❖ Gypsies, Race, Culture, and Hybridity in Wilhelm Jensen

In his day Wilhelm Jensen (1837–1911) was an enormously popular writer and editor in the style of Gustav Freytag, the author of works which fill 140 volumes, and the respected friend and colleague of both Wilhelm Raabe 1 and Theodor Storm. Now he is nearly forgotten. Despite occasional pleas for scholarly reassessment in terms of his professional status 2 or as a writer of exotic novels, 3 he is, thanks to Sigmund Freud, remembered only as the author of Gradiva — Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück (1903). 4 Even so committed a defender of lost causes as Jeffrey Sammons 5 can manage only a double negative on Jensen’s behalf: ‘not an untalented writer’; and even this is rapidly qualified by a withering comparison with Raabe: ‘one of them was an artist and the other was not’.