German-Jewish Literature (Jewish Studies)

Nel piccolo villaggio di Dunscore, situato a nove miglia a nord ovest di Dumfries e Galloway, nel sud ovest della Scozia, si trova una cappella costruita, nel 1649, durante la Guerra Civile inglese. Sul frontone è stata scolpita la frase " Quanto sono amabili i tuoi tabernacoli, Oh Signore degli eserciti". Non molto distante, in una fattoria di proprietà di Thomas e Jane Haining, nasce duecentocinquant'anni, la primpogenita, di sette figli, a cui viene imposto lo stesso nome della madre: Jane. Nessuno avrebbe mai pensato che era destinata a compiere un ruolo determinante nella salvezza degli ebrei dalle grinfie dei naziste e pagherà tale gesto presso il campo di concentramento di Auschwitz-Birkenau. La vita mette a dura prova la piccola, infatti, quando compie cinque anni perde la madre. Quando Jane ha solo cinque anni, sua madre muore. Il padre Thomas deve occuparsi dei figli e Jane gli da una mano. Nonostante le incombe familiari e il triste destino, Jane non si scoraggia e riesce a mantenere vivo il sogno di apprendere. Non passa giorno che cerca, con tutta se stessa, di assecondare il bisogno d'imparare. Non paga del libro scolastico inizia a raccogliere volumi di vari generi.

Emanzipation, verstanden als rechtlicher aber auch gesellschaftlicher Prozess, findet u.a. in Institutionen statt, wenn auch nicht ausschließlich in institutionalisierter Form. Abhängig von diesen verschiedenen Zusammenhängen bilden sich spezifische Narrative der Emanzipation heraus, während gleichermaßen auch eine Narrativierung von Emanzipation – ebenfalls abhängig von ihrem Kontext – stattfindet. Der Workshop Narrativierung von und Narrative der Emanzipation beleuchtet eben genau diese unterschiedlichen institutionellen Felder, ihren Einfluss auf Einordung, Deutung und Erzählweisen jüdische Emanzipation und stellt diese in eine minderheits- oder mehrheitsgesellschaftliche Geschichtsperspektive. Die verschiedenen Zusammenhänge, die es genauer zu betrachten gilt, sind die traditionelle rabbinische Literatur, deutsch-jüdische Literatur, Orte des Lernens (z.B. Schulen), der Film und Museen. Allen ist eine Sinnein- und -zuordnung von Emanzipation eigen.

Im Rahmen der DFG Netzwerk-Gruppe Emanzipation nach der Emanzipation. Jüdische Literatur, Philosophie und Geschichte von 1900 bis heute (geleitet von Prof. Dr. George Y. Kohler [Bar-Ilan Universität] und Prof. Dr. Bettina Bannasch [Universität Augsburg])

Im zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Familienroman nimmt das Thema der Kommunikation zwischen den Generationen einen ganz wesentlichen Platz ein. Immer wieder geht es dabei um den Wert von Erfahrungen, die über die Generationen hinweg weitervermittelt werden und um die Frage des gegenseitigen Respekts. Manchmal entsteht der Eindruck, dass zwischen den Generationen eine Wand existiert, die den Austausch verzerrt oder sogar ausschließt. Dies trifft sich mit Erfahrungen, die auch im außerliterarischen Kontext immer wieder kommuniziert werden.

Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932) was an important figure in late nineteenth-century American journalism, activism, and fiction. While a few brief studies were dedicated to her biography and to her role as a Jewish social activist, editor, and contributor to The American Jewess, no critical work has been devoted as yet to her literary production. The aim of this essay is to rectify this critical neglect by examining Sonneschein’s wide literary opus and by investigating its connection, if any, to the views she expressed as a journalist and a public speaker. This essay will explore Sonneschein’s threefold literary oeuvre, consisting of the following genres: Jewish fiction, non-Jewish fiction, and literary sketches. It will also try to explicate Rosa’s often conflicting stance with regard to Judaism, feminism, and Zionism, a standpoint which should be examined in the context of the fin-the-siècle’s turbulent changes American society had to cope with, especially pertaining to massive immigra...

The contribution presents a proposal for a digital humanities and second language learning class which applies language integrated learning. Our material is a set of about 155 digitized letters in the German language. There are several learning goals that we aspire with this class. Next to the traditional goals of stepping up one's language competences we would like to achieve that nonspecialists students of the German language at BA level get an idea what DH can 'mean' for text analysis and furthermore understand the concept of distant reading.

In the early 1920s, Berlin became a major center of Yiddish publishing, with major Yiddish writers (Bergelson, Der Nister, Kvitko, etc) gathering in the German capital city. For a few years, Yiddish journals and publishing houses brought forth lavishly illustrated issues. However, they received adamant criticism from the writers who had remained in Warsaw or Moscow.

This article investigates portrayals of traditional Judaism and observant Jews in writings by assimilated German-Jewish authors. It thus explores notions projected onto traditional Jews-and particularly the Jewish body-as elements immanent to Jewish cultural production. At the centre of the enquiry are Heinrich Heine's Hebräische Melodien (1851), Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1902) and Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927). These writings construct speakers or narrators who endeavour to depart from traditional Judaism while at the same time questioning the feasibility of this effort. Following this dynamic, the article proposes that Anthony Giddens' notion of self-identity can elucidate the preoccupation with the body in modern German-Jewish literature. This preoccupation illustrates individuals' internalisation of social norms as well as their active rewriting of these same norms.

Konstantin Kountouroyanis provides insights into German writers from Prague and their reception in Japan. Prof. Hiroshi Asano translated Jürgen Serke's "Die verbrannten Dichter / Burned Poets" into Japanese. This paper is about the translation of Jürgen Serke's special volume: Böhmische Dörfer: Wanderungen durch eine verlassene literarische Landschaft (first publication Vienna & Hamburg 1987) will soon be published in Japan.

This paper examines the circus setting in Hebrew literature as a supra national theme that expresses the worldly in literature. Focusing on three circus stories by Hebrew modernist author Gershon Shofman, the paper stresses a distinct concept of physical power and its political implications. It suggests that through this power concept, the circus phenomenon lends a worldly perspective to Shofman's twentieth century Hebrew literature, which is usually read in a national context.

The knowledge and tradition manifested especially in objects salvaged by refugees fleeing Germany after 1933 are not only reminders of the former homeland in exile, they also reflect it one-to-one (this is particularly apparent in the living and eating culture). These objects therefore become bearers of the old world’s cultural traditions.

The hideous transformation of Gregor Samsa is ambiguous and situating his un-naturality as the impaired human body unconcealed several socio political discourses that is weaved around the impaired body. Impairment which means functional limitation is almost synonymously used with disability that implied loss of opportunity and exclusion. Gregor is not an exception. The invalidating gaze of society forces him to alienate himself and internalize the socially constructed version of his brokenness and lack of worth. Devoid of voice and agency, his story is at the mercy of others who are speaking of and for him. His body is robbed of individuality and reduced to a locus of power play. Paradoxically, however, the alterity which is at the heart of construction of the discourse of dis/abled is fallacious. Human and humanness is only a floating signifier. Furthermore, the shrine of humans, their body is only temporarily abled. Subjected to time, environment and illness, it is susceptible to ...

Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), the famous historian and biblical exegete, penned his commentary to the Song of Songs in 1871 to counter rising antisemitism fueled by racialized fantasies of Jewish gender and sexuality. Graetz contested antisemitic tropes of Jewish masculinity and femininity by reconfiguring the Song of Songs, this most blatantly erotic book of scripture, as a testament to and celebration of Jewish chastity. Against the lascivious femme fatal, Graetz introduced the tender Sulamit, whose paradigmatic chastity renders romantic ardor into asexual, sisterly affection. In contrast to the effeminate Jew, Graetz introduced the Friend, a brawny adventurer whose masculine attempt at chastity only reveals his sexual potency. Graetz leverages the co-constitutive relationships among gender, class, and race to bestow on these figures not only the bourgeois virtues connoted by their chastity, but also associations of whiteness and middle-class belonging. Graetz’s exegetical construction of new models of Jewish femininity and masculinity was no mere theoretical exercise, but a response to matters of life and death as the rise of sexually transmitted diseases coalesced into a public health crisis. With the specter of syphilis in the background, Graetz’s commentary to the Song of Songs proffered German Jews—and German Christians—a Semitic path to redemption from the immorality crippling fin-de-siècle Germany.

Nei meandri di tutt'altra ricerca, mi sono imbattuta in Marie-Madeleine, ovvero la baronessa Gertrud von Puttkamer, ovvero Gertrud Gunther, un'ebrea nata nel 1881 in Prussia, sposata diciannovenne al barone Heinrich Georg Ludwig von Puttkamer, 35 anni più grande di lei. Si sposarono nel 1900 e lei iniziò a scrivere poesie, racconti, romanzi.

The knowledge and tradition manifested especially in objects salvaged by refugees fleeing Germany after 1933 are not only reminders of the former homeland in exile, they also reflect it one-to-one (this is particularly apparent in the living and eating culture). These objects therefore become bearers of the old world’s cultural traditions.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust.
Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

This essay explores Gustav Landauer’s conception of the universal, redemptive role of Judaism in the history of humanity. Drawing primarily on his lectures on August Strindberg’s Historical Miniatures, which appeared in print in the periodical Der Jude in 1917, it construes how Landauer, the fin-de-siècle German Jewish writer, translator, political thinker, and anarchist revolutionary, constructs the character of the Wandering Jew (der ewige Jude) as the embodiment of the secret of human history. The essay examines the literary-critical strategies by which Landauer fashions the biblical Abraham as a generic character, fusing it together with the Wandering Jew into a perpetual motif, a point of origin, and a source of inherent human knowledge of the Eternal in various guises throughout history. Embodied in the figure of the Abrahamic Wandering Jew, the essay shows, is Landauer’s mystical-anarchic notion of the redemption of humanity through universal community and Judaism’s eternal task therein. Ultimately, the essay suggests that in Landauer’s utopian worldview, it is poetry, the aesthetic form he ascribes to Strindberg’s piece, that most adequately manifests Judaism’s counter-historical role (ןn response to Warren Zev Harvey, “Landauer, Strindberg, and the Abrahamic Promise,” in same volume).

Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, most readers assume that Benjamin’s secular identity motivated most of his inquiries and critical thinking. However, focusing on a secular sensibility obscures important elements of religious traditions in Benjamin’s writings. In fact, Benjamin suggested that widely contemporary institutions like capitalism, art, and even at times science contained poignant traces of religion and religious thought. In this article, I examine these traces by revisiting his montage of quotation, which, I argue, is where we see the most salient aspects of the use of Judaism in Benjamin’s thought. His desire to secularize life was inexorably related to his interpretations of experience ...

Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, most readers assume that Benjamin’s secular identity motivated most of his inquiries and critical thinking. However, focusing on a secular sensibility obscures important elements of religious traditions in Benjamin’s writings. In fact, Benjamin suggested that widely contemporary institutions like capitalism, art, and even at times science contained poignant traces of religion and religious thought. In this article, I examine these traces by revisiting his montage of quotation, which, I argue, is where we see the most salient aspects of the use of Judaism in Benjamin’s thought. His desire to secularize life was inexorably related to his interpretations of experience and of Judaism. I will argue that not only did Benjamin, in fact, use Jewish theological language and imagery through his montage of quotation, but also, he used this method to secularize contemporary theological-political-aesthetic paradigms. I will also argue that this method—primarily understood through his idiosyncratic use of Jewish imagery—is critical to the writing of history.

One aspect of Elazar Benyoëtz's poetry is his bold attempt to treat the catastrophe of Auschwitz through a linguistic prism. In this essay, I would like to shed light on his way of inhabiting the German language as an outsider by considering the ethical implications of his bifurcated linguistic soul. To do so, I will first analyze the general representation of language that appears in Benyoëtz's work. In particular, I will point to the dynamics of language and how its movement shapes a land and a language beyond all constraints of ownership, while providing an alternative way of inhabiting it. I will then examine possible interpretations of Benyoëtz's bifurcated linguistic soul along with its ethical implications, including not only a coming to terms with the end of GermanJewish symbiosis, but also a utopian way of repairing it.

What relationship does Edith Stein’s philosophy have with her Judaism? If her works offer little evidence to address the question directly, a comparison of her thought with that of Jewish authors of her generation can provide valuable insights into her links with the Jewish world. This study endeavors to show that Stein’s philosophy shares with those of Buber and Rosenzweig several characteristics which mark a real originality with regard to the dominant thought of their time, and which are explicitly linked, for the latter, to Jewish sources: the precedence given to otherness in the face of egological philosophies; a way of thinking about the universal which does not deny, but honors, the value of the singular; and a concern, finally, with showing the presence of God rather than demonstrating his existence. Thanks to these connections, Stein’s philosophy can be seen as implicitly marked by Judaism in many of its fundamental features. Even his conception of Christian philosophy, whi...

Regista, giornalista di successo (lavora per The Daily Telegraph e The Independent), autrice di due romanzi best-seller che hanno consacrato la sua fama di giovane artista (Seahorses, del 1997, e Too Fast to Live, pubblicato tre anni dopo), nell'ultimo decennio Bidisha ha deciso di dedicarsi alla scrittura di testi in cui la finzione si combina con elementi di denuncia e testimonianza. Dopo Venetian masters (2008), opera autobiografica in cui ha rivelato i pregiudizi che si celano dietro la facciata impeccabile della società veneziana, Bidisha sembra aver dato vita a un progetto teso all'inclusione di chi è comunemente relegato ai margini, impegnandosi così ad abbattere metaforicamente dei muri che ora sono tangibili e reali, ora sono rappresentati dalle pareti invisibili di una Londra che, in piena crisi dei rifugiati, sembra voler ignorare la loro presenza. Questo saggio si propone di indagare le strategie utilizzate dall'autrice per documentare ciò che i muri nascondo...

Regista, giornalista di successo (lavora per The Daily Telegraph e The Independent), autrice di due romanzi best-seller che hanno consacrato la sua fama di giovane artista (Seahorses, del 1997, e Too Fast to Live, pubblicato tre anni dopo), nell'ultimo decennio Bidisha ha deciso di dedicarsi alla scrittura di testi in cui la finzione si combina con elementi di denuncia e testimonianza. Dopo Venetian masters (2008), opera autobiografica in cui ha rivelato i pregiudizi che si celano dietro la facciata impeccabile della società veneziana, Bidisha sembra aver dato vita a un progetto teso all'inclusione di chi è comunemente relegato ai margini, impegnandosi così ad abbattere metaforicamente dei muri che ora sono tangibili e reali, ora sono rappresentati dalle pareti invisibili di una Londra che, in piena crisi dei rifugiati, sembra voler ignorare la loro presenza. Questo saggio si propone di indagare le strategie utilizzate dall'autrice per documentare ciò che i muri nascondo...

Wine has been linked to Spanish culture since the time of the Romans and early Christianity. In Spain, a land of vines since antiquity, the representation of the drunken body in literature and painting is an omnipresent topos since the Middle Ages. The pros and cons of this are found in medical, philosophical, moral and religious texts, but especially in novels, which warn against excess. This article studies how Spanish painters and writers developed the imaginary of wine in all its forms, be they masculine or feminine, solar or twilight, enthusiastic or drowsy, in their reflections, in their drawings and paintings, in poems or novels, in order to transmit the ideological transformation that was going to occur in Spain around this drink. For only the artist seems to preserve the tradition of the divine origin of wine, reclaiming its thaumaturgical role thanks to the Bacchic nectar. Spanish men and women suffer or benefit from the virtues of wine, the main alcoholic beverage in Spai...

Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical ...

Relazione tenuta in occasione della giornata di studi “Stefan Zweig, testimone e interprete del suo tempo” organizzata dall’ISML (Istituto Provinciale di Storia per il Movimento di Liberazione nelle Marche e dell'Età Contemporanea) in collaborazione con lo Stefan Zweig Zentrum di Salisburgo, la FSI (Federazione Scacchistica Italiana) e la Paris-Lodron-Universität di Salisburgo (21 febbraio 2022).

This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and “Investigations of a Dog” in his lecture on gesture and reconciliation, “Man Seen from the Outside.” Given the centrality of gesture in Kafka’s work, this essay considers the connections between the two figures and the likely influence of Kafka on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of gesture and intentionality. It compares their respective philosophies of gesture as they relate to meaning, reliability, silence, music, and intention. Finally, Kafka’s gestural motif of the springing body is suggested as a significant example of Merleau-Ponty’s “escaping intentions,” expressing a powerful will to intend toward others.Cet article examine la référence de Maurice Merleau-Ponty à La Métamorphose et aux Recherches d’un chien de Franz Kafka dans sa « causerie » sur le geste et la réconciliation : « L’homme vu du dehors ». Étant-donnée la centralité du geste dans l’oeuvre de Kafka, cet article examine les l...

Benjamins sprengen die disziplinären Grenzen seiner Zeit. Es liegt nahe, diese Schriften einer »ersten Kulturwissenschaft« zuzuordnen, da Benjamin eine Vielzahl kultureller Gegenstände betrachtet, ihre Ursprünge und langfristigen Verlaufsformen analysiert sowie ihre Verschränkung inRaumundZeiteinerKritikunterzieht. Wenn Benjamin das PassagenWerk auch eine »Kritik des 19ten Jahrhunderts« nennt, so ist damit weder eine Erkenntnis-noch eine Kulturkritik gemeint,sonderneineKritik,dieaufeineStandortbestimmungderGegenwartinnerhalb eines politischen Kampfes zielt. Mit den folgenden Überlegungen versucheich,diesenpolitischenKritikbegriffBenjaminserstensmitBlickaufdie Geschichte des Kritik-Begriffes zu verstehen, ihn zweitens gegenüber anderen VerwendungendesKritikbegriffesbeiBenjaminzuerörternundihndrittensals Unterscheidungsmerkmal der Kulturwissenschaft gegenüber der Kulturgeschichtezuerwägen.

This thesis sets out to examine the nature of modern Jewish stereotyping in English society with reference to a wide range of English fiction which, for the most part, has been previously undocumented in these terms. Instead of a purely literary analysis of the fictional Jewish stereotype, this thesis places the Jewish stereotype in a specific ideological and historical context which is then related to a given writer-or group of writers—and their fiction. Two chapters, moreover, demonstrate the material results of Jewish stereotyping in English society with reference to the internalisation and institutionalisation of Jewish stereotyping by British Jewry and the AngloJewish novel. The variety and impact of Jewish stereotyping is shown to encompass the ideologies of liberalism, social Darwinism, Imperialism, antisemitism, proto-Zionism, Socialism and mainstream versions of sexuality. The concluding chapter relates the modern Jewish stereotype, which was formed after the 1870s, to a mo...

It has become a truism of contemporary literary criticism that every text contains overt and covert texts within its construction, that in other words each new text molds and fits previous texts into a new context. In Günther Grass’s Hundejahre (1963) this is especially discernible, since Grass’s novel is inter alia nothing short of a rewriting of a prominent German cultural narrative – namely, the narrative of friendship of two boys who grow into adulthood, one German and one Jewish. This narrative was familiar enough to broad sections of the reading public before the Second World War but disappeared from public consciousness as a result of the traumatized memories attached to German-Jewish relations emanating from the Third Reich. It is possible to exhume many texts in a work of such magnitude, but one text in particular appears with surprising frequency throughout Hundejahre – a fact which has received surprisingly little commentary from Grass critics – Otto Weininger´s Geschecht...