his self, I discuss diverse aspects of his identities—his Polish background, his denominational incognito, his political profession, and his practice of celebration—and how they relate to each other. As a reaction to Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism, Schenker sees himself as more German than the Germans; he, the Jew, wants to be the better German. His emphatic commitment to Germanness contrasts sharply with his quiet Jewish identity and underlines his clear decision to participate in German culture, his mission as a musician and music theorist to save German music, and his assimilation—all this, however, without abandoning his position as a self-imposed outsider and without allowing his Jewish identity in his remembrance and practice of celebration in everyday life to totally disappear