Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews Revised Pages

Revised Pages Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews Revised Pages Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Kathleen Canning, Editor Geoff Eley, Founding Editor Recent Titles Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman, Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors, Three- Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918– 33 Pepper Stetler, Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book Greg Eghigian. The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth- Century Germany Anna M. Parkinson, An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold- War West Germany Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to- Day: State Enterprises in East German Society Heather L. Gumbert, Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang, Editors, German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences Scott Moranda, The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and Dictatorship in East Germany David Imhoof, Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen between the World Wars A complete list of titles in the series can be found at www.press.umich.edu Revised Pages Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews Cathy s. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2017 by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 13041- 2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 12296- 7 (ebook) Revised Pages Contents Preface vii 1 How Did We Get Here from There? 1 Introducing the Problem 1 The Cosmopolitanist Debates 9 The Jew in Contemporary Theories of Cosmopolitanism 12 Nomads, Gypsies, Jews 17 Jews and the Nation- State 28 2 Moving About: Cosmopolitanism from Jews in Coaches to Jews on Trains 31 The Enlightenment Imagines Cosmopolitan Jews 31 Writers in Coaches 42 Jews Writing Their Own Cosmopolitanism 61 3 “Everyone Is Welcome”: The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism in the Imperial Worlds of Austro- Hungarian and Wilhelmine Jewry 69 From Vienna to Berlin and Beyond 69 Vienna, Zionism, and Cosmopolitanism 73 Prague: On the Fringes of Empire 91 Berlin: Another Empire 100 4 Jewish Cosmopolitanism and the European Idea, 1918– 1933 113 After the Deluge 113 Stefan Zweig: The Model European 120 Joseph Roth’s Hotel Patriotism 127 Lion Feuchtwanger: The Empire Strikes Back 137 Cosmopolitanism Tottering on the Brink of Catastrophe 142 Revised Pages vi Contents 5 “The World Will Be Your Home”: Cosmopolitanism under National Socialism and in Exile 144 The Revolution of 1933 144 Thomas Mann and Egypt 145 Joseph in Sigmund Freud’s Egypt 159 Heidegger’s Rootless Jew 162 Zweig’s Erasmus in Exile: The Cosmopolitan par Excellence 165 Roth and Zweig: Idealizing the Austro- Hungarian Empire 170 Zweig’s Brazil: The Farthest Exile 174 Lion Feuchtwanger’s History in Exile, the Josephus Trilogy 182 6 Rootless Cosmopolitans: German Jewish Writers and the Stalinist Purges 187 The Left in World War II and Thereafter 187 Communism, National Socialism, and the Jews 188 Writing the Stalinist Purges: Alice Rühle- Gerstel, Arthur Koestler, and Manès Sperber 197 The Left and the Stalinist Purges after 1945: Rudolf Leonhard, Peter Weiss, and Stefan Heym 213 7 Russian Jews as the Newest Cosmopolitans 223 Rooted German Cosmopolitans? 223 In Germany, Gogol Is Not Sholem Aleichem 226 In America, Nabokov Really Is Not Sholem Aleichem 243 8 Walls and Borders: Toward a Conclusion 255 Notes 263 Works Cited 289 Index 321 Revised Pages Preface This book represents a collaboration between two scholars whose interests overlap for both personal and academic reasons. Cathy S. Gelbin was born in the German Democratic Republic, the daughter of a Jewish- American father and a German mother. Educated in Wall- time West Berlin and the United States, where she received her doctorate, she has taught in Germany and the United Kingdom and is now at Manchester University. Sander L. Gilman, of Russian Jewish descent, was her doctoral supervisor at Cornell and now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. He has taught at numerous universities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Both are Jewish, both are self- labeled cosmopolitans, and both are actively engaged in trying to understand what such a status means for their work in light of their biographical trajectories. This project has brought them together to examine the history into which they, in complex and fragmentary ways, fit. The title of this volume evokes the multiple meanings of both cosmopolitan and Jew in the discourse about cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the term cosmopolitan is oftentimes contested as to exactly what type of cosmopolitanism can be de- noted by that term. We can only speak of cosmopolitanisms as it is impossible easily to bring the distinctions between a “moral” cosmopolitism, such as that advocated by Martha Nussbaum, and the “utilitarian” cosmopolitanism of Peter Singer into the same conceptual category. The multiple, contradictory meanings of Jews constitute a well-kno wn problem in postmodern theory since at least 1988 when Jean- François Lyotard published Heidegger et “les juifs,” evoking the jew (lowercased in the English translation) as the mark of ineffable alterity rather than lived experience. Thus we write of “cosmopolitanisms and the Jews.” We do not seek to provide an exhaustive exploration of the oft- contradictory meanings of these two categories but rather to provide both a historical framework for their multiple meanings through detailed analyses of Revised Pages viii Preface cultural products— novels, plays, poetry, philosophical essays— that illustrate the radical conceptual shifts associated with the notion of global mobility. Both authors are not only mundivagant but also define themselves as rooted in a specific national culture (or see themselves as suspended between these two experiential poles) and explored the complexity of cosmopolitanism in their works. Thus, we have taken the position that one of the functions of literature is to serve as a thought experiment for authors dealing, in our cases, with the questions of globalization, acculturation, migration, exile, national identity, and the like. We are quite aware that literature can have many other functions and can also be read in ways radically different than we have undertaken. Our project is a literary as well as a historical one. We hope that we have shown how relatively close readings of literary texts can be used to help frame the si- multaneous contradictions and ambiguities of conceptual history, such as the history of the cosmopolitan that we have undertaken. This volume was produced with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council in Great Britain and with the engagement of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture (London). We thank Susannah Herzog for help with the preparation of the manuscript and Stephanie Schüler- Springorum of the Center for Antisemitism Research, Ber- lin, for her support. LeAnn Fields, our editor at the University of Michigan Press, has been especially helpful in formulating the project. Revised Pages Chapter 1 How Did We Get Here from There? Introducing the Problem In the twenty- first century, the debate surrounding cosmopolitanism has be- come a surrogate for thinking about the positive or negative aspects of the new globalization.1 Yet cosmopolitanism is the concretion of a range of concepts firmly embedded in historical memory, and like other such concepts, it has been constantly refashioned for use in different periods and with specific shades of meaning. Hidden within today’s cosmopolitanism is a whole range of meanings and concepts that, like an intellectual Venn diagram, come to be included within or indeed self- consciously excluded from our understanding of this concept. We can recall how George Bernard Shaw in 1907 ironically lampooned Broadbent, the ultimate Englishman, who decried everything and everyone who was not English enough: “You are thinking of the modern hybrids that now monopolize England. Hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Lan- ers, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They don’t belong to the dear old island, but to their confounded new empire; and by George! They’re worthy of it; and I wish them joy of it.”2 Things change; things remain the same. From rootless riffraff at the turn of the twentieth century, the cosmopolitan has turned into a global elite at the turn of the twenty- first century. Yet over and over again cosmopolitanism and its sister concept, nomadism, have taken on quite different meanings when their referent is the Jews.3 Once this litmus test is applied, both cosmopolitanism and nomadism are clearly revealed as symbolic manifestations of the antisemitic stereotype that associates Jews with capital. Over time, as we shall see, the related concept of the nomad gives way to that of the exile, the refugee, the D[isplaced] P[erson]. The association with capital also wanes but never quite vanishes. This is also part of the tale. Such a history of the cosmopolitan points toward the ambiva- lence of these concepts when applied in the present day to specific categories of social and geographic mobility, whether they refer to the Jew, the asylum Revised Pages 2 Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews seeker, the migrant, the undocumented immigrant.

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