Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cooper, Gabriel S.

Titel

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955

Ist Teil von

• German Studies Review, 2015, Vol.38 (3), p.664-666

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 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. Else Lasker-Schüler's lesser-known prose piece, Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, is the subject of the fourth chapter, which [Jonathan Skolnik] construes as a modernist revision of [Heinrich Heine]'s novel. Lasker-Schüler's avant-garde work of dissimilation pays homage to cultural Zionism and its valorization of East European Jewry, and in so doing, transforms nineteenth-century notions of minority literature and cultural memory. Skolnik's analysis applies Deleuze and Guattari's theory of "minor literature" to Der Wunderrabbiner, its language, and its symbols, even though these French thinkers exclude symbolism from their theory and its emancipatory aesthetic. Against Deleuze and Guattari's claim that a strategy of symbolism provides a stable ground for a literature of territory, Skolnik reads Lasker-Schüler's traditionalizing narrative as a means of playing up the paradoxes of a "deterritorialized" literature. While the oppressed Spanish-Jewish collective of Lasker-Schüler's text seeks refuge in Palestine, this "reterritorialization" is called into question and portrayed as an unsettling vision of loss. Ultimately, Skolnik illustrates how Lasker-Schüler's language subverts the very unity of land and symbol that it constructs, by destabilizing collective Jewish identity and highlighting the consequences of a forced deterritorialization.