Sprache:
Englisch
Erscheinungsjahr:
2000
Titel der Quelle:
PMLA
Angaben zur Quelle:
115,2 (2000) 125-208
Schlagwort(e):
Baudelaire, Charles,
;
Antisemitism in literature
Kurzfassung:
Discusses the evolution of antisemitism in the French poet, who did not originally exhibit such prejudice. Traces its onset to the late 1840s-early 1850s, with Baudelaire's disillusionment and financial hardship. He came under the influence of the anti-capitalism of Edgar Allan Poe and the reactionary Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre. Baudelaire's 1857 poem "Une nuit que j'etais pres d'une affreuse juive" castigates a Jewish prostitute and reflects his emerging persecution complex. His hatred for bourgeois market culture found its primary target in his Jewish publisher, Michel Levy. At the end of his life, in the 1860s, Baudelaire's antisemitism became genocidal. "Lovely conspiracy to organize for the extermination of the Jewish race, " he wrote in "Mon coeur mis a nu." In summary, Baudelaire's attitude bridged the gap between theological antisemitism and the racial antisemitism that became characteristic of reactionary modernism in France and, more generally, in Europe.
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