As German As Kafka
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As German as Kafka IDENTITY AND SINGULARITY IN GERMAN LITERATURE AROUND 1900 AND 2000 As German as Kafka IDENTITY AND SINGULARITY IN GERMAN LITERATURE AROUND 1900 AND 2000 Lene Rock Leuven University Press Published with the support of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access Published in 2019 by Leuven University Press / Presses Universitaires de Louvain / Universitaire Pers Leuven. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium). © Lene Rock, 2019 This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative 4.0 Licence. Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Attribution should include the following information: Lene Rock, As German as Kafka: Identity and Singularity in German Literature around 1900 and 2000. Leuven, Leuven University Press. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ISBN 978 94 6270 178 6 (Paperback) ISBN 978 94 6166 284 2 (ePDF) ISBN 978 94 6166 285 9 (ePUB) https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662842 D/2019/1869/49 NUR: 617 Layout: Friedemann Vervoort Cover design: Anton Lecock CONTENTS Acknowledgements 9 Introduction 11 Chapter 1 Constitutive outsiders 31 1.1 Ambivalences of Kultur and Aufklärung 31 Constructions of German identity 32 Kultur versus Zivilisation 34 1.2 “Trapped by the image of a rejected self ”—Jews in Germany, German Jews 38 Emancipation and acculturation (1770–1880) 38 Modern anti-Semitism and Jewish dissimilation (1880–1933) 41 The ambivalence of assimilation 50 1.3 A reluctant country of immigration 52 From emigration to immigration 52 Kultur in the aftermath of non-policy:MultiKulti —Leitkultur— ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ 54 1.4 Literature, identity, and singularity 63 5 6 As German as Kafka Chapter 2 Aesthetes between identity and opposition 67 2.1 The authenticity paradox—Writing between identity and opposition 67 2.2 The aesthete’s retreat: Arthur Schnitzler’sFräulein Else (1924) versus Navid Kermani’s Kurzmitteilung (2007) 74 The ‘value’ of cultural difference: Arthur Schnitzler and Navid Kermani 74 A conflict of codes: ‘aesthetics of opposition’ versus ‘aesthetics of identity’ 79 2.3 The aesthete’s awakening: Beer-Hofmann’sDer Tod Georgs (1900) versus Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand (2008) 102 Jewish aesthete and romantic rebel: Richard Beer-Hofmann and Feridun Zaimoglu 102 Realitätsablehnung & experiences of finitude 109 Aesthetics of becoming—The ambivalent rhetoric of blood 122 Conclusion 140 Chapter 3 City dwellers between difference and indifference 143 3.1 Images of the city: emancipatory visions and spatialized difference 143 Berlin: image of an unsettled national identity 144 Indifference to difference 146 The city as a site of Jewish self-definition 148 Urban stereotype and spatialized difference 149 3.2 The failure of exemplarity—‘Figures of immanence’:Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther, der Jude (1892) versus Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (2004) 151 Exemplarity, identification, alienation 151 ‘Figures of immanence’: the atomic individual versus the Leerstelle 155 Metropolitan milieus: ‘the law of the proper’ versus Verletzbarkeit 163 3.3 Disoriented city dwellers—Figures of ‘distanced proximity’: Franz Hessel’s Spazieren in Berlin (1929) versus Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Der Hof im Spiegel” (2001) 170 Reading the city 171 Disoriented/dis-Oriented city dwellers 180 Conclusion 197 Contents 7 Chapter 4 Family heroes between myth and storytelling 199 4.1 Writing in the shadow of an empire 199 4.2 Family heroes redefined: Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (1932) versus Dimitré Dinev’s Engelszungen (2003) 208 Storytellers between empires and nations:Joseph Roth and Dimitré Dinev 208 “Listening to the same story”—Heroic grandfathers and the power of fiction 212 “Against the confines of the image”—Un-/antiheroic grandsons and the power of storytelling 234 4.3 “Diaspora’s children”—Heroics of endurance and hope: Joseph Roth’s Hiob (1930) versus Zsusza Bánk’s Der Schwimmer (2002) 251 Between East and West—Between pathos and hope: Joseph Roth and Zsuzsa Bánk 251 Communities of violence—Communities of silence 257 Allowing something to be said—Hope emerging from silence 269 Conclusion 284 Conclusion The fallibility of Bildung 285 Notes 289 Introduction 289 Chapter 1: Constitutive outsiders 294 Chapter 2: Aesthetes between identity and opposition 308 Chapter 3. City dwellers between difference and indifference 321 Chapter 4. Family heroes between myth and storytelling 330 Conclusion: The fallibility ofBildung 343 Bibliography 345 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would never have made its way out of the labyrinth without the indispensable support from a great many individuals. My sincere gratitude goes out to Anke Gilleir, for her meticulous readings, her unwavering confidence, her intellectual generosity, and for arousing my interest in this highly relevant topic; to Vivian Liska, for reminding me of the potential dangers in historical comparison; to Bart Philipsen, for encouraging me to explore the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. I also wish to thank the Research Foundation Flanders for allowing me to conduct my research in a comfortable manner; Leuven University Press, KU Leuven Libraries, and the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access for the realization of this publication. And finally, I would like to thank my office mates Benedicte and Debbie; my friends Hanne and Isa; my parents-in-law, my Geschwister, my parents, and most of all Bert, Noor, and Tess. 9 INTRODUCTION1 “What is Enlightenment at the beginning of the 21st century? [Was ist Aufklärung am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts?]”2 In his plea for a Europe beyond the national paradigm, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that an embrace of Enlightenment values is more urgent than ever. Europe, he argues, suffers from a paradox: “Whoever thinks of Europe as a large nation […] awakens the national primal fears of Europeans: either Europe or the European nations—a third option is simply impossible [Wer Europa als Großnation denkt […] weckt die nationalen Urängste der Europäer: entweder Europa, oder die europäischen Nationen—ein Drittes ist ausgeschlossen].” Yet in order to allay the fears of member states, “that with their approval of the European Constitution they commit cultural suicide [dass sie mit ihrer Zustimmung zur Europäischen Verfassung kulturellen Selbstmord begehen],” they must step outside of a national concept of Europe, and rethink it from a cosmopolitan perspective—“a Europe of differences, of acknowledged national particularities [das Europa der Differenz, der anerkannten nationalen Partikularitäten].”3 Beck rephrases Kant’s sapere aude in terms of the courage to acknowledge religious, cultural, and national pluralism and to strive for equality despite those differences: Have the courage to engage your ‘cosmopolitan view’, i.e. to profess your multiple identities: to connect the lifestyles born of language, skin color, nationality, or religion with the awareness that in the radical precariousness of the world everyone is equal and everyone is different. [Habe den Mut, dich deines ‘kosmopolitischen Blickes’ zu bedienen, das heißt, dich zu deinen vielfältigen Identitäten zu bekennen: die aus Sprache, Hautfar- be, Nationalität oder Religion erwachsenen Lebensformen mit dem Bewusst- sein zu verbinden, dass in der radikalen Unsicherheit der Welt alle gleich sind und jeder anders ist.]4 11 12 As German as Kafka Beck revisits the Enlightened foundations of the European project in a context of radical global insecurity. At the onset of the twenty-first century the effects of decades-long globalization processes and migration waves are evident in the increasingly diversified ethnic, cultural, and religious makeup of Western societies. Yet the apparent triumph of ‘the global’ over ‘the local’ is only one aspect of that Unsicherheit. Europe today bears the traces of a fundamental tension of modernity: alongside globalizing tendencies and transnational cultural processes, it has also witnessed the resurgence of nationalism and particularism. In the light of European ideological history, this is a “remarkable reversal, a most unexpected turn of events,” according to Stuart Hall.5 Both the liberal and the Marxist paths of modernization “implied that the attachment to the local and the particular would gradually give way to more universalistic and cosmopolitan or international values and identities; that nationalism and ethnicity were archaic forms of attachment—the sorts of thing that would be ‘melted’ away by the revolutionizing force of modernity.”6 Instead, “the intensification of worldwide relations,” which affect “distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa,”7 seems to go hand in hand with its opposite: the insistence on the local and the particular. That tension is especially evident in Germany, a country that—unlike Britain or France—has a very limited colonial history, and struggles to this day with its status as a country of immigration, even if it houses a ‘minority’ of 17 million people with migration backgrounds.8 The presence of that minority of millions is—in part—the long-term effect of an economic globalization process initiated with foreign recruitment agreements between the 1950s and the 1970s. Since then, and with renewed intensity after the 9/11 attacks, the visibility of religious and cultural difference in German society has been the topic of heated debate. Any debate about the ‘Other’ is indirectly a demarcation of one’s own identity. Indeed, the intensity of the Leitkultur debate (2000/2001) illustrates