Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile by Bernhard Greiner (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 877 the commentaries and satires in Die Weltbuhne could be: Ossietzky was too quick to personalize his criticisms of the establishment, while Tucholsky was too quick to generalize on the basis of particular incidents. By contrast, Walter highlights the virtues of the other major journal on the liberal left, Leopold Schwarzschild's Tagebuch, notably in his discussion of the 'Berliner Blutmai' of 1929, where his analysis of the documentary evidence brings out the obduracy of the KPD leadership in pressing for confrontation, the commitment of leading Social Democrats to a repressive con? ception of state authority,and the failure of politicians to institute the sort of enquiry which might have shielded the spirit of democracy from the authoritarian instincts of the executive. With its rigorous investigation of particular cases and individual careers, this is a publication which no future investigator of the Weimar period can affordto ignore. St John's College, Cambridge David Midgley Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on theLiterature ofExile. Ed. by Bernhard Greiner. (Conditio Judaica, 43) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2003. 221 pp. ?48. ISBN3-484-65143-1. The product of a conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2001, this volume approaches the subject of exile literature through the Jewish experience of exile. A total of thirteen contributions discuss German, Hebrew, and French ex? ile literature with emphasis on the twentieth century. Jerusalem, as lost origin and desired destination in the exile's imagination, informs the theological-hermeneutic dimension of many of the articles. Further overlapping areas of discussion concern the critique of the exile/Heimat dichotomy; exile as the precondition for unrivalled artistic creativity; the aesthetic uniqueness of exile literature alongside its necessary differentiationfrom French postmodern paradigms of strangerhood and German de? finitions of anti-Fascist literature; the role of the body in exile writing. With one or two exceptions, the articles complement each other very well, and with contributions from the diverse areas of cultural history, film studies, theology, and literary studies, this volume already substantially embodies Guy Stern's vision (and defence) of the interdisciplinary future of exile studies Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Christoph Schmidt, Pierre Bouretz, and Rochelle Tobias thematize the impact of biblical stories on Jewish exile narratives. 'Jerusalem' is the recurrent imaginary location in works by Gershom Scholem, Stefan Zweig, and Jizchak Fritz Baer, while Paul Celan uses cabbalistic modes in his treatment of exile. Ezrahi's article on the concept of return to Jerusalem elucidates very well, with reference to the contemporary Israeli conflict, the danger posed by return for the open-ended creative discourse of exile. The play of signification that emerges in the compensatory mode of exile?continually simulating the absent origin?ends with the exile's return home and subsequent initiation into a finalizing Heimat discourse. Against this notion of return as the end of exile, a number of articles question the validity of the exile/home dichotomy. Mark H. Gelber and Pierre Bouretz, in their respective treatments of visions of the end of Galut in the writings of Stefan Zweig and Gershom Scholem, stress the sense of ongoing exile in Palestine experienced after return even by these convinced Zionists. Adi Gordon's excellent analysis ofthe politics of the German-language weekly Orient continues this critique of return by exposing the deep alienation feltby non-Zionist immigrants such as Arnold Zweig in 1940s Palestine. For this group, absent Germany becomes the new imaginary topos of Heimat, Palestine the place of exile. Doerte Bischoff, Carola Hilfrich, and Bernhard Greiner focus on the aesthetics of exile literature, stressing that this writing has its own unique mode of signification 878 Reviews based on re-presenting the absent homeland. Bischoff's contribution is particularly impressive for its scholarly overview of the differentand competing discourses of current exile studies. She is keen to differentiate exile literature from the narrow definitions of German Exilforschung and also from the French postmodern paradigm of universal strangerhood. (Rather more esoteric contributions, such as Tobias on Celan and Schmidt on Baer, would have benefited from this kind of academic contextualization .) Hilfrich's article examines exile in Helene Cixous's writings, but does not stress adequately the Jewish particularity of this writer,remaining instead within...