Jüdische Geschichte Archive – ZfL BLOG https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/tag/juedische-geschichte/ Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:09:41 +0000 de-DE hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cropped-ZfL_Bildmarke_RGB_rot-32x32.png Jüdische Geschichte Archive – ZfL BLOG https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/tag/juedische-geschichte/ 32 32 Ernst Müller: LAZAR GULKOWITSCHS FRÜHE GRUNDLEGUNG DER BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/12/21/ernst-mueller-lazar-gulkowitschs-fruehe-grundlegung-der-begriffsgeschichte/ Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:24:05 +0000 https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/?p=2814 Die erste Monografie, die sich ausdrücklich und titelgebend mit der »begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode« befasste, stammt von dem jüdischen Religionswissenschaftler Lazar Gulkowitsch (1898–1941). Vier Jahre vor seiner Ermordung durch die Nationalsozialisten veröffentlichte er 1937 Zur Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode in der Sprachwissenschaft in einer deutschsprachigen, der Wissenschaft des Judentums gewidmeten Reihe, die an der Universität Tartu (Dorpat), Weiterlesen

Der Beitrag Ernst Müller: LAZAR GULKOWITSCHS FRÜHE GRUNDLEGUNG DER BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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Die erste Monografie, die sich ausdrücklich und titelgebend mit der »begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode« befasste, stammt von dem jüdischen Religionswissenschaftler Lazar Gulkowitsch (1898–1941). Vier Jahre vor seiner Ermordung durch die Nationalsozialisten veröffentlichte er 1937 Zur Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode in der Sprachwissenschaft in einer deutschsprachigen, der Wissenschaft des Judentums gewidmeten Reihe, die an der Universität Tartu (Dorpat), dem Ort seines estnischen Exils, erschien.[1] Obwohl sich in den letzten Jahren verschiedene Publikationen Gulkowitsch und seinem Werk widmeten,[2] ist seine Schrift zur Begriffsgeschichte selbst dem Fachpublikum dieser geisteswissenschaftlichen Methode unbekannt geblieben, ebenso wie die zahlreichen Untersuchungen, in denen er die Begriffsgeschichte auf den Begriff ›Chassid‹ (Frommer) sowie den Chassidismus[3] anwandte. Gulkowitsch entwickelte dort an Konzepten der jüdischen Geistesgeschichte eine speziell auf die Geschichte des Judentums bezogene Theorie der Begriffsgeschichte, die aber zugleich mit dem Anspruch einer universalistischen Metatheorie der Geistesgeschichte für verschiedene Kulturen antrat.

Die Begriffsgeschichte bildete für ihn das methodische Zentrum für die jüdische Geistesgeschichte und für die Beantwortung einer ganzen Reihe jüdisch-theologischer Fragen. Gleich im Vorwort seiner Grundlegung bezeichnete er den historischen Ort seines Unterfangens. Gulkowitsch sah zeitgenössisch »den Anbruch einer neuen Epoche in der Geschichte der Sprachen«, der sich dadurch auszeichne, »daß die Sprachentwicklung bewußt in den Dienst aktiver Geschichtsgestaltung gestellt« werde.[4] Deutlich erkennbar hatte er die »gegenwärtigen Bestrebungen zur Ausgestaltung des modernen Hebräisch« im Blick[5] und suchte in der Begriffsgeschichte auch nach Antworten, um die Zukunft eines geistigen Judentums zwischen Assimilation und Zionismus zu bestimmen.

Lange Zeit erschien die »German Begriffsgeschichte«, die in große begriffsgeschichtliche Wörterbücher wie die Geschichtlichen Grundbegriffe oder das Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie mündete, in ihrem theoretischen Rückgriff auf Carl Schmitt, Otto Brunner oder Werner Conze als eine Tradition nicht nur eher konservativer, sondern auch deutschnationaler Intellektueller, die anderen Kulturen und anderen Sprachen kaum verständlich war.[6] Neben dieser Tradition gab es allerdings eine andere Linie oftmals ins Exil getriebener, in der Diskussion erst schrittweise ins Gedächtnis zurückgerufener oder eher untergründig wirkender jüdischer oder aus dem Judentum stammender Intellektueller, die sich direkt oder von der Sache her mit der Historizität von Begriffen beschäftigte: Sie lässt sich zurückführen bis auf Moritz Lazarus und reicht über Fritz Mauthner, Ernst Cassirer und Karl Mannheim bis zu den explizit begriffsgeschichtlich arbeitenden Romanisten Leo Spitzer und Erich Auerbach, dem polnischen Bakteriologen und Wissenschaftshistoriker Ludwik Fleck sowie dem Mediävisten und Begründer der Geschichtswissenschaft an der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem Richard Koebner. Unter Einbezug dieser Gelehrten, die unabhängig und meist in wechselseitiger Unkenntnis voneinander ihre Arbeiten zur Begriffsgeschichte nahezu gleichzeitig um die Mitte der 1930er Jahre veröffentlichten (Lazarus und Mauthner ausgenommen), erscheint diese kurze Spanne – um Reinhart Kosellecks Begriff umzumünzen – geradezu als ›Sattelzeit‹ der Begriffsgeschichte.

Warum aber interessierten sich jüdische Intellektuelle für die Begriffsgeschichte? Warum entwickelten sich die Begriffs- und auch die Ideengeschichte zu Favoriten ihrer Narration? Gulkowitsch spezifizierte seine begriffsgeschichtliche Methode an Besonderheiten der jüdischen und hebräischen Sprachgeschichte (ein Urtext, eine allein durch Sprache zusammengehaltene Diasporaexistenz): »Die Sprache ist immer die letzte Zuflucht einer von außen her bedrängten eigenständigen Kultur.«[7] Die »letzte Zerstörung des Tempels in Jerusalem«[8] erscheint bei Gulkowitsch wie ein Gleichnis auf seine unmittelbare Gegenwart und die erneute Vertreibung und Verfolgung der Juden. Die Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode lässt sich damit auch als Gulkowitschs unmittelbare Antwort auf die jüdische Gegenwartssituation verstehen. Begriffsgeschichte erweist sich als Fortsetzung der jüdischen Geschichte mit anderen Mitteln:

»Einem künstlichen Ersatz des Tempelkultes wäre es niemals gelungen, Wirkungen in der Geschichte hervorzubringen. Nur dadurch, daß der Eingriff von außen her die Explikation der Begriffe nicht radikal abschneiden konnte, sondern ihr bloß eine andere, aber dem Wesen dieser Kultur durchaus adäquate Richtung gab, wurde der Fortbestand der jüdischen Kultur als solcher garantiert, fand ihre Geschichte nicht etwa ein Ende, wie dies von der Geschichtsforschung des Öftern behauptet worden ist. Es ist für das Wesen eines solchen Eingriffes von außen her ohne Belang, ob ein sichtbares Symbol, wie ein Tempel, zerstört wird. Jeder Eingriff gegen geistige Werte ist eine solche Tempelzerstörung. In solchen Fällen ist es von entscheidender Bedeutung, ob das in Frage gestellte geistige Prinzip stark genug ist, um in neuen Formen anstelle der zerstörten einen adäquaten Ausdruck zu finden.«[9]

Die Diasporasituation legt es nahe, Geschichte vor allem als Geschichte von Sprache und Auslegung zu fassen. Der Zeitlosigkeit des göttlichen Gesetzes, die im Zentrum alles Jüdischen steht und um die herum sich konzentrisch profanere Gebiete gruppieren, trifft auch die Voraussetzungen, unter denen Gulkowitsch dachte. »Die das Judentum tragenden, sakral durchdrungenen Begriffswelten«, so Dan Diner »gelten zu allen Zeiten und über alle Räume jüdischer Existenzerfahrung hinweg. Dabei sind sie religionsgesetzlich begründeten Anpassungen unterworfen«.[10] Diese Perspektive macht deutlich, warum in Gulkowitschs Schriften mitunter eine merkwürdige Raum- und Ortlosigkeit herrscht, in der er das »Kontinuum der Entwicklung von der Entstehung des Judentums an bis zum heutigen Tage« ansiedelt.[11]

Sein ambitionierter Versuch, in den 1930er Jahren auf einem noch unbestellten Feld eine Begriffsgeschichte von der oder für die jüdische Geschichte zu entwerfen, ist in Kenntnis wichtiger sprachwissenschaftlicher und sprachphilosophischer Strömungen der Zeit verfasst. Dabei verwendete er eine Reihe methodischer Begriffe, die für das Jahr 1937 erstaunlich modern klingen: Latenz, Spur, Emergenz, Sprechakt, Begriff des Unbegrifflichen.

Die Edition von Gulkowitschs Schriften bietet nun Gelegenheit, sich die Modernität dieses frühen Begriffshistorikers zu vergegenwärtigen.

Der Philosophiehistoriker Ernst Müller leitet das ZfL-Schwerpunktprojekt »Das 20. Jahrhundert in Grundbegriffen. Lexikon zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland«. Von 2018–2022 arbeitete er, gefördert durch die Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, am ZfL gemeinsam mit Annett Martini (Freie Universität Berlin) an der Edition von Gulkowitschs begriffsgeschichtlichen Schriften.

Der Beitrag ist eine geringfügig modifizierte Fassung des ersten Teils der von Ernst Müller zusammen mit Annett Martini verfassten Einleitung zur Edition von Lazar Gulkowitsch: »Schriften zur begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode 1934–1940/41« (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, [Bibliothek jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur/Library of Jewish History and Culture, 3], 2022). Die Edition ist im Open Access verfügbar und enthält neben »Zur Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode in der Sprachwissenschaft« Arbeiten zu den Begriffen ›Chassid‹ und ›Chassidismus‹.

 

[1] Lazar Gulkowitsch: Zur Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode in der Sprachwissenschaft, Tartu 1937 (Acta Seminarii Litterarum Judaearum Universitatis Tartuensis).

[2] Vgl. vor allem den auf umfassenden Quellenmaterialien basierenden Gesamtüberblick bei Anu Põldsam: Lazar Gulkowitsch. Eine vergessene Stimme der Wissenschaft des Judentums, Dissertation, Universität Tartu 2011; dies.: »Von Leipzig nach Dorpat. Lazar Gulkowitsch und die deutschsprachige Wissenschaft des Judentums«, in: Arndt Engelhardt/Susanne Zepp (Hg.): Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung. Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenstradition, Leipzig 2015, S. 87–102.

[3] Vgl. hierzu Glenn Dynner: »Chassidismus«, in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig herausgegeben von Dan Diner, 7 Bde., Weimar/Stuttgart 2011–2017, hier Bd. 1, S. 489–498.

[4] Lazar Gulkowitsch: »Zur Grundlegung einer begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode«, in: ders.: Schriften zur begriffsgeschichtlichen Methode 1934–1940/41, hg. von Ernst Müller in Zusammenarbeit mit Annett Martini, Göttingen 2022, S. 91–412, hier S. 97.

[5] Ebd., S. 98.

[6] Vgl. den Gesamtüberblick Ernst Müller/Falko Schmieder: Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik. Ein kritisches Kompendium, Berlin 2016.

[7] Gulkowitsch: »Zur Grundlegung« (Anm. 4), S. 217.

[8] Ebd., S. 127.

[9] Ebd., S. 128.

[10] Dan Diner: »Einführung«, in: Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (Anm. 3), Bd. 1, S. VII–XVIII, hier S. X.

[11] Lazar Gulkowitsch: Die Bildung des Begriffes Ḥāsīd I. Der Begriff Ḥāsīd in der Gattung der Ma’aśijjōt. 1. Ḥāsīd und Wunder, Tartu 1935; jetzt in: Gulkowitsch: Schriften (Anm. 4), S. 454–488, hier S. 455.

 

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Ernst Müller: Lazar Gulkowitschs frühe Grundlegung der Begriffsgeschichte, in: ZfL Blog, 21.12.2022, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/12/21/ernst-mueller-lazar-gulkowitschs-fruehe-grundlegung-der-begriffsgeschichte/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20221221-01

Der Beitrag Ernst Müller: LAZAR GULKOWITSCHS FRÜHE GRUNDLEGUNG DER BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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Brett Winestock: MUSEUMS OF SHAME: Dovid Hofshteyn’s Vision of Holocaust Remembrance https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/08/17/brett-winestock-museums-of-shame-dovid-hofshteyns-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance/ Wed, 17 Aug 2022 07:36:26 +0000 https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/?p=2649 In early 1944, shortly after the liberation of Kyiv, the Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952) returned home from evacuation and was confronted firsthand with the horrors of the Holocaust. This encounter moved him to pen the passionate essay Muzeyen fun shand (Museums of Shame).[1] As a writer who had lived through pogroms and civil war, Weiterlesen

Der Beitrag Brett Winestock: MUSEUMS OF SHAME: Dovid Hofshteyn’s Vision of Holocaust Remembrance erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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In early 1944, shortly after the liberation of Kyiv, the Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn (1889–1952) returned home from evacuation and was confronted firsthand with the horrors of the Holocaust. This encounter moved him to pen the passionate essay Muzeyen fun shand (Museums of Shame).[1] As a writer who had lived through pogroms and civil war, Hofshteyn was no stranger to expressing his reaction to violence and destruction through literature. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, he became a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), a group largely made up of Soviet Jewish cultural figures whose work was meant to reach a Jewish audience both within and outside the Soviet Union. In an attempt to rally political, financial, and military support for the Soviet war effort, their work was regularly sent to Yiddish presses in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain but also as far as Argentina and South Africa. It was this position as a member of the JAC which made it possible for Hofshteyn to receive information from the front while he was evacuated, to write, and eventually, along with a group of other writers, return home and survey the devastation.

Soviet writers were among the first to publish their accounts and descriptions of a devastation that was almost incomprehensible at the time. Initially, it was assumed that Nazi violence against Jews would be similar to that of earlier pogroms, yet it turned out to be immeasurably worse. Hofshteyn was moved, in particular, by indisputable, visual, and immediate evidence, the “horrible pictures of massacres and sadistic acts of violence.” Yet, rather than finding himself immobilized by his grief, as was the case with many Soviet Jewish writers, he was ready not just to rebuild what had been lost, but to create something new. He suggested gathering pictures, documents, and tools of this terrible time that were to be displayed in so-called museums of shame in “every major city in the world and in every point of German population.”

Typescript of Dovid Hofshteyn’s Muzeyen fun shand. GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 90, 463-465. Published courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii, GARF).”
Typescript of Dovid Hofshteyn’s Muzeyen fun shand. GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 90, 463-465. Published courtesy of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii, GARF).

More than 50 years later, Hofshteyn’s vision has partially come to life: Holocaust memorials and museums are common today in Germany and across the globe. Institutions such as the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, which opened in 2015, aim to gather and display evidence of Nazi crimes for educational purposes. Such sites, however, lack some of the most remarkable features of a museum of shame as envisioned by Hofshteyn. For example, in Muzeyen fun shand, the poet invoked the widespread belief that the Nazis made soap from Jewish corpses, a belief he turned into a powerful symbolic performance: Young Germans were to be lathered with soap made from the bodies of the worst Nazi perpetrators in order to wash off the stain that lay upon the entire German people. Along with passing an exam on the crimes committed during the Holocaust, this cleansing would become a ritual that every young German had to undergo before entering adulthood, becoming a member of society, or even calling themselves a human being (a mentsh). Also absent from today’s Holocaust memorials is what Hofshteyn called the “peripheral work” of his imagined museums of shame – the gallows which should stand in every German city and hang everyone incapable of washing away the savagery of their ancestors.

Hofshteyn had called Kyiv his home since 1907. He first rose to prominence as a member of the so-called “Kyiv Group,” the unofficial name for a loosely connected collective of modernist writers that had begun working around the time of revolution and civil war in the late 1910s. Though he briefly left for Mandatory Palestine during the turbulent 1920s, Hofshteyn remained closely tied to the city of Kyiv for much of his life. Returning to it in 1944, he searched tirelessly for his mother and brother who had been left behind, only to discover that they had been murdered at the Babyn Yar ravine – along with tens of thousands of other Jews in one of the Nazis’ largest mass shootings. Neither a documentation center nor a museum of shame had yet been built at the site of Hofshteyn’s most personal loss. Accordingly, in 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko began his famous poem “Babi Yar” (the title reflecting the Russian rather than Ukrainian name of the ravine) with the line, “There are no monuments over Babi Yar…”[2] In the absence of a physical memorial site, Yevtushenko instead erected a literary monument. The first monument was established as late as 1976. However, due to the Soviet nationalities policy which had begun to discourage minority expression and instead sought to unify the country by portraying the entire Soviet people as equal victims, the site did not specifically mention the Jewish victims executed at Babyn Yar. Though there was no explicit Soviet guideline on memorializing the Holocaust, the saying “Do not divide the dead” best expressed a policy which tacitly erased the uniqueness of Jewish suffering.

A menorah-shaped monument in memory of the Jewish victims was erected in 1991 and, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there were plans to fully open the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center by 2023 – though those plans have certainly been hindered by the latest war of aggression on the territory of Ukraine. On March 1, Russian forces even damaged the site of Babyn Yar; the symbolism of such an attack was noted by many, including the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who asked on Twitter the same day, “what is the point of saying «never again» for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” However, even prior to the Russian war against Ukraine, the Memorial Center was already shrouded in controversy. Some critics were wary that certain funders – Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin – would seek to turn the site into an outlet for Kremlin propaganda with an anti-Ukrainian bias that focused predominantly on Ukrainian collaborators. While a number of Ukrainians were indeed collaborators during the Holocaust, even more Ukrainians became victims of the Nazis. Other critics thus argue that a sober look at the crimes committed by Ukrainians as well as by the German occupiers is a sign of the mature civil society which has emerged in Ukraine.

Covering a territory of almost 1,500 square kilometers, the Memorial Center would have eventually consisted of museums, research centers, works of art, and other audio-based and visual exhibits, including a 3D topographical map, a mirror field of reflective columns riddled with bullet holes, and a sound sculpture that murmurs the names of the dead in an endless loop. This combination of traditional and modern, interactive elements was criticized for not being somber enough for such a memorial; critics have gone so far as to deride the project as a “Holocaust Disneyland.” Advocates, on the other hand, simply describe it as a modern museum that makes use of all the technological and creative elements at its disposal to educate an audience which is more than three-quarters of a century removed from the crimes of the Holocaust. The tools may thus differ significantly from what Hofshteyn originally imagined, but in its focus on education through sensory immersion, the Babyn Yar memorial site’s aims are not that different from Hofshteyn’s museums of shame.

At a time of great mourning, Hofshteyn’s call for education was remarkable.

“Mir veln onwendn tsu di yunge daytshn di zelbe metodn, vos me vendet on tsu kets un tsu hint: mirn zey shtoysn mitn gantsn gezikht in dem shoyderlekhn heslekhn shmuts, vos dos daytshishe folk hot ongerikht in di yorn fun der milkhome.” [3]

We will use the same methods with the younger German generations that we use with cats and dogs: We will push their entire face into the horrible, disgusting filth that the German people have done during the war. (My translation.)

This focus on the full-bodied and multisensory experience of shame is best understood not as vindictive but as educational. In fact, it was a language of “reeducation” similar to that of the denazification of Germany. Hofshteyn’s museums of shame were thus the very first step away from grievance and toward indictment. The eventual charges made against the perpetrators were built on a mound of evidence provided by the same impetus to collect and document, which forms the basis of the museums of shame. Though they would never be built in accordance with his vision, Hofshteyn foresaw and demanded the will to indict which would eventually become vital in prosecuting the Nazis, in marking the legacy of the Holocaust, and in ensuring the veracity of the words “never again.”

 

Brett Winestock is a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow. He coordinates the project “The Short Life of Soviet Yiddish Literature” that is carried out by the Dubnow Institute, the Professorship for Slavic Jewish Studies at the University of Regensburg, and the ZfL. His article is an extended version of a text that was first published on the Dubnow Institute’s blog Mimeo.

 

[1] The unpublished essay is today found among the materials of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF); Dovid Hofshteyn, “Muzeyen fun sand.” GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 90, 463–465.

[2] The poem was first published in Literaturnaia gazeta on September 19, 1961. It can be found republished in Evgenii Evtushenko, “Babii Iar,” in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskaia rossiia, 1987), 309. An English translation can be found in Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Collected Poems, 1952–1990, eds. James Regan, Albert C. Todd, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 102–104.

[3] Hofshteyn, “Muzeyen fun sand.” GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 90, 464.

 

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Brett Winestock: Museums of Shame: Dovid Hofshteyn’s Vision of Holocaust Remembrance, in: ZfL BLOG, 17.8.2022, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2022/08/17/brett-winestock-museums-of-shame-dovid-hofshteyns-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20220817-01

Der Beitrag Brett Winestock: MUSEUMS OF SHAME: Dovid Hofshteyn’s Vision of Holocaust Remembrance erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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Stefani Engelstein: HOW TO WRITE AS AN OUTSIDER ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GERMAN https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2021/12/17/stefani-engelstein-how-to-write-as-an-outsider-about-what-it-means-to-be-german/ Fri, 17 Dec 2021 08:52:33 +0000 https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/?p=2413 First as a student of comparative literature with a focus on German and then as a professor of German Studies, I’ve been traveling back and forth to Germany for three decades, almost exactly the age of the reunified German state. I have stayed for weeks, for months, or for more than a year at a Weiterlesen

Der Beitrag Stefani Engelstein: HOW TO WRITE AS AN OUTSIDER ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GERMAN erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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First as a student of comparative literature with a focus on German and then as a professor of German Studies, I’ve been traveling back and forth to Germany for three decades, almost exactly the age of the reunified German state. I have stayed for weeks, for months, or for more than a year at a time. I have lived in Leipzig, in Cologne, and in Munich, but I have spent by far the most time in Berlin, a place that I have come to consider a second home. Throughout that time, Germany has changed enormously, both demographically and attitudinally. In relation to diversity in general and in its relationship to Jews.

It is 1992, the gates of the Weißensee Jewish Cemetery are locked. In the window of the gatekeeper’s booth is a hand-written note instructing visitors to ring the bell of an apartment across the street. In exchange for a passport, the gatekeeper brings the heavy metal key down from his home and lets us in. A small portion of the cemetery near the gate has been in use by East Berlin’s Jewish community. Behind this patch, a vast forest has sprung up within the walls. We wander alone among a strange undergrowth of aging gravestones and nettles. The paths have disappeared. Is the cemetery haunted by those who were buried here or by those who weren’t? Placing pebbles at a relative’s or friend’s grave is meant as a sign that the buried have not been forgotten. And yet now those pebbles, left undisturbed for half a century and covered in cobwebs, have become a stinging last trace of the unnamed visitors who placed them here—visitors who, in many cases, faced a violent death without burial or gravestone. Thirty years have passed since this visit. Today, in 2021, the cemetery has regular open hours and steady foot traffic. The forest remains, but it gives the impression of tending. Paths between the graves have been cleared. The German Army cares for the section laid with graves of Jewish soldiers who fell in World War I. And the many new graves mark the life of a new and different Jewish community.

German views on their history and their future have evolved. During this time, I have been an observer and a conversationalist. I like to talk and to listen. I strike up conversations with people at bus stops and in train stations, in bars, in cafés, and in universities. I invite near-strangers to lunch. And I haunt cemeteries, Jewish and non-Jewish, wherever I travel. But what do I know as a result? Do my experiences allow me to say something about how a country that is not mine thinks about its identity? Do they allow me to say something about those in this society who are not me, those who exist on the ever-shifting margins of German identity in ways that I do and do not share?

Professionally, I am an interpreter of texts. I write scholarly books and articles on literature and on the history of science, often together. The period that I investigate stretches from the Age of Goethe into the twentieth century. I do research in archives, although increasingly my sources are digitalized and available online. I am not a social scientist. I don’t put polls in the field. What is the status of the feeling I have for a country from my own lived experience? Is that knowledge? What is the evidentiary value of a memory? Is it something I can write about, and if so, how?

I collect experiences like postcards. Like one used to collect postcards, once upon a time.

It is 1992 in Leipzig. The Jewish community that shows up at the last remaining synagogue for the High Holidays amounts to fewer than 30 members, all over 60 years old. To find out the address of the synagogue, which has no street-facing windows and no sign, you have to persuade an employee at the city information center that you have a legitimate reason for asking.

It is 2000 in Cologne, the city of Germany’s oldest Jewish community, and I am welcomed to a Passover Seder at a synagogue that has been re-built and re-opened since 1959. I also visit an archeological site: a Mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath built in the eighth century. The first mention of Jews in Cologne dates back to the fourth century.

It is 2003 in Berlin and I am summarily called to account by a stranger for Israeli politics. A country I visited once, as a child, for two weeks and where I cannot vote. In what worldwide conspiracy has she imagined that I participate? And yet, it is true that Israel claims to act in my name too. What kind of responsibility do I therefore have and who is allowed to invoke it?

It is 2014 in Berlin and I am assured—not for the first time—that Christmas is not a Christian holiday, but is universally celebrated in Germany regardless of one’s religious background or identity. I have never seen a woman in a headscarf at a Christmas Market.

It is 2018, and a fleeting acquaintance defends the decision of the Hessian Court (upheld in 2020 at the federal level) that bars women wearing headscarves from representing the state in legal proceedings, even as interns. The head coverings would undermine the appearance of impartiality required to inspire trust in state institutions. I explain that in this extremely diverse country, a justice system composed only of people who look like my conversation partner himself radically fails to inspire me with trust in its courts’ impartiality. He remains polite but unpersuaded. He understands his own appearance as an absence of difference rather than as the presence of a particular identity.

In 2021, I listen to Deutschlandfunk. A guest is introduced as Jewish. Instead of as of Jewish background. In my experience, this is a first. The pleasure I feel is palpable. I am thrilled to visit a winter market and to be greeted in my multiethnic gym by a sign celebrating a beautiful wintertime instead of a Merry Christmas. Both are also firsts. Such little things. Such huge things. But I also visit a Christmas market. Where else in Berlin will I find the potato pancakes that are traditional for Hanukah? First, I try Gendarmenmarkt—where I stand in a long line to have my Covid vaccination checked—but, alas, no Kartoffelpuffer this year. So, the following week at a conference in Bonn, my friendly host brings me to his favorite Reibekuchen stand at the local Christmas market. They are delicious.

The same year, a friend tells me about precautions she takes before leaving the Berlin city limits to visit Brandenburg. Her German is excellent. She is not wearing a headscarf. It is also not her skin color that is responsible for potential conflict. It is attitudes towards her skin color on the part of Bandenburgians that are the problem.

It is not only Germany that has changed drastically over the past thirty years. My own country has changed as well, and I have changed too. The ways that I have changed are not independent from the ways that Germany or the US have changed, but intertwined with my experiences of them. Does that make my interpretations even more partial? What would it mean not to be partial? To be complete? Is that what a judge should strive for in judging? What scholars should strive for as they formulate critical perspectives on the world? Or is it our very partiality, our wounded edges, that allow us to make sense of the world, and to convey it?

As I embark on my current project, I embrace the fragmentary nature of experience as a valuable kind of knowledge, one that differs from the knowledge gained from sociological and historical scholarship. In Reflections from Germany on Diversity and Violent Pasts: An Essay in Six Cemeteries, my goal is to use memories as stepping stones for reflections on how society imagines itself, where boundaries are set, and how inclusion and exclusion function. What I write is, I hope, not just a memoir, but an exploration of how the social fabric in Germany is expressed. The project is also, necessarily, an account of my ever-developing perception of my own changing country. Recently, in the United States, there has been talk of using German Vergangenheitsbewältigung regarding the Holocaust as a model for facing our own history of slavery. While each of these national crimes is unique, there is in both cases a need to face the past and to recognize the way it continues to inhabit the present. My position in these two constellations is distinct. Since my vantage point in each country is partly derived from my knowledge of the other, Reflections from Germany will necessarily also set up an interplay of reflections between the two. What will emerge from this interplay remains to be seen.

Stefani Engelstein is a Professor of German Studies at Duke University. Since June 2021 she has been working at the ZfL as a visiting scholar.

 

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Stefani Engelstein: How to Write as an Outsider About What It Means to Be German, in: ZfL BLOG, 17.12.2021, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2021/12/17/stefani-engelstein-how-to-write-as-an-outsider-about-what-it-means-to-be-german/].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20211217-01

Der Beitrag Stefani Engelstein: HOW TO WRITE AS AN OUTSIDER ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GERMAN erschien zuerst auf ZfL BLOG.

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