Introduction: Positions to Defend

Abstract

GERMAN LITERATURE, Jewish Critics — the title announces a tension. German literature — its writing, reception, and canonization — has long been bound up in an uneasy, often exclusionary relationship to German-Jewish history. “In the course of its historical development,” Egon Schwarz wrote in his memoirs, “German literature and culture has always stood in a certain tension to Judaism.” For many Jews this tension became acute in the wake of the Holocaust. “The study of German literature and culture,” Schwarz notes with respect to his own turn to the field in 1949, “demands an explanation, perhaps even a justification, from a Jew who speaks and writes German, especially when it comes so soon after the Second World War and the massacre of Jews by Germans.” On the one hand there is, then, a literature with a specific history of exclusion, and an event, the catastrophe itself, which for many Jews changed everything. But the matter is neither so simple nor one-sided. For German literature was also an opening, a point of identification, a world German Jews could enter and consider theirs, even if its language was also the language of the perpetrators.