German-Jewish Writers Research Articles

Illustrating a Jewish Life: Portrait Photography, Biography and the Creation of a Jewish Public Sphere

Abstract Portrait photography is a fixed element in the history of German Jewry. This article asks what we can learn about a Jewish biography like that of the German–Jewish writer Sammy Gronemann by seeking to follow his life’s trajectories through the images he and others created of him and the appearances he coined. It argues that photography not only represented but also actively shaped his work as a writer and a Zionist politician and that it influenced the worlds he inhabited. It does so by situating Gronemann, the German Jew, in the history of German portrait photography, Gronemann, the Western Zionist, in the history of international Zionist image politics and Gronemann, the writer in the history of the creation of a visible cultural scene in the Yishuv and later Israel. Pondering Gronemann’s relationship with visual arts offers insights into the ways public visibility shaped German–Jewish realities both in Europe and in Palestine, both before and after the foundation of the State of Israel.

On Similarity in Contemporary German Jewish Literature

This essay calls for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics and politics of comparison in contemporary German Jewish literature and beyond. It describes the tendency of recent German Jewish writers and thinkers to compare and connect the experiences of Jews to those of other minoritized groups. The essay briefly discusses several theoretical paradigms that spell out the political stakes of such comparisons, including touching tales (Leslie Adelson) and multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg). It then draws attention to another modality of comparison that is particularly promising because of its purposive abstractness and its relevance for literary texts: similarity. Finally, the essay offers two examples of the productive use of similarity in recent German Jewish literature: Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (which connects different instances of historical trauma) and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (which weaves the experience of a Syrian refugee in Istanbul into a web of similar migratory movements).

Modernization of biographical narratology: Reflections on Arnold Zweig’s artistic novella Symphonie Fantastique

This article is devoted to the German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig’s (1887–1968) biographical novella Symphonie Fantastique (1943), told from the perspective of a young musicologist participating in World War II, applied to the life and work of French composer Hector Berlioz. Arnold Zweig not only writes the biography of one of the most prominent French composers for Harold Breton, but he also confronts the Vichy Regime. The aim of this article is to capture the technique of Arnold Zweig, who combines history and the identification of an artist with a given object.

Not So Little Literatures: Reading Barbara Honigmann With (and Against) Deleuze and Guattari

Although a number of critics have applied the term ‘minor literature’ to the German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann, this article proceeds on the assumption that the last word may not have been spoken on how it might be possible and desirable to apply Deleuze and Guattari to that author. In it, I extend the discourse established by Deleuze and Guattari beyond the colonial context and apply it to Barbara Honigmann in her capacity as a Jewish writer. This also involves reading what Honigmann writes about three other Jewish women writers both in the light of, and as a critique of, that Deleuze-Guattarian discourse, occasionally going back to Kafka in the process. And the conclusion is that, while Deleuze and Guattari can prove useful in drawing attention to certain traits of literatures produced by members of minorities writing as such, the dangers involved in trying to reclaim pejorative sobriquets remain incalculable, and that terms such as ‘minor literature’ are therefore probably best avoided when discussing major authors like Barbara Honigmann. Tweetable Abstract: In what sense can Jewish women writers be called ‘minor’? Robert Gillett explores this question with reference to Barbara Honigmann, a justly celebrated contemporary German Jewish woman writer, and in sometimes lively debate with Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka.

Ec-static Existences: The Poetics and Politics of Non-Belonging in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich (2017)

This article examines the work of contemporary German-Jewish writer Sasha Marianna Salzmann through the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minority. Focusing on Salzmann’s debut novel Auser Sich, I investigate how the text complicates ideas of familial, national, linguistic and gendered belonging, which results in a fundamental deconstruction of the very concept and possibility of belonging. I argue that the framework provided by Deleuze and Guattari needs to be extended in Salzmann’s case, by bringing it together with Judith Butler’s thoughts on the “ec-static” character of the self and interpersonal relationships. Based on Butler’s notion of ec-stasy, I demonstrate how Salzmann’s text develops an innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging, which connects their writing with a broader “postmigrant” trajectory. Apart from helping us question facile conceptions of belonging, Salzmann’s work thus also enables us to shift our current understanding of the cultural location of German-Jewish writing. Tweetable Abstract: This paper examines minority and ec-stasy in Salzmann’s debut novel Auser Sich, staking out these concepts’ innovative politics and poetics of non-belonging.

Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater by Caroline A. Kita

Reviewed by: Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater by Caroline A. Kita Catherine Greer Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater. By Caroline A. Kita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. xxxiii + 188. Cloth $46.00. ISBN 978-0253040534. At the heart of a movement toward German cultural renewal in nineteenth-century Vienna was the belief that compassion, or Mitleid, could enact social change through an audience’s identification with a suffering character in dramatic and musical works. Largely shaped by the writings of Schopenhauer and Wagner, this discourse of compassion excluded the Jewish subject and advanced antisemitic stereotypes. Yet as Caroline A. Kita’s monograph Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna shows, German Jewish writers and composers in fin-de-siècle Vienna contended with and challenged constructions of the “uncompassionate Jew” by turning to “biblical alter egos” (xvii) in their musical compositions and dramatic works. Kita draws on Lisa Silverman’s framework of Jewish difference and in five case studies of works by Siegfried Lipiner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Stefan Zweig, she explores how these writers and composers invoked compassion for the Jewish subject while negotiating their own German Jewish identities. Their creative works ultimately challenged popular antisemitic discourses and “reinscrib[ed] the Jews as a compassionate collective and as a modern, musical, and mythical people” (129). In response to the writings of Schopenhauer and Wagner, poet and philosopher Siegfried Lipiner developed his own theory of compassion that subsequently served as a model for Mahler, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig. In chapter 1, Kita traces the development of Lipiner’s compassionate art by looking to his early writings, including his epic poem Der entfesselte Prometheus (1876) and an 1878 speech for the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens. She illustrates how Lipiner’s biblical drama Adam, the prelude to his Christus tetralogy, embodied compassionate art by eliciting sympathy for the character of Cain. Lipiner recasts Cain as a “tragic antihero” (21) and a “victim of arbitrary categories of difference” (23) deserving of redemption. In doing so Lipiner challenges antisemitic stereotypes and his compassionate art facilitates the dissolution of cultural and religious difference, ultimately leading to the creation of an inclusive community. In the following chapter, Kita demonstrates how Gustav Mahler’s Second (1888–1896) and Third (1893–1896) Symphonies serve as a “musical corollary” (63) to Lipiner’s biblical drama and further embody his vision of compassionate art. Through the inclusion of Lieder in both symphonies (“Urlicht” [End Page 615] and “Was mir der Mensch erzählt”), Kita argues, Mahler offers “dramatic narratives of compassionate transformation” (35) that elicit sympathy for the suffering Jew while also constructing a compassionate community. Her thoughtful analyses of these two symphonies, in addition to her detailed account of Lipiner’s influence on Mahler, serve as highlights of this volume. Whereas Lipiner and Mahler evoked sympathy for the suffering Jewish subject to overcome difference, Schoenberg, Beer-Hofmann, and Zweig conversely created Jewish protagonists that served as “models of cross-cultural exchange” (xxvvii) and reflected the authors’ shifting negotiations of their individual German Jewish identities. In chapter 3, Kita focuses on two works by Arnold Schoenberg, his monodrama Totentanz der Prinzipien (1915) and the oratorio Der Jakobsleiter (1917), to show how Schoenberg employed polyphony and new poetic modes in attempts to create compassionate art that would engender collective spiritual renewal (69). In both works, Schoenberg reclaims compassion for the Jewish subject through prayer, which serves as humanity’s “compassionate covenant” with the divine. In doing so, Kita argues, Schoenberg “recast[s] the Jewish legacy of monotheism as the origin of compassionate spirituality” (93). In the following chapter Kita explores how Richard Beer-Hofmann turned to Wagner’s paradigm of Gesamtkunstwerk to enact his own vision of compassionate art in Jaákobs Traum (1915), a prelude to his planned biblical tetralogy Die Historie von König David. Beer-Hofmann’s reconceptualization of Gesamtkunstwerk evidences his attempt to reconcile German-Austrian theater practices with Jewish tradition and culture. While reviews of the 1919 premiere of Jaákobs Traum in Vienna described the work as “ein jüdischer...

German Jewish Literature after 1990 by Katja Garloff Agnes Mueller

 Reviews two things: describe the design of the dctp-website, the online profile of Klugés television production company, and explain the topoi of sky and celestial bodies in Klugés system. (It is rather unfortunate that, just two months aer publication of Toward Fewer Images, the website underwent a relaunch and is now designed differently; this by no means invalidates Ekardt´s points, though it does render his main example outdated.) Of clear importance—in terms of further disseminating Kluge’s œuvre and method—are Ekardt´s explanations in the Preface’s ‘A Note on Translation’. He states that ‘Klugés approach to handling the translation of his writing resembles his method of producing perpetually modified, sometimes expanded, sometimes cut, sometimes adapted versions of earlier works. [. . .] it was necessary to translate not only untranslated works but also untranslated sections of works for which translations otherwise exist’ (p. xxviii). In conclusion, to call Toward Fewer Images a treat for anyone interested in Klugés work would be an understatement. It is the first English-language account to aspire to cover Klugés work by focusing on his method, and it masters the material in an impressive manner. rough an approach which obviously resembles that of Kluge, Ekardt offers an analysis which opens the corpus up for further investigation. It will provide newcomers to Kluge with an accessible introduction to this complex world, while advanced Kluge devotees will find in this book a strong stimulus for future discussions. e openness and yet density of description, conveyed without loss of overall perspective, are the great advantages of a book which looks set to become a milestone in Kluge scholarship. T C D K R German Jewish Literature aer . Ed. by K G and A M. Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. $; £. ISBN ––– –. While the late s and early s saw a spike in publications on what was then contemporary German Jewish writing (among others Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler (New York: New York University Press, ); omas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, ); Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Neunziger Jahre, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke (Berlin: Schmidt, )), the conversation seems to have ebbed away again in recent years. is volume by Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller is therefore most welcome, as it promises to continue the lines of enquiry established by earlier contributions, while also bringing important updates to the debate. e editors take the period between the post-unification years and the present moment as one in which certain shis in German Jewish culture and discourse have occurred which warrant a reconsideration not only of present-day Jewish identities but also of ‘the very concept of “German Jewish literature”’ (p. ). ese include the restructuring of German Jewish communities through the influx MLR, .,   of the so-called ‘Kontingentflüchtlinge’ and their Russian and Eastern European heritages, the (re-)emergence of anti-Semitism, and various shis in Holocaust memory . e guiding questions that emerge throughout the volume concern, on the one hand, the centrality of the Holocaust for German Jewish identities today, given that it is being increasingly complemented by other, mostly Eastern European, memories of violence, while also becoming ever more historically distant. On the other hand, many of the volume’s contributions query whether Dan Diner’s ocited notion of the ‘negative symbiosis’ between Germans and Jews, which frames the Holocaust as the cornerstone of post-war German Jewish relationships and German and Jewish identities, still applies (see Diner, ‘Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz’, Babylon,  (), –). Reflecting these larger concerns, many of the volume’s chapters either engage with newly emerging authors (oen of Eastern European descent) who have not yet been studied extensively or attempt to read established authors in a new light. e volume is divided into three parts and a Coda, which includes interviews with two prominent third-generation writers (Olga Grjasnowa, Mirna Funk). e first part, entitled ‘Self Reflection in First- and Second-Generation Authors’, features fairly well-known German and German Jewish writers, examining questions of authorship, genre...

Writing Lives: A Female German Jewish Perspective on the Early Twentieth Century by Corinne Painter

Reviewed by: Writing Lives: A Female German Jewish Perspective on the Early Twentieth Century by Corinne Painter Carola Daffner Corinne Painter. Writing Lives: A Female German Jewish Perspective on the Early Twentieth Century. Peter Lang, 2019. 168 pp. Paper, $63.95. In Writing Lives: A Female German Jewish Perspective on the Early Twentieth Century, Corinne Painter provides a thorough overview of the life and work of German Jewish writer, community leader, and Holocaust victim Clementine Krämer (1873–1942). The author hereby joins several voices from the recent past who have criticized the traditional focus on experiences [End Page 128] of German Jewish men before and during the Third Reich. Studies on the German women’s movement, as Painter further argues, have also struggled to address the specific situation of Jewish women. Writing Lives makes a convincing case for revisiting largely forgotten contributions by women such as Krämer and the nuances gained by doing so, not just for our understanding of the German Jewish community between the two world wars but also for women’s history as a whole. In seven chapters, Painter analyzes examples of Krämer’s expansive oeuvre (which spans over one hundred short stories, articles, poems, and letters) and repeatedly highlights Krämer’s deep understanding of the complex times she lived in. Among the topics Krämer frequently explored are ambivalences of German Jewish identity, social expectations for and discrimination against women, and experiences of anti-Semitism between the two world wars. Painter initially identifies the German women’s movement, the German tradition of Bildung, and Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophy as major influences in Krämer’s works. As an activist in her community in Munich, Krämer was also involved in different social projects, from education to anti-prostitution campaigns. The second chapter consequently focuses on Krämer’s engagement with the Jewish community and with Eastern European Jewish women in particular. In her insightful analysis of Krämer’s descriptions of these encounters, Painter concludes that Krämer’s writings repeat cultural stereotypes yet also include important moments of self-reflection. The third chapter dives deeper into Krämer’s double marginalization as a German Jewish woman. Painter emphasizes here that Krämer’s courageous participation in public life and her fight for gender equality also forced her to deal with criticism from within the German Jewish community. Krämer’s writings often confirm the traditional roles of women as wives, mothers, and educators. Painter uses two of Krämer’s short stories to showcase in the fourth chapter how and why Krämer repeatedly chose to write about these topics. According to Painter, writing about women and education allowed Krämer to position herself as an unquestioned authority and, in the process, create a space in which she could imagine new possibilities for women in society. In the fift h chapter, Writing Lives continues the idea of Krämer’s parallel exploration of traditional and progressive perspectives by tracing her long engagement with war work. Painter’s close readings of both stories and private letters reveal that Krämer infused her writings during World War I with antiwar stances and ideas of pacifism. [End Page 129] Krämer’s Die Rauferei (1927; The brawl), a novella about the divisions of the Weimar Republic, is the main focus of chapter 6. As Painter shows, the continuous sense of chaos in the story exposes any belief in single ideologies as unsustainable. The last chapter discusses Krämer’s experiences of living as a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany, the difficulties of emigration, and the consequent fragmentation of the German Jewish community. Especially noteworthy is the fact that during the Third Reich, Krämer continued organizing social events for Jewish women, which provided chances for socializing and mutual support. Painter selects a manuscript of one of Krämer’s speeches about fashion from one of these events to demonstrate how Krämer used her seemingly mundane speech for a veiled commentary on the impermanence of everything, including National Socialism. Painter’s study of Krämer’s largely forgotten oeuvre adds an important nuance to our understanding of Germany’s early twentieth century. Krämer...

Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp.

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

Cosmopolitanism and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman

Reviewed by: Cosmopolitanism and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman Carsten Schapkow Cosmopolitanism and the Jews. By Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 343. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-0472130412. Cosmopolitanism and the Jews, coauthored by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman, is an important scholarly contribution in which the authors provide a detailed analysis of the complex relationship between cosmopolitanism and the Jews. The book consists of eight chapters in which a good number of primary sources, mainly from the field of belles lettres, are analyzed. The book is organized in chronological order beginning with a theoretical introduction to the topic. Other chapters discuss cosmopolitanism during the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century in both Austria-Hungary and Germany, the interwar period with its new appreciation of a European idea, National Socialism and exile, German Jewish writers under Stalinist oppression, and finally "Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans." The title of the book is misleadingly general because the book focuses almost entirely on Jews writing in German; the exception is chapter 7, "Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans," which also takes into account Russian-Jewish authors writing in either German or American English. Based on what Gelbin and Gilman call contemporary "fluid identity" (5), their intention is twofold: First, to "look at how the Jews, however defined, come to shape the various contemporary models of cosmopolitans and how such models, in turn, come to redefine what is understood as Jewish" (5). Second, it is Gelbin's and Gilman's objective to shed light on how the cosmopolitan as a concept over 250 years "turned into a global elite at the turn of the twenty-first century" (1). With the focus on a cultural elite of Jewish writers, the second objective does not become entirely clear in the book. Each chapter emphasizes different writers' depiction of cosmopolitanism, [End Page 615] beginning with the Enlightenment, in which, according to the authors, the notion of cosmopolitanism came into being. And as they correctly express, "the rootless, nomadic, cosmopolitan defined the Jew in European consciousness among non-Jews and Jews alike and shaped Jewish identity politics" (256). Non-Jewish authors like Schiller and Goethe held dear a concept of cosmopolitanism that opposed any kind of nationalism. But Schiller and Goethe (among others) were also concerned about the changes wrought by modernity, which enabled the Jews to blend in and become less visible. Gelbin and Gilman are therefore correct to emphasize that non-Jewish, Enlightened German thinkers understood cosmopolitanism as a part of Enlightened German culture. The widespread longing for a nation state during the course of the nineteenth century troubled the more inclusive idea of cosmopolitanism toward the Jews as expressed by Enlightened, Jewish and non-Jewish, intellectuals. And skeptical voices regarding the Jews as cosmopolitans became ever more skeptical when asking whether Jews could actually express their loyalty to Germany. Through the close readings of multiple primary sources, the authors offer occasionally unexpected insight—from outsiders such as African American author W.E.B. Du Bois, then a graduate student in Berlin, who observed and described the minority complex of the Germans and applied it to the negative perception of the Jew as a cosmopolitan in his 1893 essay "The Present Condition of German Politics" (103). Another example is Thomas Mann, who saw himself in the tradition of Enlightened thinkers like Goethe and, together with many German Jewish writers, believed himself to represent the real and "healthy cosmopolitan" (146) German culture while living abroad during the Nazi period. But there were also writers like Stefan Zweig, who prioritized his loyalty to Germany over his cosmopolitanism, mainly because of external events like World War I and his time in exile. Or the many German Jewish authors who came to the heartbreaking realization that Stalinism had failed and found that the term "cosmopolitanism" how turned against the Jews. But non-Jews, too, became part of this cruel and perverted ideology, as the case of GDR politician Paul Merker shows. In these passages of the book the reader is fully immersed in these fascinating and painful stories. Unfortunately, however, the book fails to...

The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger

Reviewed by: The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany by Jonathan O. Wipplinger Sharon M. Wailes and Monika Herzig Jonathan O. Wipplinger. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. U of Michigan P, 2017. 311 pp. Paper, $39.95. Jonathan Wipplinger presents a thorough analysis of the impact of jazz as a musical art form rooted in African American culture on the young democracy of Germany, specifically the city of Berlin. His research digs [End Page 174] deep into articles, news reports, publicity materials, concert programs, and also translations of the poetry of Langston Hughes, while also providing an analysis of the political context in order to document the impact of the arrival of jazz as a symbol for American culture. Wipplinger refutes the commonly held notion that legitimate African American jazz was unknown in Weimar Germany apart from its "diluted commercial imitations" (12). Furthermore, he argues that the overwhelming publicity that symphonic jazz and the white band director Paul Whiteman received in Weimar Germany eclipsed the presence of African American jazz artists, leaving the initial impression that Germans were unfamiliar with African American jazz. Wipplinger offers a badly needed alternative narrative in which the musical contributions of African American jazz performers and composers become visible and in which the complexity and "messiness of cultural transfer" are acknowledged (13). The modernism of the 1920s, observed in Dadaism and expressionism, was largely facilitated through the cultural friction associated with jazz that allowed the development of a new identity. During this dynamic period, American Sam Wooding and his jazz orchestra from New York premiered in Berlin. Wooding's presence points to an influence on Weimar culture of African American jazz directly from America. Wipplinger discusses the strong (both positive and negative) reception of the group and then moves to the theoretical level, engaging with modernist theory. He uses the concept of aural shock, based on the theories of Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, along with socially constructed ideas of Blackness and images of the modern metropolis in his analysis. Wipplinger acknowledges Adorno's negative writings on jazz but nonetheless applies his theories, deliberately reading Adorno "against the grain" (70), a valid move consistent with the book's innovative approach. The paradoxical juxtaposition of the modern and the primitive was found in jazz—the machination and noise of the modern city reflected in the instrumentation and overwhelming nature of jazz, and Blackness in its associations for Weimar Germans with the syncopated rhythms of the "jungle" representing the primitive—yielding the concept of a "techno-primitive hybrid" (45). Wipplinger also argues that perceptions (and misperceptions) of African American musicians in Weimar Germany influenced modernist thought. With the rise of the Nazi party, racial discrimination led to the rejection of jazz. Nazis conflated Blackness, modern jazz, and Jewishness, as shown in an image at the exhibition Entartete Musik (Degenerate music), [End Page 175] depicting a caricature of a black saxophonist with a large hoop earring and a Star of David on the lapel (234). Yet German Jewish writers and artists were attracted to jazz because they saw parallels between the plight of African Americans in American culture and their own circumstances as outcasts. In uncovering an alternative narrative of history, Wipplinger also engages with gender directly. His chapter on Girlkultur discourse of the mid-1920s analyzes a new conception in which the feminine was cast as the foreign, even threatening other. Although the dancing girls of the era were white, Fritz Giese posits a primitive black ancestry to their rhythmic dancing. The ideas surrounding Girlkultur give jazz, race, and gender an interrelatedness that was perceived to drive the process of modernity. A thorough, in-depth document of the impact of jazz culture on the Weimar Republic, The Jazz Republic satisfies a need to see jazz from a transnational perspective and can function in the classroom as a springboard for fruitful discussion of German modernism and the complexity of cultural exchange. Wipplinger offers a list of alternative figures on the Weimar jazz scene whose presence can serve as an antidote to the prominent white males featured in textbooks for German foreign-language instruction. His narration supplements the usual...

The Mortara Case and the Literary Imagination: Jewish Melodrama and the Pleasures of Victimhood

The 1858 kidnapping of six-year-old Edgardo Mortara by officials of the Papal States in Bologna unleashed a media frenzy across Europe and North America, giving voice to widespread expressions of outrage over the overreach of the Catholic church and the anachronism of Papal rule. Jews in the German-speaking world did not just follow the sensationalized reporting on the fate of this Italian Jewish boy baptized by his Catholic nurse. They also produced a body of melodramatic fiction and drama that took the Mortara case as its inspiration. This literature, written by rabbis and those with close ties to rabbinical leadership, responded to the Mortara affair by creating narratives with happy endings where Jewish children taken into custody by the church inevitably return to their parents and embrace Jewish tradition. Discussing literary texts by Salomon Formstecher, Leopold Stein, Abraham Treu, and Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, this article explores how German-Jewish writers self-consciously transformed the Mortara affair into melodramatic literature designed for the purposes of entertainment. Melodrama hardly marked a withdrawal from the arena of political protest, however. Studying how these texts functioned to entertain their readers, this article explores how this body of literature drew its energy from an interplay of fantasies of Jewish power and vicarious experiences of Jewish victimhood. In doing so, the analysis reflects on the social function of melodrama in nineteenth-century Jewish life, bringing to light the mechanisms that Mortara fiction used to produce pleasurable feelings of self-righteousness in its Jewish readers.

Rootless cosmopolitans: German-Jewish writers confront the Stalinist and National Socialist atrocities

This article examines the impact of the Stalinist persecutions of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ on the Jewish involvement with leftist ideas. In inter-war Germany and Austria, Jewish intellectuals played a disproportionate role in promoting both cosmopolitanist and leftist ideals. While belonging mostly to the bourgeois spectrum, many harboured close sympathies with the young Soviet Union, whose imperative of Communist internationalism seemed to chime closely with their own cosmopolitanist sentiments. This dream was shattered in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 1950s in particular, when Jews were persecuted as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. The author studies the novels by three German-speaking Jewish writers, Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s The Break, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Manès Sperber’s Like a Tear in the Ocean, which were written in close proximity to the Stalinist crimes. She argues that these novels offer a unique insight into the seemingly impossible schism that leftist Jews faced in confronting the Stalinist crimes. In doing so, these novels enable us to trace the Jewish leftist predicament that both sustained the socialist–Communist project and ultimately called for its critical interrogation.

Translation in Exile: The Case of Hans Sahl in the USA

Translation in Exile: The Case of Hans Sahl in the USA Associate Professor Mi-Hyun Ahn Abstract Translation serves as a significant medium for exiled writers who live in Diaspora without any legal status. In addition to the financial incentive, these writers perform translations to maintain their linguistic and cultural identities in adverse circumstances. Hans Sahl, a German-Jewish writer, who escaped from the Nazi regime to the USA and settled there for a long time, translated a lot of American plays into German. Through the translation of American plays, he made a crucial contribution to the restoration of the scant German theater after WWII and to fostering a positive image of American German society. For instance, his translation of Thornton Wilder’s plays introduced style of American life to the devastated German society, which was void of many values and had not recovered psychologically from the trauma of the darkest time. Even though Sahl permanently perceived himself as a ‘transzentaler Obdachloser’, he provided a representative example for cultural exchange through his translation activities. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n2a5

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik Gabriel S. Cooper Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955. By Jonathan Skolnik. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0804786072. Jonathan Skolnik’s masterful study reads German Jewish historical fiction as a popular genre of minority culture that sought to inscribe Jews into German culture and society. Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction written in German drew on the Sephardic-Jewish past and expressed a dynamic that philosopher Franz Rosenzweig dubbed “dissimilation”: an obverse movement to assimilation that affirmed a distinctive Jewish identity alongside new German identities. By reinventing Sephardic-Jewish history, Jewish writers asserted hope for integration and voiced concerns about assimilation, antisemitism, and persecution. Resonant Sephardic-Jewish themes—the vibrant Jewish culture of Islamic Spain, conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion—provided a rich source of Jewish self-understanding, through which minority cultural memory could be reinterpreted in new historical contexts. Skolnik’s book follows on the heels of recent scholarship on Jewish historical fiction by Maurice Samuels and Jonathan Hess, but it does not retread these authors’ paths. Instead, Skolnik offers valuable insights into a literature that served (among other functions) as a corrective to the project of modern, secular Jewish historiography (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Taking cues from historians Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, Skolnik addresses the interplay of history and memory in German Jewish culture, and this exchange’s effects on German Jewish identity construction. One of Skolnik’s significant contributions here is his demonstration of the idea that German Jewish historical fiction remained in dialogue with the majority culture, even as it asserted a unique German Jewish identity. The book’s first chapter examines the “first modern Jewish historical novel,” Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837). Spinoza reacted against the literary figure of Ahasuerus, an enduring representation of “Jewish history” for Europeans. Auerbach has Spinoza dream about a persecuted, unenlightened, dying Ahasuerus, signaling the triumph of secularization and rationalism embodied by the philosopher. However, the [End Page 664] novel also consciously confronts the challenge secularization posed to Judaism and Jewish identity. Auerbach situates his novel between the radical assimilationism of Karl Gutzkow and the Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, in which Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became embroiled. By identifying Spinoza as the precursor to Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment thought, Auerbach perpetuates an ideology of Jewish emancipation by claiming Spinoza for Jewish history. Spinoza thus strives to insert minority culture, which secularization threatens to marginalize, into the national narrative of German literary history. Historical fiction would serve thereafter as a model for Jewish writers concerned with Jews’ integration as Jews into German culture. In his second chapter, Skolnik interprets Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) both as a text that posits secular literature as a counterweight to the demythologizing tendencies of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and as a modern type of Jewish cultural memory. Skolnik’s compelling analysis of the “Haggadah” motif illustrates the critical role Heine envisioned for narrative in negotiating the divide between Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicism. In his “secularized Haggadah” modeled on Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott, Heine revives the Sephardic-Jewish thinker, Don Isaac Abarbanel, an ambivalent figure endowed with the cultural integration of that historical epoch, and the knowledge of how fleeting that achievement was. German Jewish writers of historical fiction learned from Heine to appropriate Abarbanel as a vehicle for expressing a range of attitudes toward the projects of (Jewish) integration and modernization. Chapter 3 treats five nineteenth-century historical novels addressed to a German Jewish public sphere, which had arisen from German Jews’ acculturation and their thriving print culture. Skolnik maintains that this minority literature sought to create a normative, stable Jewish identity compatible with the project of integration. Jewish historical fiction achieved this didactic aim through allusions to German “high” culture, often works by Goethe and Lessing. Skolnik also makes a cogent argument here for the inadequacy of existing theories of minority culture in analyzing German Jewish literature; rather than attempting to subvert the project of national identity—a strategy germane to other minority cultures—German Jewish...

Diaspora, Postmemory and the Transcultural Turn in Contemporary Jewish Writing: Barbara Honigmann’s Autofictional Writings

According to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents continued dislocation: as the homeland of their ancestors has “ceased to exist” they are destined forever to remain exiled from the “space of identity” (Family 243). The German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann is one of those descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors even though she was born in Germany to where her parents had returned after the war. However, in contrast to Hirsch, she embraces life in diaspora and self-imposed exile as the true source for constructing a genuine identity in which she is true to her Judaism. In illuminating the discrepancy between Hirsch’s analytical reading of exilic postmemory and Barbara Honigmann’s way of creating it in literature, this article shows that different conceptualizations of diaspora give rise to different postmemorial aesthetics: whereas Hirsch’s photographic aesthetics represents the melancholic insight that a return to the place of origin is impossible, nostalgic aesthetics gives in to this very desire for a “final return” (Hall). However, both the nostalgic and the photographic aesthetics are based on a territorial understanding of home and on the idea that identity is bound to a specific space. In contrast, Honigmann’s aesthetics of postmemory, which I call transcultural, perceives diasporic identity as the result of a constant blending and mixing of cultures. Thus, identity is not connected to a distinct place, but rather to a “common genealogical origin” (Boyarin, Boyarin). However, as this origin has been forgotten, the author must laboriously reconstruct it in her autofictional writings.

»Das schönste Theater bleibt doch das Gericht.« – Todesstrafe und Talion im Drama Sammy Gronemanns

AbstractBiblical death penalty becomes practically inapplicable through talmudic legislation, though it is supported by the authority of the Torah. Consequently, death penalty remains a potential means of punishment, at least theoretically so, constituting a motif in the dramatic texts of the German-Jewish Zionist, lawyer and writer Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952). Following his immigration to Tel Aviv in 1936, difficulties in the application of this topos and of »Talion« in general become apparent in his dramatic works, particularly with regard to Germany. In face of the emerging horrors of the Shoah, Gronemann struggled to preserve the humanist-talmudic moment of the suspension of death penalty. He did so despite Zionist attempts to return to the biblical origins of Judaism, with its implied denial of cultural achievement in the Diaspora.

Lost in Third Space? Narrating German-Jewish identity in Maxim Biller’s autobiography Der gebrauchte Jude (2009)

After the Holocaust Jewish life in Germany was invisible: many survivors left Germany, and most of those who did stay or returned from exile preferred to keep a low profile. Most Germans were keen to move on; their awareness of Jewish life was reduced to memorial contexts, and, being the majority, they dominated public discourse of commemoration. From the 1980s on, young German-Jewish writers of the second generation started to reflect in their work on what it meant to be Jewish in Germany. They have thus contributed to making Jews more visible again in Germany. This process has been helped by the immigration of Jews mainly from the former Soviet Union following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article examines how in his most recent text, Der gebrauchte Jude, the controversial second generation writer Maxim Biller reflects about the parameters of this visibility through his autobiographical discourse.

The Multilingual Pleasures of Slavic Worlds: Sacher-Masoch, Franzos, Freud

This essay investigates the linguistic play and geopolitical scenarios in the work of Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (author of Venus in Furs and the man who gave his name to “masochism”) and his younger contemporary, the German-Jewish writer Karl Emil Franzos. Both men grew up in the Eastern borderlands of the Habsburg Empire, in the Crownland of Galicia, which was inhabited by Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles. A third figure with a distinctly Habsburg imperial biography, Sigmund Freud, provides both techniques for reading and serves as a subject of analysis in his own right. Drawing on a psychoanalytic toolbox, this essay develops a provincial reading of psychosexual and geopolitical fantasies in these writers' work within the context of Austrian culture after Austria's defeat to Prussia (1866) and subsequent German unification (1871). The analysis devotes special attention to the linguistic origins of Sacher-Masoch's favored fetish object, the fur-lined kazabaika. Sacher-Masoch's particular brand of fetishism, this essay argues, is a form of resistance to the procrustean bed of national identity in favor of an aestheticized and idealized vision of imperial multiplicity. This article aspires to remind twenty-first-century critics that Freudian psychoanalysis was born at the border and emerged from the interstices of multiple languages, religions, and nationalities. In the Habsburg imperial setting where psychoanalytic thinking first took hold, the psychoanalytic subject and the syntax of the fantasy were always emphatically multilingual and cross-cultural.