Jewish Communality in German Avant-Garde Magazines of the 1910s and 1920s

Abstract

During the 1910s and 1920s the so-called ‘little magazines’ were vital intermediaries of the new art movements in Germany. At the time, the Jewish community's patronage of the avant-garde was essential due to the positions of many of its members as cultural mediators. The magazines established an alternative distribution channel for uncustomary topics, and particularly for the avant-gardists’ heterodox accounts of Judaism. This article investigates the community that these publications established, and the purpose of their community-making. The avant-gardist communities reflect the heterogeneous character of the Jewish community by questioning the principles of identity and sameness as their foundation. Arguably, the impulse to modernise the Jewish community led to a double de-territorialisation: German-Jewish artists involved in the avant-garde were revisionists within Jewry and yet ‘too Jewish’ for the mainstream population. The texts concerning Jews and Judaism published in the avant-garde magazines supported the creation of an alternative Jewish community. Accordingly, the little magazines functioned as mirrors of their contemporary Jewish community and its relations to avant-gardist communality.