Abstract This essay re-examines Martin Buber’s early writings on Jewish art (1901–1903), which are typically framed solely as expressions of his cultural Zionism. I argue, however, that they also reflect his formative aspirations as an art historian, deeply engaged with the intellectual tools and methods of his time. Drawing on his training with the Vienna School’s Franz Wickhoff, Julius von Schlosser, and Alois Riegl, Buber traced Jewish art as a historical evolution in perception – from an ancient, aural, anti-visual disposition to a modern, visually expressive culture. Rather than nationalist or essentialist, his narrative is historicist: modern Jewish artists like Lesser Ury emerge not by rupture but through shifting spiritual, sensory, and cultural conditions. Central to Buber’s analysis is the beholder’s role, influenced by Riegl’s theories, which makes the Jewish viewer an active participant in meaning-making. Through close readings of Buber’s early writings and his interpretation of Ury’s artworks, my essay shows how Buber envisioned Jewish art as a modern form of religious experience supporting Zionist goals while also addressing spiritual and cultural renewal.

Abstract Manfred Winkler met Paul Celan, his fellow countryman from Bukovina, in October 1969. At the reading in Jerusalem, Winkler asked Celan whether a line in his poem “da sah ich dich, Mandelstamm” referred to the trunk of the almond tree or the poet Mandelstam. Through this conversation, the images “almond tree” and “almond” became an important cipher for the relationship between Winkler and Celan. After this encounter, Winkler wrote at least 20 poems under the direct influence of Celan, in which he quotes from Celan’s vocabulary. In another untitled poem of his, “Mandel” does not appear, but only the word “Niemand”. They have the element “mand” in common, probably in allusion to the poet Ossip Mandelstam, who, like Winkler und Celan, symbolizes the poet in exile. Here, the poetic transformation of the almond is driven to the phonetic level of the word. Thus, the almond continues to transform itself in Winkler’s poems, and there is no end to it.

Abstract This article examines the post-imperial poetics of Manfred Winkler. Tracing the imperial imaginary from the Austro-Hungarian “Habsburg myth” through its disintegration in the Holocaust, Winkler reconfigures Israeli space as a heterotopic, palimpsestic site layered with memories of imperial tolerance, Jewish trauma, and Zionist displacement. Rejecting the dominant Zionist migration narrative – structured by the binary of exile and homeland – Winkler constructs a poetic identity grounded in multiplicity and non-binary spatiality. An analysis of the poems reveals how Winkler’s Hebrew poetry enacts a dialectical Aufhebung (Sublation) of the empire’s cultural legacy: both negating and preserving its pluralistic ideals within the later Israeli context. Winkler’s work emerges as a critique of the national literary canon’s erasure of diasporic and Holocaust-inflected voices, articulated most poignantly through his translations of Paul Celan’s poems and his affiliation with the marginalized Eked publishing house.

Abstract At the conclusion of “Minima Moralia,” Theodor W. Adorno invokes a “standpoint of redemption.” I interpret this formulation as a methodological self-description and argue that it does not conflict with critical theory’s commitment to immanent critique. After distinguishing between two divergent accounts of immanent critique in recent scholarship, I turn to the idea of a “standpoint of redemption” or “inverse theology,” traced back to Siegfried Kracauer’s early writings on Franz Kafka. In his “Notes on Kafka,” Adorno develops motifs from Kracauer into his most thorough articulation of the negativist-messianic device. Instead of contrasting social phenomena with ideal alternatives, “inverse theology” presents the absurd as normal, rendering reality uncanny through analogies that depict humans as animals and the present as if it belonged to a distant past. In this way, the standpoint of redemption emerges indirectly, by estranging everyday life. Adorno’s reading of Kafka thus clarifies his own method of social critique. This method neither contradicts the version of immanent critique that, I contend, most faithfully captures the tradition of critical theory, nor does it entail substantive theological commitments. Rather, it can be understood as a form of “inverse utopianism.”

Abstract Anabasis shapes Manfred Winklerʼs lyrical path in many variations, leading him through the fields of other arts and between them. The present article follows this lyrical path, whereby it understands itself as anabasis, a “wandering through uncharted territory”, in the sense of Alain Badiou. Winklerʼs path to poetry implies an encounter that turns into an embrace or entanglement, forcing the creative self to constantly adapt and reminding the reader of Celanʼs conception of the poem as a dialogue, while recalling image quotations when oscillating between different art fields. Winklerʼs palette of intermedial references is broad, ranging from Michelangelo and Botticelli to Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. However, less famous artists such as Gyula Zilzer, Hans Fronius or Caspar Neher also belong to the expanded fields of this poetry.

Abstract Departing from the long-standing polarized debates around Kafka’s personal relationship to Zionism as well as the marks of Zionist ideas and culture on Kafka’s works, we try to analyze aspects of Kafka’s poetics within this context, rather than trying to ascribe a fixed ideological content to his writings. Against this backdrop, we give a reading of less-known texts from the later period of Kafka’s śuvre, in particular small, lyrical forms, with a focus on Kafka’s treatment of the Exodus myth and the motive of the dysfunctional guard or watchman..

Abstract The engraver, draughtsman, and miniature painter Moses Samuel Lowe (1756–1831) is almost forgotten today. This essay searches for traces of his life and his artistic work. Lowe’s work in the educated circles of Berlin is particularly explored. As one of the first Jewish artists to receive an academic education, Lowe was characterized by tireless creativity and inventiveness. He gained his artistic experience mainly within the sociable networks of the Berlin Enlightenment and the Prussian Haskalah, to which he remained ideologically and conceptually connected throughout his life. His portraits gave individual faces to many of the thinkers in these scholarly and literary circles. Lowe also provided illustrations for their publications, which, with their often allegorical expressiveness, served the vivid cognition of the recipients and thus contributed significantly to the educational intention of the writings.