Studies in Symbolist and Modern Literature

Although a number of important studies have reopened the question of the German-Jewish dialogue (such as those by Klaus Berghahn, George Mosse, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and, most recently, Jonathan Hess), the “place” of Jews and Jewish thought within German modernism is still contested ground.  This is partly due to Gershom Scholem’s famous critique that the German-Jewish dialogue never took place. This course will begin by reassessing and, ultimately, rejecting Scholem’s position in favor of alternative models for studying the cultural histories and geographies of German/Jewish modernism.

Rather than considering German-Jewish modernism as a problem of “dialogue” (or lack thereof), we will look at a number of critical case studies, which allow us to re-imagine the cultural genealogy of this modernism as a complex of dialectical relationships, tensions, and responses between Jewish thinkers and German thinkers. Possible case studies include: Dohm’s idea for the “civic improvement” of the Jews and Mendelssohn’s challenge to Jewish regeneracy in Jerusalem; the place of Jews within Hegel’s Philosophy of World History and Heine’s “deconstruction” of Hegel in his Reisebilder; the emergence of Goethe’s transnational “German” subject in the Italienische Reise and Kafka’s immigrant subject in Der Verschollene; and Freud’s representational practice of memory in The Interpretation of Dreams and Sebald’s reworking of Freud in his novel Austerlitz. Using Mendes-Flohr, Hess, and Benjamin’s reflections on history as our jumping-off points, we will attempt to imagine alternative models for understanding and historicizing German-Jewish modernism. We will conclude by looking at the consequences of this reconsideration, such as the deterritorialization of the German language, nation, and culture, and the emergence of cultural models of hybridity, transnationality, and contamination. Students are expected to develop and present individual research projects as well as write a research paper. This course will be taught in English, and the readings will be available in German and English translation.