Will Lehman

Jewish Colonia as Heimat in the Pampas: Robert Schopflocher’s Explorations of Thirdspace in Argentina

This essay reads the stories of German-Jewish-Argentinean author Robert Schopflocher as explorations of marginality in what Edward Soja has called Thirdspace, while arguing that Schopflocher’s stories also offer a critical evaluation of this concept. Like Soja, Schopflocher understands spatiality as a primary mode of interpretation and challenges binary modes of thinking that assume stable boundaries between privileged and marginalized identities. Schopflocher’s narratives are likewise in dia- logue with many of the same critical and literary sources to which Soja refers in his articulation of Thirdspace, such as Michel Foucault’s “heterotopias” and the Argen- tinean writer Jorge Luis Borges’s “Aleph”. Yet Schopflocher’s texts make a strong case for the re-imagining of these “other spaces” as well: the heterotopia because it relies on problematic assumptions and Borges’s Aleph because it lacks a call for political action. These texts also seek to reclaim rural spaces in general and the iso- lated Argentinean-Jewish agricultural colonies in particular – not as stable, romantic Heimat landscapes or reincarnated Eastern European shtetls, but as dynamic spaces of multicultural intersection every bit as complex as the metropolis.

The increasing critical focus on space as a primary interpretive mode, the “spatial turn” in cultural studies, that this volume explores, represents another attempt to view cultural production through a new critical lens, and as such is not unlike a host of other periodical “turns” that cultural studies have taken.1 The pioneering

1 I am referring here to the psychological (Jacquette), psychoanalytical (Seidman), linguistic (Rorty), postmodern (Hassan), the translation (Bassett) and cultural (Mitchell) turns. In German Studies specifically, there have been other “turns” as well, such as the “Turkish turn” in German literature (Adelson). Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychologism: Critical and Historical Readings on the Psychological Turn in Philosophy. Ed. by Dale Jacquette. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003; Steven Seidman: Relativizing Sociology: The Challenge of Cultural Studies. In: From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives. Ed. by Elizabeth Long. Oxford: Blackwell 1993. Pp. 37–61; The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Ed. by Richard Rorty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992; Ihab Habib Hassan: The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1987; Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere: Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters 1998; Don Mitchell: Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell 2000; and Leslie A. Adelson: The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005. 302 efforts of geographers Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey, among others, have introduced new ways of imagining the spatial into a critical tradition that has largely prioritized historical and social analysis. Not surprisingly, this growing academic emphasis on spatiality coincides with the increased migration of people from poor countries – often former colonies – to the metropolitan centers of the West, a process that is itself a product of that series of economic and social developments popularly under- stood as globalization. As these immigrants have increasingly demanded rec- ognition of their own voices and experiences – whether from their academic seats or the picket line – they have served as the primary impetus for that series of challenges to Eurocentric narratives of history known collectively as the postcolonialist movement. These polyphonic discourses have wide- ranging objectives: to elucidate the social and economic barriers that main- tain Western hegemony, to attempt to clear a speaking-space for those who are denied a voice, or even to revel in the myriad opportunities for subverting traditional binary paradigms of identity through hybridity and masquerade. Whatever the purposes of its individual representatives, postcolonialist criti- cism of all strands focuses on the long-term impact of Western colonialism on subjected peoples, both in their “native” lands and in the Western metropo- lises to which they have come. Inasmuch as the narratives of subaltern migra- tion are characterized by the common tropes of dislocation, isolation, and transgression, postcolonial theory has contributed substantially to a spatial- ization of the critical imaginary. Yet while spatial analyses of the stories of “foreigners” in Berlin or Hamburg – whether recently arrived immigrants, long-term residents, or born in Germany – may go a long way in showing how German and non-German spaces are negotiated and contested, they cannot tell the whole story, as they offer little help in unraveling the complex web of power relationships con- structed when migration runs in the reverse direction. For “German” space not only coincides with the borders of the German nation-state – it is also imagined, constructed, and lived in narratives both written and set in those distant places where German-identified writers have settled. In this essay I focus on the German-language work of the Robert Schopflocher, whose spa- tially emphatic stories of interwoven and overlapping German, Eastern Euro- pean, Argentinean, Jewish, and Catholic identities seem to invite a particular spatial reading. In the following sections, I first introduce Schopflocher as an intriguing yet understudied author in Anglo-American German studies. I then read one emblematic story as a literary articulation of what Soja refers to as the “radically open” location of Thirdspace. Finally, I invoke Massey’s critique of space/place dualism in order to both suggest an opening of some of the unseen borders of Soja’s Thirdspace and theoretically ground Schopflocher’s attempt to “untame” our imagination of rural Heimat space.