An Enclave in Time? Russian-Jewish revisited

Olaf Terpitz

While travelling through Europe Ilia Erenburg composed a set of travel sketches and feuilletons. One of those travel features, written in 1923, is entitled ‘Letters from a café’ (Pis’ma iz kafe), and subtitled ‘ in the year 1922’. Erenburg outlines in this text casually his perception of Berlin. The city, alien and hostile as it may appear to the foreign visitor, emanates a spirit of dynamism unencountered before and after in other European capitals of the time: ‘You can listen to Europe’s heart only in Berlin’. However, the city’s vitality cannot deceive the visitor about its inherent transitoriness and dangers. ‘The heart of Europe does not work as it should at all. It beats irregularly in anticipation of unbearable separations and dazzling encounters.’1 Berlin, indeed, became in the interwar period a leading trend-setting centre of cultural production in Europe, later encapsulated in the myth of the ‘roaring twenties’. In particular, the city became a major centre for Jewish and non-Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe who estab- lished publishing houses, newspapers, cultural associations and organi- sations, however short-lived. These highly productive cultural milieux have attracted a heightened interest in recent scholarship. Scholars have studied various historical, sociological, and cultural aspects of this migration, often focusing on a selected group, selected persons or works.2 In those narratives ‘Russian Berlin’ with its manifold publishing

1 my translation, from the German edition: Ilja Erenburg, Visum der Zeit, trans. by Hans Ruoff (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1982), p. 55. Original Russian edi- tion: Il’ia 5Erenburg, Viza vremeni (Berlin: Petropolis, 1930). 2 There is a growing number of studies published in Europe, the United States, Israel and Russia: e.g. Sergei S. Ippolitov and Almaziia G. Kataeva, ‘Ne mogu otorvat’sia ot Rossii . . . ’: Russkie knigoizdateli v Germanii v 1920-kh gg (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ippolitova, 2000); Marc Raeff, Russia abroad: A cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Hélène Menegaldo, Les russes à , 1919–1939 (Paris: Edition Autrement, 1998); Karl Schlögel, Das russische Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas (München: Pantheon, 2007); Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Heather Valencia, ‘Yiddish Writers in Berlin 1920–1936’, in The German Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. by Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel, (Lewiston, 180 olaf terpitz houses rarely encounters ‘Hebrew Berlin’—where Sh.Y. Agnon and Saul Tchernichowsky worked and lived temporarily, ‘Yiddish Ber- lin’—where in 1925 the YIVO was founded, or for that matter ‘Ger- man’ and ‘German Jewish’ Berlin. The impression arises that studies of migration to Berlin are to a high degree compartmentalized and, as such, detached from the complex net of temporal, spatial, personal, linguistic and ideational relations in which they are situated. Apart from geographical displacement migration usually entails various forms of dislocation. There seem to be, at first glance, more discontinuities than continuities. This is certainly true to a varying degree in respect of the migrants’ social condition, e.g. working place, income, housing, residential permanence. However, changes in social, political, and societal circumstances are usually accompanied by the respective diasporic or ethnic minority group’s need for self-assertion.3 Beliefs, attitudes, behavioural patterns, a shared historical experience, even modes of thinking appear as central elements of preservation in processes of identification. If changes in the social setting have an immediate effect on everyday life, cultural continuity shows primar- ily in the longer term. To create referential coherence, as cultural continuity might be described in terms of discourse history, or legiti- macy in terms of , groups and their participants rely on what Maurice Halbwachs analysed as collective memory. This concept was taken further by Jan Assmann who distinguishes between communica- tive and cultural memory.4 Cultural continuity, in short, depends to a high degree on communication, including the availability of means of

NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 193–207; Dan Laor, ‘Agnon in Germany 1912– 1924: A Chapter of a Biography’, AJS Review, 18:1 (1993), 75–93; Zohar Shavit, ‘On the Hebrew Cultural Center in Berlin in the Twenties: Hebrew Culture in Europe— The Last Attempt’, in Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 68 (Mainz: Gutenberg Akademie, 1993), pp. 371–380; Verena Dohrn and Gertrud Pickhan (eds), Transit und Transformation: Osteur- opäisch-jüdische Migranten in Berlin 1918–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010). 3 On diaspora, migration and identity see among many others for example: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Jan and Leo Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, History: Old Para- digms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cul- tural Anthropology 9:3 (1994), 302–338; Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora politics: at home abroad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4 maurice Halbwachs, The collective memory, translated from the French by Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row 1980 [La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses universitaires de , 1950)]; Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1992).