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Hybridity, " and Translation

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Hybridity, Scott Spector MITTEL-EUROPA ? SOME AFTERTHOUGHT S ON PRAGUE JEWS, "HYBRIDITY, " AND TRANSLATION It is some years now since I finished writing "Prague Territories", a study of Ger- man-speakin g Jewish Prague writers of Kafka's generation. When asked to con- tribut e a piece of writing on the Prague Jewish translators of works from Czech to German , a subject dealt with in the final chapter of that book, I decided to use this as an opportunit y to reflect on some of my earlier thoughts on nationa l identit y and what I called "the translation project." This referred to the whole ränge of Czech- to-Germa n translation efforts by Prague Jews in the period from the turn of the nineteent h Century through to the First World War - a remarkabl e collective contri- bution in a period when those around them did not engage in such efforts. In the course of preparing for and attending the 2003 Conference at the Universit y of Munic h (originally schedule d for Haifa University ) and in its aftermath, however, my reflection on these issues did become a genuin e "rethinking" in particula r ways which will become apparent in the course of my discussion. One principá l way in which the Munic h meetin g drove these reflection s was pro- grammatic , if perhaps not deliberately so: my contribution at that time was sched- uled on a pane l includin g in its title the term "cultura l hybridity." This intrigued me, not because "cultural hybridity" aptly characterizes something I described in my translatio n chapter, but did not have the insight or foresight to name. In fact, I had cited Hom i Bhabha in my book (Homi Bhabha is the theorist I most closely associ- ate with the term. cultura l hybridity) , but in a slightly different context. In my con- clusion, I note d Bhabha's insight that positions which in particular historical con- texts might be described as "marginal" are, in their closeness to borders, extremes, or limits (in the language of centers and peripheries), necessarily those the best placed to be "in between cultural Spaces," and henc e to have a mediar y function. This is one of the ways that cultural studies theorists have sought to valorize posi- tions that have previously been identified with oppression, persecution, or (again) " marginalization. " Anothe r way, linked but not identical, is suggested by the term "cultura l hybrid- ity." This is a term that has been applied by theorists of colonialism to describe the ambivalen t effects of the identitie s produce d by the colonia l processes. This complex ambivalenc e is spelled out in Bhabha' s essays in "The Location of Culture", and it is fair to say that the Interventio n has been misinterprete d by those who understan d it as an accep tanc e of a genus or category of the "hybrid" that is then celebrated for Spector, Scott: Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siěcle. Berkeley, Los Angeles 2000. 2 Ibid. 237. Bohemi a 46 (1) 2005 28-38 Spector: Mittel-Europa? 29 subverting the original, pure, colonizingspecies. 3 In an analysis informed by psy- choanalytic sources, Bhabha usually avoids denotinga type ("the hybrid") who acts in certain ways under colonial conditions, but instead refertso hybridity as either a "process" or a "sign" of processes of domination and resistance.4 It is specifically not "a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures," a description in which we more than faintly recognize the imageman y have painted of the Prague Jews in the period of nationalist conflict. Here are some problems with these modeis for our cultural context. First of all, it needs to be established immediately and without confusion that the identification of Prague Jews in thisperio d as culturally marginal is inadequate. While we might adjust the demographic figures one way or the other to accommodate different boundaries of the city, or to identify Jews ,as Czech rather than German, and so on, it is clear that, in the heyday of German-liberal culturahegemonl y of the latter nine- teenth Century, the Jewish minority of Prague was unlike that of any other European city of its time as it represented fully half of the culturally German population (that is, the ruling minority). Thus, Hans Tramer's influential diagnosis of the "three-fold ghetto" of Prague German-speaking Jewsha s needed to be revised.5 The Jewish Prague translators emerged from the generation after that of what we might call "high German-liberalism." Members of that previous generatiohan d access to an affiliation with German culture that was less problematic than it would fober their children - they remained powerfully identified as Jews (very few would ever be bap- tized, for example, in comparison with the Viennese or Berliners), but their under- standing of themselves as Germans, anhencd e part of the rightly rulingminority , was not troubled in the way it would bfoe r those born in the 1880s. Hillel Kieval has shown that far from all of the Prague Jews were German-identified, and those who were did understand themselves,a s I said above, as Jews.6 Yet they were com- fortable with what Mendes-Flohr calls the German-Jewish "duaidentity,l " more so perhaps than any of the German Jews.7 Once the challenges to German-liberalism - námely the Czech national movement and the völkisch German one - reachead cer - tain pitch in Prague, this Situation changed radically. Franz Kafka's generation inher- ited both an attachment to German culture anda consciousness of social position at the same time as they sensed the unstable, tenuous, peripheral State of their condi- tion. They were in fact alreadya threatened Jewish minority, but one that remained nonetheless a slight majority of the traditionally dominant German population of the city; this was a population whose position in the turn was threatened by rising Bhabha, Homi K.: The Location of Culture. London, New York 1994. , Ibid. See esp. 112-115. See Tramer, Hans: Die Dreivölkerstadt Prag. In: Robert Weltsch zum 70. Geburtstag von seinen Freunden. Tel Aviv 1961, 138-203. - Translated into English under the title "Prague - City of Three Peoples". In: Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964) 305-339. See Kieval, Hillel Joseph: The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918. New York, Oxford 1988. - Cf. idem: Languages of Com- munity: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley, Los Angeles 2000, see esp. 114-180. See Mendes-Flohr, Paul: German Jews: A Dual Identity. New Haven/Conn. 1999. 30 Bohemia Band 46 (2005) illiberal ideologies, even as it also represented a language group privileged in the monarch y at large. These layers of identit y trappe d the young Prague German- speaking Jews between identities inside and outside of the power structure, so that an analysis of their literary products as representation s of "minorit y culture " is itself problematic . This structurally complex picture of the "place" of German-speakin g Prague Jews in the central European landscape lends itself to languages of cente r and periphery, to images of "liminality" and cultural transmission. There is clearly something valu- able in this way of looking at things, although one wants to do so with close atten- tion to the historical specificity of this particula r case. Now, it is clearly more than a coincidenc e that the practice of translation is of special interest to theorists of this comple x process of "cultural hybridity" and also the special provinc e of Jewish writ- ers in the context of the Czech-Germa n conflict in the late nineteent h Centur y and the early twentieth Century. Taking off from Franz Fanon, Bhabha offers the rieh image of liberatory people in times of struggle as "bearers of a hybrid identit y [...]. They are caught in the discontinuou s time of translation and negotiatio n ... ". 8 These metaphor s resonate evocatively with my own in "Prague Territories", but also with those of the Prague translators themselves in the particula r time I am now dis- cussing. Part of my purpose in my longer discussion of the Prague translator s was to recuperat e this rhetoric through an intensive reading of the peculiarit y of the act of translatio n and its self-conception in its own particular momen t - this is what I understan d to constitute genuine historicization. 9 The cliché I though t worthy of avoiding in this case - one that I feit was truly "deeeptive" in the sense of represent- ing historical figures in a way directly contradicted by their self-understandin g in their own time - was the image of a populatio n of liberal humanist Jews seeking to reconcil e two illiberal communities. Of course, the translatio n efforts in which they engaged did have powerfully humane, universalist , and selfless effects. But the trans- lators were at the same time creating a world of their own in a way that we can too easily lose sight of. In that spirit, let me revisit two of early twentieth-century Prague' s idiosyncratic translators. Rudol f Fuchs (1890-1942) i s in some ways an idiosyncratic case, but one that is perhap s for this very reason particularly telling - in fact my presentation of him in "Prague Territories" was organized around this tension. Unlik e the core "Prague cir- cle" group, he was born in Czech Bohemia , in Poděbrady , rathe r than Prague, and Czech had been his first language.
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