Fritz Eichenberg's Wartime Wuthering Heights

This essay considers a 1943 Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Wuthering Heights illustrated with wood engravings by German Jewish refugee Fritz Eichenberg. Given the historical reality of modern statelessness and the inherently troublesome demands of assimilation, I suggest that Eichenberg occupies an ambivalent social and aesthetic position: an absent-present narrator-critic poised on the threshold of Brontë's novel who re-interprets the text from the vantage point of wartime displacement. Unlike both popular and critical midcentury readings of Wuthering Heights, which foreground its status as a tragic love story or an ineffable masterpiece, Eichenberg's visual adaptation makes it Heathcliff's story – a story about hybridity, exclusion, and the search for belonging. Pairing Eichenberg and Wuthering Heights, moreover, points to distinct yet connected forms of assimilation challenges experienced by European Jews and other marginalized modern subjects, offering an occasion to re-think how histories and identities that are frequently treated as separate are in fact intertwined.