Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

Princeton University Press

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
book: The Jewess Pallas Athena
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

The Jewess Pallas Athena

This Too a Theory of Modernity
  • and
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021

About this book

"The Jewess Pallas Athena"--a line from a poem by Paul Celan. It is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions. But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the twentieth century?

This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country from which they had been expelled and to which they would never want to return. Among the many prominent female intellectuals and literary figures Barbara Hahn discusses are Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Else Lasker-Schüler, Margarete Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. In examining their writing, she reflects upon the question of how German culture was constructed--with its inherent patterns of exclusion. This is a book about hope and despair, possibilities and preventions. We see attempts at dialogue between Christians and Jews, men and women, "Germans" and "Jews," attempts initiated by these women that, for the most part, remained unanswered. Finally, the book reconstructs the changing notions of the "Jewess," a key word in modern German history with its connotations of "salons," "beauty," and "esprit." And yet a word that is also disastrous, in which there culminated everything the dominant culture condemned as dangerous.

Author / Editor information

Barbara Hahn is Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University. She is the author or editor of several books published in Germany on German-Jewish literature and culture. Together with Ursula Isselstein, she is editor in chief of the correspondence and diaries of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag).

Reviews

"This work is a major contribution to cultural history and is appropriate for graduate level students and above, as well as the widely read general reader."---James LaForest, Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter --- "Professor Hahn has masterfully assembled a representative collection of prominent German Jewish women who joined in, and contributed to, [the] exciting and productive period in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries or who lamented its passing in the twentieth. . . . The Jewess Pallas Athena is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarly works evaluating German Jewish life as well as studies concerning theories of modernity."

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
    Download PDF
  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    v
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    The Jewess Pallas Athena

    1
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Breaks in Tradition

    14
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    “Egyptian Style”

    30
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    The Myth of the Salon

    42
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    “Cries into the Void”

    56
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    The Modern Jewess

    60
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Encounters at the Margin

    68
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Odd Beings

    85
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    In Search of History

    99
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Kaddish for R. L.

    109
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Baggage of Debris

    121
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Thinking in a Combat Alliance

    134
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    “Complete Unreservedness”

    138
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Gestures and Poems

    147
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Goddess without a Name

    156
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Silence — Conversation

    167
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Notes

    181
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Bibliography

    211
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Acknowledgments

    225
    Download PDF
  • Requires Authentication Unlicensed
    Licensed

    Index

    227
    Download PDF

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 7, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9781400826582
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400826582
eBook ISBN: 9781400826582
Keywords for this book
Jews; Hannah Arendt; Judaism; Writing; Poetry; Martin Heidegger; Romanticism; Autobiography; Thought; The Other Hand; Martin Buber; Henriette Herz; Karl Jaspers; Rahel Varnhagen; Paul Celan; Exclusion; Margarete Susman; Lecture; Bourgeoisie; Historical figure; Literature; Genre; Modernity; Two Women; Jewish history; Religion; Zionism; Elisabeth Blochmann; Rosa Luxemburg; Georg Simmel; Yiddish; Moses Mendelssohn; Garret; Physiognomy; Philosophy; Nelly Sachs; Publication; German language; Christendom; Acculturation; Correspondent; Racism; Muteness; Residence; Friedrich Schleiermacher; Germans; Philosopher; Friedrich Nietzsche; Suffering; Historical fiction; Orthodox Judaism; Festschrift; Greek mythology; Moritz Lazarus; Monologue; University of California Press; Household; The Various; Form of life (philosophy); Virginity; Mrs.; Humiliation; Conversion to Judaism; Women in Judaism; Stefan George; Grandparent; In Search of Lost Time; Max Liebermann; Walter Benjamin; Rainer Maria Rilke
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
Downloaded on 22.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400826582/html
Scroll to top button