Introduction: Positions to Defend

Summary

GERMAN LITERATURE, Jewish Critics — the title announces a tension. German literature — its writing, reception, and canonization — has long been bound up in an uneasy, often exclusionary relationship to German-Jewish history. “In the course of its historical development,” Egon Schwarz wrote in his memoirs, “German literature and culture has always stood in a certain tension to Judaism.” For many Jews this tension became acute in the wake of the Holocaust. “The study of German literature and culture,” Schwarz notes with respect to his own turn to the field in 1949, “demands an explanation, perhaps even a justification, from a Jew who speaks and writes German, especially when it comes so soon after the Second World War and the massacre of Jews by Germans.” On the one hand there is, then, a literature with a specific history of exclusion, and an event, the catastrophe itself, which for many Jews changed everything. But the matter is neither so simple nor one-sided. For German literature was also an opening, a point of identification, a world German Jews could enter and consider theirs, even if its language was also the language of the perpetrators.

The second part of the dyad — Jewish critics — is also problematic, especially since in racist thought it was the Germans who created literature and Jews who criticized it. This opposition rested upon a still older idea according to which non-Jewish Germans worked and produced and eked out a living by the sweat of their brows while Jews were parasitic upon the labor of others. At first glance, the opposition German literature-Jewish critics would seem to reproduce this old trope of the anti-Semitic imagination.

Still, we must be mindful and not let our understanding of the past be sabotaged by a poisoned language. Trauma must not be allowed to close the gates of experience. There is a relationship between German literature and Jewish critics; it is complex and overdetermined; it has a history and it carries a burden; and it is constitutive for our field. This volume seeks to understand this relationship and to illuminate its intricacies.

I

The discovery, primarily in the 1980s, of the Holocaust as both a traumatic event and a scholarly subject, constituted the central axis around which thinking about Jewish critics and German literature turned.