Conditio Judaica

Im langen 19. Jh. zählt die Zerstörung Jerusalems (70 n.d.Z.) zu den am häufigsten in politischen Diskursen funktionalisierten historischen Ereignissen. Von der jüdischen Emanzipationsdebatte bis zur Etablierung des Antisemitismus fungiert sie in zentralen Texten (z.B. von C.K.W. Dohm, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Wolf, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Marr oder Theodor Herzl) als historisches Exempel.

Die Studie untersucht, wie literarische Bearbeitungen des Stoffes dominante Deutungen sekundieren, rekonfigurieren oder dekonstruieren: So verdeutlicht die Vielzahl von christlich geprägten Romanen die Diskursmacht der christlichen Heilsgeschichte. Ludwig Philippsons Novelle „Der Flüchtling aus Jerusalem“ (1839) hingegen stellt die opferzentrierte Perspektive des rabbinischen Judentums in der Diaspora infrage und bietet positivere Deutungen der Tempelzerstörung an. Max Rings Romanreihe „Das Haus Hillel“ (1878) entwirft eine Gegengeschichte, die die exklusiv christliche Lesart hinterfragt.

Ein Ausblick ins frühe 20. Jh. zeigt die anhaltende Popularität des Stoffes: In Texten von Lion Feuchtwanger, Sven Hedin, Max Jungmann und Hans Kyser werden bis heute relevante Fragen über Identität, Historiographie und interkulturelle Verständigung diskutiert.

Author David Vogel (1891–1944) and his (second) wife Ada Nadler (1900–1946) exchanged numerous letters over the course of their lives. Around 220 surviving letters have been compiled in this volume, stemming from the days of their first acquaintance, from their travels, from the years Ada spent in lung sanatoriums, and from the French internment camps that David Vogel was imprisoned in as an “enemy alien” in 1939/40.

This study adds a new perspective to ongoing debates in German memory discourse about the relationship between representations of the Shoah and of the history of colonial violence, showing how some Jewish literature written in German in recent decades has already been showcasing some of the fundamental philosophical issues underpinning the foundations of today’s memory crisis.

Born in 1937, Israeli-Austrian poet Elazar Benyoëtz began his literary career in Hebrew before becoming one of the most prominent German-speaking aphorists. This is the first volume to dive into his multilingualism. A convergent reading between cultures and languages sheds new light on a painful but productive exchange between German and Hebrew.

The works of Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel focus on the catastrophes that culminated in the horrors of the two world wars, which affected the authors themselves. In order to make sense of their times, these two Austrian-Jewish literary figures directed their attention toward the prophet Jeremiah. This specific Biblical reference did not just become literature – it also allows us to paint a new profile of each of these writers.

In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Max Brod’s posthumous papers which included a collection of Kafka’s manuscripts be transferred to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. If Kafka’s writings may be seen to belong to Jewish national culture and if they may be considered part of Israel’s heritage, then their analysis within a Jewish framework should be both viable and valuable. This volume is dedicated to the research of Franz Kafka’s late narrative “The Burrow” and its autobiographical and theological significance. Research is extended to incorporate many fields of study (architecture, sound studies, philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish studies, literary studies) to illustrate the dynamics at work within the text which reveal the Jewish aspects implicitly thematicized. Examination of the structure created, the nature of sound perceived, the atmosphere experienced and the acts performed by the protagonist serve as the foundation of this analysis and offer new access to Kafka’s work by presenting an interpretive, space-semantic approach. “Der Bau” is presented as a life concept given the task of constituting identity, highlighting the critical link between the literary and biographical Kafka and demonstrating the necessity of understanding the author as a Jewish writer to understand his late narrative.

For her outstanding research project, Andrea Newsom Ebarb was awarded the “Forschungsförderpreis der Vereinigung der Freunde der Universität Mainz e.V.” in 2023.

The debate about the Jewish nation and its language(s) reached its climax at the Czernowitz Language Conference. Using this event as a starting point, this volume reveals new perspectives on the debate about Jewish national languages and literatures in Central and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.

For secular, well-educated society, the “countryside” has always been a projection screen for desires and aversions. Almut Laufer examines the narrative traces left by rural Jewish communities by considering the texts of non-Jewish authors of the late Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment and the stories of Jewish authors of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries that reflect inner Jewish discourse.

Throughout his lifetime, the German-Jewish poet Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937) characterized himself as exclusively “German” and was attacked for this by anti-Semites and Zionists alike. The study examines his position between “Germanness” and “Jewishness” and the basic tenets of his works. The analysis is enhanced by the commented edition of his 1935–1937 correspondence with Walter A. Berendsohn.

This book is devoted to the study of the bilingual “parallel poems” of Ludwig Strauss (Aachen 1892 ˗ Jerusalem 1953) created between 1934 and 1952 in Palestine/Israel and which exist in two variants, a Hebrew and a German version, one of which is the original and the other a self-translation. The aim of this study is to compare the versions and their interpretation based on Strauss’s theoretical essays on poetry and translation, his political writings and works of literary criticism. Special attention is paid to Strauss’s concept (linked with the idea of messianic redemption) of poetry as a “fore-image” of a future true community of men and as “the earthly expression of the Absolute” directed at interpreting divine revelation and its “translation” into human language. In examining Strauss’s experiments with self-translation, by which he aimed at establishing a dialogue between languages, and between people and nations, this study considers the two processes of translation: from divine speech into human language and from one human language into another.

Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952) is considered one of the foremost Zionist writers of German. This volume is the first to explore Gronemann's correspondence and, through it, his far-reaching network of relationships. His correspondents included important politicians, writers, and artists, such as contemporaries Theodor Herzl, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Albert Einstein, and Theodor Heuss.

Sammy Gronemann (1875–1952) is one of the most outstanding Zionist authors and satirists to have written in German. This volume collects his short prose, mainly texts from his estate, part of which has been lost. It includes previously unpublished short stories, fragments of novels and dramas, essays written within the scope of his political, legal, and cultural work, as well as poems, couplets, parodies, and satires from all stages of his life.

Sammy Gronemann’s first literary success was his 1920 bestseller Tohuwabohu. This satirical novel is a period piece that marks the start of Gronemann’s literary career and presents a humorous portrait of Jewish life in Berlin after the turn of the century. Albert Einstein considered it a “masterpiece” because of its perspicacious and lucid depiction of the many facets of German Judaism.

Elias Canetti was a passionate believer in the power of the proper name. This study attempts for the first time to systematically present his Work on Names. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unknown documents, it reveals the great interpretational relevance of Canetti’s Zurich Nachlass. The book casts new light on the works of one of the 20^th century’s greatest writers in the German language.

How did female German-Jewish writers negotiate issues of femininity, Jewishness, and urban experience at the beginning of the 20th century? Godela Weiss-Sussex describes the evolution of multi-dimensional portrayals of the personal and societal place of the “German Jewish woman” in these intersecting discourses. She combines this with an analysis of the aesthetic and communicative structures of the texts, making visible the strategies these writers used to attract a wide readership and the literary and intellectual traditions in which they placed themselves.

Kompert’s narratives offer rich depictions of Jewish life in the ghettos of Bohemia. A hallmark is their portrayal of the complexities of intercultural love relationships. The novel Zwischen Ruinen (1875) depicts a successful inter-religious marital relationship made possible by the recent introduction of civil marriage. It illustrates Kompert’s dream of becoming acculturated to mainstream Christian society while preserving Jewish identity.

In Zionist journalism and literature during the First World War, the poetic language of Zionism was transformed into a language of war. Eva Edelmann-Ohler shows that Zionist interpretations of the war refer back to templates that existed before the war and were applied in different discursive arenas. Literary resonances of these interpretative patterns can be seen in the works of Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, and Felix Theilhaber.

During the first half of the 19^th century, light theater typically portrayed Jews as objects of mockery or morally questionable minor characters. This was also true of Kalisch’s farces. Yet it is thanks to his farce, “One of our people,” which enjoyed success well into the 20th century, that we see a Jewish main character portrayed in an entirely positive manner, thus casting new light on Jewish life in a non-Jewish environment.

This is the first in-depth biography of the German-Jewish writer Gerson Stern. His work, which has been republished only a few years ago, is concerned with important phases in German-Jewish history: the early period of Emancipation in the 18th century, the seemingly successful integration of Jews in Germany, and finally, the collapse of integration. The biography reveals the paradigmatic importance of Stern’s life and work and invites the reader to rediscover the author of Weg ohne Ende [Way Without End].

The Jewish experience of expulsion from a familiar cultural, linguistic, and social milieu during the period of the Third Reich and Jewish attempts to deal with the circumstances of exile can be regarded as paradigmatic in many ways for the experiences of refugees and migrants during our times. This volume is based on a conference presented by the German Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in April 2011.

Using Gertrud Kolmar’s (1894-1943) complex relationship to her German-Jewish origins as a point of departure, this study explores the hidden discursive structures in her poetry. The focus is on the poem “Garden in Summer” from her 1937 cycle of poems titled WELTEN (WORLDS). A detailed analysis of transtextual traces and their discursive interpolation reveals the poem as a kaleidoscope of scenarios of cultural, emotional, and spiritual encounter and permeation between Germanness and Jewishness within the scope of a melancholic “endgame.”

Berthold Auerbach’s letters to Jakob Auerbach rank among the most important sources in German-Jewish literature. Over a span of more than 50 years (1830-1882), the writer confided to his friend and cousin, a Jewish educator, about the events of his personal life, which were inextricably bound up with the problems of Jewish emancipation. Auerbach’s letters also paint a vivid image of his struggles as a Jew to secure an uncontested place in the literary and liberal political networks of the time. Jakob Auerbach published the first edition of the letters in 1884, together with an introduction by Friedrich Spielhagen, but it has never been reissued until now. This new edition, which includes commentary and indexes of persons and subjects, does justice to the renewed interest in this correspondence, fueled in part by two monographs (Kerstin Sarnecki 2006, Hermann Kinder 2011). The original Gothic script has been updated with Antiqua and, as a result, the digital version is readily searchable.

On the 70th anniversary of Joseph Roth’s death, this volume examines the current relevance of his work. His works and opinions were regarded as being overly oriented towards the past; his leanings towards the monarchy were mocked, his call to supranational thinking interpreted as a simple response to contemporary events. He was read chiefly as the narrator of the vanished Habsburg empire or of the vanished Eastern European Jewry.
Today, at a time that Europe is uniting, one gains a different picture: it no longer seems strange that he regarded ideological commitments as an excessively tight corset and viewed himself as a bridge between East and West. The elements of supranationality and interculturality in his work and life can now be acknowledged.

In his literary texts, which remained mostly unpublished, Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) anticipated the linguistically skeptical ideas of his time. In new intertextual, intermedial and muted writing styles, he confronts the inadequacy of language in a creative manner. Through his entanglements with works of German literature and music, the Jewish author Landauer wrote himself into German culture. The presentation and analysis of all literary texts provides an important contribution to both research on Landauer and the study of cultural and social functions of intermediality and intertextuality.

After all that has happened, German Studies in Israel is not at all self-evident, but represents a challenge in several respects. Who is challenged and what does the challenge consist of? In Israel the German language as medium and subject of German Studies was long considered taboo. A primary aim of German Studies is to prevent the cultural heritage of German Jewry from falling into oblivion in Israel, but rather to preserve it and ‑ wherever possible ‑ to enable it to thrive again. How can German Studies assert itself in the face of the worldwide streamlining of the university system in this field, which is also taking place in Israel? Who benefits from having German Studies in Israel? Finally, what scientific, political and cultural purposes can, should and does it want to serve?

This study investigates the function of the recourse to the messianic tradition of Judaism among German-Jewish intellectuals in the first third of the 20th century. Messianic figures of thought play an important role in the Jewish discourse of identity. Moreover, they are used productively in the creation of general theories in the realm of cultural studies, especially regarding the philosophy of language and history and the theological-political complex. Here, all the considered authors (Benjamin, Bloch, Broch, Buber, Landauer, Rosenzweig, Scholem) secularize Jewish Messianism in one way or another, thus transforming the Messiah into the “messianic”. This also means, however, that the messianic figures of speech include not only figures of thought but also rhetorical figures of speech or tropes that reflect various constellations of sacrality and secularity in the modern era. Tension between the secular and the sacred, and also between cultural particularity and universality, forms part of the modern adaptation of Jewish Messianism, as does the possibility of a sudden dialectical critical shift to an affirmation of violence.

After the breakdown of civilization during the Holocaust, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice quickly regained its traditional position at the forefront of the West German theater scene. Despite or indeed due to the fact that the piece exhibits problematic constructions of Jewishness in the figure of the money-lender Shylock, it became an important reference point and medium of difficult debates regarding the problem of German hate and German guilt. This volume discusses important stations of this contradictory reception history from the perspective of English and German studies, theater studies and commemorative history research.

Mehring’s drama, first staged by Erwin Piscator in 1929, caused the biggest theatre scandal of the Weimar Republic. It portrayed a diverse picture of the city of Berlin – from the stock exchange to the “Scheunenviertel” – and a socio-political cross section through the German population after the First World War. The text, which also illustrates the lives of Jews in Berlin at that time, is made more accessible to modern readers by a commentary referring to the events surrounding inflation as well as the lives of Jews in Germany.

The volume deals with popular German-Jewish and Yiddish culture from the second half of the 19th century until the post-war era. Main issues are the participation of German-Jews in modern mass consumption and entertainment culture, the autonomous ‛Jewish’ forms developed there, the interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish popular culture, and above all the media and access channels such as periodicals, publishing and press corporations, department stores and boulevard theatres.

This study analyses the career of Max Brod during the first decades of the 20th century in the cultural and political context of Prague and against the background of the problems of identity which were typical for this context. After the failure of his first attempt to solve the problem of identity by espousing an “indifferentist” philosophy of life, Brod developed a personal conception of Judaism which took Buber as its starting point. Working from the discovery of this identity, he plays an active role in the Zionist movement and in the political life of the first Czechoslovak Republic working for the recognition of Jewish nationality and as a cultural mediator for the benefit of members of the Prague Circle and Czech artists.

The study is concerned with research into 20th century Jewish autobiography written in German. After an overview illuminating the tradition of autobiographical writing in the 19th and 20th centuries, the study develops the specific conditions of Jewish autobiography, which has been in existence since the end of the 18th century. The main section of the work is given over to individual studies of autobiographical texts by Jakob Wassermann, Werner Kraft, Gershom Scholem, Max Fürst, Ernst Toller, Ludwig Greve, Ruth Klüger and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.

The volume examines the autobiographical texts by Saul Friedländer and Ruth Klüger in the context of their academic work. Both their scholarly and their autobiographical work are subjected to the tension between the opposing poles on the one hand of wishing to approach a reality outside the text and on the other of being aware that every interpretation always depends on the contemporary context and personal background of the interpreter. Thus Friedländer and Klüger approach each other from the two poles of disciplines traditionally opposed to each other ‑ the study of history, directed towards ‘objective’ verifiable facts, and the study of literature, with its focus on engagement with fiction.

The nationally motivated hostility towards Jews did not just start with Richard Wagner or the anti-Semitic writings produced in Imperial Germany from 1871 onwards. As the study shows, even the writers of the Romantic generation in the early 19th century drew up their idea of a "German character" which was rigorously delineated from alleged Jewish characteristics. This is shown in the study using both essayistic and fictional texts by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano among others.

“Wide-screen book” or “Night of the Nights”? The verdict of German literary critics was already oscillating between these two extremes in 1978. This controversy, which was ignited by Hilsenrath’s first work Nacht (“Night”) and was specific to Germany compared with the international reception of his work, runs throughout his writing. This study traces the history of the reception of his novels, i.e. the readings revealed by arts pages, literary studies and general readers, and analyses how they function.

Collected volume of studies on the stage representation of Jews in European theatre between 1830 and 1940. The way in which Jews are represented on the stage stretches between the poles of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism on the one side and Jewish renaissance and Zionism on the other. The individual studies all consider the boundary conditions given by cultural and mental history. This volume is the first attempt to view both the spoken word and musical theatre from this point of view.

Barbara Honigmann’s texts oscillate between disclosure and concealment. This leitmotif manifests itself in the choice of genre and structure of her works, in her use of language, in the way she draws her characters and in her double life as a woman writing in German and a painter leading a religious life in Strasbourg. The study provides a content analysis of her prose writing, with its main themes of family research, exile, memory, life in the ex-GDR and Strasbourg and examines Honigmann’s place within recent Jewish literature.

This book provides access to the Jewish mystic side of selected poems by Paul Celan. The reader is led to a crossing point in the poem with the poet's consciously or unconsciously instilled cultural knowledge. Here an interpretation is proposed which correlates with the poet’s cultural knowledge and reading experience. Thus many of Celan’s poems follow cabbalistic practice by narrating in numbers. Structural numbers and the symbolic meanings of numbers are therefore to be identified and interpreted as bearing meaning.

This book received the "Wissenschaftspreis 2008" [Price for the best dissertation in German Studies] of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Germanistik [Austrian Society of German Studies].

In 2004 the one-hundredth anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s death was commemorated throughout the world. The myth of Herzl, as it has developed over the last century, has perhaps become more important than the historical figure. This volume contains revised and expanded essays, which were originally delivered as lectures at international Herzl centennial conferences in Antwerp, London, and Jerusalem. Topics treated include the Herzl myth, Herzl’s nationalism and Zionism, his self-understanding and image, his authorship of comedies and philosophical tales, Herzl and Africa, as well as his reception in Israeli and other literature. Zweig films are also considered within this same context.

With her analysis of Wassermann's literary concept of justice, Elisabeth Jütten presents him for the first time as a representative of a modern age inspired by a life philosophy. Just like the philosophical, cultural and religious discourses of the turn of the century, his concept of justice with its personal accentuation is based on the topos of the 'new man', which is given its specific form by Wassermann's dual identity as a German and a Jew. For Wassermann, the Jew is predestined to forge a unity out of the duality in himself and thus to put an end to all injustice.

This is a study of one of the few prose texts by an author much better known for his poetry. It is inspired by Celan's remark that »Gespräch im Gebirg« was written "in memory of an encounter that never happened." Instead of taking the conventional course and treating this remark as a reference to Adorno, the author examines the poetological implications behind it. Though hermetic at first glance, the text yields up a surprising number of its apparent enigmas when subjected to close reading, poetological analysis, intertextual comparison with texts by Adorno, and reference to letters recently published for the first time.

This study of the monthly journal »Die Freistatt« (1913/1914) concentrates on its programmatic objectives and its concept of literature. The review was the only German-Jewish periodical to represent a 'pan-Judaic' approach, distinguishing it both from liberal and Zionist Judaism in Germany at that time. This approach is largely attributable to the influence of Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann (1888-1921), whose life and work is another major subject the study focuses on.

The rediscovery of the works of the Galician writer Soma Morgenstern only took place after his death. They are marked by the quest for identity embarked on by Jewish intellectuals in the 20th century. Exiled in America after the Shoah, Morgenstern turned away from Christian Europe, attributing to it the religious blame for the Holocaust. "Die Blutsäule" is, however, written in idiosyncratic German, with many reminiscences of the language of the Bible. Given that this was also the language of the 'hated' perpetrators of the Holocaust, the complexion of the novel is intricate indeed. The study reconstructs its religious, historical, and literary background.

"New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism" presents some of the most important current scholarship on 'Moses and Monotheism'. The essays in this volume offer new perspectives on Freud's perception of Judaism, of collective trauma and collective repression, national violence, gender issues, hermeneutic enigmas, religious configurations, questions of representation, and constructions of truth, while exploring the relevance of 'Moses and Monotheism' in diverse fields - from Jewish Studies, Psychoanalysis, History, and Egyptology to Literature, Musicology, and Art.

This study on conceptual history indicates how German-Jewish authors writing between 1750 and 1850 pitted definitions of their own against the general notions of 'nation', 'fatherland', 'patriotism', and 'nationalism' emerging in that period. This process is regarded against the background of their cultural and (incomplete) legal emancipation. The definitions were influenced not least by the Jewish origins of the authors in question. As a response to the dangerous growth of nationalism in the 19th century, they are very largely geared to the cosmopolitan view of patriotism typical of the German enlightenment.

The 19th century German-Jewish historical novel was born of the need to supply readers with popular novels, a novelty in Jewish literature. Through the back door it provided a chance to update images of Jews and Judaism and rewrite Jewish history according to the ideological needs of the main participants in the struggle out of the Ghetto. Rabbis, teachers and community leaders wrote novels that first appeared in the main papers, the "AZJ" and "Der Israelit". The novels enjoyed great popularity, especially among youth. Though they rejected any national aspect of Jewish history, the very choice of themes and heroes enhanced national pride. They were translated/adapted into Hebrew and played a major role in the national awakening in Eastern Europe and in Israel.

This study analyses the German-Jewish symbiosis as a historical phenomenon that made a significant contribution to Germany's cultural flowering in connection with the emergence of an educated middle-class (Bildungsbürgertum) around 1800. It began when German culture had to be 'invented' in order to free itself from the supremacy of French culture. In political, cultural, and linguistic terms Germany had nothing that could truly be called 'national', and precisely the same applied to the Jews as well. The educated middle-classes were kept remote from political life by the German Sonderweg and did not engage with anti-Jewish tendencies. The study discusses the development of this symbiosis up to its dissolution in a European framework, on the one hand, and as a result of Zionism on the other.

This volume contains an edition of three important historical narratives by Salomon Kohn (1825-1904), a comprehensive bibliography and a thorough study, in which Kohn's work is located in the context of German-Jewish literary and cultural history of the 19th century. The volume thus represents the first ever scholarly engagement with an author who must be regarded as the founder of German-Jewish historical fiction and who belonged to the most popular writers of his time.

In the eight decades after the 1830s, ghetto literature became the most important genre in the development of Jewish literature in German. In its first section, this documentation outlines the reception accorded to the genre up to the early 1930s with reference to and commentaries on over 600 sources. The second section facilitates access to the primary texts by providing an annotated bibliography, brief biographies of the just under 100 mostly Jewish authors of ghetto literature, and indexes of names and subject matter.

This volume examines the Jewish identity of the Austrian writers and thinkers Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Karl Kraus, and Theodor Herzl in the cultural context of the Austrian fin de siècle and the cultural crisis that went with it. All of them drew more or less consciously on a rich Jewish heritage, which they either turned away from (Kraus, Zweig) or sought a new rapprochement with (Beer-Hofmann, Herzl). The dynamic tensions resulting from the interplay between the absorption of Austrian culture, on the one hand, and the imprint of century-old Jewish traditions and values on the other find their expression in the different responses of these Austrian-Jewish personalities to the culture and cultural crisis of the fin de siècle. As such they can be considered paradigmatic for the situation of all European Jews.

Prof. Dr. Aron Freimann (1871-1948) was one of the outstanding personalities in the field of Jewish Studies at the beginning of the 20th century. He made the Hebrew and Jewish collections of Frankfurt University Library into one of the most significant holdings of its kind anywhere in Europe and also performed important functions in Frankfurt's Jewish community. The study relates the development of Jewish Studies to the context of Jewish cultural and literary history and represents an important contribution to the history of Jews in Germany prior to the advent of National Socialism.

This volume contains the lectures delivered at an international conference in Israel devoted to the topic of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Zionism. Kafka's interests in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Jewish Nationalism and his various relationships to his Zionist friends and his participation in Jewish national and Zionist-related activity are explored from a number of different critical vantage points. Likewise, his writings are considered within the specific framework of Jewish nationalism and Zionism.

The focus of this volume is the prose work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Albert Drach (1902-1995). The author explores Drach's critique of totalitarian culture by examining his representations of power and powerlessness, identity and difference, along with cultural processes of exclusion. Drawing on areas as diverse as psychoanalysis, the grotesque and post-colonial theory, this study identifies a significant discursive difference between Drach's shorter fictional prose and the Holocaust trilogy. Drach's highly original linguistic dexterity, his much-discussed 'protocol style', offers a sophisticated critique of the relationship between power, insubordination and capitulation. This is the first English language study dedicated to the complex prose of Albert Drach. It is of interest to students and scholars of Austrian literature, German-Jewish literature as well as Exile and Holocaust Studies.

In the first third of the 20th century, Georg Hermann (1871-1943) was an internationally well-known and popular author. His gentle irony and the bitter-sweet cachet of his atmospheric descriptions have remained uniquely distinctive. Both in his novels and in his political and aesthetic writings, he documents the slow artistic and intellectual change that took place in the first half of the 20th century. The articles in this volume examine Hermann's achievement as a novelist, a chronicler of life in Berlin, a critic of art and literature, and an observer of the German-Jewish response to life.

The study describes the development from autobiography to (post-modern) experimental narrative in the depiction of the Holocaust. In the interpretation of testimonies by survivors, emphasis is placed on selective memory, illustrated with reference to representative texts from different types of literature. A number of novels that have (in some cases) been given a mixed reception stand as representatives of the experimental approach (novels by Jewish and non-Jewish authors such as Hilsenrath, Gary, Grossman, Amis, Thomas, Ransmayr). A chapter is devoted to young Jewish literature in the Netherlands.

This volume, edited in honour of Professor Jeffrey L. Sammons of Yale University on the occasion of his retirement, presents a series of incisive essays on German-Jewish literary and cultural history from the Enlightenment until the rise of Nazism. Key Jewish figures, including Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Rahel Varnhagen, Berthold Auerbach, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Kafka, and Jacob Wassermann, are considered in excitingly new scholarly frameworks. Also German writers and personalities, like G. E. Lessing, Goethe, Grillparzer, Jean Paul, Julius Langbehn, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and many more, are included in diverse discussions of German-Jewish literary and cultural history of this period.

The articles in this volume derive from a German Research Council-funded project devoted to the study of discourses in German Jewish journals and the tensions they reflect between acculturation, anti-Semitism, and the quest for Jewish identity. The undertaking was initially inspired by the conviction that an analysis of Jewish periodicals is an especially promising way of reconstructing essential and existential issues concerning Jewish minorities in German-speaking countries on all important political and cultural fronts, without evening out the immediacy of the debates in favour of abstract theories. Central to the project are the debates on the First Zionist Conference in Basle and the issue of the 'Eastern Jews' in the First World War.

»Stern der Erlösung« (1921) by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is one of the great systematic works of 20th century philosophy. At the same time it is an attempt to create a foundation for Jewish identity with explicit recourse to the Bible and in contradistinction to assimilated Judaism, an attempt that for many interpreters has lost none of its actuality. What are the sources that Rosenzweig draws upon for inspiration? Which philosophers and theologians does he enter into an - explicit or implicit - dialogue with? How does he transform those sources and relate them to his arguments? The 24 articles in this collection discuss selected passages of »Stern der Erlösung« in quest of answers to these questions. The results cast a new, and frequently surprising, light on Rosenzweig's thinking.

The analysis of exile literature in the articles of this volume focuses on the Jewish experience of exile, thus giving the subject a profound, 2,500-year depth and a corresponding variety of strategies for coming to terms with the experience of exile. At the same time, this perspective broadens the perspective on the phenomenon of exile literature to include the tensions between 'exile and homecoming'. The essays discuss German, Hebrew, and French exile literature, with the emphasis on the 20th century.

The »Source Edition on the History of the Jewish Theatre in Vienna« comprises 79 sources from 1880 to 1955. Some of the documents have been translated from Yiddish. The edited sources are generously annotated and the Appendix provides information on the most important authors, plays and actors of the Jewish Theatre. This edition is the first to contain a number of documents that have hitherto been difficult to consult, for geographical and linguistic reasons. As such, it is a major source of information for scholars from different research areas and also for the broader public.

This study of the history of the Jewish Publishing House in Berlin, from its establishment in 1902 to its destruction in late 1938, are primarily the company itself, its founders, managers, owners and the broad range of books it published. Above and beyond that, its contacts with institutions, authors and other publishers provide new insights into Zionism and its representatives in Germany, among them Martin Buber, David Wolfssohn and Salman Schocken.

Thomas Mann's (1875-1955) engagement with contemporary Jews and his epic portrayals of them trace the ups and downs of history and reveal them as such. In his work, the Jews are given a key role in the debates of the 20th century. From Naphta and Krokowski in »The Magic Mountain« and Joseph and Moses there are connecting links and analogies between Germans and Jews, all the way up to Fitelberg and Breisacher in »Doctor Faustus«. The chronological treatment foregrounds both continuity and change in Mann's views, the mixture of fascination and prejudice they reveal, and their ongoing differentiation and refinement. The study (first published in French in 1995) deepens our awareness of the structural unity of Mann's oeuvre and makes a contribution to research on mentalities.

Jewish literature blossomed in Germany during the years 1933 to 1938. It was tolerated by the National Socialists and served German Jews as a means of self-ascertion and frequently also provided guidelines. With reference to narrative literature, the study provides both a general outline and an analysis of individual works, thus delineating more clearly a type of literary life that both reflected the range and scope of inner-Jewish discussion and asserted its resistance to the humiliating constraints imposed by the non-Jewish environment.

The volume assembles the papers delivered at an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Klagenfurt in December 2000. The studies focus on a variety of different topics, all of which shed light on different versions of Jewish identity (or identities) in the 19th and 20th centuries. They also mirror the polyphonic nature of the discourses on Jewish life and thought. Another aspect highlighted by the collection is the interaction between Jewish intellectuals as cultural mediators and the evolution and reception of modernism in central Europe. The main focus is on the early 20th century, with some attention also given to the post-Shoah epoch. Geographically, the studies concentrate on major centres and regions of central Europe, notably Vienna, Bohemia/Moravia, Hungary, Bukovina, Galicia, the southern Slavonic countries, and Trieste.

By illustrating the quintessentially different self-perceptions of three German writers of Jewish background, all born in or around 1880 in Berlin, this book examines a range of German-Jewish identities in a socio-cultural context in Wilhelmine Germany. Moritz Goldstein (1880-1977), the conflict of his dual identity and the interplay between being a German writer and a cultural Zionist is covered first. Particular attention is given to the genesis of his essay 'Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß' with its call for Jews to vacate their seats in German literary culture. The range of positions unfolding in the debate, following its publication in 'Der Kunstwart' in 1912, serves to illustrate the spectrum of German-Jewish self-definition at the time. In the second part, the writings of Julius Bab (1880-1955) are examined in so far as they shed light on his advocation of a synthesis of 'Deutschtum' and 'Judentum'. The far side of the spectrum of German-Jewish self-definition is represented by Ernst Lissauer (1882-1937), who propagated complete assimilation, considering the Jewish element as an obstacle which had to be overcome on the road to 'Deutschtum'. This study depicts how external cultural and political influences shaped the transformation of their ideas of what it meant to be Jewish in Germany and how they responded to increasing anti-Semitism. By recognising the way in which the individual's cultural identity was constantly refashioned in the face of external challenges, a fuller understanding of the evolving self-perception of German Jews is reached.

This study is the first to essay a systematic examination of the statements made by turn-of-the-century Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) on Judaism and anti-Semitism. They are unique from various points of view, including their number, their continuity, and the long stretch of time they extend over (1880-1931). Over and above that, they are the expression of an intensive and many-sided engagement with Schnitzler's own Jewishness, with Austria, and with German culture. Further, they are remarkable for their seismographic sensitivity to anti-Semitic tendencies of any kind, a quality that was anything but widespread at the time.

The volume assembles the papers presented at an interdisciplinary symposium organized by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in March 2000. Various conceptions of Austrian identity emerging in the course of Austria's multi-faceted political and cultural history from the 19th century to the present are analyzed for their ideological intentions. In the process, the fissures, contradictions, and myths marking Austrian history and civilization stand revealed. In counterpoint, a number of articles describe the heterogeneous and multifarious models and constructions of Jewish identity elaborated in response to the rival pulls of emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and anti-Semitism, modernity and exile.

Whereas many other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers - including Derrida - have concentrated on a refusal of totality and celebration of 'otherness', the poet and intellectual Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-1952) combines this emphasis with an equal stress on the 'need' for certain collectively acknowledged limits. Next to the wider significance of this book for discussions of Holocaust studies in relation to current theoretical and social issues, it will also offer a new interpretation of Elias Canetti's work. This is the first detailed examination of Steiner's anthropology and philosophy and its relation to the work of his close intellectual friend Canetti.

This is the first academic treatment of the life and work of Henry William Katz (1906-1992) who has been forgotten by scholars and critics for fifty years although his first novel won him the Heinrich-Heine-Prize in exile in 1937. From a combined literary, historical, biographical and sociological perspective, Ena Pedersen analyses Katz's depiction on the Eastern European Jews in Galicia, Weimar Germany and in exile, focusing on the problems of anti-Semitism, assimilation, German-Jewish symbiosis, and Jewish identity. The book further provides a first biography of Katz and places him in the context of German exile literature through comparisons with contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish writers in exile.

This study examines the only extant Arthurian romance in German Jewish (»Widuwilt« / »Artushof«) and its links with Wirnt von Gravenberc's »Wigalois«. Central concerns are German-Jewish and Jewish-German literary transfer and aspects of the history of reception and impact of »Widuwilt« and »Artushof«. The protagonist was designed to figure as a 'Jewish Arthurian knight', which indicates that as early as the 14th/15th century there was a Jewish upper class using literature as a means of social participation and representation.

The book describes the transformation of discourse in cultural studies, a discourse which after its inception around the turn of the century was also designed to salvage German-Jewish interculturality. This transformation manifests itself in a discourse on political theology (involving Carl Schmitt and Gershom Scholem) through which the disastrous dissociation of the two cultures took its final and irrevocable course.

What was the driving force that motivated Austrians driven out of their homeland after 1938 and seeking refuge in the United States and Canada to devote their professional lives to the cultivation of literature in German, thus becoming intermediaries re-tilling the intellectual subsoil of the 'perpetrator cultures' Germany and Austria in their new home? Alongside practical considerations it was certainly a love of literature, of Kafka, Rilke, Werfel, Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and their literary worlds, all of which held out the prospect of regaining a finer, more humane homeland. Throughout, however, their suspicion of German literary studies (a discipline which as early as the 1920s had vigorously supported the dissemination of nationalist and national socialist cultural ideology at Germany's universities) remained very marked indeed. At the same time, the analytic re-acquisition of literature, philosophy and art was a way of rebelling against the enforced abandonment not only of murdered friends, slaughtered relatives and confiscated property but also everything which had started to represent a home from home culturally, intellectually and emotionally.

The work begins with an attempt to understand the philosophy of Nazism and its attendant anti-Semitism, as a necessary prelude to the study of philo-Semitism, which also displays a continuous tradition to the present day. Most of the non-Jewish authors in Germany in the nineteenth century expressed both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic views (as did most of the German-Jewish authors of that same time); the following work deals with philo-Semitic texts by the non-Jewish authors of the period. The writer who provides the largest body of relevant material is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but works by Gutzkow, Bettine von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Grillparzer, Ebner-Eschenbach, Anzengruber, and Ferdinand von Saar are also examined, as are several tales by the Alsatian authors Erckmann and Chatrian. There is a short chapter on women and philo-Semitism. The conclusion draws attention to the feelings of guilt that are revealed in a number of the texts.

A collection of analyses of Paul Celan's work as a translator is supplemented here by studies on and by translators of Celan's works into other languages. The intriguing quality of this confrontation lies in the light it trains on the necessity of subjecting the language and the interpretation of a poem to a process of transformation extending to the very terms in which they are cast.

In German Romantic literature, Jewish mysticism was also a source of inspiration for Christian authors such as Novalis, F. Schlegel, Brentano, Arnim, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Whereas for Romantic theologians and philosophers the Kabbala represented the primal religious doctrine of humanity and a bridge between Rabbinic tradition and Christianity, the literary fraternity saw in it both an esoteric Jewish doctrine of the arcane and the magical and a trope for the mysterious power of language and writing to transcend rationalism and conscious authorial intention.

The study sets out (a) to give an in-depth account of the discursive implications of the complex terms 'Judaism', 'modern' and feuilleton (arts pages) against the background of present-day theories of modernity, alterity and the history of aesthetics, and (b) to demonstrate the interdependency of discourses on politics and literary aesthetics with reference to concrete texts. The analysis of selected Viennese feuilletons (the corpus comprises texts by Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, Ferdinand Kürnberger, Sigmund Schlesinger, Friedrich Schlögl, Karl Landsteiner, Betty Paoli, Daniel Spitzer, Ludwig Speidel and Theodor Herzl) concentrates on the strategies of literarization employed by bourgeois-liberal journalism in its persistently conservative phase to bolster the concepts of identity informing it.

This study attempts to analyze the multi-faceted and complicated relationship between the Central European, Germanic-Austrian cultural milieu and the Jewish national literature and culture which evolved within it at the turn of the last century. Issues regarding the construction and differentiation of a modern Jewish national identity and culture as an aspect of Cultural Zionism are central to this project, as are the problematical literary and cultural partnerships forged in an age of rising racialist thought, growing feminist consciousness, and increasing secularism.

The Bohemian and Moravian ghetto novels by Leopold Kompert (1822-1886), Eduard Kulke (1831-1897) and others are a repository of frequently highly detailed information on Jewish social life in the 19th century. For the first time in the framework of a study in cultural anthropology, they are examined here for their value as literary sources serving the reconstruction of everyday Jewish life. Also central to the investigation is the question of Jewish assimilation/acculturation in the age of emancipation, a subject dealt with notably in Heinrich Heine's famous »Rabbi von Bacherach« (1840).

The articles in this volume originated from a symposium organized in 1994 by the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The aim was to elaborate a methodological framework for research into German-Jewish intercultural identity, centering on an attempt to define the 'intercultural space' between two cultures. This space proves to be the condition both of potential cultural renewal and of the real catastrophes occurring in the context of intercultural encounter. The problem of intercultural translation needs to be seen in terms of the theory and practice of dialogue across this space, inasfar as the locus of this problem is situated in the 'space' between translatability and untranslatability.

The articles in this volume originated from an international and interdisciplinary symposium organized in October 1994 by the Bibliothèque Nationale Luxembourg in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute (London), the Division of German-Jewish Literary History at the RWTH Technical University in Aachen and the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature of Haifa University. Common to all of them is the question of the various available modes of individual and collective Jewish self-awareness and self-definition existing in Central Europe in the period between 1870 and the Third Reich/Second World War.

The writer Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) is one of the figures of political and literary life around the turn of the century whose importance for German-Jewish modernism has been largely neglected. Anarchist and reformer, writer and theatre critic, friend of Martin Buber and intellectual pioneer and mainstay of cultural Zionism, he left a body of work that has yet to be explored in all its variety and apparent contradictions. Hence the articles in this volume approach Landauer from a broad range of viewpoints. Some point up the early formative influences on Landauer and his particular predilections, his reading of Goethe and Spinoza, his first forays into literary activity; others trace hitherto neglected links between Landauer and psychoanalyst Karl Landauer, mathematician Felix Hausdorff and theologian Paul Tillich. Also subjected to analysis are the problems posed by the political message of Landauer as a revolutionary of the Munich Räterepublik and the utopian impact of his ideas on the Weimar years. Other contributions cast light on German-Jewish modernism in the context of the history of ideas, almost all of them converging in the extermination or banishment of its representatives by the Nazis.

Up to the pogrom of November 1938, German Jews were legally entitled to publish and there was a broad range of Jewish publications. Thereafter the National Socialists prohibited the over 100 Jewish periodicals hitherto available. With reference to content analyses of the four largest and most important newspapers and interviews with former journalists, the author examines the inherent potential for intellectual resistance and in so doing establishes a tentative 'typology of Jewish resistance behaviour'. Brief monographs, a table of the titles of all traceable Jewish periodicals appearing during the Third Reich, an index of persons and a number of potted biographies also make the book a useful source of reference.

In careful analyses of selected scenes from Nelly Sachs' dramas (1891-1970), the study pinpoints the Jewish, language-philosophical and aesthetic traditions central to the stage works of this author. The texts themselves represent an inherently complex process of artistic reflection on the limits between lyric and dramatic diction. By concentrating on individual texts by an author profoundly shaken by the shoah, the analysis situates her dramatic oeuvre in the context of the ongoing debate on obsessive memory in the face of the universal disappearance of idealist utopias.

The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.

This collection of new studies on Jewish authors from Austria (among them Franzos, Beer-Hofmann, Schnitzler, Broch, Roth, Kisch, Brod, Canetti, Celan, Ausländer) is dedicated to the Tel-Aviv literary historian Margarita Pazi. Common to the articles is the endeavour to offset a certain tendency towards de-historicization in the assessment of their works, given that all these writers bear the imprint, to a greater or lesser degree, of Austria under the Habsburgs, with its broad variety of literary landscapes. The effects of this specific constellation continued to make themselves felt up to the Second World War and beyond, as is reflected in the works of many of the authors dealt with here.

The »Bayreuther Blätter« periodical was founded by Richard Wagner in 1878. In the 61 years of its existence, it was the central literary vehicle of the cultural movement emanating from Bayreuth and as such represents a major source of information on mentalities prevalent in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century. The study traces the origins and foundation of the publication and discusses its scope, design, conception, the audience it addressed itself to, and the contributors who wrote for it. A central focus is the discussion of the ideological role played by the periodical in connection with anti-Semitism, racism and Teutonicism. In addition, an alphabetic index of authors and a systematic index of key-words make the volume into a detailed work of reference on the »Bayreuther Blätter« and a valuable bibliographic resource.

"Yet the dark places are the centre" claims George Steiner in "The Bluebird's Castle". Any attempt to analyze rationally the predominating barbaric phenomenon of the 20th century, namely the Holocaust and its Fascist background, challenges the limits of human understanding. The phenomenon of the Holocaust is a consequence of these "dark places" where again in Steiner's words "we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization". A final understanding of the theme is beyond the limits of rationality and may also be viewed in the light of Adorno's "no poetry after Auschwitz". Nevertheless, the need to attempt reflective and creative 'work' on this topic continues. The aim of the book is to study the relationship between ideology and myth as they function diversely in Fascist and Antifascist drama. All the plays discussed are constructed as a paradigmatic constellation between myth and ideology, coordinated by a central and homogeneous political intent. The difference between them lies in their Fascist or Antifascist attitude. The plays analyzed were chosen for the treatment of a common thematic Ur-myth: the post-figuration of the return of the prodigal son and the story of the crucifixion from the New Testament. The 'prodigal cluster' includes plays by Franz Theodor Csokor, Ernst Wiechert and Max Frisch, the 'sacrificial cluster' plays by Otto Erler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and George Tabori. As an introductory analysis, the theme of the artist and his mission is treated in two plays written in the pre-Nationalsocialist period: "Der Einsame. Ein Menschenuntergang" by Hanns Johst and Bertold Brecht's reaction to this play in "Baal". A final analysis deals with the fusion of mythologems and ideologems as demonstrated in two plays dealing with the New Myth of Germania by Richard Eutinger and Heiner Müller.

In the 19th century the ghetto literature genre was a central phenomenon in avowedly Jewish literature both in German-speaking areas and in Central Europe in general. In terms of literary history the genre is associated with the rise of regional literature after the 1830s and the village chronicle in particular. This meant that in the course of the 19th century German-speaking areas (alongside Germany itself notably the countries of the Habsburg monarchy) saw the emergence of a wide variety of ghetto narratives. What all these had in common was their function as a literary response by Jewish authors to the cardinal issue of the potential forms available for Jewish emancipation and identity in that period.

The life and work of the writer and literary scholar Ludwig Strauß (b. 1892 in Aachen, d. 1953 in Jerusalem) represent the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture to a degree otherwise rarely encountered. This collection of articles on his life and work, edited by the first holder of the newly-established Ludwig Strauß Chair of German-Jewish Literary History at the German Department of the Technical University (»RWTH«) of Aachen, assembles essays marking the 90th and 100th anniversaries of his birth. Thus the opportunity for a new or more profound acquaintance with the personality of Strauß the creative author and literary scholar in all its various facets has never been more favourable.

The question of whether Palestine, where Else Lasker-Schüler spent the last six years of her life (1939-1945), was in fact able to represent a 'home' for her is discussed in this study from a variety of new vantages. Of central importance here is an understanding of Else Lasker-Schüler's 'transgressive' view of her host country, i.e. a view concentrating on the dynamics of various kinds of transition. This generates a new perspective not only on the late poems and the posthumously published drama »Ichundich« written in Jerusalem but also on the book »Das Hebräerland«, the fruit of her first journey to Palestine.

The once dominant role played by the art of aphorism in the various genres of European literature is a thing of the past. The present study sets out to show why traditional contemporary aphoristic writing is frequently derivative and how the poet Elazar Benyoëtz breaks with the conventions prevailing in it. Of significance here, as in the much broader currents of contemporary philosophy, is the way in which the individual 'other' attains a new status over and against the 'self' in Benyoëtz' work. Whereas in traditional aphoristic writing the 'other' is largely addressed via the unmasking of collective clichés, Benyoëtz draws upon the individualising elements of aphoristic discourse to achieve an individualisation of the 'other'.

The religious interest in natural philosophy, magic, pantheism, mystic language theories and symbolism, theogony and cosmogony displayed by many German Romantic authors was a response to what Hegel called the 'aridity of the Enlightenment'. This interest led to a rediscovery of cabbala. Among Jewish Romantics, and to an even greater extent among Christian Romantics, Jewish mysticism became not only a source of religious, philosophical, and artistic inspiration, but also a subject of scholarly and philosophical debate. In 1991 the hitherto largely neglected interconnections between cabbala and the history of scholarship, literature, and ideas in the Romantic period were the subject of two interdisciplinary symposia at the University of Kassel and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This ist he first major monograph on Richard Beer-Hofmann (1866-1945), the most significant representative of the early 20th century Viennese literature alongside Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler. Its three parts provide 1) an overall discussion of Beer-Hofmann's work; 2) an in-depth interpretation of his novel »Der Tod Georgs« and 3) a discussion of the links between this novel and philosophical discourse around the turn of the century (language scepticism, critical empiricism, monism, Gestalt psychology, interpretation of dreams, theories of myth), also tracing for the first time the literary connections between Beer-Hofmann and other prominent authors of the epoch (Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Andrian, Bahr, George, Rilke, Borchardt). Central to Beer-Hofmann's literary identity is his demonstrative and affirmative declaration of his Jewishness from the late 1890s onwards.

A considerable portion of the literature of exile and emigration in the 20th century has come from Jewish authors. Yet it appears to be the case that specifically Jewish features are subordinated to those experience common to all exiles (acculturation problems, antifascist commitment) or at least do not leave any major imprint on the literary works themselves. Little attention has been given to this point in the discussion of exile literature so far. The essays assembled in this volume represent an initial approach to the problem. They stem from a symposium organised by the Department of German Language and Literature of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 1989.

Proceeding from a critique of existing theories on the fantastic and the historical novelo that have largely guided previous research on the Jewish author Leo Perutz (1882-1957), the present study attempts to pursue new avenues of inquiry. The analysis of »Die Dritte Kugel« (1915) and »Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke« (1953) points up both the range and the consistency of Perutz' conception of the historical novel. Drawing on Christian and Jewish theology, Perutz constructs an image of the world in which the protagonists invariably fail to achieve their ends. They are doomed by the 'logic of history' and their efforts end in their own destruction. In complete reversal of Hegel's dictum history is seen to operate via the 'ruse of unreason'.

This volume contains the lectures, many substantially expanded and revised, which were delivered at an international conference held at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva in 1990. By utilizing the methodological guidelines and insights of reception aesthetics, a range of Jewish readings of Heine's works and his complex literary personality are analyzed. Considerations of his impact on major figures, like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Karl Kraus, Else Lasker-Schüler, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod comprise the major part of the book. In addition, there are readings of Heine by minor or neglected Jewish writers and poets, including, for example, Aron Bernstein and Fritz Heymann, and by Jewish writers in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, as well as by Jewish readers within other national readerships, for example, the American and Croatian. In the process of this analysis, the notion of Jewish reception itself is naturally subjected to critical scrutiny.