Volume 57, Issue 2

Franz Kafka’s “Der Bau” is, among others, a story about dwelling and real estate. This essay makes visible how Kafka’s late fragment considers aspects of law, narration, and metaphor in order to establish a (bourgeois) form of property. The character of this proprietary order is explored in the text. Particularly the often-neglected framework of property that Kafka assigns to the burrow and its monologuing resident reveals a connection to a well-known problem in Kafka’s literature, namely the problem of the institution. The reading of Kafka’s “Der Bau” therefore becomes – also in dialogue with aspects of Kant’s philosophy of law – a categorical contribution to the (metaphorical) institution of property itself.

In this article I contend that Paul Celan’s poem, “Todtnauberg,” written as a follow up to his visit to Martin Heidegger’s Berghütte , should be read not only as a challenge to Heideggerian philosophy’s fundamental assumptions – primarily the notion of dwelling in the world via poetic language – but also to the very structure of philosophical thought, with its biases and inadequacies. Drawing on Celan’s idiosyncratic use of the term Verjudung I show its centrality in understanding the poem’s deconstructive move, as it applied to the binaries inherent to Heideggerian thought: pure/impure, indigenous/foreign, rooted/uprooted, and authentic/inauthentic. Posing the deconstructive qualities of the poetic against the crude decisiveness of philosophical thought, I argue that “Todtnauberg” ‘catches’ Heideggerian thought unprepared, as it presents it with its own blind spots, misconceptions, and loose ends, and thus rattles the very ground in which it seeks to ground itself.

The reconstruction of the creation of Paul Celan’s posthumous poem “In meinem zerschossenen Knie” enables an examination of the complex network of elements of his own biography – the traces of formative readings, his identity questions projected in his positions towards Judaism and Zionism, the obsessional poetic motives etc. – from which the poet lets the lyrical text ‘coagulate.’ The relationship between the author’s genetically anticipated ‘message’ and the hermeneutic freedom in the interpretation of Celan’s poetry is also considered.

Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus , first published 1947, tells the story of a fictional German musician, Adrian Leverkühn, paralleled with the rise and fall of Germany in the first half of the 20 th century. In fact, the idea of Doktor Faustus predated Mann’s exile, and it had been already conceived as a work of lateness – a Faust , a Parsifal in prose. In the process of creating variations on lateness, Mann referred to the musical models of Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and the music criticism of Theodor W. Adorno. As a product of Mann’s exile in Southern California, Doktor Faustus connects the concept of lateness with his experience of exile through music, as Edward Said would later point out in his reflections on “late style.” By engaging with pre-existing compositions and criticism, I will present Doktor Faustus as a novelistic rendering of musical lateness that not only engages with compositions such as Wagner’s Parsifal and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony but also sheds new light on the interpretation of lateness as an artistic and – above all – human experience.

Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s contentious novel Lolita has stirred heated controversies that originated from Nabokov’s treatment of a thorny subject matter. What makes his achievement so stupendous is that he penned a book about a forbidden desire and succeeded in persuading his reader to feel for the deviant. The present study intends to fathom Nabokov’s success in his art of deception drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialist ideologies of aestheticism and despair in order to offer a new insight regarding the elements used in Humbert’s narration and character which bestow upon him the distinctive personality of the aesthete. Referring to Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence introduced in his “Either/Or,” it is suggested that Humbert, similar to Kierkegaard’s Johannes, aesthetically alienates himself from commitment and consequence while keeping an eye open for the interesting and relishing sensual immediacy. It is this shrewd aestheticizing of Humbert’s character that grants him his unique status that has elicited both attraction and aversion.

This article sets out to explore the conditions that paved the way for the unique success of the German translation of Zeruya Shalev’s second novel, Love Life (Hayei ahava, 1997), offering a specific example of the potential benefits that arise from cross-cultural translations. Upon its publication in Israel, Love Life was received quite critically; it was considered too simplistic, straightforward, and feminine to be considered an ‘important’ work. However, following the novel’s translation into German by Mirjam Pressler in 2000, it gained wide recognition in Germany and soon became a best-seller, owing much to Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s unusually warm review on the television program Das literarische Quartett (The Literary Quartet). Hence, this article examines the various cultural and commercial conditions that set the backdrop for Love Life ’s success as a translated work. While focusing on the reception of a specific literary text, the article surveys both Israeli and German literary spheres, and draws on the contemporary discourse in the field of World Literature. Furthermore, it offers a comprehensive discussion on translation, and demonstrates the unique position of translated literature, and specifically Hebrew literature, in the German literary field. Subsequently, the discussion sheds light not only on the circumstances that supported, if not determined, Love Life ’s enthusiastic reception in Germany, but also on the extraordinary effect of this success on Shalev’s position within the Israeli literary system in the two decades that have followed.