De Gruyter

Chapter Title: Berlin and : Toward German-Hebrew Studies Chapter Author(s): Amir Eshel and Na’ama Rokem

Book Title: The German-Jewish Experience Revisited Book Author(s): the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem Book Editor(s): Steven E. Aschheim, Vivian Liska Published by: De Gruyter. (2015) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjwr1.18

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This essay provides an initial mapping of the emerging field of German-Hebrew studies. The field encompasses the study of German-, literature, and thought; the cultural and intellectual history of Zionism; modern ; and contemporary Israeli culture. It also includes the broad sphere of intercultural exchange between contemporary Germany and : the extensive work of Israeli artists in Germany; the nascent Hebrew culture in Germany; the extensive translation and reception of Hebrew literature in Germany; the role Israel plays in the German literary and cultural imagination and vice versa; and the role that Germany and its past play in contemporary Israeli cultural, liter- ary, and political discourses. We should not envision German-Hebrew studies as the small area at the intersection of all of these fields, as if charted on a Venn diagram. A mapping of German-Hebrew studies as a field in its own right reveals that it represents more than the sum of these different fields or the sum of what they have in common. The interlinguistic conversation between the two languages dates at least as far back as Moses Mendelssohn’s bilingual authorship and translation work in the late eighteenth century. Mendelssohn’s famous Bible translation – its Hoch- deutsch written in Hebrew characters to make it accessible to the broad Jewish readership – can be seen not only as the start of the Jews’ linguistic assimila- tion into a German-speaking sphere but also as an embodiment of the linguistic hybrids that are created in the encounter between the two languages. Ensuing works often followed Mendelssohn’s example and contained both translation and language mixture. They provide us with a fascinating prism through which to refract Jewish cultural and literary history, tying together different moments and questions in new and often unexpected ways. Mendelssohn’s successors in the Jewish Enlightenment continued through- out the nineteenth century to inhabit a cultural space deeply informed by the two languages. In German, they promoted a new “Wissenschaft des Judentum,” while Hebrew-language publications such as Hameasef (1784–1811) were harbingers of a Hebrew Republic of Letters that would for many decades be oriented toward the German-speaking world. In the first half of the twentieth century, German-speaking cities such as Berlin, Heidelberg, and were home – for extended or briefer periods – to some of the most important Hebrew writers of the time, including M. Y. Berdycze- wsky, S. Y. Agnon, H. N. Bialik, S. Tschernichowsky, Leah Goldberg, Avraham Ben-

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Yitzhak, , and Uri-Tsvi Grinberg. Some of them, such as Micha Josef Berdyczewsky, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (Sonne), and David Vogel, even explored the possibility of writing in German or of translating their own work into German. Others, such as Agnon and Goldberg, found interwar Germany a fertile topic for their fiction. This situation coincided with the rise of various forms of Hebraism that pre- occupied German Jews and non-Jews alike. Important examples of this cultural turn were new translations from Hebrew, following in the footsteps of Mendels- sohn’s famous Bible translation. The most prominent example is the translation of the Bible by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber. Rosenzweig also translated medieval Hebrew poetry and Hebrew liturgy. These projects all claimed to bring a Hebrew spirit into the German language. Other authors and artists showed an interest in Biblical figures and tropes, in the figure of the “Land of the Hebrews,” and even in the shape of the Hebrew letters. Charting the lively traffic at the intersection of German and Hebrew in these early decades of the twentieth century presents a challenge. In this brief essay, we contend that there are two complementary sides to the task of writing this cultural history and chronicling its continuation through the end of the twentieth century. The first is the challenge of the archives. The untapped archives of the German- Hebrew exchange need to be located, accounted for, documented, and used pro- ductively, which has occurred only very partially until now. The second is the ethical challenge of accounting for this history without ignoring its moments of crisis but not reducing everything to them. Upon first reflection, these may seem like two very different challenges. We propose, however, that they are intertwined and that a productive engagement with German-Hebrew studies takes this link into consideration. The radical upheaval at the heart of the twentieth century casts a difficult shadow on any talk of German-Hebrew bilingualism and eclipses the perception of a fruitful engagement of Hebrew authors with the German cultural realm. In the wake of the Holocaust, German and Hebrew may intuitively seem to inhabit mutually repellent magnetic fields. The notion that the two could cohabit a cul- tural space, coexist in a single mind, or even speak simultaneously within one lit- erary text may seem hard to fathom. Nevertheless, certain linguistic and literary hybrids that mix the two languages reflect the experiences of exile, displacement, and loss. Notable examples are Paul Celan’s use of Hebrew in his poems or the German language and bilingual fragments and poetic experiments that exist in the archives of authors such as Ludwig Strauss and . Even a text that presents itself as embodying a teleology from German to Hebrew – Gershom Scholem’s memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem – is belied by a writing and publi- cation history that moves back and forth between German and Hebrew, as did

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Scholem’s career more broadly. Scholem’s memoir was published in Germany in 1977 and in English translation in 1980. Toward the end of his life, he worked on a substantially expanded version in Hebrew, which shines a different light on his early engagement with the Kabbalah; it was published after his death in 1982 (Idel 2012). Scholem and Amichai belong to a larger group of German-speaking Israeli authors and scholars, such as Dan Pagis, Natan Zach, Elazar Benyoëtz, Ruth Almog, , Baruch Kurzweil, and Gershon Shaked, who played constitutive roles in the formation of the Israeli public and cultural spheres. What role, however, does the German language play in these authors’ real or metaphoric archives? It would be worthwhile to study their archives, which are located in Israel and abroad, and to analyze the forms of self-translation and lan- guage mixture documented there. In addition, it is important to consider other cases such as Scholem’s twice-written memoir that constitutes a public archive of movements between German and Hebrew. The relationship between the work of these Hebrew authors and that of a group of postwar authors and scholars who lived in Israel but wrote in German offers another interesting field for study. The latter include Werner Kraft, Max Brod, Ilana Shmueli, Manfred Winkler, and Shalom Ben-Horin, to name a few. The picture becomes even richer with the addition of a third category of figures belonging to both of these groups, such as Ludwig Strauss, who wrote and published in both languages, and Tuvia Rübner, who began writing and publishing in German, made a transition to Hebrew in the 1950s, and has returned to German-language writing in the past decade. These examples challenge the oft-repeated truism that after the rise of Nazism and espe- cially after the Holocaust, the German language was silenced in Israel and the German-Hebrew dialogue came to an end. The field of Hebrew literary studies has recently enjoyed what might be labeled an “archival turn.” Scholars such as Yfaat Weiss, Shachar Pinsker, Maya Barzilai, Gideon Ticotsky, Adriana X. Jacobs, and Lilach Nethanel are gaining exciting new insights into major Hebrew authors by turning to their archives. Some of this work is limited, however, by its monolingual Hebrew orientation, specifically its disregard for German materials in the archive. For example, in her fascinating and groundbreaking book on the archive of David Vogel, Netha- nel provides a powerful conceptual and theoretical framework for this archival turn. A key example for her is the different versions of the opening paragraph of Vogel’s posthumously published Viennese novel, which she discovered in the archive and brought to light. Nethanel compares them and uses Vogel’s revisions in order to reflect on the nature of the writing process and the traces that it leaves in the archive (Nethanel 2012). The fact that this same paragraph exists in the archive in Vogel’s own German translation, however, hardly receives a mention.

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This example suggests that the archives of authors from the pre-State and State periods still hold much promise, specifically for scholars who are interested in the German-Hebrew connection. At the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the current generation of Israeli artists, musicians, performers, students, and writers has been drawn once more to German cities, primarily Berlin. Israelis travel to Berlin not only because of the vibrant cultural scene and affordable rents but also, we believe, because of a productive horizon of creativity that emerges yet again at the intersection of German and Hebrew. A number of contemporary Hebrew literary works that mix the two languages or touch on Germany, Berlin, and the German Jewish past in different ways provide glimpses of this fruitful cre- ativity. Yoel Hoffman’s novels blur the borders between Hebrew and German and document the dialect of Jewish immigrants in Mandatory Palestine and in Israel. Some authors, such as Judy Tal or Almog Behar, revisit and reinvent their Ger- man-Jewish family histories. Their writing is not simply historical fiction about German Jews, but rather an investigation of the continuing relevance of these family roots to the lives of contemporary Israelis. Others, such as A. B. Yehoshua, Haim Be’er, and Dudu Bossi, describe Israeli protagonists who travel to Germany and find different forms of freedom there. For the protagonist of Yehoshua’s epon- ymous novel, Molcho, Berlin symbolizes the possibility of breaking free from his late wife; the first-person narrator in Be’er’s novel Upon a Certain Place travels to Germany to overcome his writer’s block; Dudu Bossi’s Ovadia, in the novel The Noble Savage, is an Arab Jew who chooses to settle down in Germany and engage in cultural and political provocation there as an act of defiance against the Zionist establishment. Benny Tsiffer, the editor of ’s Culture and Literature section, draws a line connecting the section’s German-Jewish editorial roots, which go back to founder Salman Schocken, and his current editorial policy which, as he describes it, “continues the secret love affair with German culture, which has long since lost its original form and become an abstract fantasy” (Tsiffer 2012). Acute observers have described this love affair with German culture and the challenging ethical and political questions it raises for young Israelis. Among them are Fania Oz- Salzberger (2001), Ofri Ilany (2010) (writing for the blog “Eretz haemori”), and the authors and editors of Spitz, the Hebrew-language magazine in Berlin, and of Mikan ve’eylakh (which carries the suggestive subtitle Hebräisch-diasporische Zeitschrift aus Berlin, the Hebrew-diasporic journal from Berlin). Authors such as Katharina Hacker, Katja Behrens, and Maxim Biller reciprocate with a form of German Hebraism in their works or at least a fascination with Israel. One can find numerous, high-quality translations into German of Hebrew novels. Although barely acknowledged by the German academy, Hebrew literature enjoys great

This content downloaded from 73.241.144.250 on Tue, 19 May 2020 17:11:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Berlin and Jerusalem: Toward German-Hebrew Studies 269 popularity with German audiences, often making it to the bestseller lists. Meet- ings and encounters between German and Hebrew authors have been a frequent occurrence, at least since the 1980s, initiated by figures such as Anat Feinberg and Efrat Gal-Ed, who are important mediators of Israeli literature and culture in Germany. In the spring of 2012 alone, the Literaturwerkstatt in Berlin hosted an event titled “Wie man Verse schmuggelt,” bringing together Hebrew and German poets, and the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung sponsored a German-Israeli literary day featuring an impressive lineup of German and Hebrew novelists (Literaturwerk- statt Berlin program description 2012; “Deutsch-israelische Literaturtage 2012” program description 2012). Increasingly, the German-Israeli encounter is triangulated with the Israeli- Palestinian dialogue in works of literature – such as short stories by Saviyon Liebrecht and Uri Tzaig – and of popular culture – such as Ethan Fox’s film Walk on Walter. Theater productions of plays by Yehoshua Sobol and others, which are staged regularly in Germany and Austria, raise related questions. In many cases, such as Yael Ronen’s play Third Generation, which deals with historical trauma, the plays are actually German-Israeli co-productions. In this instance, the Tel- Aviv–based Habimah Theater and Berlin’s Schaubühne acted as co-producers (Handelzats 2012). A vast, fascinating, and thus far widely understudied area is the work of Israeli artists such as Dani Karavan in the German-speaking world. This terrain includes such towering works as Karavan’s 1982–1986 “Ma’alot” next to the Hein- rich-Böll-Platz and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the 1988–1993 “Die Straße der Menschenrechte” (The street of human rights) at the Germanisches Nationalmu- seum in ; the 1996–1999 “Garten der Erinnerung” (Garden of memory) in Duisburg; and his 2012 “Mahnmal für die von den Nationalsozialisten ermor- deten Roma und Sinti” (Memorial for the Nazi-murdered Roma and Sinti).¹ Such works literally transformed the topography of major German cities. Karavan is the best known in the dynamic space of art that stretches between Germany and Israel and includes artists such as Zvika Kantor and Yoram Merose, who live and work in both Germany and Israel, and the Berlin-based Israeli video artist Omer Fast. The work of these and other Israeli artists, such as Michah Ulman, often touch on the memory of World War II and the Holocaust and attract much critical and public interest.

1 Karavan’s work in Cologne also generated a performance act of the acclaimed Karavan en- semble (led by his daughter, Yael), which took place on the same site 25 years after the work’s completion. Event information on Karavan Ensemble homepage. http://karavanensemble.com/ shows/maalot/ (last accessed 8 September 2014).

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Questions of translation and reception are undoubtedly central to an inves- tigation of the field of German-Hebrew relations, as is evident from the earlier- mentioned point of origin, a Bible translation. Translation in the other direction, from German to Hebrew, was also of fundamental importance to the project of the Haskalah. It retains an important role in ventures ranging from the literary journal Keshet, which published many contemporary German authors such as Thomas Bernhard and Günther Grass in the 1960s and 1970s, to the current lists of the major publishing houses in Israel, which frequently publish classical and modern German literature. Within this field of literary exchange and translation, the Hebrew transla- tions of German-Jewish authors, ranging from Heinrich Heine through Paul Celan to Barbara Honigmann, are often seen as a special case of domestication or repatriation of lost voices. Indeed, from 2008 to 2012, the Israel National Library fought and ultimately won a legal battle to claim the German-language archives of Max Brod – including manuscripts by Franz Kafka – as Israeli cultural pat- rimony. Regardless of one’s assessment of the merits of this case, the striking fact that Israel claims these German-language documents as national property further demonstrates that contemporary Israel remains attuned to Germany and the German-Jewish past. New research is bound to introduce further nuances and complexity into our briefly outlined narrative of the field of German-Hebrew studies. This inves- tigation takes its cue from an academic environment that increasingly rejects a concept of individual languages and literary traditions as discrete and isolated entities and is replacing it with a global perspective, encompassing world lit- erature and translation studies. More and more German departments are hiring experts on German-Turkish culture and are teaching German-Turkish bilingual texts, for example; the field of Hebrew literature has arguably advanced con- siderably from the time when it was studied in isolation from Yiddish or Arabic literature. This larger context does not, however, account for many of the par- ticularities of the German-Hebrew contact zone or the German-Hebrew dialogue and the challenges of opening up this intersection for a productive scholarly con- versation. The need to enhance and expand the nascent field of German-Hebrew studies is especially evident in the German-speaking world, specifically in the German academic landscape. With the telling exception of the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (HfJS) in Heidelberg, no professorship dedicated to the study of modern Hebrew literature and culture exists in today’s Germany. The Austrian and Swiss academic landscapes similarly lack this and adjacent fields of study.²

2 Recently, the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt has announced an exciting new collaboration with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem on the topic

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Not only the configuration of academic fields, scholars’ training, and the organization of research programs account for the slow development of studies at this intersection, even though, of course, that is a significant part of the story, and one that merits further discussion. A deeper problem remains the impossibility of dealing with the issue without facing the Holocaust and confronting the question of its aftermath in the ethical, political, and cultural sense. In other words, the very project of telling this history as a single, continuous narrative that connects the emergence of the Hebrew Enlightenment in Germany with the current boom in German-Israeli exchanges across the abyss of the Holocaust raises serious moral and historiosophical questions. This, of course, is also why it is worthwhile.

Bibliography

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“Die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen in den Geisteswissenschaften zwischen 1970 und 2000. Studien zu Wissenschaft und Bilateralität,” which is likely to have a substantial impact on the field we are charting here.

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