Literaturrevolution in Continental Jewish Aesthetics

Abstract

AbstractThe German term Literaturrevolution, associated with the modern period in literature, covers various aesthetical ideas and ideologies revolving around the notion of revolution. Concerning revolt, Literaturrevolution entails a radical reinterpretation of the relation between art and reality as it charts the role of art during the socio-political upheavals of modernity. The article traces the variety of readings of the notion of revolution present in francophone and germanophone Jewish literature and meta-literary discussions in Europe from the early 1900s until the outbreak of the Second World War. It accounts for the reception, adaptation, and utilization of revolutionary discourses among expressionists and dadaists of Jewish origin. The motivation to focus on Jewish thought in particular derives not only from its peculiarities but also from its discursive plurality. This plurality is already evident in Gustav Landauer’s Die Revolution (1907), which captures the manifoldness of reformist ideas in East-Central European Jewish thought. In the wake of his book, the aesthetic, religious-ecstatic, and socio-political aspects of revolution overlapped and amalgamated. The multifaceted conceptions of revolt are particularly noticeable in the Jewish manifestations of Literaturrevolution as they placed the aesthetical with the social in parallel, evoking both socialist and fascist conservative opposition.