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23 13043742 ZT t- Lp+ 2,'T AVE Moses Rosenkranz, the Bukovina and the concept of Sprache als Heimat Joan Avery Queen Mary, University of London Submitted for GermanLiterature PhD October2008 The work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Signed 10 October 2008, Joan Avery Abstract The aim of this study is to present the poet Moses Rosenkranz from the Bukovina and to examine how Heidegger's phraseSprache als Heimat applied to the life and works of this particular poet and his environment. The first section looks at Rosenkranz's biography within the context of the Bukovina, where many people grew up speaking German, Ruthenian, Romanian, Yiddish and Polish. This placed the authors from the region in a particularly favourable context for having first-hand knowledge of the way language could or could not become an ersatz home for them in everyday life once their own homes had been lost. The second part of the thesis investigates the way loss affected Rosenkranz's writing and the conditions Heidegger saw as necessary for an encounter with Dasein. This revealed some of details the of Heidegger's understanding of the words `existence', `language' and `Heimat' which could not correspond to Rosenkranz's relationship to language or belonging. The third part of the thesis considers ways in which a sense of belonging could be recreated in Rosenkranz's writing. relationship with words and the material realities it involved were by his analysed using autobiography, his poems and the letters he wrote to his first wife Anna Ruebner-Rosenkranz. Paul Celan, as the most significant poet from the Bukovina, is often cited as a means of comparing the two writers and in order to convey a fuller picture of the literary area. Comparing Heidegger's thoughts on language and home with the way Rosenkranz and other Bukovina poets understood the two concepts provided new material for an interpretation of Sprache Heimat in als terms of the relationship between writer and reader. This revealed that the language understanding of in the works of the Bukovina authors was actually closer to the language conclusions on reached by the philosopher Levinas than to those of Heidegger. Levinas how shows the relationship to the other, to whom language is addressed, can become for the real reason writing and the point where language and belonging meet. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 ............................................................................................................................................ Introduction 6 ...................................................................................................................................... Part 1: The Bukovina Heimat 16 ......................................................................................................... The Bukovina literary 16 as a space............................................................................................... The Bukovina 24 myth of the .......................................................................................................... Homes Heimat: the 31 within village .............................................................................................. The house 40 ................................................................................................................................... Rosenkranz's biography 45 ............................................................................................................. Rosenkranz Bukovina 55 as a poet ................................................................................................. Part 2: The loss 69 effects of ............................................................... ................................ Heimat and its 69 mindscapes .................................................. ............................................ Preserving the familiar 76 ......................................................... ........................................... Home in the 89 unknown ................................................................................................................ Time the 96 and subject .................................................................................................................. Silence ......................................................................................................................................106 Losing the 121 subject .................................................................................................................... Part 3: Reconstructing .................................................................................................................. 131 The for need metaphors............................................................................................................ 131 Sprache Heimat als as a metaphor ........................................................................................... 140 Amery's to the objections metaphor ........................................................................................ 144 Re-instating the subject ............................................................................................................ 149 The poem's address................. .................................................................................. 158 4 `Redress ' 166 of poetry ................................................................................................................... Language home 173 as .................................................................................................................... Conclusion 178 .................................................................................................................................... Bibliography 185 ................................................................................................................................. Introduction The concept of Heimat is becoming kaleidoscopic in an age of intensive migration where the displaced person has become the protagonist of many works of art. Whether in novels, poetry, films, biographies, pieces of music or art installations the theme of home and homelessness is being explored with its many variations. Not just intellectually, but also emotionally the word `home' is loaded with evocative power. `Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears' invisible counterparts, by mention of the word home? Is there any other word that can " feel so heavy as you hold it in the mouth? Kamila Shamsie's novel Kartography about contradicting feelings towards home is just one of the recent tributes to the numerous people who have had to emigrate and start again in a new country. The entity that used to constitute home in could the past be called a nation, a language, a town or a family but now even those familiar do terms not seem sufficient when trying to identify what creates a sense of home. The country of childhood is not necessarily where the adult feels at home. Language does not imply always cultural affinities and mindscapes can vary more than quantifiable factors. Currently the many mixtures of countries of origin and mother-tongues, especially in urban keep contexts, raising the question of what exactly it is that makes a person belong to a particular group. Whether war, poverty or personal reasons have caused an individual to leave one country and settle in another, the effort of readjusting oscillates between loyalties to the past and the need to adapt to the present. The hardships of everyday life as a foreigner often require casting memories aside and addressing the basic challenges of social integration. Thus be the past may relegated to a part of memory which only occasionally dares to come out in letter conversation, a song, a or perhaps in a religious ritual, but many migrants choose amnesia instead as the best remedy for the conflicting emotions caused by loss. It is it is improves crucial to understand what that peoples' sense of identification with a larger forms belonging group, as traditional of are changing rapidly due to migration, but also due immediacy to technology and the with which people and information can connect. The how way communication codes work and they can convey the feeling of community is part of the how language become home. The question of can a type of sound of the human voice as be the expression of the need to within someone else's sensory world extends itself to the text then becomes written which the articulation of that need, thus creating an interdependency between readers and writers. This decisive aspect of language as the binding agent between people is one of the main ways in which a Heimat is formed. Kamila Shamsie, Kartography, (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 63. 6 The difference between the emotional image of Heimat in poems and the philosophical concepts of what Heimat is runs throughout the study and becomes one of the main obstacles when trying to merge the poet's version of Heimat and that of the philosopher. Throughout this thesis Heimat will be seen as both the idea and the practical reality which would most be affected by the turmoils of the twentieth century. Although the history of the concept Heimat as seen by Bloch, Nietzsche or Lukacz would provide a deeper understanding of the historical trajectory of the term in the German language, focus in the this study will be on the interaction between two authors, who in different ways, saw language itself as a type of belonging; Heidegger as the twentieth influential