Volume 18, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Encounters Between Hebrew and German: Literary Cross-Cultural Relations 1900–2024; Guest Editor: Judith Müller

In the following article, I propose a comprehensive exploration of Abraham Ben-Yitzhak’s poetry, centering on the dialectics of revelation and concealment, often referred to as “ hester panim ” in Hebrew. This concept, deeply rooted in traditional Jewish theology, signifies God’s concealment and exile from the human realm, where He hides His face and turns His back on His people. By examining Ben-Yitzhak’s poetry through the lens of “ hester panim ” we gain valuable insights into his work. This concept is not a mere theoretical framework; it is intricately woven into his early Hebrew poems and undergoes a significant evolution in his post-World War One German writings, dated around 1925.

This article examines Berlin’s urban space as represented in the novels Lifney Hamakom by Haim Be’er and Avedot by Lea Goldberg. Based on close reading as well as distant reading methods (mapping, annotation, and visualization), the article argues that, despite being written in different periods, both novels are similar in their representation of space: neither novel depicts Berlin as an actual living city or as a concrete setting for their plots. Rather, in both novels Berlin’s space is seen as a symbol for a German-Jewish fantasy of symbiosis: cosmopolitanism in the spirit of Bildung . Poetically, however, this impression takes two different forms: while Avedot freezes the city as an image of potential symbiosis, Lifney Hamakom is significantly affected by the mass of symbols of the city’s space.

This essay describes the departure from Europe, arguably the theme that unites Lea Goldberg’s three novels, in terms of the German tradition of Hermeneutics. I explore the various hermeneutical approaches in two of the novels, Mikhtavim Minesi ’ a Meduma and Avedot , and connect their metafictional and metacritical debates to the circumstances of their composition, publication and reception. While Mikhtavim Minesi ’ a Meduma employs a humanistic and universalist Weltliteratur perspective in order to downplay the emotions of bitter rejection from a beloved cultural home, Avedot contends with hermeneutical and philological questions ranging from authenticity and interpretation to the mystery of artistic creation. Avedot ’s plot revolves around the philologist-poet protagonist’s quest for his own pseudo-ancient text, but ultimately raises questions about the spiritual nature of the creative process and whether or not this spiritual baggage can be relayed to an external reader, in political circumstances that accentuate the poet’s sense of alienation. The two novels, with their unstable form, provided Goldberg an opportunity not only to contemplate aesthetic questions, but also to psychologically process the tearing away from the cultural and intellectual legacy of Europe and in particular that of Germany.

This article presents one issue of the Swiss literary journal Hortulus as a case study on forms of exchange, translation, and traffic between German and Hebrew in the wake of Nazism and World War II. Drawing on discussions in the field of Periodical Studies, I examine the various networks in which Hortulus 37 – a special issue devoted to new poetry from Israel – is situated. I highlight the heterogeneity of the volume, which contains materials translated into German from multiple languages, as well as original German texts. Translation itself appears in the volume as a heterogenous practice, which encompasses self-translation and various modes of collaborative translation. Since many of the authors who are translated into German in the volume were native speakers of that language, the lines between collaboration and self-translation are blurred in ways that have important consequences for our theorization of translation and self-translation.

This paper explores the complex interplay of German and Hebrew in the context of Israeli literature, focusing on Dan Pagis’ “Sealed Railcar” cycle of poems (1970). It delves into the historical background of how German became a repressed language in Israel, and the impact of the Shoah on this linguistic repression. The study introduces the concept of interlingual homophonic hermeneutics as a methodological approach to uncovering hidden German subtexts within Hebrew texts. Specifically, it analyzes the iconic poem “Written with Pencil in a Sealed Railcar” to reveal a German-Hebrew homophonic subtext and the profound ethical questions it raises.

My paper examines Franz Rosenzweig’s and Paul Celan’s translations of Yehudah Halevi’s poems, approaching the topic from the perspectives of both translation studies and literary criticism. On the one hand, I will scrutinize Rosenzweig’s and Celan’s translations against the backdrop of their theological approaches. I will also attempt to articulate the translation technique that Celan typically employed throughout his life, while translating from multiple languages into German. On the other hand, I will explore Celan’s implicit departure from Rosenzweig and his choice to specifically translate these two poems in light of his poetics, his notion of exile, and his exclusive choice of using German as his only poetic language.

Ausgehend vom Begriff Grenzsprache untersucht der Aufsatz den Appelfeld’schen zentraleuropäischen Raum unter Einbezug der erzählten Sprachen einerseits sowie die Relation von Mehrsprachigkeit, der deutschen und der hebräischen Sprache andererseits. Die hebräischsprachigen Texte Appelfelds behandeln oft deutschsprachige Figuren in einem multilingual geprägten Raum. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz werde ich den Roman כל אשר אהבתי [Alleswas ich liebte, 1999] analysieren und anhand der Erzählung von Räumen, der Figurensprache und der Thematisierung von Mehrsprachigkeit das Deutsche und weitere Sprachen im Hebräischen hervorheben. Es wird zu beobachten sein, dass sich liminale Lebensformen nicht nur in der Biographie, sondern auch im Schreiben finden: In anderen Worten, die sprachliche Transgression führt zur Schaffung einer persönlichen Literatursprache, die Appelfelds Beziehung zu seinen Sujets aber auch zur Leserschaft prägt.

This article examines the position of the implied reader within a narrative communication model of translated texts, through the unique case study of Yoram Kaniuk’s The Last Berliner (2002/2004). While offering a comparative analysis of the book’s commercial presentation and critical reception in source and translation, the discussion analyzes ways in which national motivations and tones are translated (or re-located) into a different national and cultural setting. These in turn shape and reflect the text’s notion of its implied reader, which is further complicated by the fact that The Last Berliner was translated and published in German two years prior to its publication in Hebrew. It seems, then, that the book constructs two antithetical implied readers, which correspond to its different motivations in German and in Hebrew. Thus, the article takes the movement between the two cultures and languages as its point of departure, and sets to explore the tensions between the two cultural-political spheres through the notion of the intended reader and its realizations in the text’s critical reception.

Since 1945, the memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War has played a major role in Hebrew and German literature. This article suggests a comparative reading of prose works by Ruth Almog and Jenny Erpenbeck that deal with these memories, in light of the challenges identified by scholars of modern Hebrew and German literature. What literary devices do these writers use to respond to the catastrophe of the twentieth century? In what way do their stories intersect? To what extent do they reflect German-Hebrew dialogue? I argue that by combining historical details and fiction within a literary texture based on contiguity, variation, and intertextual relations, both writers call into question the binary of perpetrator versus victim and calamity versus redemption. I show how their grammar of displacement in Hebrew and in German helps account for the literary workings of memory and ethical justice.

German language texts, across a range of genres have been written about the Holy Land, Mandatory Palestine, the State of Israel, and about Israel/Palestine. These texts reveal the positioning of the authors either in the subtext, or directly. As they were authored in German, these texts were written with a German-speaking audience as a mental interlocutor in the writing process. This article considers German-language texts as primary sources to learn about the authors, the nexus of the Holy Land, Mandatory Palestine, the State of Israel, Israel/Palestine, and Germany; how generational differences manifest in the topics; and how flows of knowledge have diversified over time. The choice of texts follows the logic of ethnographic fieldwork: it is opportunistic, as anthropologists consider the written word in all its forms and genres as data.