Jewish Characters Research Articles

Precisiones literarias sobre el antijudaísmo de Gonzalo de Berceo en el Milagro de Teófilo (XXIV) = Literary Reflections on Gonzalo de Berceo’s Anti-judaism in The Miracle of Theophilus (XXIV)

In the medieval Marian collection Los Milagros de Nuestra Senora (Miracles of Our Lady) by Gonzalo de Berceo, the Milagro de Teofilo (The Miracle of Teophilus) is the most extensive and elaborate. The poem, which enjoyed wide circulation in other European vernacular languages, contains a moralizing didactic message aimed at the readership in order to prevent any contact with the Devil and his followers. In this case, it is a Jew who acts as an intermediary between Teofilo and Satan. However, whereas the rest of the European versions portray anti-Semitic features on the Jewish character influenced by popular folklore, such as embodying an evil animal-like creature involved in diabolical practices, these references are absent in Berceo’s version. Berceo’s position with respect to the Jew stands out as one based essentially on anti-Jewish traits inherited from Patristic and other traditional clerical thought. Hence, it lacks anthropological and racial prejudices common to anti-Semitism in the rest of Europe and which were unknown in the Iberian Peninsula imaginary at least for the following two centuries.

Fictions of identity: (Re)imagining the stories we tell

In Perceptions of Jewish History, Amos Funkenstein argues that Jews are caught in a continuous loop of telling and retelling Jewish history. Taking medieval reimaginings as a starting point, this essay maps this loop as expressing a resistance to temporal erasure by considering modern historical fiction that reimagines Jewish presence in annus domini temporality. In essence, modern Jewish writers populate history with Jewish characters in order to write Jewish presence into the medieval now of Christian time. This essay explores what is involved in balancing the historical record (where Jews are frequently subalterns and often oppressed victims of establishment authority) with a fictionalized history (where utopian visions of the past imagine a Jew who has agency and voice).

The Jewish Character In The Saudi Novel: Its dimensions and Its Connections between rejection and reconciliation

The Jewish Character In The Saudi Novel: Its dimensions and Its Connections between rejection and reconciliation

The Jewish Character In The Saudi Novel: Its dimensions and Its Connections between rejection and reconciliation

The Jewish Character In The Saudi Novel: Its dimensions and Its Connections between rejection and reconciliation

Paulus als Yischmaelit?: The Personification of Scripture as Interpretive Authority in Paul and the School of Rabbi Ishmael

While a growing body of scholarship suggests that Paul’s scriptural hermeneutics may fruitfully be illuminated “backwards” in the light of his early Christian reception and interpretation, the enigma of the precise Jewish character of his exegetical method remains tantalizingly unsolved. Any attempt to illuminate this obscurity by way of Paul’s Jewish matrix must wrestle with one intractable fact and its correlative question: Paul was a Pharisee (Phil 3:5), but what kind of Pharisee? Past answers to this question in terms of various first-century rabbis—as exemplified by the studies of Joachim Jeremias, Hans Hübner, and, more recently, N. T. Wright—stumble upon the methodological skandalon of the late dating of Tannaitic sources. The present article proposes a new way through this impasse, in the form of a twofold contribution. First, a comparison of the scriptural hermeneutics of the Pauline letters—particularly Galatians—and the midrash attributed to the school of Rabbi Ishmael reveals an important and overlooked similarity: their common personification of “Scripture” as a self-interpreting authority. Triangulating between this common complex of hermeneutical features and Essene and Alexandrian exegetical methods, one can then recover with reasonable probability some contours of Paul’s first-century Pharisaism that have ramifications for understanding Paul’s Jewish education, his relationship to Torah, and his apocalypticism and mysticism.

HUMOROUS AND SATIRICAL PERSPECTIVES ON JEWISH CLASSES IN PHILIP ROTH�S GOODBYE, COLOMBUS

Ponte Academic JournalMar 2016, Volume 72, Issue 3 HUMOROUS AND SATIRICAL PERSPECTIVES ON JEWISH CLASSES IN PHILIP ROTH�S GOODBYE, COLOMBUSAuthor(s): Faruk KALAYJ. Ponte - Mar 2016 - Volume 72 - Issue 3 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2016.3.1 Abstract:Philip Roth, of Jewish ethnicity, is a distinguished and famous writer in American literature. His first novella Goodbye, Colombus contains five other short stories; they feature Jewish characters from all classes. This diversity enables Roth to employ the humor and flippancy of the lower and upper classes (and between the two). Neil Klugman, the narrator and protagonist of this novella, lives in a working-class neighborhood and falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, a college student from a wealthy family. Roth, from Klugman�s point of view, satirizes Jews, their relationships with each other, and their interactions with Gentiles. Having many differences between the two classes whose common ground is their Jewishness, the novel indicates both their weaknesses and power. Many critics have reached the consensus about Philip Roth�s witticism and accomplished puns. For instance, Safer compares �Roth's style to that of a stand-up comic�. Furthermore, Girgus, lumping Woody Allen and Philip Roth together, states: �Both have established public identifies as Jews. Their works humorously interlace ethnic differences and relationships, sexuality, and moral and social themes.� (121) Roth lampoons his society and himself as a New Jersey Jew. In this study, I will discuss the satirical and humorous characteristics of Roth�s first (1959) novella, Goodbye, Colombus. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password

Una escudilla con decoración figurativa procedente de la Judería de Teruel

Within the newly discovered archaeological site in the square of the Jewish quarter of Teruel, stands a ceramic tile, a bowl of local development dated between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth. Its uniqueness comes from its decor, which depicted what we consider two Jewish characters with clear parallels in Jewish and Christian Hispanic iconography of the time. This is a finding of great interest, since it is a fairly rare event within the iconographic corpus and medieval ceramic repertoire. In any case, it is a magnificent example of the strength of the Jews of Teruel during the Late Middle Ages.

PARTE DA SOCIEDADE OU SOCIEDADE À PARTE? REPRESENTAÇÃO DE JUDEUS NA NOVELA DIE JUDENBUCHE (1842) DE ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF

Este artigo analisa Die Judenbuche, uma novela de Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, publicada em 1842. O texto, compreendido pela autora como uma representação de costumes e moralidades de uma sociedade, retrata também personagens judaicos. Neste artigo, analiso a forma como os judeus são representados: como parte da sociedade ou como uma sociedade à parte.

“Receive with Simplicity Everything That Happens to You”: Schlemiel (Meta)Physics in the Coens’ A Serious Man

Before Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2009 production A Serious Man, Jewish motifs have consistently appeared in their cinematic output. However, the Jewish characters functioned in an ethnically diverse setting and rarely took centre stage, with the notable exception of the eponymous struggling leftist playwright in Barton Fink. Nevertheless, even here the Jewishness seemed to be universalized into “humanity.” Elsewhere, through their accessory characters, the Coens primarily offered a nod to the illustrious and/or notorious Jewish presence in various spheres of American society (e.g., smalltime gangster Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing or movie mogul Jack Lipnick in the aforementioned Barton Fink). In addition, steadfast religious observance has been an object of affable ridicule (e.g., store owner Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski). A Serious Man, however, reveals an unprecedented strategy. Described by the Coens as their most autobiographical film to date, it has a predominantly Jewish cast, deals almost exclusively with a Jewish community in the Midwest, and is heavily steeped in themes which have long been the staple of the Jewish literary tradition. Most evident is the familiar figure of the schlemiel, the eternal loser, embodied in the protagonist Larry Gopnik, whose seemingly endless predicaments form the spine of the plot. Marketed as a comedy, A Serious Man nevertheless consistently exhibits a dark, existential undercurrent, which renders its decidedly grim ending a rather logical payoff. Drawing on the research of seminal scholars on the subject of schlemiel narratives (e.g., Ruth Wisse, Sanford Pinsker), the essay is an attempt to situate the film within this tradition. Furthermore, I argue that the Coens reinvest the figure of the schlemiel with a philosophical charge that it possessed in folk legends and Yiddish literature; at the same time, they adapt the schlemiel to the postmodern condition. This allows them to address the fundamental uncertainty of our age, signalled in the film through the formulae of Heisenberg and Schrödinger.

Essentialism promotes children's inter-ethnic bias.

The present study investigated the developmental foundation of the relation between social essentialism and attitudes. Forty-eight Jewish Israeli secular 6-year-olds were exposed to either a story emphasizing essentialism about ethnicity, or stories controlling for the salience of ethnicity or essentialism per se. After listening to a story, children's attitudes were assessed in a drawing and in an IAT task. Compared to the control conditions, children in the ethnic essentialism condition drew a Jewish and an Arab character as farther apart from each other, and the Jewish character with a more positive affect than the Arab character. Moreover, boys in the ethnic essentialism condition manifested a stronger bias in the IAT. These findings reveal an early link between essentialism and inter-group attitudes.

Czech Women Writers and Racial Others: (Un)timely Reflections on the History of Czech Nationalism

Czech historians are often reluctant to study negative aspects of the Czech past, including more extreme forms of Czech nationalism and particularly racism. This article examines attitudes of Czech women writers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to racial Others. Focusing on the works of Božena Benešová, Gabriela Preissová, and Růžena Svobodová that featured Jewish and Romani characters, it argues that women’s views resembled those of their male contemporaries and ranged from interest in marginalized groups to implicit and explicit antisemitism. The article explores contradictions characteristic of the three writers’ works with Jewish and Romani themes and points out commonalities and differences in the treatment of both groups. It is intended as an opening of a discussion on a little-studied aspect of Czech nationalism.

Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg (review)

Reviewed by: Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen ed. by Vincent Brook, Marat Grinberg Judah M. Cohen (bio) Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen. By Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg, eds. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014. xxxiii + 275 pp. Woody on Rye, when viewed from outside of the circle of scholars interested in Jewishness and Woody Allen’s movies, seems like an insider conversation content to remain that way. The volume brings together a series of respected scholars to explore ideas and themes in Allen’s movies from c. 1992 onward—films, Brook and Grinberg claim, largely overlooked in scholarship due to the “the major fissure in Allen’s career caused by the Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi Previn scandal” (ix). Unfortunately, the addition of a lens of “Jewishness” appears to hamstring the contributors—and their volume’s contribution—more than it helps. Grinberg, in his own essay, provides a justification: “Woody Allen ought to be viewed as a serious Jewish artist and philosopher, whose Jewish or indeed Judaic thinking shines through even or especially in the absence of apparent Jewish markers, thematics, or identity” (38). Yet while this pairing seems natural on the surface (and may appeal theoretically to Jewish studies), these dual foci too often turn the volume into an exercise in scholarly self-affirmation. Despite Woody Allen’s complex, and often dismissive, relationship to Judaism in his own accounts, his voice is drowned out here by scholarly fiat. Scholarship that explores a celebrity’s or artist’s “Jewishness” has become its own cottage industry, achieving varying degrees of success. Often such studies involve combing a subject’s works for indicators of Judaism, whether obvious or coded; triangulating these observations with other mediated accounts of the artist, such as newspaper interviews or profiles; and anchoring the discussion to more general thematic ideas in the work of prominent scholars. While at times illuminating, these kinds of studies have been critiqued as more interested in arranging [End Page 271] data to achieve a preconceived end than in letting the evidence speak for itself. An entire volume predicated on such a preconceived end, moreover—here, Allen’s Jewishness—has the trap already set. Attractive writing and humorous turns of phrase, as well as a whimsical design that replaces colons in chapter titles with a broken pair of glasses, cannot save many of the essays from suffering as a result. Historians might find particularly annoying the lack of primary materials engaged beyond Allen’s films, leading, among other things, to long plot narrations/readings (especially Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, and Scoop) that can repeat across several essays. Without other historical benchmarks, moreover, the films double as their own insular history, leading to a false impression of hermeticism. I also had difficulty with the frequency by which authors asserted signs of “Jewishness” through acknowledged stereotype: how discussions of a nose, or hypersexuality, or shortness of stature, unproblematically become paradigms of Judaism in order to establish a dialectic with Christianity or to address gender relations. A three essay “Schlemiel Studies” section proves emblematic of this approach, proclaiming the Schlemiel as a distinctive Jewish character and then labeling Allen’s characters as Schlemiels-by-presumption. A three essay section on Allen’s female characters includes a number of interesting ideas about the portrayals of Jewish women but works with such a limited amount of material that by the end arguments seem repetitious. And assertive speculation about Allen’s creative choices, given that none of the authors appeared to make any efforts to contact him, seem to emphasize the artifice of scholarly convention and its questionability here. Among many examples: “what is especially striking about Cassandra’s Dream is that Allen brings God back with a vengeance” (51). I came to wonder, as I arrived at the end of the book, if releasing the authors from the “Jewishness” target might have led to a more diverse—and, frankly, better, collection. In contrast, James Fisher’s essay on Allen’s Broadway plays offers a glimpse of what this volume could have become. A refreshing detour from the film analyses, Fisher’s more...

The Lure of the Other: Sheridan, Identity and Performance in Kingston and Calcutta

How did the American War affect ideas of nationality, identity, and belonging for the widely dispersed and varied British subjects? This article addresses this question through an examination of the performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutta, Bengal. In each of these sites, theatrical performances enabled residents to embrace both the love of alterity and the longing for home that were each endemic to colonial life. Yet the comic figures of Jewish characters in each play suggested that Britishness and otherness were not far removed from each other, as theatrical performance, almost despite itself, began to sketch in more similarities than differences dividing us from them. In a moment when metropolitan anxieties about empire and colonial engagements with otherness had become entangled with practices and peoples that seemed to put British identity at risk, Sheridan’s two comedies hint that empire could make everyone an “other,” a “them.” Sheridan then attempted to diffuse that insight in his plays, inviting the audience to laugh at itself as it engaged in the pleasures, and pains, of real and imagined identifications.

Sundays at the Priory

The guests whom George Eliot and George Henry Lewes entertained at their Sunday salons generally included a number of Europeans, as well as an occasional American, during a period when fruitful cross-cultural exchanges coexisted with international tensions that would eventually culminate in the Great War. Although visitors from Russia appeared only sporadically at the Priory, one of the most regular, Olga Novikoff, held and advanced opinions that seldom coincided either with those of her hosts or of the other guests and clashed most seriously with those of Robert Lytton, a particular friend of Lewes's, though only a rare attendee at the Sundays. At the same time, no evidence exists that political differences disturbed the atmosphere at the Priory, even though Novikoff's later letters to the Times revealed that Eliot's highly positive representations of Jewish characters in Daniel Deronda could not have constituted a stronger opposition with the open anti-Semitism of her guest. Meanwhile, Lewes's response to Lytton's position in India in 1876 reveal an attempt to influence international relations extremely rare, if not unique, in the activities of the Priory host.

Public attitudes toward policies related to labor migrants in Israel

This paper focuses on determinants of public attitudes in Israel toward two policy questions. First, should immigration policy measures be more restrictive toward overseas labor migrants? Secondly, should overseas labor migrants be replaced with Palestinian workers? Based on an attitudinal survey administered to a representative sample of the Israeli population, the findings indicate that support for a restrictive immigration policy is quite prevalent among Israelis. However, the survey reveals only moderate consent for replacing overseas labor migrants with Palestinian commuters. Attitudes toward a restrictive immigration policy are explained by the perceived threat posed by overseas labor migrants to social and economic interests. This threat is explained by the respondents’ socio-economic characteristics. Attitudes toward the replacement policy are partially explained by the sense of threat to the Jewish character of the state posed by overseas migrants, but are also attributed to several personal characteristics. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.

“The Other Woman” – Eliza Davis and Charles Dickens

“The Other Woman” – Eliza Davis and Charles Dickens Murray Baumgarten (bio) The letters Eliza Davis wrote to Charles Dickens, from 22 June 1863 to 8 February 1867, and after his death to his daughter Mamie on 4 August 1870, reveal the increasing self-confidence of English Jews.1 In their careful and accurate comments on the power of Dickens’s work in shaping English culture and popular opinion, and their pointed discussion of the ways in which Fagin reinforces antisemitic English and European Jewish stereotypes, they indicate the concern, as Eliza Davis phrases it, of “a scattered nation” to participate fully in the life of “the land in which we have pitched our tents.2” It is worth noting that by 1858 the fits and starts of Jewish Emancipation in England had led, finally, to the seating of Lionel Rothschild in the House of Commons. After being elected for the fifth time from Westminster he was not required, due to a compromise devised by the Earl of Lucan and Benjamin Disraeli, to take the oath on the New Testament as a Christian.3 [End Page 44] And Eliza and her husband, James Phineas Davis, had in 1860 become the inhabitants of Tavistock House, purchasing it that year from Charles Dickens. In the eyes of the law, English Jews now received the same treatment, privileges and rights as Christian English folk. Yet the Jews were not exactly at ease in England. During the negotiations for his house, Dickens mentions to a friend, that “the purchaser of Tavistock will be a Jew Money Lender.”4 Three days later he writes, “If the Jew Money Lender buys (I say ‘if’ because of course I shall never believe in him until he has paid the money.)”. A month later he writes to Arthur Stone, “I hope you will find the Children of Israel, good neighbours” (Letters 9: 307). Slighting remarks, these. Yet Dickens also adds, that “Mrs. Davis appears to be a very kind and agreeable woman. And I have never had any money transaction with any one, more promptly, fairly, and considerately conducted than the purchase of Tavistock House has been” (Letters 9: 306–07). Praising Eliza Davis, Dickens overcomes the thrown-off comments he had made. Obtuse and unthinking, they derive from the lurking antisemitism and fear-ridden Jewish stereotyping of his era and culture. That stereotype Eliza Davis confronts in her forthright correspondence with Dickens when she notes that “there are other oppressions, <far> much heavier other things far sharper, than the fetters and goads of Damascus Lebanon or Russia” (Clark 1918, 17). How Literature Matters “Emboldened by your Courtesy,” Eliza Davis began her first letter to Charles Dickens on 22 June 1863, initiating a correspondence that would extend throughout the rest of his life and even beyond. It is one of the most sustained exchanges of letters we have between Dickens and someone outside his immediate circle. All her letters to Dickens bore her address: Tavistock House, while Dickens’s came from Gad’s Hill Place and Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was traveling as part of his reading tour. In 1870 after his death, the “Letters from a Jewess” as they were headlined, were excerpted in several newspapers, including The Observer, the Daily News, and The Jewish Chronicle. Like other diligent correspondents, Eliza Davis kept copies of her letters [End Page 45] and interleaved them with Dickens’s responses.5 At Eliza Davis’s death in 1903,6 the full set of letters was included in the Estate Sale and purchased by a friend who passed them on to Cumberland Clark, a journalist, traveler throughout the Empire, and man of letters.7 In 1918, Clark published the complete set of letters as Charles Dickens and His Jewish Characters.8 Dickens’s letters are included in the Pilgrim Edition; and the entire correspondence was republished in 1921 in The Dickensian. Since then the rethinking of Dickens’s achievement, and his public life, as well as the relative obscurity of this exchange, make the chance to revisit them and explore their impact a welcome opportunity. Cumberland Clark prefaces his 1918 publication of the letters with a brief statement, noting that the recent...

The "German-Jewish Dialogue" and its Literary Refractions: The Case of Margarete Susman and Gershom Scholem

“What have I in common with Jews?” muses Kafka in a diary entry from January 1914. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”1 Despite Kafka’s ambivalence, many of his early Jewish readers believed his writing bore a distinctly Jewish testimony. Beginning with Max Brod, Kafka’s first biographer and the executor of his literary estate, German-Jewish critics have made imaginative, diverse, and contradictory attempts to pinpoint the Jewish character of his prose.2 Figures such as the poet and essayist Margarete Susman, religious philosopher Hans-Joachim Schoeps, and renowned scholar of the Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, all chose to take Kafka out of his corner and place him at the center of their meditations on Jewish identity in the modern-secular age. While these thinkers all detected something “essentially” Jewish in his writing, they each had a very different idea of what it was that determined its status as “Jewish literature.” As such, the various claims made upon Kafka’s ever-elusive Jewishness reflect the diverse ideological positions held by his readers.

The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture ed. by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller (review)

Reviewed by: The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture ed. by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller Cynthia A. Klíma Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller, eds., The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Austrian and Hapsburg Studies 16. New York: Berghahn, 2013. 244 pp. The purpose of this highly interesting volume is to bring forth various areas of research and mutually to provide information regarding the café culture of Central Europe. The impetus for this “coming together” was twofold: the exhibition Vienna Café 1900, held in 1980 in Vienna, and the Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange conference, which took place in 2008 in London. The eleven essays that make up this volume do not disappoint; in fact, each one shows the reader that a great deal of research been done in the area of café culture, but also that there remains more work to be pursued, especially in the realm of the former Habsburg lands. The essays in this work discuss topics that delve deeply into café culture, from the importance of space, to the fin-de-siècle era and the radical changes in the personality of the café, to the presence of the Yiddish language in the intellectual atmosphere, to design and conversational stimuli. Indeed, the discussion topics make up a highly intricate and complex mix of the philosophy, history, and psychology involved in the emergence of the café culture from the 1870s through the fin-de-siècle era. The café became a site for the birth of urban modernity (1) and, in a society such as Vienna’s, where free speech and freedom of association was strictly regulated, it loosend the inhibitions of the Viennese citizens. The enclosed area of the café, the ability to mix with one’s social level, the sharing of ideas, and the pursuit of literary activity were all stimulated by the relaxed, off - the- street atmosphere of the café. Thus was born the age of Viennese modernism, resulting not only in great literature but [End Page 117] also in the discovery of writers and artists whose activity might not have been known had the café been a restrictive and less intellectually friendly entity. In Gilbert Carr’s essay, the importance of the Café Griensteidl cannot be denied, for it became “a magnet for ‘politicians, non-politicians, jurists, and philosophers, scholars reticent and loud, citizens from all districts’ to play, read or to debate current affairs” (34). In the essay by Steven Beller, the work Die Tante Jolesch by Friedrich Torberg is used to discuss the link between the Jews and the modern Viennese coffeehouse. The original Café Griensteidl was, as a matter of fact, a gathering spot for Jewish intellectuals from 1848 until the cafe’s démolition in 1897. In the Café Central and Café Herrenhof, Beller states that “the cast of characters, while not exclusively Jewish, was predominantly so” (53). Beller questions why Jews would feel an affinity for the coffeehouse and concludes that “the coffeehouse was completely reliant on the sort of international trade in exotic, colonial goods that Jews were also associated with, and coffee’s centrality to Viennese consumer culture thus reflected a globalisation, or exoticisation of European culture […] that paralleled the rise of tea in British consumer culture” (53). Schachar Pinsker investigates the “Jewish character” of the Viennese, Berlin, and Lemberg cafés and questions whether it is possible to define and identify their Jewishness. He states that the Jewish link to the café was the result of “the encounter with the big city and with the disorienting pulse of metropolitan life” (83). Thus, the café became a refuge for those who could relate in experience, language, and culture and at the same time share intellectual creativity. Pinsker states that the “flowering enclave of Hebrew and Yiddish modernism in Vienna gave us many literary representations of the cityscape and its cafés” (87). Torberg’s work again serves as a point of departure for Tag Gronberg’s essay; however, he refers back to Kolschitzky’s influence on café culture, the defeat of the Turks in 1683, and the introduction of coffee...

« Les Juifs n’ont rien contre les policiers »

After the Holocaust, German literature was tainted in two ways. First, just as the Endlosung challenged the idea of culture in general, the fact that German was the “language of the perpetrators” contaminated the German language itself. In 1951, Theodor W. Adorno articulated, in a very influential way, the idea that culture was impossible after the Holocaust. This concept significantly impacted German literature and its portrayal of the genocide of the Jewish people. Analysis of post-war German literature shows the field to be highly heterogeneous. Writers’ “subject-positions” (D. LaCapra) and ideological attitudes determined their approaches to writing about the annihilation of Jews, a topic that incidentally was rarely covered by German literature. This article focuses on two canonical authors from the post-1945 period and briefly discusses Susanne Kerckhoff’s outstanding small body of work. Although both Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Wolfgang Weyrauch had already published work throughout the Nazi period, they were regarded as post-war writers. It can be argued that their writing in the years immediately following World War II was decisively shaped by the idea of guilt. Whereas Kaschnitz was concerned with a conservative Christian rejection of guilt, Weyrauch’s Jewish characters served to exonerate the Germans.

Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer by Alexandra Kleinlercher (review)

Reviewed by: Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer by Alexandra Kleinlercher Katherine Arens Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung: Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer. By Alexandra Kleinlercher. Vienna: Böhlau, 2011. Pp. 472. Paper €39.00. ISBN 978-3205786054. Kleinlercher, a faculty member at University College, London, has in this impeccable volume taken up the perpetually thorny problem of Austrian author Heimito von Doderer and his implication in both antisemitism and National Socialism. To supplement her thorough survey of the published material on the author, Kleinlercher conducted interviews with Doderer’s secretary and biographer Wolfgang Fleischmann and exchanged emails with Hasterlik’s niece, as well as accessing collections of letters that have heretofore not been made available to scholars (“The Hine Collection” 367–368). The result is a readable, superbly documented book that has done the incredible service of collecting all the evidence available on those charges, addressing them openly and even-handedly, without preconception. The author should be commended for pointing toward the situation’s almost inevitable but unappetizing conclusions, without claiming definitive answers that would push further into a complicated era than the evidence warrants. The book is divided into two sections, the first dedicated to Doderer’s biography and the second to his work. Kleinlercher first addresses letters from his first wife August (Gusti) Hasterlik and correspondence from family and friends that reflect on Doderer and his antisemitism on a day-to-day level. Those insights, however, are pulled into a broader exposition of his life that carefully verifies dates, names, and [End Page 688] issues. Thus her first chapter, “Herkunft und Jugend,” addresses his German heritage and how he identified with it, his possible bisexuality or at least bisexual curiosity, and his experiences as a POW in World War I. The second chapter adduces evidence for his antisemitism and his approach to the National Socialist cause, starting with his 1933 entry into the party. Chapter 3 takes on his “career” as a Wehrmacht officer (1940–1945); chapter 4 traces his road from POW to successful author after a nominal denazification. Chapters 5 and 6 illuminate his postwar negotiations with fame and establishment as a public figure, especially with respect to friends shared with Gusti Hasterlik and particularly with Albert Paris Gütersloh. This history confirms a general conspiracy to cover up the author’s National Socialist past and establish him as the voice to renew an Austrian national literature after the war. The second part of Kleinlercher’s project turns toward the evidence from text criticism. The centerpiece is a comparison of Die Dämonen (1956) with its early version, Die Dämonen der Ostmark, and other documentation back as far as a 1929 personal ad that Doderer inserted into the Neue Freie Presse, seeking “Anschluß an ca. 40-jährige distinguierte israelitische Dame (Wienerin) von nur sehr starker korpulenter größerer Figur und schwarzem Haar,” guaranteeing discretion—an author looking for material on a projected novel, Dicke Damen, which presaged both versions of the Demons. In this category also fall the essay “Sexualität und totaler Staat” and the mid 1930s “Aide mémoire” for the project. All the levels of the book retain clear evidence of his concern with antisemitic and racist stereotypes, and with his desire to split the races. Kleinlercher is careful in tracing the links between Aryan and Jewish characters in the novel, and how the novel was gradually edited to reduce the prominence of various characters’ Jewish heritage and to stress instead a more philosophical thesis differentiating two realities, the gaps between inner and outer worlds. She leaves little question that the novel retains significant racial prejudices, even as it withdraws from overt National Socialist viewpoints. The final section of Kleinlercher’s book publishes some of the most important recovered documentation, including most notably a thorough exposition about the question of Doderer’s Aryanizing an apartment (401–422), which shows that there is not enough evidence to support an answer. Nonetheless, it is clear that Doderer edited his own history with the Nazi party—he renewed his membership as late as 1939. Yet he also joined the Catholic Church in 1940 and claimed that date...