Band 7, Heft 1-2

The article focuses on the memoir written by Lea Goldberg on the poet Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Pegisha im Meshorer, 1952). It presents the results of a phenomenological reading of the memoir. The author maintains that by paying attention to the intention of the text as well as to its cultural, intellectual and emotional dichotomies, one reveals the resolution at the end of the memoir of an inner conflict implicit throughout the entire text. This reading results in a re-definition of the appropriate genre attribution for this work (which we may call polemical memoir) and yields a new key to understanding the artistic and intellectual conflicts that characterize a wide range of poetic phenomena in Goldberg’s poetry.

This essay explores the as yet undiscovered lyrical conversation conducted by Lea Goldberg with Avraham Sonne. It traces the different stages in Goldberg’s writing on him, through a close reading of all poems in which she addressed Sonne over many years. The first section of the essay concentrates on the construction of Sonne as a poet figure. The second section discusses the internalization of Avraham Ben Yitzhak as a superaddresse within the cycle “Al Ha-Priha.” The final section reflects Goldberg’s attempt to address Sonne not as a poet but as a private individual.

After World War I, Avraham Ben Yitzhak had all but ceased to publish the modernist Hebrew poetry for which he is famous. He continued, however, to compose literary drafts in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish well into the mid-1920s. This essay interprets a selection of these unpublished writings in the context of his criticism of wartime technology and nationalist fervor. Ben Yitzhak’s early poetics of dissolution and decadence underwent further radicalization in the post-war years; experimenting anew with expressionist and cinematic styles, he cast apocalyptic images of a dying world abandoned by God and characterized above all by the mass statelessness of its denizens.

Hermann Broch and Abraham Sonne (Avraham Ben Yitzhak) met during the second half of the 1920s in Vienna. Broch had given up his career as co-owner of a textile factory and begun to study the Neo-Positivism of the Vienna Circle and to write his novel “The Sleepwalkers.” Sonne was the director of the Jewish Teachers College in Vienna. The two men took to each other and met in Viennese cafés on a regular basis. In 1938 (after the ‘Anschluss’) Broch emigrated to the United States, and Sonne to Palestine. The letters published here span the period between 1938 and 1950, the year of Sonne’s death. They are documents of friendship and of an intellectual exchange (in particular regarding Broch’s novel “The Death of Virgil,” which appeared in 1945 in New York).

Based on the published and unpublished correspondence between three prominent members of the Zionist Prague Student Association Bar Kochba, Hugo Bergmann, Hans Kohn and Robert Weltsch, the article explores their complex and fluctuating relationship with Martin Buber between 1910 and 1965. Fascinated as they were by Buber’s three Speeches on Judaism before World War I, the three intellectuals embraced his vision of a humanistic version of Jewish nationalism and became leading interpreters of his religious-political views both in Germany and Palestine. However, as their letters reveal, the political developments of the 1920s up to the 1940s, and in particular the conflict with the Arab population in Palestine and the National Socialist persecution in Europe, led them to a growing sense of disenchantment with Buber and their own youthful cultural Zionist convictions, which prompted all three of them to make divergent biographical choices.

Significant materials produced by German-Jewish writers, artists and scholars have been preserved in public archives as well as in private family collections in Israel. Many of these materials were salvaged from Nazi Germany and brought to Israel with considerable difficulty during the years 1933-1945, or in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah. The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Bonn University and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach have begun a joint project to make these archival collections more accessible in Israel and to initiate new research based on them. Against this background, the article explores the role of archival processing in the construction of historical knowledge and the formation of cultural memory.

This paper introduces the collection of the German Zionist and librarian Heinrich Loewe (1869-1951) at the Municipal Library of Tel Aviv. A short biography of Loewe and an overview of the contents of the collection is followed by the presentation of a selection of letters which were sent to Loewe as head of the Municipal Library during the 1930s by German Jews who had already emigrated or were about to emigrate and wished to donate their books to this public institution. The paper traces the transfer of these books from the private realm to the public sphere of the library. It describes this transfer as a disruption of a private order against the background of the disruption of the larger order within which those collections had acquired their meaning and discusses their change of meaning that this transfer implicated as an elucidating reflection of the consequences of emigration.

The administrative archive of Habima, nowadays Israel’s national theater, resides at the Israeli center for the documentation of the performing arts at Tel Aviv University. The majority of the documents, which date from the 1920s and early 1930s, were written in German, and involve prominent German Jewish businessmen and intellectuals. This archival corpus is surprising, because the profile of Habima is generally associated with the Eastern European- Soviet theatrical heritage and with the revival of Hebrew. This article seeks to present the nature of this collection and to reevaluate its contribution to the study of German Jewry as well as to the history of Hebrew theatre.