Exile as a Literary-Political Mission: Leo Katz’s Antifascist Bukovina Novel Totenjäger (1944)

Summary

Both Leo Katz’s (1892–1954) name and his novel Totenjäger (1944, Death Hunters) are barely known at all in German-speaking culture or academic Germanistik. This is unjust, because Katz is one of the most important German-language authors of Jewish descent from Bukovina, a German-speaking literary landscape in Eastern Europe that emerged in the Habsburg period and endured through the process of Romanianization after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, yet eventually foundered during the Second World War. Although Katz left Bukovina at the age of twenty-two, he repeatedly made literary returns to his native land—as in the case of his first novel Totenjäger. As is so often the case with exile authors, this work is hard to understand without an awareness of Katz’s eventful biography and his political convictions, as well as historical developments in Eastern Europe. Above all else, it is important to bear in mind that Totenjäger is not intended to be an autonomous aesthetic work, but is a Zeitroman (novel of the times) that reacts to, comments upon, and offers an interpretation of historical reality. In that regard, this novel is highly characteristic of the German-speaking exile community in Mexico of which Katz was part: here, the antifascist, communist, and pro-Soviet worldview of the German-speaking émigrés comes out to the full.

Leo Katz’s Life and Work

Leo Katz came from a Hassidic family from Siret, a small town in Bukovina with a predominantly Jewish population. Until the end of the First World War, Siret belonged to the k. u. k. (i.e., kaiserlich und königlich) Habsburg monarchy and sat on the Romanian border; and from 1919, the town was in Romania. Both Katz’s religious background and growing up in a multiethnic Bukovina milieu loyal to the Habsburg regime took on vital significance in his private and literary life. As a result of his orthodox upbringing, Katz always held on to the daily devotional readings from the Tanakh and devoted himself to the history of Judaism even beyond his studies in Vienna, where he wrote his dissertation on the impact of the Black Death on the situation of the Jews in Germany; but this form of socialization also gave a particular color to his literary works, for example, in updating episodes from Jewish history and the Tanakh. Not least, Katz thanked his origins for his mastery of Yiddish as a second mother tongue, alongside German.