The Iberian Dimension of the German-Jewish Discourse: Robert Menasse's "Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle"

Abstract

The Iberian Dimension of theGerman-Jewish Discourse: Robert Menasse's Dz? Vertreibung aus der H?lle FLORIAN KROBB National UniversityofIreland, Maynooth For Hans-J?rgen Schr?der on his 6oth Birthday, 7 March 2003 In writing about its own history, a community writes a collective autobio graphy for itself.Through historical writing, that community provides itself with a sense of origin, ancestry and lineage, thereby generating both a sense of identity in the present and a sense of direction for the future. As with personal autobiography, collective autobiography chooses and portrays defining events and periods in its subject's development, such as birth (of the individual) or foundation (of the community), defence against dangers from outside or disintegrating forces; probation, consolidation and unification (marriage) are set-pieces of such histories, which help to structure, compre hend and eventually justify the self-image of individual and community alike.1 While this phenomenon has been aptly theorized with reference to communities defining themselves as 'nations', it can be argued that the same holds true for other communities, whether they define themselves in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, regional origin or religion.2 The Jewish commun ity ? even though it has been described, and has occasionally described itself, as a nation ? is one such group, as iswitnessed by the upsurge in historical writing on Jewish history since the early decades of the nineteenth century, when, challenged by new demands for self-definition arising out of the process of embourgeoisement,the historical dimension came to assume a role and an importance previously held by religion.3 From the late eighteenth century onwards, history and historical narration began to fill the void created by the decreased relevance of religion ? a 1 See, for example, the remarks by Roberto Simanowski, 'Einleitung ? Zum Problem kultureller Grenzziehungen', in Kulturelle Grenzziehungen im Spiegel der Literatur. Nationalismus, Regionalismus, Fundamentalismus, ed. by Horst Turk, Brigitte Schultze and Roberto Simanowski (G?ttingen, 1998), pp. 8-60, especially pp. 21-24. 2 One example would be Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on theOrigins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London and New York, 1991). 3 Ismar Schorsch, From Text toContext. The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH and London, 1994). 172 Menasse's Die Vertreibung aus der H?lle victim of the processes of emancipation and embourgeoisement, with their secularizing consequences. History now had to provide meaning, gaining the responsibility for instilling and fostering a sense of collective identity by deducing from the remembrance of a shared past in the post-biblical world a vision of an anticipated destiny. In this respect, theJewish community was not unique ? the nineteenth century was throughout Western civilization the age of historical legitimization of contemporary views and actions. For the Jewish community as a minority in Christian society, however, such a turn to history surely had a special significance and urgency which have to be considered against the background of collective self-definition at a time of accelerated social and cultural change. If the above statements hold true for the modern ? Jewish or non Jewish ? relationship with history, then the postmodern relationship with history has become fundamentally more problematic. No longer can the assumption be maintained that there is a single, authoritative process called 'history' leading up to the present state in a linear fashion. There is, rather, the acknowledgement of a plethora of competing and conflicting versions of events of the past ? and of competing and conflicting interpretations of their meaning and their relevance for the present. In this perspective, representations of history reveal themselves as projections, while historical accounts become constructions generating their meaning as verbal struc tures, i.e. narratives: 'Every history is first and foremost a verbal artefact, a product of a special kind of language use.'4 I The concept of history as projection and construction characterizes Robert Menasse's Die Vertreibungaus der H?lle [ The Expulsion fromHell], a new historical novel that attracted considerable attention at the Frankfurt Book Fair in September 2001 and sparked a number of controversial reviews in themost influential German-language newspapers.5 Thomas Kraft, writing in the RheinischerMerkur, calls the novel a 'Volltreffer' [here: hit]; Martin Luchsin ger's verdict on the book is...