Volume 33, Issue 2 - Themenheft Das Fremde im Eigenen – das Eigene im Fremden. Jüdisches biographisches Schreiben über Andere (Hg. von Grażyna Jurewicz und Ulrike Schneider)

In terms of historiographical potential and literary value, depictions of the lives of others are considered inferior to autobiographies. One finds autobiographies, which promise to provide exclusive insights into the historical inner worlds, epistemically more revealing. While their study has become a very important part of Jewish Studies, investigations into the life stories of others represent a notable research gap. This issue takes this remarkable bias in the perception of the two genres within Jewish Studies as its starting point. The contributions gathered here interrogate historical examples of biographical narrative with the aim of unlocking its historiographical potentials and thus highlighting the relevance of biographical writing for the study of Jewish cultures.

A few years after Moses Mendelssohn’s death (1786) David Friedländer wrote life-history descriptions in which he took a fragmentary look at Mendelssohn’s personality and emphasized that he had succeeded in approaching moral perfection as a human being and as a merchant to a high degree. With the virtuous perfection pattern Moses Mendelssohn ( Vollkommenheitsmuster Moses Mendelssohn ) designed by him, Friedländer initially pursued two intentions: on the one hand, he established a modern Jewish educational ideal, and on the other hand, his image of Mendelssohn served him to combat prejudice among non-Jews. Three decades later, Friedländer published further biographical fragments about Mendelssohn, this time appearing in a distinctly educational context, and again presenting Mendelssohn as an educational ideal. The article analyzes Friedländer’s ›Platonic‹ mode of presenting Mendelssohn and questions the significance of his parallelization of Mendelssohn with Socrates. In addition, it examines Friedländer’s choice of the fragment as a descriptive category and form of biographical representation, with which he functionalizes Mendelssohn for his pedagogical aims.

This paper focusses on Fanny Lewald’s historical novel »Prinz Louis Ferdinand« of 1849. I examine the biographical as well as cultural-historical circumstances of the work’s genesis. Lewald clearly intended it as a critique of Prussian history, but at the same time the work’s focal point turns out to be a quite personal, female perspective. This perspective is mirrored in the prince’s experiences of loss and powerlessness. This leads me to explore the poetological dimensions of a writing in which the figure of the Prussian prince becomes a prismatic center of Lewald’s self-reflection. Here, the figure of Rahel Levin, as prominently portrayed by Lewald in her novel, plays a special role. It is precisely in her that the author’s interest in the political position of the Jewess in her as well as in Rahel Levin’s time becomes apparent.

In 1896, the literary scholar Ludwig Geiger published the volume »Dichter und Frauen«. Two articles in the volume were devoted to the female writers Dorothea Schlegel and Fanny Lewald. The essays are characterized by the literary-historical attempt to bring together life and work as well as the inclusion of first-person documents such as letters or diary entries. The relation between Geiger and his biographical ›objects‹ is based on the discrimination they experienced as Jews. In his contributions to the two authors, Geiger emphasizes their patriotic attitude, which he himself, as a German citizen of Jewish faith, strove to fulfill with his research.

Max Brod’s writing about Franz Kafka is one of the much-debated biographical undertakings of the 20th century, whose impacts still occupy literary scholars. Max Brod himself as well as his own extensive literary and journalistic-essayistic oeuvre is hardly known anymore, and this is also true for the numerous Kafka editions and contributions. Yet Brod’s interpretation of his friend has a life of its own and continues to have a subcutaneous effect. Until his own death in December 1968, Brod attended to his friend’s work with both devotion and appropriation, creating a Kafka cosmos in which he had assigned himself a key position. This constellation thus suggests a particularly close interweaving of autobiographical and biographical writing, which is the focus of this article.

This article deals with a manuscript of a lecture on Marcel Proust given by the author and musician Hermann Grab (1903–1949) in the year 1933 in Prague. In a biographical and interpretative study of Marcel Proust’s life and work, Grab’s lecture tried to offer orientation in a time of growing anti-Semitism. Focusing on Proust’s Jewish family, his illness and isolation, but especially on his main Jewish characters Charles Swann and Albert Bloch, Grab explains two ways of reacting to anti-Semitic threats. But moreover, and towards the end, a third option is revealed through this biographical-interpretive work. According to this, literary narrative seemed to be the key for Grab’s approach, thus the lecture simultaneously reveals Grab’s self-image as author.

In his poem »Memento«, Hinko Gottlieb (1886–1948) – a lawyer and a poet – portrayed a trait of his contemporary and companion Lavoslav Schick (1881–1941) – a historian and a lawyer too – with wit and humor. His approach is biographically, at the same time he uses irony to make fun of Schick’s own biographical approaches to other Croatian Jews. As a result of the analysis of this commemorative poem, published in 1934, questions are raised about the source value of a satirical poem. Likewise, about the meaning, form and about (political) intentions of biographical depictions in general. For the contemporaries, but also for today’s researches.

This article traces the history of the double biography »The Grimké Sisters« (1967/2004) by Gerda Lerner, an American Jewish historian who, as a Viennese Jew, escaped Nazi Europe for the United States in 1939. Focusing on the history of the making of »The Grimké Sisters«, the essay analyzes Lerner’s book as ›life writing‹. It demonstrates Gerda Lerner‘s (1920–2013) becoming scholarly persona in the context of her self-interpretation of the Grimké Sisters as her own figures of identification and role model. By showing the nexus of African Americans’ rights and women’s rights in the Grimké sisters’ engagement, Gerda Lerner processed the own in the foreign. In doing so, Lerner’s interest in white abolitionism and the women’s rights movement in the 19th century U.S. echoes her multiple outsider and persecution experiences as a Jewish emigrant, left-wing feminist, and pioneer in Women’s history in the 20th century.

Within German Jewish contemporary literature’s engagement with the Shoah and Second World War, a new approach has gained traction: auto/biography. This article examines characteristics of recent German Jewish auto/biographical family narratives and discusses newer genre poetics of auto/biography. If every biography is also autobiography, these contemporary auto/biographical family narratives showcase the other side of that poetological coin: preoccupied with self-definition and self-assurance, these first-person narrators seek to position themselves in the generational chain of their families through a reconstruction of their family histories. By way of example, the article offers a reading of Marina Frenk’s auto-fictional debut novel »ewig her und gar nicht wahr« (2020) as an innovative, radically fictionalized, and polyphonous family biography.

»Ha-opera ha-erez israelit«, also known in English as the »Palestine Opera«, was founded in 1923 in the still nascent city of Tel Aviv. There was no stately opera house, no large stage for grand performances, not even a professional orchestra. The financial budget was extremely modest – and yet, over the course of only four seasons (1923–1927) no fewer than 17 operas were performed, all of them in Hebrew translation. This article takes the centenary of the first Hebrew opera as a point of departure to probe the history of this important cultural institution in pre-state Israel. The initiative for this ambitious undertaking came from Mordechai Golinkin (1875–1963), a seasoned conductor and passionate Zionist. Like Golinkin, most of the singers were of Russian origin. Remarkably, all libretti were in Hebrew with a synopsis in English and Arabic, so as to cater to a particularly broad audience. The article pays special attention to the four ›Hebrew/Jewish‹ operas which Golinkin selected during those years (one each season). This in turn raises the question as to how these categories were understood and debated at the time.

In Hamburg, as elsewhere, debates about aspects of remembering the Shoah have been and are being conducted not only locally, but across national and other borders. People with a personal history of persecution and a connection to the city have a special position in these debates. The same applies to the discussions in the 1980s and 1990s in which the associations of former Hamburg residents in Israel spoke out – and were usually heard. Initially, two groups existed, one in Jerusalem, one in Tel Aviv, which merged in 1992 and had close contact with Hamburg. They are described here both as organisations in Israel and as actors in remembrance politics of the city. This essay elaborates on their commitment at the example of exhibition projects on Hamburg’s Jewish history.