Search Results (11)

This article examines the interplay between Jewish and Muslim identities in German public discourse, focusing on their roles as placeholders in constructing contemporary German identity. It argues that discussions of Judaism, antisemitism, and the Israel–Palestine conflict often serve as projection surfaces for national self-perception, neglecting the complexities of Jewish and Muslim lived realities. Drawing on critiques by Elad Lapidot and Jean-Claude Milner, the article explores how the exclusion of heteronomous identities—grounded in divine law—exposes the structural limitations of modern liberal societies. It highlights the substitution of traditional Jewish identity with a liberal-compatible version in German discourse, while simultaneously framing Muslims as the “new Other”. This text calls for Jewish and Muslim communities to challenge the narratives that marginalize and instrumentalize them, advocating for solidarity to address shared challenges and enrich pluralistic democratic frameworks. Full article

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. Full article

The current article argues that Paul Mendes-Flohr’s turn to address contemporary challenges faced by Jews at large, and Israeli Jews in particular, is proleptic in the sense that it excavates the anticipation of the current intellectual, spiritual and moral reality from the intellectual history of modern German−Jewish thought. Based on a reading of his recent book, Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities, the discussion shows how Mendes-Flohr’s adaptation of Martin Buber’s call to aspire to I−Thou relations supports proleptic historiography both as a historiographical methodology and as a moral act. Full article

This paper examines French philosopher Sarah Kofman’s fractured relationships to her identities as Jew and woman. Active participant in postwar debates surrounding deconstruction and psychoanalysis, acclaimed reader of Freud and Nietzsche, and interlocutor of Derrida, Kofman is today most widely remembered for her autobiographical writings about her childhood as a young Orthodox Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Kofman’s mother sent her to pretend to be the daughter of a Christian woman, which both ensured Kofman’s physical survival and led to an uncanny Freudian doubling of the maternal figure, such that both “Jew” and “Christian” became unstable, mimetic identity categories which Kofman could never again fully inhabit. The paper examines Kofman’s writings on Nietzsche, suggesting that her attempt to absolve the German philosopher of the charges of antisemitism oft leveled against him functioned as a similarly failed and incomplete means of asserting control over her personal identity. If Kofman could demonstrate that Nietzsche was not in fact an antisemite, then she could write herself into the lineage of Continental philosophy and reclaim the stable ancestry she lost during the war. Yet the paper concludes that a counter-narrative running throughout Kofman’s writings suggests an awareness that she could never fully absolve Nietzsche, and therefore that her attempt to claim Nietzsche as a father figure would always fail. The paper thus suggests that the illusion of control and stability epitomized by Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche provides an interpretive thematic to understand the unstable figure of the post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher. Full article

Henry Ries (1917–2004), a celebrated American-German photojournalist, was born into an upper-class Jewish family in Berlin. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1938 to escape Nazi Germany. As a new American citizen, he joined the U.S. Air Force. After the war, Ries became photo editor and chief photographer for the OMGUS Observer (1946–1947), the American weekly military newspaper published by the Information and Education Section of the Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS). One photograph by Ries that first appeared in this newspaper in 1946, and a second, in a different composition and enlarged format, that he included in his 2001 autobiography, create significant commentaries on postwar Germany. The former image accompanies an article about the first post-WWII German feature film: Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us. The photograph moves from functioning as a documentation of history and collective memory, to an individual remembrance and personal condemnation of WWII horrors. Both reveal Ries’s individual trauma over the destruction of Berlin and the death of family members, while also conveying the official policy of OMGUS. Ries’s works embody a conflicted, compassionate gaze, conveying ambiguous emotions about judgment of Germans, precisely because of his own identity, background and memories. Full article

This article examines the notion of “Desintegration” (de-integration), as introduced by German Jewish authors Max Czollek and Sasha Marianna Salzmann, against the backdrop of ongoing re-negotiations of identity, belonging, and “Heimat” (sense of home) in contemporary Germany. While many artistic contributions to the debates around “Desintegration” have come from the realm of performance art, I will pay special attention to Salzmann’s prize-winning novel Außer Sich (Beyond Myself) (2017), as a literary approximation of the “Desintegration” paradigm, which showcases what I call a “non-authoritative” poetics of non-belonging. I will conclude by showing that the notion of “Desintegration” and its connection to a broader “postmigrant” trajectory enable novel perspectives on three of the central issues discussed in this article: the current location of German Jewish literature and culture; contemporary German-language contestations of “Heimat” and belonging; and the relationship between art and politics. Full article

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish–Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist–Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism. Full article

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany. Full article

Celan’s poetry is deemed universal and experimental, and its main characteristic is to “explore possibilities of sense-making.” His poetry is also acknowledged to be the apex of Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, contending with existentialist questions such as the existence God in the Holocaust and the possibility of restoring Jewish identity. In this paper I will examine how Celan uses paradoxes in his poetry to create atheistic and skeptical expressions. The technique of paradox expresses the concurrent existence of two contradictory possibilities; the article will present three types of paradox typical of Celan’s poetry: (1) the affirmation and denial of the existence of God; (2) the mention of rituals from Jewish tradition, while voiding them of their conventional meaning; (3) the use of German, specifically, for the reconstitution of Jewish identity. My main argument is that paradox in Celan’s work creates a unique voice of atheism and skepticism, since it preserves the ideas that it rejects as a source for fashioning meaning. In order to explore how Celan constructs paradox, I will use Wittgenstein’s resolutions of the paradoxes that emerge from the use of language, and I will show how they illuminate Celan’s use of this technique. The article will examine three Wittgensteinian methods of resolving the paradoxes that Celan employs in his oeuvre: highlighting, containing, and dissolving. Full article

The following contribution is an excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of Austrian Jewish émigrée, Lilian Renée Furst (1931–2009), a pioneer in the field of comparative literature. This journal issue grew out of an April 2011 conference in her memory, held at the National Humanities Center, on “Jewish emigres and the Shaping of Postwar Culture.” The nexus between her innovative intellectual contributions and her experience as a Jewish émigré reflects one of the conference's central concerns: How, why, and in what fashion did the émigrés' dislocations shape innovative intellectual paths and cosmopolitan visions of Europe and European culture. Born in Austria and educated in England, Furst pursued an intellectual career in the United States, hoping it would allow her to break out of narrow national boundaries. The excerpt of her memoir here illuminates how her life's work as a pioneer in the field of comparative literary studies grew out of her experience with language as a German-speaking refugee in wartime England. Her memoir written in the third person about “Rachel” also reflects her dual identity as Jew and European. Part I by Dr. Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau, the literary executor of the memoir and a former graduate student of Furst, places “The Rachel Chronicles: A Kind of Memoir” in relation to Furst's other autobiographical writing. Part II includes Furst's own introduction to “The Rachel Chronicles,” followed by her chapter on “Growing up in wartime England.” (The whole of her unpublished memoir is available to researchers in the "Personal Papers of Lilian R. Furst," Girton College Archives, Cambridge University (http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0271%2FGCPP%20Furst)). Part III is a bibliography of Furst's writings. Full article

Konrad Wolf was one of the most enigmatic intellectuals of East Germany. The son of the Jewish Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf and the brother of Markus Wolf—the head of the GDR’s Foreign Intelligence Agency—Konrad Wolf was exiled in Moscow during the Nazi era and returned to Germany as a Red Army soldier by the end of World War Two. This article examines Wolf’s 1968 autobiographical film I was Nineteen (Ich war Neunzehn), which narrates the final days of World War II—and the initial formation of postwar reality—from the point of view of an exiled German volunteer in the Soviet Army. In analyzing Wolf’s portrayals of the German landscape, I argue that he used the audio-visual clichés of Heimat-symbolism in order to undermine the sense of a homogenous and apolitical community commonly associated with this concept. Thrown out of their original contexts, his displaced Heimat images negotiate a sense of a heterogeneous community, which assumes multi-layered identities and highlights the shared ideology rather than the shared origins of the members of the national community. Reading Wolf from this perspective places him within a tradition of innovative Jewish intellectuals who turned Jewish sensibilities into a major part of modern German mainstream culture. Full article