Between German and Hebrew: The Counterlanguages of Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss 9783110466614, 9783110464146

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Lina Barouch Between German and Hebrew

Lina Barouch

Between German and Hebrew The Counterlanguages of Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss

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ISBN 978-3-11-046414-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046661-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-046450-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston & Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem Cover Illustration: David Boskovich, Trees with Cactus, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm, 2011 Typesetting: Dr. Rainer Ostermann, München Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

This book is dedicated with love to my parents Gertrud and Moshe and to my children Talulla, Emmanuel and Ben.

Acknowledgements In writing this study I have incurred many debts of gratitude. First and special thanks is owed to David Groiser from the German Language and Literature Department at the University of Oxford, whose highly attentive reading of early drafts helped me recognise and pursue compelling qualities of my own analysis, and assisted me in negotiating a correlation between philological aptness and philosophical horizon. I am also deeply grateful to Ritchie Robertson who accompanied and encouraged my work at Oxford University from day one, always granting immediate support and constructive criticism, especially at crucial cross roads. In Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv and in Kibbutz Merhavia, I encountered scholars to whom I am sincerely indebted: the exchanges with Itta Shedletzky, Tuvia Rübner, Steven Aschheim, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Galili Shahar have proven vital to this long-term project, which draws on their expertise and writings. My dear friends Noa Schonmann and Ilit Ferber I thank for their long-standing intellectual friendship and specifically for commenting on my attempts to compose a gripping yet clear introduction to this study. Ilit, together with Vivian Liska, I also thank for fostering a broader academic enquiry into Gershom Scholem’s theory of lament, resulting also in my translation together with Paula Schwebel of Scholem’s key text on this subject, which is often cited in this book. The joint practice of translation granted me further empirical and theoretical insights on central issues I grappled with. The act of translation and other forms of movement between languages lie at the heart of this book’s inception and completion. In this respect I would like to particularly thank my parents, Gertrud and Moshe, for lovingly bringing me up as a polyglot child and young adult whose passion for language as such and for mother tongues and foreign languages is unceasing. On the professional level I am greatly indebted to Sunniva Greve and Judith Siepmann who were committed to ensuring that the final version of this book is stylistically coherent and intelligible notwithstanding the multilingual worlds and texts discussed and re-enacted. I would like also to thank Bela Strauss for personally granting me permission to quote material from the Arie Ludwig Strauss Archive, in conjunction with the National Library of Israel. Strauss’s unpublished, bi-lingual notebooks have been a significant source of inspiration to me. Throughout the years of my research the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and its current academic head, Yfaat Weiss, have provided a dynamic and growing community of scholarly entrepreneurship and support. Alongside this institution I wish also to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) for providing the financial, institutional

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and scholarly support systems indispensible throughout different stages of my research and writing. Finally I wish to thank my children, Talulla, Emmanuel and Benjamin who were born and have become full-fledged lingual beings in the period since I initially began work on this project. I am grateful for their own incomparable versions of living bilingualism, which daily invigorate my boundless browsing in books, libraries and archives.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements  Note on Transliteration 

 VII XI

Abbreviations of Selected Primary Sources  Introduction 

 XI

 1

I

Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation   23 1 The Lamentation of Language Itself   25 Scholem, Benjamin and Buber: Mind, Revelation and “Erlebnis” in Language   33 Border Dialectic and Tradition   39 2 From Lamentation to Retaliation   47 Germany: The Rise of Zionism and the Fall of Hebrew   49 Jerusalem: Hebrew between Victory and Catastrophe   60 3 Agnon: Hebrew at the Crossroads   70 4 Conclusion   75  77 Werner Kraft: “Singing a Lost World”  Linguistic Dystopia and Restitution in Germany   82 The Odd Couple: Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus and the First World War   82 Kraft and the German-Jewish Predicament   85 Student and Librarian between the First World War and 1933   91 2 Exile in Jerusalem   94 “Writing into the Void”   95 “Imaginary Companions” and a German “Ark” in Exile   97 3 A German Ark in Jerusalem: Language, Criticism and Translation   102 Karl Kraus: Positive Language Critique   102 Rudolf Borchardt: Language, Decay and Restoration   111 4 Conclusion   120 II 1

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III 1 2

Ludwig Strauss: Polyglot Dialogue and Parody   123 Hebraism and Dialogue in Germany   124 Political Writings: Language and Mediation   125 The Mediator: Identity, Literature and Language   133 Poetological Treatises: Poetry as Dialogue   135 Polyglossia and Parody in Palestine   144 Mutual Echoing: Leah Goldberg, Language Renewal and Translation   148 Messianic Reverberation: Linguistic Passage and Homecoming   153 3 Conclusion   168 Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language 

 179 Appendices  Appendix A  Appendix B 

 179  179

 181 Bibliography  1 Archival Sources   181 2 Published Sources   181 Index 

 194

 171

Note on Transliteration The transliteration system from Hebrew is based on ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts (Washington: Library of Congress, 2007), p. 68. All diacritic signs were omitted, except for ‘ for the Hebrew ayn. Standard names and titles follow the transliteration conducted by their owners. Transliterations within quoted texts are kept in their original form.

Abbreviations of Selected Primary Sources Scholem, Gershom. Briefe. Edited by Itta Shedletzky. 3 vols. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1994–1999. Vol. 1: 1914–1947, edited by Itta Shedletzky (1994) SchBr I Vol. 2: 1948–1970, edited by Thomas Sparr (1995) SchBr II Vol. 3: 1971–1982, edited by Itta Shedletzky (1999) SchBr III —. “On Lament and Lamentation.” Translated, introduced and annotated by Lina Barouch and Paula Schwebel. Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014): 4–12. L —. Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923. Edited by Karlfried Gründer, and Friedrich Niewöhner. 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–2000. Vol. 1: 1913–1917 (1995) SchTb I Vol. 2: 1917–1923 (2000) SchTb II

Strauss, Ludwig. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Tuvia Rübner and Hans Otto Horch. Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 73. 4 vols. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998–2002. Vol. 1: Prosa, edited by Hans Otto Horch (1998) StGW I Vol. 2: Schriften zur Dichtung, edited by Tuvia Rübner (1998) StGW II Vol. 3: Lyrik und Übertragungen, edited by Tuvia Rübner (2000) StGW III Vol. 4: Dramen, Epen, Vermischte Schriften, edited by Hans Otto Horch (2002) StGW IV

Introduction Introduction At the Edge of Silence Humming did nothingness lure me away, Till I came to a resounding halt: At the edge of silence arose the word At the edge of the night stood the shape.1 (Ludwig Strauss)

The dialogue between silence and speech marks pivotal moments in modernist and exile literature alike. While central modernist poets have consciously chosen silence in response to the perceived inadequacy of language to represent the world, silence is for émigré or exiled writers often the presumed, if momentary, response to loss of their original linguistic environment and the confrontation with a new speech community. Metaphorical and empirical language crises thus conflate at the threshold between silence and word. At the same time, dialogues and crises on this threshold undo the apparent dichotomies between silence and word, and between mother tongue and foreign language, giving way instead to a spectrum of literary and linguistic negotiations that confirm the hybridity and heteroglossia of language. This book explores the literary acts through which German-Jewish writers Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Werner Kraft (1896–1991) and Ludwig Strauss (1892–1953) came to terms with the linguistic dilemmas and opportunities they encountered as a result of their German-Jewish cultural location and their linguistic dislocation following emigration and exile. I will demonstrate that they developed three divergent forms of counterlanguage: I call these Hebraist lamentation, Germanist steadfastness and polyglot dialogue, respectively. The term counterlanguage denotes written and spoken forms of resistance to existing literary canons and dominate speech cultures and as such is understood as a performative act of writing. Indeed, Scholem opposed Zionist attempts to revivify Hebrew as a mere secular vernacular by advocating a return to the language of the Hebrew lament. As an exile, Kraft reterritorialised German literature via controversial literary figures, while Strauss employed his unique polyglot aptness to resist the political and linguistic purisms of his time.

1 The original German poem by Strauss is entitled “Ufer des Schweigens”: “Rauschend lockte das Nichts mich fort, |Da geschah mir tönendes Halt: |Wuchs am Ufer des Schweigens das Wort, |Stand am Ufer der Nacht die Gestalt” (StGW III, 223). All translations from German in this book are my own unless otherwise specified.

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 Introduction

In the final years of World War One all three writers corresponded intensively with one another. In the midst of their personal wartime crises they passionately discussed the relationship between language, metaphysics, Judaism and contemporary German literary figures such as Stefan George and Karl Kraus. These topics continued to define their life-long literary and scholarly oeuvres and to accompany their turbulent biographies. Born into assimilated Jewish families in Germany during the 1890s Scholem, Kraft and Strauss spent their youth and young adulthood writing exclusively or primarily in their German mother tongue. From the outset, however, the relationship of German Jews to the language was accompanied by mixed feelings of belonging and of foreignness. Exposure to Hebrew within the framework of modern Zionism and the Jewish Renaissance during World War One and the Weimar years rendered their relationship to these national languages increasingly complex. Beyond the cultural and political significance attributed to language during this period loomed the “crisis of language” in European and German modernist literature, which questioned the reliability of language as such. The linguistic dislocation experienced by Scholem, Kraft and Strauss as a result of voluntary or forced migration between 1923 and 1935 was further cause for the amplification of existing linguistic crises and struggles. In these intricate and shifting contexts, the counterlanguages of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss destabilised the dichotomous divide of silence and speech, with silence as the conscious literary or philosophical suggestion of key figures like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Kraus, and mute resignation the response of fellow exiled writers in Palestine in the face of linguistic and cultural uprooting. Prior to a detailed discussion of the counterlanguages of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss in the individual chapters, this introduction locates them in broader modernist and cultural-national debates on language. My examination illustrates the unique, individualised expressions of the engagement with language as found in Scholem, Kraft and Strauss while at the same time recognising the exemplary nature of this preoccupation among German Jewish writers in general. Indeed, the very engagement with the question of language is representative of the emancipatory, acculturated and post-assimilatory German Jews to the extent of forming a historical narrative for the period 1893–1933.2

2 Shulamit Volkov, “Sprache als Ort der Auseinandersetzung mit Juden und Judentum in Deutschland, 1780–1933,” in Jüdische Intellektuelle und die Philologien in Deutschland 1871–1933, ed. by Wilfried Barner and Christoph König, Marbacher Wissenschaftsgeschichte 3 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 223–238.



Introduction 

 3

German-Jewish History: Linguistic Narratives Language is a crucial “locus of engagement with Jews and Judaism in Germany” between the years 1780–1933, argues Shulamit Volkov, thus suggesting the formulation of a linguistic narrative alongside the narratives of emancipation and anti-Semitism.3 Adopting the decisive claim for a linguistic narrative that acknowledges the role of language in the cultural self-definition of Germans and German Jews during the period in question, this book first of all expands the temporal and geographic frameworks provided by Volkov and other scholars discussed below by focusing on processes of (linguistic) dislocation and their acute literary manifestations. Existing studies mainly demonstrate the linguistic narratives pertinent to either Germany (and Central Europe) or the countries of exile, including British Mandate Palestine and Israel. As such, previous literature provides a sound basis for my examination while it underscores the need for further scrutiny of processes of linguistic transfer and their literary expression in general, and the unabating movement between German and Hebrew in particular. In other words, the scope of study is not confined to the German experience or to the experience of exile but rather attempts to highlight the continuities, ruptures and crises in processes of dislocation, as well as the correlated shifts and amplification of phenomena such as cultural and linguistic marginality and migration. This far-reaching issue of linguistic dislocation in its literary manifestations is explored by means of the three specific cases of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss, who emerge as seminal in their unique and divergent forms of counterlanguage. The comparison between them reveals a common and representative engagement with questions of language – as postulated by the linguistic narrative, while their responses show individualised acts of counter-writing. In Volkov’s well-grounded chronological overview of the German and German-Jewish linguistic narrative, Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie) of 1783 emerges as paradigmatic due to its cultural linguistic nationalism, which simulataenously allowed him to applaud Judaism and label Jews as permanent strangers.4 Alongside theoretical models of language and nationalism as also formulated by Humboldt and Hamann, Volkov lists the bureaucratic shifts and frameworks that ensured the official status of 3 Ibid. The role of language and culture has been seminally discussed by George L. Mosse, “A Cultural Emancipation,” in German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1–20. For a detailed study of the role of language in the culture of nineteenth-century German Bürgertum, see Angelika Linke, Sprachkultur und Bürgertum: Zur Mentalitätsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1996). 4 Volkov, 224. Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie, in Werke, ed. by Ulrich Gaier, vol. 5, Schriften zum Alten Testament, ed. by Rudolf Smend (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 661–1308.

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 Introduction

German even before German unification in 1871. Official edicts required Jews to learn German and confined the use of Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish to the private and ritual spheres, or ordered them to acquire German family names.5 At the same time Jewish groupings promoted their own linguistic agendas, some advancing Hebrew as a modern language from as early as the Enlightenment (through the periodical Hame’asef), but more commonly German (e.g., in the periodical Sulamit), an endevour that reflected the role ascribed to the German language in the process of acculturation.6 Mastery of the German language, whether coupled with the rejection of Hebrew and Yiddish or not, became the substance of Jewish acculturation. As such, it was the most noticeable aspect of Jewish success and simultaneously the most sensitive locus for criticism of and attacks against Jews. Arndt Kremer’s study helps conceptualise this paradoxical state of affairs. Kremer explains how, indeed, a völkisch anti-Semitic concept of “anti-language” emerged, which negated the importance of language in the crafting of cultural and national identities in favour of ethnic criteria. Hence this anti-Semitic concept fought against the idea of the “vernacular nation” [sprachbestimmte Kulturnation] understood as a nation based on linguistic continuity and later reconstituted as a political entity.7 The idea of the vernacular nation was derived from the linguistic philosophies of the Herder-Hamann-Humboldt tradition and adopted by the humanistic Enlightened German Bildungsbürgertum. It was borne by the longing for a unified nation and a solid belief in New High German as the national language, based on its literary language.8 Reading mostly printed media and official documentation Kremer analyses German-Jewish discourse on the vernacular nation for the period 1893–1933 and identifies two principal competing concepts: the respective mother-tongue ideologies of the liberal, acculturated Jews, on the one hand, and the cultural Zionists, on the other. The first was based on the hope that emancipation and linguistic acculturation would put an end to the discrimination and discrediting of the Jewish minority and result in the attainment of equal national rights. It was hoped, in other words, that language would ultimately decide on questions of the nation, national feeling and national rights. According to Kremer, liberal German-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum– its social status

5 Volkov, 228. 6 Ibid., 232. 7 Arndt Kremer, Deutsche Juden – deutsche Sprache: Jüdische und judenfeindliche Sprachkonzepte und -konflikte 1893–1933, Studia Linguistica Germanica 87 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 404. 8 Kremer argues that the combination of national and cosmopolitan-humanistic ideas as offered by Humboldt, Herder and Grimm nonetheless included the potential for nationalistic language concepts (Kremer, Deutsche Sprache, 404).



Introduction 

 5

and self-perception in the context of Emancipation and the associated linguistic acculturation – fully identified with the German vernacular nation.9 Yet in practice the extraordinary endeavours of German Jews to acquire Bildung could always be attacked as corrupted forms of Bildung (“Verbildung”, “Überbildung”), which in the worst case were labelled un-German.10 Such was the spirit of the attacks against Heine’s language and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s music, a claim most infamously made by Wagner in his essay on Jews and music (1850), in which he argued that the Jew spoke the modern European language merely as one acquired.11 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this anti-Jewish argumentation received a philological seal with the term “Semite”, through which Jews were again classified as complete strangers and their language fixed as the prime location of their interminable “foreignness”.12 Thus since Rahel Varnhagen, educated German Jews had repeatedly felt uneasy about their German, often identifying language as the parameter with which their inability to “fit in” was measured.13 In his discussion on the dialectics of assimilation Amos Funkenstein has shown that language in general, and even specific expressions (from Yiddish or Ladino, for example) could be simultaneous proof of Jewish assimilation and isolation.14 Moreover, as Sander Gilman demonstrates with numerous examples and across many genres of writing, language played a role in the German-Jewish internalisation and projection of anti-Jewish ideas that ascribe an essential “hidden language” (Yiddish or Mauscheln) to the Jews, hence assuming their inability to have any other mother tongue.15 The cultural Zionists in Germany had largely adopted the model of the “cultural nation” [Kulturnation] but used it for their own purposes. In other words, these German Zionists, who were as acculturated as their fellow liberal German Jews, likewise believed that language was the “medium” of a nation’s history and mentality, and crucial to building a nation, especially when the latter was non-existent as a geographical and political entity.16 Hebrew in this context was

9 Ibid., 405. A detailed analysis of the liberal Jewish language concept is developed by Kremer in Chapter 5 of his book (ibid., 161–287). 10 Volkov, 232. 11 Ibid., 236. See Richard Wagner, Das Judenthum in der Musik, 2nd rev. ed. (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1869). 12 Volkov, 236–237. 13 Ibid., 237. 14 Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialetics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1/2 (1995): 1–14. 15 Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1986). 16 Kremer, Deutsche Sprache, 407.

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 Introduction

given the constitutive function that liberal German Jews allotted to German and promoted in the writings of Buber, Ahad Ha’am and other cultural Zionists.17 As will become emerge in the individual chapters of the book, the intense and crisis-prone engagement with language as a prime factor in shaping the cultural and political identity of a nation was complemented by a modernist literature that negotiated the perceived forces of language and its limits. One standard account of the period claims that “to be a fin-de-siècle Viennese artist or intellectual, conscious of the social realities of Kakania, one had to face the problem of the nature and limits of language, expression and communication.”18 This resulted in attempts to formulate a general philosophy of language, as in Fritz Mauthner’s Essays on the Critique of Language (Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache) 1901–1902 and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921.19 It also led to what has been termed “language-conscious” writing in Austrian literature from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.20 Joseph P. Stern summarises the two poles of this “language-conscious” literature: on the one hand, there was the belief in “language as an absolutely moral indicator of life, acting as an infallible witness to all that happens in the world, part of a pre-established and perhaps even mystical harmony between words and action.”21 According to Stern, this view greatly inspired the work of satirist Karl Kraus. On the other hand, Fritz Mauthner, for example, arrived at the opposite conclusion, arguing that language is metaphorical and therefore an inaccurate, unreliable and uncontrollable means of communication.22 This total language scepticism was mirrored in the language

17 The detailed analysis of the German Zionist language concept is found in Chapter 6 of Kremer’s Deutsche Sprache, 288–401. A series of contributions on the promotion of Hebrew (and Yiddish) by German and Russian Jews in the German-speaking environment appears in Michael Brenner, ed., Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). See also Mark H. Gelber, “The Hebraic Poetics of German Cultural Zionism: an ‘Umlaut’ over the ‘Vav’,” in Integration und Ausgrenzung, ed. by Mark H. Gelber, Jakob Hessing and Robert Jütte (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009), 171–180. 18 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 117. 19 Ibid., 119. 20 Joseph Peter Stern, “Words are also Deeds,” in The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology (Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1992). 21 Ibid., 54. Dirk Göttsche specifically evaluates the enduring significance of the language crisis for Austrian literature in Die Produktivität der Sprachkrise in der modernen Prosa (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenaeum, 1987). 22 On the metaphoricity of language, see also Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe,



Introduction 

 7

scepticism of Hofmannsthal’s “Chandos Letter” or the description of language in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities.23 In general Stern emphasises the relationship between acute language consciousness and the multilingual and heteroglot character of the Empire. These linguistic conditions led either to a sense of linguistic aridity and deprivation that generated the highly divergent literary languages of Rilke and Kafka or to an awareness of linguistic tensions and conflicts of the kind that served as the basis for Nestroy’s comic word play and Karl Kraus’s linguistic satire and “language teachings” [Sprachlehre]. Important for my own study is Stern’s recognition of an acute language consciousness among the German-Jewish writers of the Empire, as they had “the right to the possession of the very language of their creativeness challenged.”24 The twofold questioning of the reliability of language as such and of a people’s right to a specific national language during this period has frequently been discussed with the help of spatial terms. In Extraterritorial George Steiner thus refers to a language with “a lost centre” and to a writer linguistically “unhoused”, arguing that this revolutionary predicament coincided with the crisis of morals and formal values in the periods immediately preceding and following World War One.25 Discussing literary modernism and the “crisis of language”, Richard Sheppard similarly establishes a direct link between the overwhelming sense of linguistic aridity and a much broader socio-cultural problem. For Rilke and Hofmannsthal the transition from an aristocratic, semi-feudal and agrarian order to one that was middle-class, democratic, mechanistic and urban is represented by the abandonment of an order whose language was “poetically amenable”, and whose structures and forms were total and impressive in their apparent permanence and rootedness. Instead they find a language that is culturally lost, whose order was “cerebralised” and whose structures were partial and repressive.26 Hence in general terms the core of the modernist “crisis of language” is ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 1, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 875–890. 23 Stern, 54–55. 24 Ibid., 50. 25 George Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, 5th ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), vii–ix. With regard to the ideas of “unhoused” (language) see the concepts of “transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit” or “Heimatlosigkeit” in Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1920). 26 Richard Sheppard, “The Crisis of Language,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 325–327.

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 Introduction

defined as the perceived tension between the “primal essence” of language and its rational, utilitarian dimensions.27 German-Jewish writers of the early twentieth century – exemplified by figures such as Franz Kafka, Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin – are commonly considered modernists par excellence due to their shared struggle with the loss and recovery of tradition, and their unique cultural location: for the German-Jewish writer was deeply rooted in and separated from German culture, acutely experiencing the combined paradoxes of the tradition and language in which he lived and created.28 As this book shows, the internalised sense of linguistic inadequacy and marginality, exacerbated by the experience of emigration and exile, renders the question of language pivotal.29 A basic understanding of the new linguistic environment that Scholem, Kraft and Strauss encountered in Palestine and Israel is crucial if questions of linguistic dislocation and integration are to be explored. With this study I also hope to enable future comparison with other immigrant communities, notably with Russian and Yiddish immigrant writers in Palestine during the same period (whose impact on the emerging Hebrew literature was immense), as well as with a younger generation of Israeli Mizrahi poets who – as second and third-generation immigrants – frequently revolt against the rejection of their Arabic and Judeo-Arabic heritage.30 In an article on German literature in Israel, Margarita Pazi claims that Hebrew for most German-Jewish writers was primarily an elusive language of 27 Sheppard, “Crisis.” See also Göttsche, Produktivität. 28 Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Steiner, Extraterritorial. 29 The question of exemplarity can prove tricky. Jews, German Jews, and writers and poets in general have often been referred to as exemplary “others”. Vivian Liska shows that German-Jewish thinkers of the early twentieth century themselves labelled the Jew as a “paradigmatic stranger” (Georg Simmel), “conscious pariah” (Hannah Arendt), “representative of a spirit free of preconceptions” (Walter Benjamin), and a figure independent of the “consensus of the compact majority” (Sigmund Freud). See Vivian Liska, “‘Man kann verjuden’: Paradoxes of Exemplarity,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, ed. by Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman and Richard I. Cohen (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 198–212. Liska shows that Derrida, for example, not only uncovers what he calls the “paradox of exemplarity,” which is amplified in the German-Jewish context, but “sees an opening towards an ethical stance no longer grounded in or aiming for a stable identity, but, on the contrary emerging from and oriented towards this vertiginous dynamic itself” (ibid.). 30 Itamar Ibn-Zohar, Polysystem Studies (Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, and Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). See especially pp. 97–130 on the interdependence of Russian and Hebrew within the polysystem and on the contribution of Russian and Yiddish to Modern Hebrew. In the concluding remarks to the book I briefly turn to the case of Mizrahi poetry in Israel.



Introduction 

 9

escape or outlet [Auswegsprache], and that constant engagement with questions of language itself helped shape and broaden their identity. Pazi argues, however, that German literature in Israel did not seek to fulfil a mediating role between the authors’ countries of birth and Israel. On the linguistic level she finds influence or estrangement. The former points to the influence of the new linguistic environment, predominantly Hebrew, on the German language of the text, while the latter refers to the “stagnation” of German, now removed from linguistic developments in German-speaking countries.31 In my study, which in comparison to the above literature, delves into the writings of three specific authors, I argue that dislocation, whether voluntary or imposed, amplified the linguistic volatility in which Scholem, Kraft and Strauss created. “Exile” from the German mother tongue and the immediate confrontation with Hebrew – sacred Ursprache and revived Zionist vernacular – were critical and existential. I show that while still in Germany, Scholem, Kraft and Strauss did not (intermittently) fall silent, as in the exemplary case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal32; I ask whether they were tempted to create, as Else Lasker-Schüler did, an imaginary Hebrew or claim to write Hebrew in German33; if and how they might have viewed translation between German and Hebrew (and Yiddish) as a form of 31 Margarita Pazi, “Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur Israels,” in Deutsch-jüdische Exil- und Emigrationsliteratur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 81–94 (91). Jürgen Nieraad lists Kraft among the very few writers whose written German remained stylistically proper and was not affected by developments such as “colouration” [Einfärbung] or estrangement (Jürgen Nieraad, “Deutschsprachige Literatur in Palästina und Israel,” Exilforschung 5 (1987): 90–111 (104)). In contrast to Pazi, Nieraad argues that only a small number of texts engage with this particular writing phenomenon or the experience of language loss and language privation (ibid., 102). A different but complementary category of secondary literature on the question of German in Palestine and Israel is more concerned with the linguistic aspect of its preservation and, as such, documents and records numerous interviews in and about this language. See Anne Betten and Miryam Du-nour, eds., Sprachbewahrung nach der Emigration – Das Deutsch der 20er Jahre in Israel: Texte und Untersuchungen zum gesprochenen Deutsch, Phonai 45 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000). According to this study the main factors contributing to a transition to Hebrew are age at immigration, length of stay and contact with the Hebrew language prior to emigration, and motivation. Interestingly, a higher degree of education posed an obstacle to such a transition (ibid., 189). See also Anne Betten and Miryam Du-nour, eds., Wir sind die Letzten; Fragt uns aus: Gespräche mit den Emigranten der dreißiger Jahre in Israel (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1995). 32 See the so-called “Chandosbrief”: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” in Hofmannsthal: Selected Essays, ed. by Mary E. Gilbert (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), 105–115. 33 Itta Shedletzky, “Ktav u-tmuna: hedgashim ‘ivriyim etsel else lasker-schüler [Script and Picture: Hebrew Emphases in Else Lasker-Schüler],” Masekhet 3 (2005): 79–101 [Hebrew]. Shedletzky bases part of her analysis on Uri Zvi Greenberg’s discussion of Else Lasker-Schüler’s “Hebrew”: “Dvora be-shovya [Dvora in her Captivity],” Davar, 26 February 1926, 2–3.

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 Introduction

German-Jewish mediation; in the context of their linguistic dislocation, I examine whether Kraft and Strauss emigrated as “language mystics”, like Scholem, or as acute “sceptics”; whether dislocation resulted in linguistic paralysis or a burst of creativity; how German was “reterritorialised”34 and whether it replaced Hebrew as the “sacred shrine” of the (Jewish) exilic imagination;35 Not least I explore how the Zionist rhetoric of “return” and “revival” affected their approaches to language and met their approval or opposition.

Excursus: Three Times Buber The significance of Martin Buber and his reception for the generation of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss cannot be overestimated, and indeed all three responded vigorously and in divergent ways to his writings on religion, myth, Judaism and language, and to his political engagement in the context of the Jewish Renaissance. In 1963 Robert Weltsch described Buber as a teacher of an entire generation of Central European Jews.36 Even Scholem, who from his mid teens had distanced himself explicitly from Buber and in general professed Buber’s “utter lack of influence” in the Jewish world,37 admitted at the same time that he knew of no other book about Judaism during this period with more impact than Buber’s Three Speeches on Judaism – not on scholars who barely read the speeches but on the youth who Buber had called to an awakening and which many took seriously.38 Scholem’s ostensibly conflicting comments reflect the ambiguous reception of Buber by this generation of German Jews. Paul Mendes-Flohr explains the ambivalent reception partly with “the paradox of Buber’s public posture.” The two poles of the latter, argues Mendes-Flohr, are Buber’s “advocacy of a religious anarchism and his commitment to enhancing the dignity and self-esteem of the

34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Edwige Brender, “‘Neither as a Cowboy nor as a Goldhunter, but Simply as a Refugee’: Franz Werfel’s Debate with his American Publishers, Translators and Adapters,” in Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, ed. by Alexander Stephan, Exile Studies 11 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 97–119. 35 Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, “When Exiles Return: Jerusalem as Topos of the Mind and Soil,” in Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on the Literature of Exile, ed. by Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 39–52. 36 Robert Weltsch, introduction to Martin Buber, Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden (Cologne: J. Melzer, 1963), xxiii. 37 Gershom Scholem, “Martin Bubers Auffassung des Judentums,” in Judaica (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 2:133–192 (135). 38 Ibid., 149.



Introduction 

 11

Jewish community.”39 To many, including close friends such as Franz Rosenzweig, these poles seemed contradictory.40 Yet if we keep Scholem’s distinction between scholars (such as Rosenzweig) and contemporary youth in mind, it seems plausible to argue that precisely because of this paradox was the generation of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss able to identify with Buber to a large extent: “On the one hand, Buber represented an iconoclastic conception of Jewish spirituality and religious life” with an anti-institutional and anarchic thrust, and “on the other hand, [he] embodied the renewed ethnic pride and self-confidence of German-speaking Jewry.”41 Mendes-Flohr furthermore claims it is important to remember that in his Three Speeches Buber spoke in the name of a “subterranean” or “non-official” Judaism, thereby consciously targeting a specific primary audience. In fact, this audience had chosen him, since Three Speeches was solicited by members of the Bar Kochba Association in Prague, whose request implied they had approached him because they were convinced he “was the only Jew in the West who could address them as one who is equally at home in the wisdom of Israel, still cherished by Eastern European Jewry (Ostjudentum) and in Western, European culture.”42 Ernst Simon affirms that Buber was regarded by his audiences as a bridge-builder whose very person mediated the culture of East European Jewry to Western, largely assimilated Jews and introduced the “wisdom of Israel” to a general European public.43 His early work on Hasidism, for example, integrated the “distinctive expression of Jewish spirituality into the general discourse and idiom of the fin-de-siècle” and compared it to other mystical traditions.44 What indeed inspired Bar Kochba was Buber’s depiction of Judaism as a spiritual phenomenon comparable to universal human experience, and as such did not demand “separation from” [Abgrenzung] German culture.45 As will become clear in the individual chapters, in Germany both Scholem and Kraft questioned Buber’s definitions of Judaism and his political practices, while Strauss became an outspoken follower of Buberian cultural Zionism. After originally declaring his relentless support for Buber in his early youth, Scholem soon vigorously attacked what he perceived as Buber’s superficial, mythologising and fashionable forms of Judaism and “Hebraism”. Kraft, on his part, strongly criticised Buber’s refusal to include Rudolf Borchardt in his journal, Der Jude, 39 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Buber’s Reception among Jews,” Modern Judaism 6/2 (1986): 111–126 (12). 40 Ibid., 112. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 116–117. 43 Ernst Simon as quoted in Mendes-Flohr, “Buber’s Reception,” 117. 44 Mendes-Flohr, “Buber’s Reception,” 118. 45 Ibid., 118–119.

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 Introduction

and thus his appropriation of the right to define who is Jewish. All three, however, changed their approach to Buber once in Palestine and later Israel. Strauss, who by then had become Buber’s son in-law, was now disillusioned with the disparity between Buber’s Zionist declarations and his actual reservations about the resettlement of the Strauss family to a Kibbutz requiring them to adjust to a harsh pioneer lifestyle.46 Scholem, despite his on-going objections to some of Buber’s scholarship, was by the 1930s working to help Buber move to Jerusalem. Once in Jerusalem, Kraft became a regular visitor of Buber’s and later published the notes of their conversations. As in the question of language, the actual engagement of all three writers with Buber is representative of their generation, whereas the clearly differing substance of their responses reveals the complexities of their German-Jewish identity.

My Case Studies Delving into the correspondences between Scholem, Kraft and Strauss during World War One provides initial yet striking evidence of their early engagement with questions of language. In 1916 Scholem and Kraft exchanged the original copy of Walter Benjamin’s paradigmatic essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”.47 The ensuing correspondence demonstrates how Benjamin’s linguistic reflections highlighted a shared concern for the question of language and its relation to the world. In a letter Scholem sent Kraft from the military hospital in Allenstein in August 1917, he asked “whether the mental being of the world is language and script” and added that he was inclined to answer this affirmatively.48 Kraft had earlier confided to Scholem that the “question of language may indeed be the key question in metaphysics, as I have experienced it in terrible ways, in relation to Novalis, George, Kraus etc.”49 Their reception of the Viennese satirist and language critic Karl Kraus, in turn, emphasises Scholem and Kraft’s divergent linguistic allegiances to Hebrew and German, respectively. In November 1917 Scholem wrote to Kraft that “what Kraus calls the experience of the ancient word [Erlebnis des alten Wortes], I have learnt through Hebrew, even

46 See the correspondence in Briefwechsel: Martin Buber – Ludwig Strauss 1913–1953, ed. by Tuvia Rübner and Dafna Mach (Frankfurt a.M.: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990), 202–208 (24 January – 9 March 1936). 47 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 2:10–157. 48 SchBr I, 85. 49 Ibid., 360, n. 3.



Introduction 

 13

without being a poet.”50 For Kraft, on the other hand, Kraus became a key figure in the battle against German linguistic and cultural decline. In the correspondence between Scholem and Strauss it was the figure and poetry of Stefan George that highlighted their varied approaches to questions of language, Judaism and Zionism. Strauss had always felt indebted to George’s poetry and language although he strongly opposed his personality cult, which he criticised in 1918 in a series of parodies.51 Parody as a form was to reappear in Strauss’s post-emigration bilingual poems from 1936 and his attack on linguistic and cultural purisms. Back in 1918, Scholem had criticised precisely what he perceived as the “chimerical” mode of Strauss’s George parodies.52 This disagreement reflects their differing views on Zionism and their German-Jewish identities, for while a great deal of Strauss’s writings negotiated between his multiple cultural and linguistic affiliations, Scholem’s rhetoric propagated an “absolute negation” of culturally and linguistically hybrid forms as part of his Jewish and Zionist searching. In this context he wrote to Strauss in November 1918 that he had found an “entrance” into the “true centre of Judaism” in the Hebrew lamentation [kina], a 1917–1918 treatise that represents a core text of my examination. Coming from assimilated German-Jewish homes of Bildung, the literary and scholarly paths that Scholem, Kraft and Strauss pursued, and the genres of writing in which they excelled, differed. Scholem was to become a leading historian of Jewish mysticism and as such published mainly historical studies based on an extensive philological examination of primary sources. For his early adulthood in Germany and the initial decades following emigration, however, his journals, letters and essays will be primarily examined here. Although the main corpus of Kraft’s published work focused on German literary figures and topics, I also draw on a selection of his letters and journals, as well as on his autobiography. Strauss, who viewed himself first and foremost as a poet, published widely in other literary, political and poetological genres. The different text forms and genres under review in this book allow for a deeper understanding of the linguistic approaches on which they are based and include apophatic experimentation, the adherence to literary German spoken and written prior to emigration, and bi-lingual poetry. The common genres of correspondence and diaries, partly published, provide the opportunity to explore personal attitudes and intellectual 50 Ibid., 126–127. 51 StGW I, 274 and StGW III , 688–691. 52 Itta Shedletzky, “‘Zum wirklichen Zentrum des Judentums’: Eine Kontroverse zwischen Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem und Ludwig Strauss,” in Jüdischer Almanach des Leo Baeck Instituts 1993, ed. by Jakob Hessing (Frankfurt a. M.: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 96–103 (97–101).

14 

 Introduction

processes with an unparalleled immediacy to biographical events and the underlying historical developments.53 By emigrating to British Mandate Palestine Scholem, Kraft and Strauss were all confronted with the same polyglossia, which included Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, German and other European languages spoken by various Jewish immigrant groups, as well as Ladino, Arabic and English. Yet it is precisely the divergency of their responses to this new linguistic environment – coupled with the linguistic approaches they brought with them – that render their comparison appealing and instructive as an illustration of the ways in which the capacity of language is recognised and employed. Whereas Scholem and Strauss began writing and publishing in Hebrew alongside German after emigration, Kraft failed to learn this language altogether. At the same time, however, Scholem and Strauss wrote in and about the Hebrew language in their own distinctive ways, and all three writers shared an essential belief in the indicative and constitutive forces of language as such. Remarkably, the subjects of my three case studies did not experience an incapacitating crisis of language as such, although Scholem and Kraft did undergo specific crises with regard to the perceived fall of Hebrew and German, respectively. These, however, did not produce muteness or literary paralysis. The persistence and the survival strategies of my research subjects led Nieraad to characterise the biographies and literary existences of both Kraft and Strauss as atypical counter-examples in the context of German literature written in Israel. Nieraad includes Strauss and Kraft in two separate groups of writers of the fifth ‘aliya (the wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1929 and 1939). Strauss is grouped with committed Zionist writers like Shalom Ben-Chorin and Manfred Sturmann, who had already arrived with a prior Hebrew ideology and Hebrew skills [bereits hebraisiert].54 Kraft, on the other hand, belonged to a group of writers who came unprepared as non-Zionists, with neither the will nor the 53 Steven Aschheim bases his study of Scholem, Klemperer and Arendt mainly on their private chronicles and notes. In addition to the problems associated with these sources (self-objectivating, self-discovering, self-eliding potentialities, even self-servicing) Aschheim draws attention to their unique immediacy, as “they inhabit the present moment in which the fluidity of affairs and the unfolding of the self is captured in process” (Steven Aschheim, Scholem, Klemperer, Arendt: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3). 54 Shalom Ben-Chorin’s integration of new and old cultures and languages was successful, albeit not without difficulties, whereas Manfred Sturmann’s life was completely severed as a result of emigration (Nieraad (1987), 94–97). Other writers such as Arnold Zweig, Heinz Politzer or Manfred Vogel arrived as non-Zionists, as Kraft did, with no previous knowledge of Hebrew and little desire or ability to learn it. Further cases to be examined would include Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Simon, Max Brod and Else Lasker-Schüler (ibid.).



Introduction 

 15

ability to learn the Hebrew language. At first, however, all immigrant writers faced the same situation, and despite of various cultural and literary activities could rely only on themselves in their attempt to preserve and develop their linguistic and literary activity in the new country.55 Nieraad lists Strauss in this particular context as the apparently only poet of this generation to successfully integrate the Hebrew he acquired into his own poetical language alongside German.56 Kraft is described as a counter-example to Strauss because he managed to continue his literary and scholarly existence within the German language, notwithstanding the influences and expectations of an entirely new environment.57

German-Hebrew Contact Zones and Counterlanguages Entitled Between German and Hebrew this study postulates shifting German-Hebrew “contact zones” in whose context the selected texts and acts of writing, including their counteractive modes, should be read. Contact zones are defined as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”58 Developed largely in the context of post-colonial theory the notion of contact zones 55 Nieraad (1987), 94–95. 56 This assertion is contestable although prolific Hebrew poets whose mother tongue is German, such as Yehuda Amichai or Tuvia Rübner, were of a younger generation (both born in 1924) and arrived in Palestine at a younger age (in 1935 and 1941, respectively). On Amichai see, for example, Nili Scharf Gold, Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008); Naama Rokem, “German-Hebrew Encounters in the Correspondence between Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan,” Prooftexts 30 (2010): 97–127; On Rübner see his autobiography Ḥayim arukim ktsarim [A Short Long Life], (Tel Aviv: Keshev, 2006) [Hebrew]. 57 Nieraad (1987), 96–97. This claim is repeated by Nieraad in “Deutschsprachige Literatur in Israel,” in Stimmen aus Jerusalem: Zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur in Palästina/Israel, ed. by Hermann Zabel (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 260–278 (261–262). 58 Marie Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40 (34). Homi Bhabha’s “third space” and Edward Said’s “median state” are of course notions also considered. See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); For “median state” see Edward W. Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” in Representations of the Intellectual, The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage Books, 1994), 35–47. Said ascribes this term specifically to Theodor Adorno and explains it as a state of permanent suspension and of being forever “curmudgeonly disagreeable” and resistant to accommodation (ibid., 36–39). See also Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001), 173–186. Other works question the supposed productivity of exile as metaphor or the Jew as an exemplary exile or “other”, and attempt instead to emphasise the specific conditions of exile under examination. See, for example: Kader Konuk, “JewishGerman Philologists in Turkish Exile: Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach,” in Exile and Otherness,

16 

 Introduction

helps in understanding the hybrid, fluid and conflictual environments in which the German-Jewish writer lived and created during the first half of the twentieth century. It is asked how the chosen texts express German-Jewish “sociocultural complexities”59 and more specifically how these texts echo the violability, instability and defiant character of the marginal, migrant or exilic writer. Considering the notion of contact zones, this study postulates neither a fixed spatial idea of “between German and Hebrew” nor negative entrapment. It subscribes to numerous potential dynamics such as positive overlapping and reciprocal permeation rather than to mutual exclusion or suspension, not unlike the idea of the “German-Jewish hyphen”60, which may denote disjunction, conjunction or adjunction, or the paradoxical simultaneity of all three.61

31–47; Jacques Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” in Acts of Religion, ed. and with an introduction by Gil Anidjar (New York and London, 2002), 135–188. 59 Pratt speaks specifically of texts that exemplify “the sociocultural complexities produced by conquest and empire” (Pratt, 34). 60 Franz Rosenzweig uses the term Bindestrichjuden (hyphen-Jews) in his 1924 letter to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. He asks, “wie Christjuden, Nationaljuden, Religionsjuden, Abwehrjuden, Sentimentalitätsjuden, Pietätsjuden, kurzum Bindestrichjuden, wie sie das neunzehnte Jahrhundert geschaffen hat, ohne Lebensgefahr für sie und für das Judentum wieder – Juden werden können” (Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Briefe und Tagebücher (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 508). 61 See, for example, Harry Brod, “The German-Jewish Hyphen: Conjunct, Disjunct or Adjunct?” in Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity, ed. by Roy Jerome (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), 91–103. Another fertile figure of thought is the turgeman as discussed in Chana Kronfeld’s analysis of Yehuda Amichai’s poetics. Amichai’s figure of the turgeman (translator) emerges as poet-translator who, according to Kronfeld, skillfully escapes dichotomies of holy-secular, origin-mimesis and source-translation. Contrary to the Romantic notion of poetic genius, the turgeman essentially recycles existing texts and earlier traditions and functions as an intercultural mediator and intergenerational messenger. As such the poet-translator mediates between generations as well as cultures and it is from this position that he acquires his strength and resourcefulness. While wishing to avoid a misleadingly harmonic concept of mediation and dialogue, it could be argued that the figure of the turgeman embodies linguistic and literary aspects of the contact zone. In contrast to the Hebrew word metargem, more widely used for translator, the turgeman specifically denotes the traditional translator of a Rabbi’s Hebrew sermon to a mostly Greek or Aramaic speech community. Chana Kronfeld, “Ha-meshorer ka-metargem etsel amihai [The Poet as Translator in Y. Amichai’s Work],” Ot 3 (2013): 5–20 [Hebrew]. Kronfeld has rightly pointed out the heavy emphasis put on the politics underlying literary production in Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” or Emily Apter’s idea of “translation zone”. Adopting Kronfeld’s critique, my close reading of texts in the individual chapters of this book ultimately seeks to analyse their poetics, while nonetheless demonstrating the correlation between the poetics and politics of the texts discussed. See Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).



Introduction 

 17

This study traces the ways in which Scholem, Kraft and Strauss face and fashion aspects of the German-Hebrew “contact zones” within the scope of their literary productions, and demonstrates particularly the defiant, performative mode of their writing oeuvres, which I define as counterlanguages. I draw the term “counterlanguage” from the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and linguistic anthropology. The latter has mostly applied counterlanguage to African-American English in order to emphasise the conscious attempt by US slaves and their descendants to represent an alternative reality through a communication system based on ambiguity, irony and satire.62 These substratal ways of speaking inherited from Africa were reshaped by the historical experience of African Americans in America in order to undermine suppressive racial power relations in the context of plantation slavery and its aftermath, which dictated a highly regulated speech culture.63 Relevant to my examination despite the differing historical contexts and their associated power relations is precisely the defiant potential found in language as such and in specific speech cultures, as well as the resultant performativity of the acts of writing examined. Discussing variations in the concept of the performative in literature and philosophy of the twentieth century, Jonathan Culler argues that the tension between the constative and performative functions of texts makes for their basic structure. Culler bases his examination on J. L. Austin’s paradigmatic distinction between constative utterances that, in Culler’s formulation, “make a statement, describe a state of affairs, and are true or false, and another class of utterances that are not true or false and that actually perform the action to which they refer: performatives.”64 Yet this distinction, as Austin himself discovered, encounters difficulties because there may be “implicit performatives” where there is no explicitly performative verb (such as “promise” or “order”), and therefore any utterance could be an implicit performative, for constative utterances perform actions like affirming, describing and stating.65 Furthermore, as Culler shows, Austin “distinguishes the locutionary act, which is the act of speaking a sentence, from the illocutionary 62 Marcyliena Morgan, “The Africanness of Counterlanguage among African-Americans,” in Africanism in African-American Language Varieties, ed. by Salikoko S. Mufwene (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 423–435. 63 In a further study Morgan reiterates that under plantation slavery conditions, speech and the style of speaking were highly regulated, requiring verbal and physical confirmation of the relationship between dominator and dominated (Marcyliena Morgan, Language, Discourse and Power in African-American Culture, Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22–23). 64 Jonathan Culler, “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative,” Poetics Today 21/3 (Fall 2000): 503–519 (504). 65 Ibid., 505.

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 Introduction

act, which is the act we perform by speaking this sentence, and from the perlocutionary act, which is an act accomplished […] by performing the illocutionary act.”66 In the literary sphere, although actually excluded by Austin, this means highlighting a use of language that is active and world-making, and generally viewing literature as an act.67 The understanding of literature as performance nourishes my own examination, since it gives due weight to the defiant modes that my chosen authors attempt to develop and pursue in changing environments of cultural marginality. In order to understand the predicaments faced by the culturally and linguistically marginal writer we may turn to Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as performative, for Butler claims that gender is not what one is but what one does. On the one hand, gender is a prescribed repetition of subjectivating norms that one cannot cast off at will and that work, animate and limit the gender subject. On the other hand, these subjectivating norms are the resources from which resistance and subversion are formed.68 Butler is recognised as a key theorist of the performative (and of the speech act) alongside thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Derrida’s discussion on the performative revolves around the issue of iterability or citationality but also of the possibility of inaugural acts. The latter are acts that create something new in the political as well as the literary sphere, acts of writing that no longer consist of theoretical knowledge, of new constative statements, and that not only change language but by changing language change more than language.69 In contemplating the essence of modernist poetry, poets themselves emphasise poetry’s reluctance to accept linguistic dictation. According to this view, whether we speak of political poetry or not, at the centre of modernist values we find the ethos of “not-speaking” as one speaks and “not-writing” as one writes.70 Linguistic opposition thus also becomes a core thematic engagement of 66 Ibid., 506. 67 Ibid., 507. 68 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 213. Culler discusses Butler alongside Derrida and Paul de Man as central thinkers contributing to the idea of the performative. See Culler, 512–513. 69 Culler, 509. Culler shows how Paul de Man points out that language at its most characteristic comprises of utterances that display a paradoxical, not necessarily harmonious, even self-undermining relationship between the performative and constative, between what they do and what they state, in other words a relationship that is not necessarily harmonious or cooperative (ibid., 510). 70 The Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor as quoted in Shaul Setter, “‘Noshekh, yonek mar’il lash motsets madbik’: ‘al lashon ha-hitnagdut ha-‘ivrit be-shirato shel yizhak laor. [‘Biting, Feeding, Poisening, Kneeding, Sucking, Contaging’: On the Hebrew Counterlanguage in the Poetry of Yizhak Laor],” Ot 1 (2010): 163–190 (179) [Hebrew].



Introduction 

 19

such poetry.71 This position in turn entails an ineluctable if fecund paradox, for language is countered in language, as the case of Paul Celan’s counter-German demonstrates. In the context of German-Jewish literature, the term counterlanguage has indeed most notably been applied to the poetry of Romanian, German-Jewish, Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, written, crucially, after World War Two. Scholarship addressing his relationship to the German language typically asks how he solved the dilemma of writing in a language that is “at the same time his mother tongue and the language of his brethren’s extermination”?72 How was he able to re-appropriate a language in which he and his brethren had been silenced and exiled?73 It has been maintained that Celan forced this language to undergo the very selfsame exile and silence by “bearing suffering and death in its own morphology and syntax.”74 In other words, Celan had “no other concern than to tear apart this language, pierce holes into it and construct within this language, which is and is not his own, another ‘counterlanguage.’”75 Celan thus spoke a “counter-German” in which “German takes revenge on German, subverting, dissembling, and reassembling itself in a lawless linguistic freedom to which history itself has given license.”76 Similar qualities are found in the consciously pierced, disrupted and heteroglot bi-lingual poems of Strauss, and in the anarchic and revengeful aspects that Scholem attributes to sacred Hebrew. Kraft’s Germanist steadfastness is, however, more reminiscent of strategies of continuity and survival, which are paradoxi71 Setter, 179. 72 Jean-Claude Pinson as cited and translated from French in Chicana Nagavaraja, “Contemporary Poetry as a Global Dialogue,” in Re-Imagining Language and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. by Suthira Duangsamorsorn, Studies in Comparative Literature 49 (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2005), 304. Originally in Jean Claude Pinson, A quoi bon la poésie aujourd’hui? (Nantes: Editions Pleins Feux, 1999), 43. Theo Buck’s collection of essays on Celan is thus entitled Muttersprache, Mördersprache, Celan-Studien 1 (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1993). 73 Harold Schweizer, “Paul Celan: Suffering in Translation,” Suffering and the Remedy of Art (Albany: State of New York University Press, 1997), 139–155 (145). 74 Ibid., 144. George Steiner argues contestably that Celan generated an “unhoused, broken, idiosyncratic […] ‘meta-German’ cleansed of historical-political dirt and thus, alone, usable by a proudly Jewish voice after the holocaust” (George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 389). 75 Pinson in Nagavaraja, 304. 76 Schweizer, 146. Schweizer shows how Celan himself alludes to this type of counterlanguage or counter-writ in the “Meridian” speech, where he likens his poetry to the language of “Atemwende” [turn of breath], a duplicitous word that epitomises both breath and death, spirit and matter, word and silence. To Celan, Büchner’s Lucile from Danton’s Death is the “personification” of the suicidal counter-poetic. Celan’s own poetry or “Atemwende” is likewise a radical gesture of perilous “Gegenschrift” [counter-writ], “Gegenwort” [counter-word; word against the grain] (ibid., 145).

20 

 Introduction

cally also attributed to language in Celan’s poetry. Harold Schweizer argues that German can be seen as the sole continuity in the midst of Celan’s political, geographic, historic and linguistic dislocations, both in his native Bukovina and as a German poet and lecturer in Paris.77 This continuity does not, however, protect German from the grim marks of its experience. On the contrary, the painful survival of language is often couched in allegories with an etymology of translation, such as “ferry across” [übersetzen], “camp-following language” [mitgewanderte Sprache] or “co-| writing| heel” [mit-| schreibende| Ferse], all of which suggest, according to Schweizer, violent linguistic dislocations where language “resurfaces enriched with blood, silence, murder and history.”78 Although my own examination does not focus on post-Holocaust approaches to language, it nonetheless demonstrates how questions of linguistic rights, transfer, dislocation, re-appropriation and exile helped shape the specific approaches to language of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss. They developed a counteractive linguistic and literary legacy: Hebraist lamentation, Germanist steadfastness and polyglot dialogue. Despite their obvious differences, these counterlanguages share a fundamental conviction of language as a constitutive force and moral indicator in the world, as well as a defiant quality directed against perceived forms of linguistic and cultural decline, and existential threats. Scholem’s early writings on language revolve around ideas on the language of lamentation (“On Lament and Lamentation”, 1917) and the language of retaliation (“On Our Language: A Confession”, 1926).79 These writings express his fear of the “fall of language”, mainly in the context of the Zionist revival of Hebrew as modern vernacular. Scholem attempted to counteract the secularisation of Hebrew by stressing and promoting its qualities of silence and lament. This counterstrategy can be seen as a precursor of his later writing on history, labelled as “counter-history” and defined as “the belief that the true history lies in a subterranean tradition that must be brought to light, much as the apocalyptic thinker decodes an ancient prophecy or as Walter Benjamin spoke of ‘brushing history

77 Ibid., 141. 78 Ibid., 141–143. The translations of Celan’s German verses are provided by Schweizer. Schweizer also alludes to Celan’s 1958 speech on the occasion of receiving the Bremen Prize. 79 L; the German version of the 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig entitled “Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache” is reprinted in Stéphane Mosès, Der Engel der Geschichte: Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), 215–217. The English translation of the letter by Ora Wiskind is reprinted in Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. by Benjamin Harshav (Stanford University Press 2008),168–169.



Introduction 

 21

against the grain’.”80 Indeed, by retrieving the language of Hebrew lamentation from seeming oblivion Scholem enacted the “lamentation of language itself”, thematically and formally. After his emigration in 1923, Scholem’s counterlanguage of lament was complemented by the idea of a “language of retaliation”, which he discussed in the famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig in 1926. Here Scholem warned that the sacred aspect of Hebrew would one day retaliate against its modern, secularised speakers. While Scholem has been described as the “guardian of the Hebrew word”81, Kraft envisaged himself as keeper of the German spirit and the German language. In line with the notion of a vernacular nation, Kraft believed the spirit of a nation to be expressed in its language. His work as a librarian in Hanover indicated and contributed to his recovery and preservation projects, manifested, for example, in the discovery of nineteenth-century German thinker C. G. Jochmann’s manuscript on language and the collecting of anonymous literary texts for later publication. However, the experiences of flight and of exile after 1933 explain more clearly the persistence and zeal that characterise his life-long mission of recovery. In order to save the German spirit and language in the face of cultural decline and cataclysmic historical events, Kraft carefully forged a refuge or “German ark” in Jerusalem, where he discussed the literary works and linguistic approaches of, among others, Franz Kafka, Goethe, Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus. Hence Kraft’s counterstrategy consisted primarily in the act of reterritorialising the German spirit and the German language in defiance of both Germanist and Hebraist politics.82 Reterritorialisation and preservation nonetheless resulted in the simultaneous appreciation of Borchardt’s “restorative” German, Stefan George’s “new poetic language” [neue Dichtersprache] and Karl Kraus’s satire. The relentless loyalty of Scholem and Kraft to Hebrew and German, respectively, is in turn countered by the polyglot agenda of Ludwig Strauss. His counterlanguage emerges most clearly in the bilingual poems written after emigration and included in the 1937 cycle Small Night Watches (Kleine Nachtwachen).83 In Germany Strauss had written on Zionist politics and Hebraist agendas within the perimeters of cultural, Buberian Zionism, although precursors of the parodic tone and polyglot agenda of the bi-lingual poems can be found in the 1913 novella

80 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982), 11–12. 81 Itta Shedletzky, “Wächter des Worts,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 March 2007, www. faz.net/artikel/C31399/waechter-des-worts-30110378.html (accessed 24 July 2011). 82 See Dekoven Ezrahi, “When Exiles Return.” 83 Ludwig Strauss, Kleine Nachtwachen, in StGW III, 688–691.

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 Introduction

The Mediator (Der Mittler) and in the parodies on George (1918).84 The bi-lingual poems in Small Night Watches can be seen as a form of counter-writ on various levels. By letting German and Hebrew inhabit the same text, they revolt against purist linguistic claims, thus pursuing a subversive ideal that is confirmed by the allusion to the Menippean satire. Bilingualism and parody combine to produce a heteroglot counterlanguage that relativizes cultural and linguistic purisms and extremist political claims. At the same time Strauss escapes the bind of empty relativism in his messianic suggestions on translation in pieces such as “A Psalm Returns Home” (“Ein Psalm kehrt heim”).85 The counterlanguages of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss attempt to defy linguistic power relations and literary canons, and are recognised as literary performatives of various forms such as paradoxical language or apophasis, reterritorializing citationality, and multilingual, heteroglot code-switching.86 The book is divided into three chapters dedicated to Scholem, Kraft and Strauss, respectively. The division allows, firstly, for an in-depth reading and understanding of the linguistic reflections and emerging counterlanguages unique to each writer, and, secondly, for an exhaustive comparison of all three. Each chapter is arranged more or less chronologically, following the development of their respective approaches to language from early adulthood in Germany through emigration or flight to British Mandate Palestine to permanent settlement in its speech community. The chronological organisation allows to examine whether a “crisis of language” already existed in in Germany and to trace and evaluate shifts or amplifications of such a crisis following dislocation and settlement within a new linguistic environment.

84 Ludwig Strauss, Der Mittler, in StGW I, 13–26. 85 Ludwig Strauss, “Ein Psalm kehrt heim,” in StGW I, 325. 86 These may indeed be identified as attempts to become nomads and migrant within one’s main language (or languages) and a moving away from the sources of power and dominance that exist in language, see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka; Setter, “Hebrew Counterlanguage.” Setter analyses several poems by the Israeli poet Yizhak Laor that display the inherent conflict between the sharp and divergent arguments and the metric shifts in which they are expressed and Laor’s explicit statements about poetry’s need for such conflict (e.g. Setter, 171–172). In fact, Laor argues that opposition lies in the centre of the modernist ethos so that the oppositional expression becomes also a thematic centre of poetry: it is modernist poetry’s ethical priority to write, not as one writes, and to speak, not as one speaks (ibid., 179).

I G  ershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation Gershom Scholem (Berlin 1897 – Jerusalem 1982) has arguably contributed like no other scholar to the study of Jewish history and Jewish culture in the twentieth century. At the same time Scholem’s radius extends beyond his paradigmatic works on Jewish mysticism to the history of German Zionism, the issues of German-Jewish dialogue and German-Jewish acculturation, and the scholarly and intellectual developments of the yishuv (Jewish community) in Palestine and later Israel.1 This extensive radius is captured in Scholem’s writings on language. Indeed, his early reflections on language accompanied and at times even defined crucial biographical, intellectual and political stepping-stones in his life. The following chapter discusses broadly speaking two types of Scholem’s writings on language: esoteric and polemic.2 In the first part of the chapter I will discuss the esoteric essay “On Lament and Lamentation” (1917) (henceforth “On Lament”) which develops a complex theory on the language of the Hebrew lamentation.3 In order to render this dense and perplexing essay more accessible I illustrate its genesis in relation to Scholem’s concurrent study projects, his significant dialogue with Walter Benjamin and his relationship to Martin Buber. My analysis focuses, however, on the idea of the “language of the border”, through which Scholem attempts to formulate and enact a paradoxical yet productive dynamic between silence and speech, and offers provisional definitions of non-symbolic and non-referential language. These early linguistic speculations reflect Scholem’s continued engagement with questions of transmissibility, the interaction between exoteric and esoteric tradition, and the ideas of revelation, destruction and redemption. The second part of the chapter will trace the development of Scholem’s linguistic ideas from his youth in Germany (1916–1923) to the period following emigration to Jerusalem (1923) and will evaluate the effect of this dislocation on Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation

1 Michael Brenner, introduction to Münchener Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur: Zur historischen Gestalt Gershom Scholems 2 (2007): 5–8. 2 Esoteric elements often permeate other writings, as will become clear from a closer read of chosen texts. 3 Gershom Scholem, “On Lament and Lamentation,” translated, introduced and annotated by Lina Barouch and Paula Schwebel, Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014): 4–12. Henceforth cited as L. A slightly amended version of this translation, alongside further translated texts by Scholem on the theme of lament and an extended introduction by Barouch and Schwebel appeared in Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel, eds., Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives (Berlin: De Gruyter 2014), 313–320.

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 Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation

Scholem’s thought. Firstly it will be demonstrated that, parallel to writing his theory of the silent language of lamentation, Scholem condemns the loss of lament in the language of his generation and particularly in Modern Hebrew. Numerous polemical texts combine esoteric ideas found in “On Lament” with a contemporary Krausian terminology in denouncing the “prattle” of Scholem’s Zionist and Jewish peers. A noticeable amplification of his critique takes place after immigration to Jerusalem in 1923. The issue of the loss of lament continues to feature in several essays that discuss the difficulties inherent in the historical realisation of Zionism in an increasingly pathos-filled, apocalyptic vocabulary. Such is his warning of a retaliatory language that will attack its speakers, as expressed in the well-known 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig “On Our Language: A Confession”.4 Scholem’s writings on language, since they are concerned mainly with Hebrew as holy language, interweave philological, empirical and metaphysical (or theological) concerns. The two first parts of this chapter nonetheless stress different aspects of his reflection on language. Scholem’s theory on the language of lament may nominally engage with the Hebrew lamentation and partly result from his translation of the Book of Lamentations into German, but empirical and philological enquiries mainly serve broader metaphysical questions. In the second part of the chapter I move to his political and polemical writings on Modern Hebrew. Here, no doubt, he fiercely criticises the empirical use and abuse of Hebrew in the framework of Zionist vernacular nationalism. Ultimately, however, this language critique peaks in the interlocking of empirical and metaphysical concerns: Scholem explicitly correlates the “fall” of Hebrew to the metaphysical status of the Jewish people in the world. The symptomatic loss of lament in language communicates, in Scholem’s view, the blind and oblivious “entry of the Jewish people into world history”. Thus this chapter generally illustrates how Scholem grants Hebrew and language as such both theological and cultural-nationalist significance.

4 Scholem, “On Our Language,” 168–169.



The Lamentation of Language Itself 

 25

1 The Lamentation of Language Itself5 It is a metaphysical truth that all nature would begin to lament if it were endowed with language […]. This proposition has a double meaning. It means, first, that she would lament language itself.6 (Walter Benjamin) All Lamentations by their very definition lament, but they lament – and this is the uniqueness of this lamentation – not just any being, but rather language itself.7 (Gershom Scholem)

“On Lament and Lamentation” has been described both as Scholem’s first consistent theory of language and as one of his most remarkable “independent, esoteric” texts from the period.8 Indeed, Scholem offers a unique yet not easily decipherable engagement with, among others, questions on non-referential and symbolic language, the dynamics between speech and silence and the relationship between language and tradition or transmissibility. At the heart of his text lies the definition of the Hebrew lamentation as “the language of the border”, which oscillates between spoken and unspoken language. The metaphor of the border helps Scholem stress and reconcile the paradoxes inherent in language and the question of its transmissibility. Scholem’s puzzling statement that “all lamentation laments language itself” encapsulates some of the inherent aporias: how can language lament itself? How can language communicate its own weaknesses or limits in language? “On Lament” attempts to describe and re-enact 5 A different version of the first part of this chapter appeared as “Lamenting Language Itself: Gershom Scholem on the Silent Language of Lamentation,” New German Critique 111 (2010): 1–26. 6 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, ed. by Markus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 72. 7 Gershom Scholem, “[Hiobs Klage],” (1918) in SchTb II, 544–547 (545). Unless otherwise stated all translations from Scholem’s writings are my own. 8 Sigrid Weigel, “Scholems Gedichte und seine Dichtungstheorie: Klage, Adressierung, Gabe und das Problem einer biblischen Sprache in unserer Zeit,” in Gershom Scholem: Literatur und Rhetorik, ed. by Stéphane Mosès and Sigrid Weigel (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Bühlau Verlag, 2000), 16–47; Daniel Weidner, Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 147. Since the original inception of this chapter on Scholem and lament two separate essay collections that deal largely with Scholem’s early writings on lament have appeared, including translations into English of several key essays. First, a special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014) and thereafter the aforementioned essay collection edited by Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel entitled Lament in Jewish Thought. The latter seeks a so-called multi-pronged approach to lament and the different ways of dealing with lament’s paradoxical nature (see Leora Batnizky, preface to Lament in Jewish Thought, xiii–xvii (xiii)).

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 Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation

these paradoxes by developing lamentation as an anarchic, charged “liminal language” that oscillates between speech and silence and between (self-) annihilation and redemption. At the heart of these issues lies a fascination with the dialectic between openness and secret, concealment and revelation, which similarly defined Scholem’s concurrent enquiries on tradition and transmissibility.9 Scholem’s use of these terms in the essay itself as well in other concurrent texts and notes from his journals is not always consistent or fully developed. The reader may, therefore, draw on Scholem’s numerous references to concepts like Torah, revelation and tradition, but these remain partly lacking and illustrate Scholem’s own ardent searching. In extension to his understanding of a necessary interaction between esoteric and exoteric tradition Scholem develops the liminality of lamentation as the key to its transmissibility and endurance. The essential instability of the language of the border results in (self-) destruction but at the same time grants lamentation its immortality. Scholem describes a language that gravitates from its precarious position on the border towards unspoken (symbolic) language in a momentary self-cancelling act that simultaneously abolishes the symbol. Yet because lamentation is understood as the very border itself, the leap towards the symbol fails and lamentation returns from its temporary exile. An infinite cycle of exile and return is established: the charged, anarchic moment of self-negation experiences endless repetitions. Self-negation is paralleled with self-affirmation, an equation which explains how the (self-) destructive quality of language paradoxically ensures it immortality or survival as tradition. Scholem’s fascination with “practices of transmission”10 is articulated through the performative aspect of the 1917 essay. “On Lament” is not merely a discursive text or an analysis of the ways in which lamentation is bequeathed but in itself an active “inscription” into tradition.11 Indeed, the paradoxes of language invite a certain performative engagement with the issues at hand. I wish to argue that in writing on the language of lamentation Scholem experiments with apophasis, which aims to solve the dilemma of saying the ineffable.12 Scholem adopts the metaphor of the border, which he understands as a non-territory or non-place, and tries to avoid an essentialist or positive definition of lamentation by using techniques such as double negation and self-cancellation. The 9 Weigel, 18. See also Itta Shedletzky’s introduction in SchBr III, vii–xv; Stéphane Mosès, “Scholem and Rosenzweig: The Dialectics of History,” History & Memory 2 (1990): 100–116. 10 See Stéphane Mosès on Scholem in his volume Angel, 145–183. 11 See Weidner, 21. 12 On the definition of apophasis, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 2–3.



The Lamentation of Language Itself 

 27

apophatic aporia reaches its peak in the claim that “all lamentation laments language itself.”13 I thus read Scholem’s essay as “an act of writing” or “theory in practice” and not exclusively as a discursive text. Indeed, writing is understood as performance, practice as well as sketch, through which the writer attempts to fulfil himself and to find his place and to inscribe into tradition.14 The act of deliberate inscription is related to Scholem’s inclusive, if provisional, notion of tradition during this time, which he defines in open letters and journal entries. We will see that when referring to (Jewish) tradition Scholem interchangeably uses, whether consciously or not, terms such as teachings [Lehre], Torah and the “totality of Judaism”. The latter spans from the Bible, the oral teachings up to all contemporary Jews potentially contributing to Jewish learning, himself clearly included. The following sections of the chapter firstly examine the genesis of “On Lament” in the context of Scholem’s early intellectual searching. I will then move on to discuss Scholem’s primary dialectical constellation of spoken and unspoken language in relation to the early linguistic ideas of Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber.15 This will be followed by a close reading of “On Lament”, which demonstrates the relevance of Scholem’s “border dialectics” to the relation between language and tradition, with particular emphasis on the ideas of linguistic destruction, mourning and redemption.

The Genesis of “On Lament and Lamentation” “On Lament and Lamentation” was conceived in 1917 as an epilogue to Scholem’s translation of the Book of Lamentations into German.16 Itta Shedletzky, the editor of Scholem’s published letters, has described his intensive work on the lamentations as a reflection of his mourning for a Judaism lost to emancipation and assimilation. According to Shedletzky, Scholem perceived this “work of mourn13 SchTb II, 545 (1918). The difficulty of reaching a purely “performative mode” of apophasis is described in the epilogue to Sells, 207–217. See also Weidner, 21. 14 Weidner comments here specificially on Scholem’s practice of writing (ibid.). 15 Alongside the key conversations held with Benjamin in this context the volume Lament in Jewish Thought provides comparative insights into Scholem’s theory of laments and its relation to ideas found in Kant, Hermann Cohen, Gadamer and Celan. See Ilit Ferber, “‘Incline thine ear to me, and hear my speech’: Scholem, Benjamin and Cohen on Lament,” in Lament in Jewish Thought, 111–132; Adam Lypszyc, “Words and Corpses: Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ between Gadamer and Scholem,” in Lament in Jewish Thought, 221–236. 16 According to the editors of Scholem’s diaries, “On Lament” was probably finished on 2 December 1917, a day after completion of the translation of the Biblical lamentations, and a fair copy prepared by Scholem in January 1918 (SchTb II, 128, n. 1).

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 Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation

ing” – described by Scholem himself as “a confession of my own state of mind”17 – as a necessary means of recovering the traces of that tradition. A personal dimension also responsible for Scholem’s preoccupation with mourning and lamentation may have been his traumatic experience in the German army during the summer of 1917.18 Scholem’s extensive work on the kinot [Hebrew lamentations] is evident in his printed journals as well as unpublished material.19 This material includes systematic translations of lamentations into German, provisional hand-written lists of Biblical lamentations, notes on relevant secondary literature, detailed German translations of specific Hebrew words with accompanying comments, and studies on existing translations such as the Luther translation of the Book of Job.20 What are probably the earliest translations by Scholem of Biblical lamentations into German appear in a notebook dated 1915–1917.21 After writing “On Lament” Scholem also completed the translations and commentaries to the Biblical lamentations of Job and Ezekiel.22 During his lifetime only Scholem’s 1919 translation of the medieval Jewish lamentation “what I desired [the Torah] was burned in the fire” [sha’ali serufa ba-eish] was published, in Buber’s journal Der Jude.23 The existing material indeed demonstrates a rigorous study of the lamentations. However, it is not clear that Scholem’s vast intellectual undertaking during these years can be reduced to a sense of mourning, as Shedletzky suggests. Her argument likewise fails to explain why Scholem was particularly interested in the language of lamentation. More convincing is Shedletzky’s use of the term “work of mourning”, which may imply a conscious act of “inscription”.24 As such Scholem’s “mourning” must be understood neither as fatalistic resignation nor as melancholic withdrawal but as a conscious endeavour to “lament language 17 SchBr I, 144 (7 March 1918). 18 Itta Shedletzky, “Be-ḥipus aḥar ha-yahadut ha-avuda [In Search of a Lost Judaism],” Zmanim 61 (1997–1998): 78–85 (80) [Hebrew]. Weidner adds that the “existentialist undertones” in this context are also related to Scholem’s ascetic ethos of lonliness and to lovesickness during this period (Weidner, 192, n. 347). 19 Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel, Archive 4° 1599/277-IV. 20 Archive 4° 1599/277-IV/19. See recent English translations by Paula Schwebel to some of the published texts and translations of Scholem into German in Lament in Jewish Thought, 325–350. 21 See editors’ comments on the writing and revising of these translations in SchTb II, 112, n. 1. Scholem’s translations follow on pp. 112–127. 22 SchTb II, 544, n. 1 and 548, n. 1. 23 The translation and introduction appeared in Der Jude 4/6 (1919–1920): 283–286. It is reprinted in Scholem’s diaries with an additional conclusion (SchTb II, 607–611). 24 Shedletzky uses the Hebrew term “‘avodat evel” but refrains from referring specifically to Freud’s notion of “work of mourning” [Trauerarbeit]. The interpretation of what “work of mourning” might mean in Scholem’s case is therefore based on my own reading of his texts.



The Lamentation of Language Itself 

 29

itself”, thus counteracting the withering of this tradition. What are the scholarly and ideational resources employed by Scholem in this act of inscription? Scholem’s journals and letters from the conception period of “On Lament” reveal diverse cross-references between the topic of lamentation and subjects like Jean Paul’s writing on humour, elegies written by Rilke and Else Lasker-Schüler, the meaning of time in Judaism, the Rabbinical “inlaid style” and mathematical formulas.25 These references testify to Scholem’s readings of German literature and philosophy, his increasing knowledge of Jewish and Hebrew sources and his study of mathematics.26 Daniel Weidner shows that Scholem’s early reflections on semiotics were based equally on his study of Hebrew and mathematics. Scholem’s reflection on the relationship between mathematics and language constitutes “a determination of the border of language”, for Scholem locates mathematical language beyond normal language, both in its un-metaphorical character and its muteness.27 In several diary entries from 1916 onwards Scholem notes, for example, that mathematics distinguishes itself first and foremost through its un-metaphorical nature.28 Since mathematics does not require the term “as if”, Scholem concludes that “here language has overcome itself: it says, what is, without detour.”29 Mysticism, on the other hand, can only speak in “image and metaphor.”30 Scholem quotes Benjamin and writes that “mathematics is a nameless teaching: it is a perception, and in fact a metaphysical one”31. Later, however, he claims that “Torah is no doubt a higher system than even mathematics […] Torah cannot be symbol [...] for a transmission of the truth is by definition un-symbolic.”32 In a 1917–1918 university essay entitled “Exercises in Logic following Lotze’s Logic” Scholem claims that the entire philosophical realm of logic is based on the idea “that pure thought can be represented completely only in the pure symbol.”33 In tandem with his un-symbolic understanding of mathematics and of the Torah, however, he concludes that there are fields, which cannot be reached through 25 SchTb II, 147–148, 171, 305, 356, 547 (1918). The “inlaid style” defines texts which are interlaced with expressions from the Bible and the Talmud. 26 Scholem’s autobiography, Mi-berlin le-yerushalayim [From Berlin to Jerusalem] (Jerusalem: Am Oved Publishers, 1982) [Hebrew], gives an account of these intellectual undertakings. See Chapters 2 and 3 on Jewish background and Jewish awakening (ibid., 26–61). 27 Weidner, 176–180. 28 SchTb I, 264 (2 March 1916). 29 Ibid., 265. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 467 (7 January 1917) and SchTb II, 213 (winter 1917–1918). 32 SchTb I, 434 (24 November 1916). 33 SchTb II, 110. See also Weidner, 178.

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 Gershom Scholem: Language between Lamentation and Retaliation

the sphere of Logic, such as religion or history whose “inner linguistic principle” cannot be exhausted through the system of signs.34 Scholem’s fascination with spheres whose inner linguistic principle reaches beyond the explanations of logic and semiotics is crucial to his work on the language of lamentation and his reflections on Judaism in general: “The lamentation engages me constantly. I know now that this is an entrance to the true centre of Judaism, an entrance as little known as the two others which I have discovered so far: the idea of the Torah and language.”35 The fascination with a linguistic principle that is beyond mere communicability defines Walter Benjamin’s theoretical enquiries throughout these years.36 It has been shown that perhaps more than any other person it was Benjamin who became a central figure in Scholem’s intellectual advancement during this period, especially with regard to questions of mysticism and language.37 In fact, Scholem claimed “On Lament” as a continuation or even completion of Benjamin’s 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”.38 Benjamin, in turn, commented on Scholem’s translations of the lamentations and his 1917 essay.39 Their exchanges on the topic of lamentation include Scholem’s reference to Benjamin’s idea of the lament of nature and joint discussions on lam34 SchTb II, 111. 35 Letter to Ludwig Strauss from 1 August 1918 (SchBr I, 170). In a letter to Harry Heymann, Scholem writes that this has explicitly resulted in essays on the teaching of definition in Lotze, on mathematical logic and the philosophical text “On Lament and Lamentation” as epilogue to the translation of the Biblical Lamentations completed in November (SchBr I, 132). 36 Benjamin, “On Language.” 37 The friendship as seen through the eyes of Scholem is reconstructed in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Secondary literature analysing their intellectual partnership includes: Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem and Levinas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991); Moshe Idel, “A. Abulafia, G. Scholem, and W. Benjamin on Language,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott, ed. by Jens Mattern, Gabriel Motzkin and Shimon Sandbank (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000), 131–138; Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Recent discussions on the dialogue between Scholem and Benjamin on the topic of lament appear in Ilit Ferber, “A Language of the Border: On Scholem’s Theory of Lament,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 21/2 (2013): 161–186, and Paula Schwebel, “Lament and the Shattered Expression of Mourning: Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014): 27–41. 38 SchTb II, 88 (3 November 1917). See also Weidner, 191–192. Scholem translated Benjamin’s essay into Hebrew (Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 38). 39 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, vol. 1, 1910– 1918 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995), 442.



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entations written by Rilke and Else Lasker-Schüler.40 After reading Scholem’s essay Benjamin revealed to him that in a 1916 piece entitled “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy”41 he had likewise attempted to solve the question of how “language as such [can] fulfil itself in mourning and how ... it [can] be the expression of mourning.”42 For the most part, Scholem’s essay helped Benjamin to recognise “on the basis of my nature as a Jew, the inherent code, the ‘completely autonomous order,’ of the lament and of mourning.”43 At the same time Benjamin maintains that “in contradistinction to your point of departure, mine had only the advantage of pointing me, from the very start, to the fundamental antithesis of mourning and tragedy, which to conclude from your essay, you have not yet recognised.”44 He is likewise unconvinced that “every pure act of mourning must lead to a lament.”45 What can one learn from this exchange with Benjamin? Scholem stresses in a diary entry from March 1918 that “with the exception of Walter, I am incapable of speaking to my friends about the things that most deeply move me. It’s awful! I know I would just encounter boundless incomprehension.”46 The complexity of Benjamin’s role with respect to Scholem’s thought in general and his work on the lamentations in particular has been discussed in several readings of the text. Sigrid Weigel, for example, argues that the 1917 essay reflects Scholem’s attempt to formulate his very own literary theory in that it describes the birth of poetry out of a figure of destruction. She concludes this from Scholem’s translations of 40 SchTb II, 139 (24 November 1918). According to Scholem, Benjamin referred him to a lament in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (Scholem, Freundschaft, 84). In March 1918, Scholem also commented on Rilke’s and Else Lasker-Schüler’s laments of David for Jonathan to which Benjamin referred him (SchTb II, 147–148); Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (1978), 1:169. Scholem himself translated the Biblical lamentation of David for Saul and Jonathan in December 1917 (SchTb II, 88). 41 Walter Benjamin, “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, 1:59–61. According to the editors of the German scholarly edition of Benjamin’s works this essay was probably written between June and November 1916 and marks the beginning of Benjamin’s major work on the German mourning play (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2:929–930). 42 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 120. 43 Ibid., 120–121. 44 Ibid., 121. 45 Ibid. 46 Gershom Scholem, Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem 1913–1919, ed. and trans. by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 215. In truth, however, Scholem did share some of his intentions and work on the kinot with other friends such as Grete Brauer, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss, and had one of his translations published by Buber (SchBr I, 144, 149, 170 (1918)).

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the Hebrew lamentations, which she regards as poems in their own right, and the comparison he draws between lamentation and poetry due to a common linguistic “liminal character” and “tragic paradox”. Weigel reinforces her argument by referring to the influence of Benjamin, himself preoccupied at this time with questions of poetry and language.47 Daniel Weidner also shows the role played by Benjamin’s enquiries into poetry and language but denies that Scholem’s 1917 essay results in an aesthetic theory, concluding that Scholem cannot ask genuinely aesthetic questions and instead applies terms such as revelation, tradition and holy scripture.48 In a letter to Werner Kraft dated 6 August 1917, which concerns Benjamin’s 1916 essay “On Language”, Scholem indeed confesses that “for me (and, from my perspective, I do not know whether I can say ‘unfortunately’), the aesthetic sphere remains […] so totally inaccessible and even invisible that I cannot possibly imagine where aesthetic orders exist in the world.”49 His preoccupation with Hebrew and mathematics, continues Scholem, drove him to reflect upon the nature of language and the study of three theories of language that have developed within the Jewish tradition. Through its literature and notion of “commentary” the Jewish tradition has, according to Scholem, tacitly but firmly affirmed a question burning within Scholem too: “whether the spiritual essence of the world can be expressed.”50 In the same letter Scholem notes that Benjamin’s treatise still lacks several key elements such as the question of symbolic language and a theory of signs and script, “which in my opinion lead to the deepest levels possible, for they raise the most decisive questions for mathematics and the philosophy of religion (to wit, whether the spiritual essence of the world is language and script – a proposition which I, according to my notion of Judaism, tend to affirm).”51 The question of whether the “mental being” of the world can be expressed in language also defines Benjamin’s linguistic speculation. Scholem tends to answer this question affirmatively, based on his understanding of Jewish sources. In Scholem’s theory the “mental being” of lament is “mourning” and it finds expression in the language of lamentation. Alongside the Jewish rabbinic tradition of commentary, which in Scholem’s view communicates 47 Weigel, “Dichtungstheorie.” 48 Weidner, 191 and 196. 49 Gershom Scholem, A Life in Letters 1914–1982, ed. and trans. by Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 52. In the same letter Scholem claims that Zion and mathematics are the two things that constitute the constant centre of his life (ibid., 87). 50 Scholem, A Life in Letters, 52. According to the editors of the German edition the “three” language theories Scholem refers to are probably the Biblical, Rabbinic and Kabbalistic theories (SchBr, 360, n. 4 to letter no. 31). 51 Scholem, A Life in Letters, 51 (3 August 1917).



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divine revelation, the tradition of lamentation conveys the language of mourning and silence. It can therefore be concluded that in “On Lament” questions of mathematics, semiotics and poetics take the backseat while Scholem focuses on the dialectic between language and tradition.52 This line of enquiry points, among others, to Scholem’s study of Franz Joseph Molitor’s 1827 The Philosophy of History; Or, on Tradition (Philosophie der Geschichte oder ueber die Tradition), which devotes several chapters to the centrality of language in the Jewish tradition and Jewish mysticism in particular, and which Benjamin had also read.53 Indeed, David Biale examines Scholem’s early “view of the nature and efficacy of language to transmit divine revelation” as a response to a “theological crisis in Judaism” – the question of the ability of historical tradition to communicate with the secular Jew.54 Biale’s interpretation of Scholem’s early linguistic speculations would thus support Weidner and Shedletzky’s arguments on the centrality of the issue of tradition in “On Lament”. In offering this view as a point of departure I wish to argue that “On Lament” deals first and foremost with the related questions of language and transmissibility. In the following section I will explore Scholem’s early reflections on the ability of language to communicate and transmit divine revelation or “mental being” in relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber.

Scholem, Benjamin and Buber: Mind, Revelation and “Erlebnis” in Language In “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Benjamin states: “Within all linguistic formation a conflict is waged between what is expressed and expressible and what is inexpressible and unexpressed.”55 In other words, “lan52 I agree here with Weidner, who maintains that mathematics plays a secondary role in “On Lament and Lamentation” (Weidner, 191). With respect to semiotics Weidner argues that Scholem’s early understanding of the symbol is not homogeneous since he considers it simultaneously as the ambiguous, deep, metaphorical mystical symbol and as a purely conventional sign deprived of all iconicity, which as such must be distinguished from the Romantic idea of the symbol as the “shining through” of a trancedental being in the finite (ibid., 175). 53 Franz Josef Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Hermannschen Buchhandlung, 1827). See especially Chapter 7, “Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache und Schrift bei den Ebräern,” 329–354, and Chapter 8‚“Ueber den Ursprung der Vokalpunktation,” 355–420. According to Weidner, Molitor’s book influenced Scholem’s early understanding of tradition and aroused his interest in language theory (Weidner, 177–180). On Molitor’s influence on both Scholem and Benjamin, see also Moshe Idel, “Abulafia”; Jacobson, 114–122; Mosès, Angel, 130–131. 54 Biale, Counter-History, 113. 55 Benjamin, “On Language,” 66.

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guage is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the non-communicable.”56 In viewing “On Lament” as a continuation of Benjamin’s essay, Scholem indeed uses the above distinction as a point of departure for his own essay, in which he distinguishes the linguistic spheres of “the revealed and the silenced”.57 Scholem and Benjamin thus reject what Benjamin terms a “bourgeois conception of language”, which maintains that “the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and its addressee a human being”58 in at least two senses. First, they include in language a non-communicable, silent substance. Second, they claim the communicability of revelation by stating that “the highest mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) at the same time the only one that does not know the inexpressible”.59 A more sceptical view of language would not grant it the ability to transmit divine revelation, as is evident in Martin Buber’s early writings.60 I suggest, therefore, that Scholem’s 1917 essay be considered not only in relation to Benjamin’s 1916 essay but likewise in the context of Martin Buber’s early thought, which also affected Scholem during the same period. It will be shown that despite Scholem and Buber’s contrasting views on “the nature and efficacy of language to transmit divine revelation”61, both were fascinated by the conflict between the inexpressible and its expression in language. The disparate language views developed by Scholem and Buber were closely linked to their respective understanding of “lived experience” [Erlebnis] or the experience of divine revelation.62 In his early youth Scholem much admired Buber’s concept of Judaism and supported his influence within the German Jewish community. In 1914, for example, he declared: “It wasn’t an easy decision and it caused quite a stir, but I’m now sailing in full speed ahead in the direction of Martin Buber”.63 But Scholem soon began to question Buber’s views and 56 Ibid., 74. 57 L, 6; Weidner, 191. Paula Schwebel illustrates that Scholem in fact overturns central paradigms in Benjamin’s 1916 essay. She discusses especially the continuity in Benjamin between finite and divine language, which she believes is countered by Scholem with an abyss between an “inexpressible symbolism” and its expression (Schwebel, “Lament and the Shattered Expression of Mourning”). This does not, I argue, contradict their joint fundamental distinction between silence and speech as I discuss it here. 58 Benjamin, “On Language,” 65. 59 Ibid., 67. 60 See Biale, Counter-History, 113. 61 Ibid. 62 For a discussion of Buber’s writings on language, see Asher Bieman, introduction to Martin Buber Werkausgabe, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäfer, vol. 6, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, ed. by Asher Bieman (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003), 9–68. 63 Scholem, Diaries, 26.



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in 1916 dismissed several of his ideas, most notably the concept of “lived experience”. According to Biale, Buber’s “mystical scepticism of language” during this period ruled out the possibility of expressing the experience of the divine in human language. Biale and Asher Bieman trace this scepticism back to Fritz Mauthner’s language critique, which argues that only “perceptual experience” [Erfahrung] can be conceptualised in language, for the latter evolves from the naming of sense perceptions.64 Accordingly Buber maintains that “Language is knowledge [...] and knowledge is the work of the commotion, in its greatest miracles a gigantic coordinate system of the mind. But the experience of ecstasy is not a knowing.”65 Scholem had already rejected Mauthner’s language scepticism in 1915: “Mauthner’s view could not let me survive more than an hour, I am too young for such mild resignation: words are wind, sciences are words, hence sciences are wind. My mind and emotion will not accept this logic.”66 This early rejection, which may sound arbitrary and intuitive, nonetheless paves the way for a more grounded belief in the paradigmatic and indicative functions of language.67 In 1919 Scholem also espouses the Krausian polemic against Mauthner: “My assumption about Mauthner’s language critique: that it is a highly sophisticated ideology of journalism […] A sceptical theory of language, which is formulated by experts with unconditional, impressive stubbornness, provides the basis of this unfounded exchangeability of words, which defines journalism.”68 While Scholem denounced Mauthner as an ideologue of journalism who proclaims the arbitrariness of words, Mauthner himself wanted to free humanity and the likes of Scholem from their “word superstition” and the “tyranny of language”. He defined the former as the belief that “the existence of the word were evidence for the reality of that, which it signifies.”69 He described Judaism as a “word religion” which, historically, abandoned the ritual of sacrifice at the temple in favour of 64 Biale, Counter-History, 115. Bieman writes that the introduction to Buber’s Rabbi Nahman must be read as an engagement with Mauthner’s language critique and Gustav Landauer’s Skepsis und Mystik (Bieman, 41). Mauthner argues that there is nothing in the human mind or in language, which was not already in the senses, or in other words, there is no word which does not stem from the watching of the material worlds to which the own body and its experiences belong (Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3rd ed., vol. 1, Zur Sprache und zur Psychologie (Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1923; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969), 235–236). 65 Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr, trans. by Esther Cameron (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univesity Press, 1985), 6. 66 SchTb I, 138–139 (29 July 1915). 67 Mosès, “Dialectics.” 68 SchTb II, 482–483 (13 July 1919). 69 Mauthner, 158.

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the service of the word in the synagogue. “Word fetishism” is thus particularly evident within Judaism, although it has similarly taken hold of other cultures as well as the scientific community.70 Writing on the varieties of religious experience, Buber “wanted to establish the irreducibility of religious experience to any other concept: the experience of the noumenal world was ontologically and epistemologically different from any other experience”.71 Buber seemed fascinated precisely by the “contradiction between ecstasy, which does not go into memory, and the desire to save it for memory, in the image, the speech, in confession.”72 In the introduction to Ecstatic Confessions Buber explains that “of all experiences which are said, in order to mark their incomparability, to be incommunicable, only ecstasy is by its very nature the ineffable.”73 In other words, the ecstatic experience of unity is “removed from the commotion, removed into the most silent, speechless heavenly kingdom – removed even from language, which the commotion once laboriously created to be its messenger and handmaiden.”74 Moreover, the silent and solitary nature of the “lived experience” is corrupted by the communal element of language.75 Buber’s collection of confessions seems nonetheless legitimised by the conclusion or compromise that “the ecstatic’s will to say is not mere impotence and stammering; it is also might and mastery. He wants to create a memorial of ecstasy which leaves no traces, to tow the timeless into the harbor of time”.76 What bridges the gap between the inexpressible experience and its expression in language seems to be the creation of myth: “And so it guided them to insert the experience – not as an event in the commotion, nor as a report in the intelligence of time, but to put it into the deed of their lives, to work it into their work, to make of it the new poem of the primal myth.”77 In the example of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, Buber considers words superfluous and even an obstacle to “lived experience”. Buber describes Rabbi Nahman as follows: “The word forms itself late in him; the teaching is with him at first an event and only then becomes a thought, that is, a word. ‘I have in me,’ he said, ‘teachings without clothes, and it is very hard for me until they clothe 70 Ibid., 169–170. 71 Biale, Counter-History,115. 72 Buber, Confessions, 9. 73 Ibid., 4–5. 74 Ibid., 5. 75 Ibid., 17. Mauthner defines language as a social factor and social reality when he claims that language only becomes language once it has reached beyond the individual and becomes understandable within a community (Mauthner, 19). 76 Buber, Confessions, 10. 77 Ibid., 22. See also Bieman, 43.



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themselves.’”78 The “teaching” is primarily experienced and only secondarily expressed in words. Words are described by the rabbi as the “clothing” of his essentially non-linguistic teachings. In a further passage Buber quotes Rabbi Nahman, who emphasises the experience of the reception of words by speaker and listener: “At times my words enter like a silence into the hearers and rest in them and work later, like slow medicines; at times my words do not at first work at all in the man to whom I say them, but when he then says them to another, they come back to him and enter into his heart in great depth and do their work in perfection.”79 Unlike Buber, who defined “lived experience” – and particularly “ecstasy” – as essentially inexpressible and by extension interpreted the teachings of Rabbi Nahman as fundamentally non-verbal, Scholem and Benjamin defined revelation as the most pronounceable [das Aussprechlichste]. In fact, Scholem’s turning away from Buber manifested itself in a fierce criticism of the Buberian “lived experience” in which he argues that it reduces Judaism and Zionism to an aesthetic concept and makes Hasidism socially acceptable.80 In a diary entry from January 1917, Scholem claims that the Buberian “lived experience” indiscriminately mixes concepts of mind [Geist], psyche and emotion, and thus belongs to the sphere of chaos. According to Scholem “lived experience” is not a mental system. Rather it is “currently applied as a mystically-founded magic formula” where antinomian forces are embedded within each other. Scholem adds that “lived experience” is a mixture of the “emotional mapping of the world”, the participation of the “experiencing individual” in an event, the psychological occurrence, and mental perception. As such it belongs not in the world of the mental systems, but actually in the “world of chaos”: “In reality two worlds are to be distinguished here: the world of restoration [olam ha-tikun] and the world of chaos [olam ha-tohu], the world of creation and the world of turmoil”.81 It remains unclear, however, what Scholem understands by “mind” and its expression in language. Scholem declares, for example, that it is truly good that in Russia not Buber, but Ahad Ha’am is the “man” for he speaks not of “lived experience” but of the “mind”.82 In the same way that Buber defines the “lived experince” as non-linguistic, Scholem interprets Ahad Ha’am’s concepts of “soul” and “centre” (are these the same as “mind”?) as deeper than their linguistic expression: The thinking of Ahad Ha’am 78 Martin Buber, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, trans. by Maurice Friedman (New York: Avon, 1956), 29–30. 79 Buber, Nachman, 30. 80 SchTb I, 397 (10 September 1916). 81 Ibid., 507–508 (January 1917). 82 Ibid., 387–388 (18 August 1916).

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is deeper than what he writes, for what he expresses borders on twaddle while the soul, which is not expressed, is what ultimately counts.83 In order to understand the relation between “mind” and language in “On Lament” it is more helpful to begin with Benjamin, who claims in his 1916 essay that “all communication of the contents of the mind is language.”84 At the same time “mental being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental being is its linguistic entity.”85 According to Benjamin the equation of linguistic being and “mental being” is of great importance to linguistic theory and inevitably leads to questions of religion and revelation. Benjamin argues first of all that “the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental”86 and secondly that revelation does not recognise the inexpressible. In his 1917 essay Scholem also establishes revelation as the extreme case of the expressible: “Revelation means the stage at which each language is absolutely positive and expresses nothing more than the positivity of the linguistic world – the birth of language.”87 Scholem’s definitions of “mind” and “revelation” in his early writings may be provisional, but the 1917 essay clearly argues the linguistic quality of revelation.88 This view distinguishes Scholem from contemporary language scepticism, including its Buberian form, and shows a close affinity with the writings of Benjamin. The more complex relation between “mind” and language is discussed through the equivocal concept of “mourning”, which is understood as the “mental being” of the language of lamentation. As will be shown, the equivocacy and dialectical nature of mourning and its linguistic expression in lamentation are crucial to Scholem’s understanding of the interaction between language and transmission.

83 SchTb II, 36 (14 September 1917). 84 Benjamin, “On Language,” 62. 85 Ibid., 63. 86 Ibid., 67. 87 L, 7. 88 Weidner argues that Scholem’s definition of revelation in the 1917 essay is provisional and intended merely as a “counter-idea” to lamentation (Weidner, 195). In much later studies, such as in the 1970 “The Name of God and the Theory of Language of the Kabbalah”, Scholem claims an insoluble connection between the idea of the truth of revelation and language. He states that what addresses us from creation and revelation, the word of God, is infinitely interpretable and reflected in our language (Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Theory of Language in the Kabbalah,” trans. by Simon Pleasance, Diogenes 79&80 (1972): 59–194 (60)).



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Border Dialectic and Tradition In the seemingly dichotomous constellation of revealed and symbolic language, lamentation, according to Scholem, is situated precisely on the border between the two spheres and as such, simultaneously partakes of and is excluded from both: All language is infinite. But there is one language whose infinity is deeper and different from all others (besides the language of God). For whereas every language is always a positive expression of a being, and its infinity resides in the two bordering lands of the revealed and the silenced [Verschwiegenen], such that it actually stretches out over both realms, this language is different from any other language in that it remains throughout on the border [Grenze], exactly on the border between these two realms.89

The tension between revelation and secret is vital to Scholem’s enquiry into the transmission of lamentation as tradition. Scholem establishes the tacit dimension of lamentation as the bearer of its exoteric text by stating that “the teaching encompasses not only language, but it also encompasses, in a unique way, that which lacks language [das Sprachlose], the silenced, to which mourning belongs.”90 Moreover: “The teaching that is not expressed, nor alluded to in lament, but that is kept silent, is silence itself.”91 Scholem thus embraces Molitor’s concept of tradition, which grants a central role to esoteric teachings in marvelling at the transmissibility of this silent language.92 Scholem claims that 89 L, 6. 90 Ibid., 9. 91 Ibid. Gary Smith claims that “the problem inherent in the very notion of esoteric tradition – the tension between the esoteric and exoteric – is a very early preoccupation of [Walter] Benjamin’s, related to the semantics of revelation and concealment” (Gary Smith, “‘Die Zauberjuden’: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Other German-Jewish Esoterics between the World Wars,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1995): 227–243 (242)). I agree with Smith’s refutation of “the widely-held notion of Scholem’s philosophical apprenticeship to Benjamin” and with his attempt to offer “a map of their long-term dialogic project” (ibid., 232). Interestingly, in the same article Smith also mentions Bialik’s essay on concealment and revelation in language (Haim N. Bialik, “Revealment and Concealment in Language,” trans. by Jacob Sloan and introduced by Robert Alter, in Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. by Robert Alter (New York: Behrman House, 1975), 127–137). Considering Scholem’s keen interest in Bialik’s oeuvre throughout these years and especially his translation of “Halacha and Aggada” for Der Jude (SchTb II, 559–580), it seems surprising that he does not mention Bialik’s essay on language in his diaries. 92 In the introduction to his work entitled “Einleitung: Ueber die mündliche Ueberlieferung im Allgemeinen” Molitor states that without oral tradition written teachings would be dead and separated from life (Molitor, 3–10). Molitor develops this argument in the first part of his study entitled “Erster Abschnitt: Ueber die jüdische Tradition” (ibid., 11–82).

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the transmissibility of lament is a truly “mystical law of the peoplehood”: “What unheard of revolutions must a people undergo in order to make its lament transmissible: that an entire people speaks in the language of silence can only be divined.”93

Apophasis How does Scholem manage to define this almost imperceptible language of silence? How can the “border between the linguistic realms of speech and silence” be seized? Scholem hopes to overcome the dilemma of capturing in language that which is in fact elusive precisely with the metaphor of the border, which is perceived as a non-territory or non-place. In other words, “On Lament” can be read as performative experimentation with apophasis, which, according to Michael Sells, aims to solve the original dilemma of saying the ineffable.94 Although the essay’s performative aspect is weakened by sections of discursive apophasis, its employment and relation to the subject matter remain crucial.95 In Mystical Languages of Unsaying Sells describes how apophasis developed in the context of negative theology as an alternative discourse to silence in dealing with the aporia of the ineffability of the transcendent.96 According to Sells apophasis is more than just “negation” for its etymology apo phasis suggests “un-saying” or “speaking-away” and it is usually paired with kataphasis (saying, “speaking-with”). In other words, every act of un-saying requires and presupposes a previous act of saying. At its most intense apophasis reaches a stage at which no “single proposition concerning the transcendent can stand on its own”. A series of sayings and their un-saying, or propositions and their correction, evolves. And finally, “it is in the tension between the two propositions that the discourse becomes meaningful. That tension is momentary. It must be continually re-earned by ever new linguistic acts of unsaying.”97 Sells claims that a continuing series of retractions creates a propositionally unstable and dynamic mode in which no single assertion can stand on its own as true or false. The performative intensity of apophasis is reached by the frequency and seriousness with which the language turns back upon its propositions and the distinctive para-

93 L, 10. 94 Sells, 2. 95 Sells distinguishes between apophatic language and apophatic theory, the latter being a discursive explanation of the former, thereby inevitably weakening or even neutralising its inherent tension (Sells, 2). 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid., 2–3.



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doxes thus generated. Crucial to the apophatic mode is the momentary tension created or the momentary liberation of apophasis from its own referential delimitations.98 In the first paragraph of “On Lament” Scholem uses series of negative “sayings” and their “unsaying” in his description of lament: This language reveals nothing, because the being that reveals itself in it has no content (and for that reason one can also say that it reveals everything) and conceals [verschweigt] nothing, because its entire existence is based on a revolution of silence. It is not symbolic, but only points toward the symbol; it is not concrete [gegenständlich], but annihilates the object.99

These sayings and their unsaying allow Scholem to conclude that “there is no stability of lamentation” and that lament is the only possible volatile [labile] language.100 Scholem reinforces the unstable, transitory and volatile nature of this language by developing the idea of the border as a paradoxical and self-negating concept: The border itself is both borderless and a non-place, for it is confined neither to revealed nor to symbolic language nor to both at once. Self-cancellation is crucial to the definition of lamentation as the “language of destruction”. The language in the state of lamentation destroys itself yet simultaneously everything is at the mercy of this language: “It repeatedly attempts to become symbol, but this must always fail, because it is border.”101 From its precarious position on the border, the language of lamentation oscillates between the lands of revealed and symbolic language, yet it does not entertain a symmetrical relationship with both. By no means understood as the opposite of jubilation or happiness, lamentation is described as the opposite of revelation. While Scholem sees revelation as the stage where language becomes absolutely positive and expresses nothing beyond the “birth of language [...] then lament is precisely the stage at which each language suffers death in a truly tragic sense, in that this language expresses nothing, absolutely nothing positive, but only the pure border.”102 The destructiveness and liminality of lamentation condition a more complex relationship with symbolic language. Described as the very border itself, lamentation can at best strive to take the leap towards symbolic language but it must always fail. The destructive moment occurs when lamentation in its attempt to 98 Ibid., 9. 99 L, 6. 100 Ibid., 7. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid.

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become a symbol momentarily cancels itself and simultaneously abolishes the symbol. Yet self-negation is ephemeral and transitory, and the language of lamentation fails to become symbolic. In other words, lamentation leaves the border only to return and leave again, unceasingly. This is where the immortal and the infinite natures of lamentation coincide. For the death of lamentation is not understood as a single, finite event but rather, in Weigel’s words, as the death of language in the form of a “repetitive movement of its own extinction that is directed against the symbol, or as a repeated articulation in which everything symbolised perishes, i.e. is destroyed.”103 Like apophasis, which in its search for a new discourse momentarily liberates itself from its own referential delimitations,104 Scholem’s “language of the border” is understood as an autonomous and anarchic language that exists beyond conventional linguistic systems and abandons the border in a self-cancelling act. Moreover, in apophasis the constant turning back is understood as a circular motion or epistrophē, reminiscent of lamentation’s recurrent destructive moment of turning towards the symbol.105 In this anarchic moment of self-cancellation and destruction, lamentation gains its linguistic autonomy. According to Michael Sells, “the anarchic moment [in apophasis] is intimated in the turning back of the second proposition upon the first in order to remove the delimitation.”106 Yet not unlike the anarchic moment of a joke, which can be used to either reinforce or challenge the conventions upon which it plays, so the anarchic moment in apophasis proceeds logically from its kataphatic context.107 Is the esoteric dimension of lamentation – encapsulated in its anarchic linguistic moment – likewise conditioned by an exoteric “double”? Scholem’s answer seems to lie in his anarchic concept of tradition.

Destruction The risk in describing lamentation as an anarchic and autonomous language lies in the false legitimacy potentially granted to theoretical inconsistencies or gaps.108 Yet Scholem’s employment of such concepts is clearly not opportunistic. Rather, it is located within his developing notions of anarchism and tradition. 103 Weigel, 31. My translation. 104 Sells, 9. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 209. 107 Ibid., 209–213. 108 Here I do not mean the conscious apophatic mode of “saying” and “unsaying”. One inconsistency in Scholem’s account is the description of lamentation crossing over to symbolic language and momentary destruction, which is preceded by a paragraph that denies lamentation the ability to leave its habitat and return again (L, 7).



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According to Eric Jacobson, Scholem’s use of anarchism as a critical category gave rise to a notion of Judaism that is inexhaustible and constantly reinvents itself.109 As mentioned earlier, Molitor’s 1827 study greatly contributed to Scholem’s understanding of tradition in his early writings.110 Molitor’s work, according to Stéphane Mosès, showed Scholem that the Kabbalistic worldview was not restricted to the narrow idea of monotheism but also hinted at a certain affinity with the worlds of myth and pantheism. Scholem, moreover, discovered early on that beyond the opposites of pantheism and monotheism or myth and ratio, the Kabbalah offered a system of symbols that both concealed and revealed it, and that had to be deciphered.111 While Scholem was always aware of this paradox inherent in the historical research of a mystical tradition, Mosès claims that his originality lay in his objection to ignoring either pole of the paradox. In other words, Scholem believed that the historical dimension of a mystical text could not be denied and that there was “truth” beyond its specific historical conditions. This epistemological paradox opens a space where the truth of mystical phenomena is revealed. On the one hand, writes Mosès, the meaning concealed in the mystical text must somehow “signal to the historian” even before the latter has accurately deciphered it. On the other, the historian responds to this “true communication from the mountain” (as Scholem called it) with the study not of linear historical progression but rather with the study of flaws and ruptures in the historical process.112 By viewing Jewish history and Jewish tradition neither in progressive nor monolithic terms, Scholem grants destructive moments a central place. “On Lament”, more specifically, is early evidence of his search for destructive moments and ruptures. Scholars studying the Hebrew literature of lamentations have shown its rootedness in a literary and philosophic tradition in which centuries of persecution and a codified system of beliefs have shaped specific cultural responses to collective catastrophe.113 While Scholem similarly chose to focus on lamentation, he distanced himself from presenting it as a direct response to destruction and developed it rather as a dialectic and destructive figure in its own right. The very thing that in Scholem’s view makes lamentation bequeathable is its inherent linguistic paradox – expressing that which is extinct, silenced.

109 Jacobson, 8. 110 Weidner, 184; Jacobson, 9. 111 Mosès, Angel, 130. 112 Ibid., 131. 113 Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 96–100. See also Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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In this destruction, however, silence also grants hope for redemption: So long as the inviolability of silence is not threatened, humans and things will continue to lament, and precisely this constitutes the grounds of our hope for the restitution of language, of reconciliation: for, indeed, it was language that suffered the fall into sin, not silence.114

As in the Adamistic notion of language found in Benjamin’s 1916 essay here too the fall of language explains why lamentation laments language itself.115

Mourning and Redemption In Benjamin’s account of Genesis, the Fall of man results in linguistic multiplicity and confusion, and therefore in the overnaming of nature. Prior to the Fall nature was mute but still blissful because it was named by humans in the Adamic language of paradise. After the Fall however, writes Benjamin, “when God’s word curses the ground, the appearance of nature is deeply changed. Now begins its other muteness, which is what we mean by the ‘deep sadness of nature’”.116 The transition from God’s creative word and man’s Adamic name to God’s judging word and man’s prattle lead to the overnaming of nature, which is understood as “the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness”.117 Sadness or sorrow [Traurigkeit] is thus understood as the ontological status of fallen nature and muteness as a testament to this linguistic being.118 In his study Melancholy Dialectics Max Pensky maintains that for Benjamin the only means of expressing a critical insight into the arbitrary character of human language was the “deprivation of originary signification”. Pensky argues that Benjamin views “the relation between subject and object as the stage of a catastrophic history in which the sorrowful investigation of mute nature is always outdone by the silent mourning of the ‘objective’.”119 The “objective” is the overnamed, meaningless and forgotten natural thing, sentenced by “subjective cog-

114 L, 12. 115 SchTb II, 545 (1918). 116 Benjamin, “On Language,” 72. 117 Ibid., 73. 118 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 53. 119 Ibid., 55.



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nition” and transformed, according to Pensky, into “history’s most endangered, ridiculed, and scorned creations and thoughts.”120 Mourning does therefore not denote a subjective emotion or sensibility but becomes a mode of being of the objects themselves. It is through the intrusion of arbitrary subjectivity in the form of speaking and writing humanity – which imposes itself on the objects by overnaming them – that mourning acquires an objective meaning.121 Hence nature in its muteness is charged with a dialectical tension between objectivity and subjectivity.122 The affinity with Scholem’s treatment of mourning is clear. Firstly, in defining mourning as the mental being whose language is lamentation, Scholem espouses Benjamin’s definition of language as the communication of a mental being.123 More specifically, Scholem describes mourning as a paradoxical being that, in the face of destruction, has undergone revolution: “the most powerful revolution of mourning’s innermost centre is necessary (through the restoration of the symbolic to revelation) in order to induce mourning’s self-overturning, which, as a result of its own reversal, allows for the course toward language to emerge as expression.”124 In other words, “mourning partakes in language, but only in the most tragic way, since in its course toward language mourning is directed against itself – and against language.”125 Scholem understands the linguistic expression of mourning as neither symbolic nor referential. Mourning is rather a dialectical “symbolic object” [symbolischer Gegenstand], which refers to the idea of the objective condition of things.126 No longer symbol or object, lamentation – as the linguistic expression of mourning – henceforth communicates only the extinct and inexpressible. Yet, Scholem once more overturns his previous saying and states that lamentation “is only symbolic in relation to that in mourning which itself is neither a symbol nor an object, but was a symbol and an object; now, however, in destruction, it signifies the infinite nothing, the zero to an infinite degree: the expressionless, the extinct.”127 It is from this point of departure that Paula Schwebel speaks of “the trace of an extinct symbolism in the poetry of lament”. Lamentation is in her reading of Scholem’s essay an extrinsic, fragmented language: “the exterior

120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 55–56. 122 Ibid., 57. 123 L, 8. 124 Ibid., 9. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid., 8. 127 Ibid., 10.

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is not an adequate translation of the interior, but is produced only through the destruction of the inner core.”128 Scholem illustrates this revolutionary and destructive mode with the Hebrew word eikha [how], with which the Hebrew dirges begin. Scholem speaks of the “infinite force with which each word negates itself and sinks back into the infinity of silence, in which the word’s emptiness [Leere] becomes teaching [Lehre], but above all the infinity of mourning itself, which destroys itself in lament as rhythm, proves lament to be poetry.”129 Reconsidering once more the symbolic nature of lament scholem adds that “the silent rhythm, the monotony of lament is the only thing that remains: as the only thing that is symbolic in lament – a symbol, namely, of the being extinct [Erloschenseins] in the revolution of mourning.”130 This form of lamentation, according to Scholem, shows how silent rhythm and monotony are simultaneously its only constant, fixed features, and its symbols of extinction. Lament is defined, on the one hand, as the “music of immortality” for it infinitely testifies to the youth of mankind or its “fallen” state. On the other hand, lamentation vanishes in the messianic world in which mankind has been redeemed and language restored.131 The restitution of intact language is, according to C. J. Thornhill, also the quintessence of Benjamin’s notion of redemption.132 Redemption is understood as a return to a totality of language where each object is in harmony with its fundamental name. This is the resurrection of the paradisiacal oneness between language, object and God.133 Like Benjamin’s “fallen” language, which echoes traces of the original paradisiacal language and as such harbours fragments of the messianic essence,134 Scholem’s paradoxical “language of the border” is charged with the dialectic between destruction and redemption.135

128 Schwebel, “Lament and the Shattered Expression of Mourning,” 36. 129 L, 11. 130 Ibid. 131 SchTb II, 215. In the same notebook, “Kleine Anmerkungen über Judentum, Jena Winter 1917/18”, Scholem refers to Ludwig Tieck’s Märchen und Geschichten, which was given to him by Walter and Dora Benjamin in May 1918. Scholem quotes a passage in which the “mandrake shriek” is defined as the lamentation of the mandrake root in the face of nature’s dying corpse. Scholem interprets the myth of the mandrake root as the double symbol of nature’s ability to speak and infinitely lament and man’s insanity in acknowledging nature in its speech (ibid., 214). Further notes on the mourning of nature appear in SchTb II, 615–616 (undated). 132 Christopher J. Thornhill, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus: Problems of a “Wahlverwandtschaft” (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1996), 137. 133 Ibid., 136. 134 Ibid., 134–137. 135 On the dialectical concept of messianism, see Gershom Scholem, “Zum Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum,” in Judaica, 1:7–75.



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The conclusion of “On Lament” may provide hope for the restitution of language but the fulfilment of this messianic promise appears distant in the majority of Scholem’s concurrent writings on language. If, as Scholem claims, the inviolability of silence alone assures hope for the restoration of language to its paradisiac state, then the language of lamentation echoes this hope. If, on the other hand, lamentation is forgotten or rejected then this echo may either be lost or prepared to strike back. As we will see in the following, Scholem’s polemical attacks against Zionist and Hebraist language renewers before and after emigration in 1923 warn of the loss of lament in Modern Hebrew.

2 From Lamentation to Retaliation Confession I am no more than the epigone Living in the ancient house of language. Yet the life therein is still my own I break out and destroy Thebes. Though I come after the masters of old, later, Yet bloodily I revenge the ancestral fate. I speak of revenge, and to revenge Language on all those who speak it is my will.136 (Karl Kraus)

In 1926 Scholem wrote his well-known letter to Franz Rosenzweig titled “On Our Language: A Confession.”137 Scholem’s “confession” acts as a prophetic admonition of a revengeful language that turns against its speakers. How did Scholem’s idea of “language lamenting itself” (1917–1918) shift to the notion of “language itself retaliating” (1926)?138 The above-quoted “confession” by the Viennese language critic and satirist Karl Kraus, whose writings Scholem criticised yet 136 Translated in Stern, 49. The original German poem appears in Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen (Leipzig: Verlag der Schriften von Karl Kraus, 1917, repr., Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1959), 2:79. 137 Earlier drafts of the German original (from 1925–1926) are kept in Archive 4° 1599/277-I/56. 138 Jacques Derrida offers what he calls an “internal reading” of Scholem’s 1926 letter, which looks at the “drama that is being played out and over which [Scholem and Rosenzweig] struggle: the revenge or return of the sacred, the reproach of the sacred in the face of a ‘politicolinguistic’ profanation” (Jacques Derrida, “The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano,” in Acts of Religion, 191–227 (194)). For Mosès, the 1926 letter belongs to a series of statements which confirm the centrality of language in Scholem’s thought and specifically his belief in the paradigmatic function of language as an “indicator” and “parameter” of the degree of the absence or presence

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admired, may help to illuminate several stepping stones in the evolution of Scholem’s ideas on language during this period. It will be shown that Scholem clearly likens his own “generation in transition” to a type of epigone or successor generation, whose linguistic achievements – not least with respect to Hebrew – he vehemently condemns. As part of this “damned” generation of German Jews and Zionists, Scholem, like Kraus, nonetheless recognises the “fallen” state of language in the world and demands linguistic repentance and correction, or Hebrew tikun. Yet hope for such acts of redemption seems even more remote once Scholem settles down in Jerusalem. In his disillusionment Scholem grants language the destructive power of revenge (In Kraus’s confession he seeks “bloody” revenge in and on behalf of language).139 Due to Scholem’s non-linear view of history, however, the “retaliation of language” remains a possibility rather than a promise.140 For Scholem the literary language of Modern Hebrew writers like S. Y. Agnon and Haim N. Bialik may save an entire generation of Hebrew speakers and its descendants from the destructive force of language. This part of the chapter will trace the development of Scholem’s linguistic ideas from his youth in Germany (1916–1923) to the period following emigration to Jerusalem (1923) and will evaluate the effect of this dislocation on Scholem’s thought. Firstly it will be demonstrated that, parallel to writing his theory of the silent language of lamentation, Scholem condemns the loss of lament and silence in the language of his generation and particularly in Modern Hebrew. Numerous polemical texts combine esoteric ideas found in “On Lament” with a contemporary Krausian terminology in denouncing the “prattle” of Scholem’s Zionist and Jewish peers. In the unforgiving critique produced immediately after Scholem’s emigration to Palestine the apocalyptic imagery clearly comes to dominate, testifying to an acute sense of crisis.141 of the divine in the world at a specific historical junction. According to Mosès this is particularly evident in the Scholem-Benjamin correspondence on Kafka (Mosès, Angel, 144–167). 139 In Derrida’s words, “here is this ghostly voice that cautions, warns, predicts the worst, announces the return or the reversal, the revenge and the catastrophe, the resentment, the retaliation, the punishment” (Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” 191). 140 Derrida, on the other hand, concludes from the image of the “eruption of the volcano” that Scholem views catastrophe as imminent (ibid.,195). 141 In another article on Scholem’s critique of Zionism and its language I argue furthermore that Scholem’s warning of the loss of lament may ironically be compared to the ejection of the Temple from his own historiographic project as suggested by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. See Lina Barouch, “The Erasure and Endurance of Lament: Gershom Scholem’s Early Critique of Zionism and Its Language,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014): 13–26; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Bein ‘brit shalom’ u-vein beit ha-mikdash: ha-dialektika shel geula u-meshiḥiyut be’ikvot gershom shalom [Between ‘Brit-Shalom’ and the Temple: The Dialectic of Redemption and Messianism following Gershom Scholem],” Teoria u-bikoret 20 (2002): 87–112 [Hebrew].



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Germany: The Rise of Zionism and the Fall of Hebrew When writing the 1917 essay on the silent, destructive language of lamentation, Scholem was deeply troubled by the paradoxes inherent in the renewal of Hebrew as he encountered it in his immediate surroundings. It emerges from countless diary entries, letters and public addresses that for Scholem the renewal of Hebrew embodies the dialectic between the “simultaneous presence and absence of tradition” in language or, in other words, the conflict between the “magical” and instrumental aspects of language.142 Scholem’s relentless critique of Modern Hebrew must also be read in the context of his dialectical understanding of history. According to Stéphane Mosès Scholem understood dialectic as the (necessary) negation or reversal of ideas as soon as they take on form within a historical reality.143 It follows that by acquiring concrete historical shape, modern Zionism and its Hebrew vernacular inevitably distance themselves from their ideal types, for “entry into history means assimilating into it.”144

The Role of the “Generation in Transition” Scholem defined his own generation as a “generation in transition” [Übergangsgeschlecht] who, in its Zionist endeavour to “enter history”, developed a paradoxical relationship with Jewish tradition and the Hebrew language.145 In his public statements and private correspondence we find Scholem embracing fellow Jews and Zionists as potential bearers of a sacred tradition, while fiercely criticising their actual performance. In October 1916, Scholem wrote a letter to Siegfried Lehmann, the founder of the Berlin Jüdisches Volksheim, criticising the foundations upon which the institution was established. The Volksheim was founded by Lehmann in 1916 in the “Scheunenviertel”, Berlin’s East European Jewish quarter. According to Michael Brenner the Volksheim attempted to provide an educational framework for a largely immigrant proletarian population. As such it offered practical training for adults and education for their children, based on modern pedagogical principles. Scholem most likely attacked what Brenner identifies as the culturally paternalistic objective of the Volksheim – influenced by the German youth movement and 142 See Alter, Necessary Angels. 143 Mosès, Angel, 178–179. 144 Gershom Scholem, Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 34. 145 In his diaries Scholem defines the youth with help of the Hebrew term dor tahapukhot, a generation of reversals and upheavals (SchTb II, 375 (12 October 1918)).

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the wish to create a sense of community.146 In this context Scholem specifically blamed Lehmann for adopting the Buberian concept of “lived experience” as the basis for the study of Judaism. He claimed that the Volksheim falsely believed that for its Jewish underpinning the “experience” of a certain Jewish concept of God would be sufficient.147 This approach, according to Scholem, presumes that it is possible to understand the entire Jewish tradition from a single Hasidic proverb, or, worse, from a German translation of the latter. In contrast Scholem believes in the “totality of Judaism”148, which includes alongside the Torah the works of most post-Biblical Judaism without which the decisive development of the Jewish concept of God would not have taken place. This in turn is the Jewish concept of teaching and tradition, which all later generations are to realise. 149 Scholem applies this definition of “the totality of Judaism” to Lehmann himself for Torah is understood as the epitome of the religious traditions of Judaism from Moses to Rabbi Israel Hildesheimer to Lehmann himself, should he consider himself a Jew. Scholem adds that for true renewal the acceptance of the Torah as the living soul of Judaism is vital. The origin and purpose of Torah, however, is Zion (and not “lived experience”), and therefore the living word of God to the Jews cannot be captured in the German language, only from the centre of the Hebrew language can the inner form of Judaism be comprehended. 150 As Jews, Scholem and Lehmann and their entire “generation in transition” are part of the “totality of Judaism: the sum of the currents of the Torah”.151 Yet Lehmann, like all followers of Buber’s “ideology of lived experience”, has distanced himself from the word of God, the Torah.152 The superficial and confused “ideology of lived experience” does not, according to Scholem, require the study of the Torah and its true language, Hebrew. The essence of Jewish sources – whether the Torah, the words of the prophets or the sayings of the Hasidim – is entwined “with the magical form of language”, and the translation into German warps its inner secret.153 In the same letter Scholem contrasts Buber’s “ideology of lived experience”, which preaches a mysticism that is no longer based on tradition, with Ahad Ha’am. Scholem ridicules the contemporary key question “Have you had the Jewish experience yet?” and contrasts it with “Have you perceived [geschaut] Zion?” According 146 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 186–188. 147 SchBr I, 46 (9 October 1916). 148 Ibid., 47 (9 October 1916). 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 48. 151 Ibid., 47. 152 Ibid., 49. 153 Ibid., 48.



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to Scholem Ahad Ha’am “perceives” whereas Buber and Lehmann “experience”. Ahad Ha’am is a modern Jew whereas Buber is a Jewish modern.154 Scholem also encourages Lehmann to study the works of Samson Raphael Hirsch who attempted to express the totality of Judaism in the German language.155 Ultimately, however, Scholem preaches a truthful study of the Hebrew language based on the recognition of a mystical relation between Jewish sources and their language. The “truth of the study of Hebrew” depends on the conscious distinction between the essence of the Hebrew original and its translation.156 Jewish texts should neither be studied in a foreign language nor measured by external concepts such as “lived experience” or “the doctrine of salvation”. The concept of “Torah” claims itself to be absolute and therefore its own measure. It tolerates the foreign only by permanently disguising its essence.157 A precursor to Scholem’s later ideas of retaliation is embedded in the claim that “one does not measure an inkwell with a logarithmic slide rule, and if one does, then the inkwell retaliates.”158 In Scholem’s view, the application of external criteria is particularly evident in the study of Hebrew. Scholem writes in 1916 that in Berlin there is currently a “flood” of Hebrew although “true learning” is hard to find. The Hebrew language, he bewails, has become fashionable.159 Scholem claims that the increasingly fashionable study of Hebrew among Jewish and Zionist circles is viewed in utilitarian and “peripheral” terms, which absurdly deny the centrality of Zion and the Torah. Scholem voices this critique especially against the Jewish youth movement and Zionist organisations in Germany.

A Youth without Language: Communitarian Lies versus Solitary Silence In 1917 Scholem published an open letter in the Monthly Journal for Jewish Youth Hiking (Monatsschrift für jüdisches Jugendwandern) in which he dismisses the goals and practices of the Jewish youth movement and Blue White (Blau Weiss), 154 Ibid., 49. 155 Ibid., 51. On the importance of Hirsch for Scholem’s understanding of Judaism as a “totality”, see Weidner, 243–247. 156 SchBr I, 48. 157 Ibid., 52. 158 Ibid. Here Scholem interestingly couples the idea of revenge (which reappears in his 1926 letter to Rosenzweig) with the metaphor of the inkwell, which in turn alludes both to the ideas of well (and flowing) and to the practice of writing. 159 SchTb I, 430. For a description of institutions and methods of Hebrew learning in Germany during the years of World War One and the Weimar Republic in particular, see Michael Brenner, “Authenticity Revisited: Jewish Culture in Jewish Languages,” in Renaissance, 185–211. Also relevant is Chapter 3 of the same study: “A New Learning: The Lehrhaus Movement,” 69–99.

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particularly condemning their instrumental attitude towards Hebrew.160 According to Scholem the structure of the study of Hebrew is decisive: whether one learns Hebrew, in order to be able “to be silent in Hebrew” or because it is one of the main means of shaping the national identity of the youth. Scholem perceives the latter aim to be an expression of confusion and “peripheral” thinking.161 The confusion and instrumental approach to the studying of the Hebrew language will at best turn youth into Hebraists but not true Zionists. Only the one who learns Hebrew for the sake of the Torah is a true student, a pupil of the Teaching. The latter, moreover, is the only true and compelling argument for Zionism.162 Zion and the Torah are the only possible “purposes” for which the Hebrew language should and must be studied: the first and last step on the way to a life according to the Teaching is the acquisition of Hebrew. “As long as we do not know Hebrew”, writes Scholem, “we have no measure for that which is Jewish, are victims for every deception. As long was we are not Hebrew, we have no resonance. Without Hebrew we are kings in exile, if not something worse.”163 While denouncing the study of Hebrew as a means to an end – and be it the nationalisation of youth – Scholem nonetheless recognises the centrality of the “proper” acquisition of Hebrew in the transformation of Jews from comfortable assimilationists in exile into a people with a voice of their own. Instead of Hebrew silence, however, Scholem encounters only Hebraist chatter. In a further open letter which Scholem writes in 1918 to Siegfried Bernfeld, the editor of Jerubaal: A Journal for Jewish Youth (Jerubaal: Eine Zeitschrift der jüdischen Jugend), he argues that the self-proclaimed Jewish youth movement has been subjected to a “pseudo-Zionist communal lie” that prevents it from realising they will go under in Berlin rather than go to Zion.164 In the Diaspora, Scholem continues, there can exist neither a valid Jewish community before God nor a true form of Zionism. He therefore calls for a radical dismantling of all Jewish

160 SchTb II, 105. Brenner briefly discusses the importance of the Jewish youth movements in the Weimar Jewish “quest for community.” He argues that they were largely influenced by the non-Jewish Wandervogel and its Romanticism, love of nature, nationalist thought and leadership ideals. Specific movements like Blau Weiss also upheld Zionist ideals (Brenner, Renaissance, 46–49). Walter Laqueur indicates the political naiveté and indecisiveness of the Wandervogel (Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 16), which may explain its rank as a source of inspiration even for Zionist youth movements. 161 SchTb I, 475. 162 SchTb II, 15. 163 Ibid. 164 Gershom Scholem, “Abschied: Offener Brief an Herrn Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld und gegen die Leser dieser Zeitschrift,” in SchTb II, 285–291 (288) (originally published in Jerubaal, 1/4 (1918– 1919), 125–130).



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youth groups in the belief that Zion and the Torah will be reached in solitude and silence and not through community activities that are infested with prattle. He claims the terminology of this prattle mixes and confuses ideas such as Zion and a state of the future, Judaism and “mental being”, perception and “lived experience”.165 As a result of their prattle youth has lost its language and cannot establish a genuine connection to Hebrew. This youth and its language can only be redeemed by dissolving its organised structures and abandoning its activities in the search for solitude and silence, for in the same way that this youth is unable to exist in solitude it is incapable of being silent. Scholem argues that silence, which unites pure word and pure deed, is a foreign concept to youth.166 By abandoning its prattle and seeking silence and solitude, youth may be in a position to establish a true Jewish community, which, according to Scholem, can be proven only in its capacity to be silent in Hebrew. In doing so youth would also abandon the “Jewish experience” at whose altar it sacrificed Judaism.167 “Lived experienced” was sought in order to compensate for youth’s lack of silence and loss of language, but it is the false road to redemption. “Pure” youth, according to Scholem, will redeem itself not through the proclamation of “lived experience” but through lamentation.168 The redemption of youth depends on deserting previous communitarian practices and false goals in search of silence, solitude and lamentation. This open letter, which is entitled “Farewell”, acts as Scholem’s own turning away from the Jewish youth movement in favour of an “ascetic ethos”. As Weidner claims, it is an ethos that does not entail a retreat or “falling silent” but the active employment of a “pronounced silence” [beredetes Schweigen] as a polemico-political act.169 Scholem’s critique and abandonment of the Jewish youth movement is replicated 165 SchTb II, 287. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 287–289. 168 SchTb II, 289. Scholem applies these themes in a 1918 poem entitled “The Ball”: “I am Youth you are Joy| Yet both of us are lies| Too enthralled by the ball| To be ourselves at all. | | We reject what is common| Yet have now forgotten| that finer, purer home: | The joy of being alone. | | Youth. Laughter is hard| When all silence is barred| Yet revulsion is not an escape| Blessed those who seek change. | | Our words achieved only eloquence| As messengers of silence| We two were only in rhyme| Having forestalled time.”(Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems, ed. by Steven M. Wasserstrom and Richard Sieburth (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2003), 59). 169 Weidner, 88–91. Weidner claims that during this period, and notably from 1920 onwards, Scholem’s Zionist statements became more esoteric and less frequent and his ethos less revolutionary and more ascetic (ibid., 85). In his essay “Karl Kraus” Benjamin uses the term “a silence turned inside out” [gewendetes Schweigen] (Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2:338), which he describes as “a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds and billows, its livid lining turned outward” (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 2:436).

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in his attack on other forms of organised Zionism, whose “fallen” language he similarly views as polluted by utilitarian and journalistic jargons in the service of limited political aims.

Organised Zionism: Prattle and Propaganda In 1919 Scholem writes a letter to Ludwig Strauss in the latter’s capacity as one of the founders of Die Arbeit, the German language journal of Hapoel Hatzair, a Palestine-based Zionist workers party with a presence in Germany. Scholem charges Hapoel Hatzair with a double betrayal: against the word and against the deed. Against the word by not elevating it from its “insignificance and enslavement to lawlessness”, which will necessarily destroy it if a deeper movement of language does not enable its revival.170 Like the fallen language of the youth groups, Die Arbeit is corrupted by its “journalistic prattle”.171 Journalistic jargon, claims Scholem, stylistically overburdens language with “heavy decorations” in the false belief that these will convey the message most effectively. In doing so the journal sins against the foremost law under which a Zionist should live: chastity [Keuschheit].172 Scholem cannot accept such prattle from an organisation whose programme supposedly consists of the renewal of the nation and its language. Scholem argues that Hebrew does luckily not know the “shabby” means by which a Berlin journalist decorates his feuilletons, but the German translations of Die Arbeit corrupt the simple, straightforward style of the original with contemporary journalistic German.173 In the same way that Scholem urges youth groups to abandon their search for the “Jewish experience” and their idle chatter, he demands that Hapoel Hatzair “cure” its German before attempting to “conquer” Hebrew. According to Scholem Hapoel Hatzair’s declared revival and conquest of labour are not compatible with the renewal and conquest of language. For language is abused in the chatter about

170 SchTb II, 494 (n. 63) (22 July 1919). This is reminiscent of Karl Kraus’s words in “In dieser großen Zeit”: “Wer Taten zuspricht, schändet Wort und Tat und ist zweimal verächtlich” (Karl Kraus, “In dieser großen Zeit,” Die Fackel 404 (1914): 1–19 (3)). 171 Criticism of the press and its journalistic style and language were common at this time. The foremost polemicist against these tendencies was again Karl Kraus, of whose journal The Torch (Die Fackel) Scholem was a regular reader. Scholem also discussed Kraus and his work with Werner Kraft. Scholem writes in his diary in 1915 that Die Fackel partly infuriated him but mainly made him happy due to its struggle against the media (SchTb I, 204). 172 SchTb II, 494, n. 63. 173 A letter to Ludwig Strauss (SchTb II, 489, n. 50 (22 July 1919)). Scholem is, however, aware of the faults modern journalistic Hebrew may have.



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labour, even in Palestine, where he believes people otherwise to be silent.174 The renewal and mastery of language are, in Scholem’s view, unattainable as long as language is abused for political purposes such as socialist propaganda. Here again Scholem contrasts this abusive journalistic prattle with the peaceful, silent language he presumes exist in Palestine. Yet Scholem is aware that in Palestine a new legacy of remembrance is emerging, which does not know how to lament.

Remembrance and Lamentation In 1917 Scholem worked on the translation into German of Yizkor: A Book of Remembrance for the Fallen Watchmen and Labourers in the Land of Israel.175 Scholem later asked to remain unnamed as translator because of his objection to the book’s use as a Zionist propaganda tool. He essentially regarded the “mystification of violence” as essentially un-Jewish and warned that it called for a pure “muscular Judaism” or for a Jewish way of life based solely on an agricultural ethos.176 In a diary entry from February 1918, Scholem suggests that these “propaganda-dead” have fallen for the wrong goal and bewails the absence of lament in their remembrance. He regrets that none of the essays of the volume and not even Yosef Haim Brenner’s contribution laments.177 In absurdly alienating itself from tradition, the book Yizkor is in want of lament and silence, and results in a loud, infantile cry.178 Instead of lamentation and humble reporting on the deaths of these Zionists, Yizkor uses the depiction of the dead as “political magic”, rendering it treasonous “Christian literature”.179

174 SchTb II, 458. The Hebrew word tikun is translated in the diaries as “atonement”, “redemption”, “new order” (ibid., n. 67). 175 Jiskor: Ein Buch des Gedenkens an gefallene Wächter und Arbeiter im Lande Israel, ed. and forwarded by Martin Buber (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1918). ”Yizkor” is Hebrew for “memorial prayer”. 176 SchTb II, 143 (26 February 1918). Scholem alludes here to several Zionist trends, such as A.D. Gordon’s pioneer and agricultural ethos and Max Nordau’s “muscular Judaism”. Despite their differences both stressed the need for a corporeal regeneration alongside spiritual and moral ideals. See, for example, Todd Samuel Presner, “The origins of Muscular Judaism,” in Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, Routledge Jewish Studies Series 24 (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–23. 177 SchTb II, 144 (26 February 1918). 178 Ibid., 144 and 347 (notebook dated 1 August 1918 – 1 August 1919). 179 Ibid., 279–280 (31 July 1918) and 487 (17 July 1919). See also Scholem, Me-berlin le-yerushalayim (From Berlin to Jerusalem) [Hebrew], 100. Scholem also accuses Buber, who wrote the introduction to the German edition of the book Jiskor, of legitimising this misuse of magic and increasing the basis for confusion within the Jewish community (SchTb II, 280 (31 July 1918)).

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Scholem’s 1921 critique of Franz Rosenzweig’s German translation of the Hebrew grace after meals is illuminating in this context. On the one hand, Scholem praises Rosenzweig for granting suitable expression to the mourning of the Jewish people through the translation’s “profound harmony, plus a quality that points to something beyond expression, along with the nonmetaphorical uniformity of [Rosenzweig’s] stance”, which Scholem considers as “the legitimate seal over the abyss of the religious agitation of our wretched people.”180 On the other hand, he accuses Rosenzweig of applying Christological concepts to the original Hebrew ethos of the text. According to Scholem “the clearest, and most worthy Jewish elements seem to be eliminated; the true moral aspect of our language, the hatzne’a lekhet [humble, simple way], is banished; and language gets transformed, for no reason, into the nuance-rich colourfulness and demonic ambiguity of the terminology of salvation.”181 Similar to the book Yizkor, which according to Scholem is an un-Jewish piece of propaganda void of silence and lamentation, Rosenzweig’s translation – despite its silent monotony – eliminates the chastity and humbleness of the Hebrew original in favour of a demonic language rich in nuance. The same is true, as we have seen, for Scholem’s attack on the instrumental study of Hebrew in his native Berlin, his rejection of the journalistic prattle in Die Arbeit and his abandonment of the Jewish youth movement whose language he deems lost. Apart from his fierce criticism Scholem provides ideas for the “correction” [tikun] of this dire linguistic state.

Hebrew Tikun: A “Spoken Silence” As early as 1916, Scholem discusses the paradox of promoting the study of a language whose silent features are central. He reiterates that the true Zionist learns Hebrew, because he has found his home [Heimat] in its centre, and in order “to be silent in Hebrew”. This deems the “propaganda for Hebrew” extremely difficult.182 How does Scholem’s belief in the silent, humble nature of the Hebrew language and his stark objection to explicit propaganda allow him to promote 180 Scholem, A Life in Letters, 117 (7 March 1921). 181 Ibid. In 1924 Scholem’s critique of Rosenzweig’s Yehuda Halevi translation work became more aggressive. Here Scholem describes the translation as a type assassination of Hebrew poetry underpinned by ideologies of the philosophy of history (“Meuchlermords an der hebräischen Dichtung unter geschichtsphilosophischen Ideologien” (Scholem as quoted by Benjamin in Benjamin, Briefe (1978), 1:345)). 182 SchTb I, 431 (22 November 1916). Scholem recognises only one form of learning, which originates from the “zero-point of the soul” and results in the transformation through Hebrew (ibid., 430).



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the study of Hebrew? Daniel Weidner maintains that the ascetic ethos behind Scholem’s esoteric writing protects him from using the idle chatter and empty phrases he condemns in the language of the Zionists. Scholem’s particular practice of writing, Weidner argues, does not entirely disclose the object, for “what cannot be expressed, remains obscured yet present elsewhere.”183 As we saw earlier, Scholem’s abandonment of the Jewish youth movement and its prattle does not result in muteness. Rather, Scholem wishes to found a Zionist language, which orbits a “spoken silence” [beredetes Schweigen] and which results neither in muteness nor in a retreat into a form of private purity but rather in a polemico-political act.184 Scholem’s “promotion” of the Hebrew language consists first of all in his rejection of the populist Hebraism found in German Jewish circles and the use of Hebrew as a political tool. His diaries, letters and short essays from these years also provide an insight into what he believes is the “right” way of studying Hebrew and its legitimate purposes. The 1919 manuscript “How Should One Study Hebrew?” (“Wie soll man Hebräisch lernen?”) presents a detailed plan of study as well as ideal principles that echo a linguistic nationalism promoted in the Hamann and Humboldt tradition.185 The opening paragraph presents the correct aims of the study of Hebrew. The aim is not the ability to express oneself in this language, but rather a permeation of Hebrew in order to understand that the mental and linguistic essences of Judaism are identical.186 In other words, the student of Hebrew should not view language simply as a means of communication but acknowledge it as the linguistic expression of a “mental being”. An advanced stage of study is reached when the language is understood in its silent features rather than through its speech. Scholem argues that the “perception” [Sicht] of Hebrew and not its spokenness is the aim. Therefore only once the student enters the silent regions of language can one speak of an advanced stage of study.187

183 Weidner, 102. Weidner maintains that Scholem’s turning away from Buber leaves him speechless at first but eventually allows him to develop his own point of view, mainly between 1918 and 1923 (ibid., 85–103). Decisive, according to Weidner, is the “self-constraint” [Selbsteinschränkung] in Scholem’s statements – a Zionism of “ideology” becomes an esoteric Zionism, and the revolutionary and messianic ethos, one of asceticism (ibid., 85). 184 Weidner, 89–90. 185 SchTb II, 612–614 (1919). 186 Ibid., 612 (1919). Scholem recounts a meeting of Jewish students in Berlin where he was accused of belonging to those who perceive the centre of Judaism not in its mental being but in language (ibid., 213). 187 Ibid., 612 (1919).

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In this context Scholem also warns of the pitfalls of Modern Hebrew, which he believes has undergone a process of partial emptying and become a victim to “modern thinking”. Beginners should therefore avoid focusing on Modern Hebrew until they have gained an insight into the religious aspects of the language. An understanding of the religious categories of language is to be sought through religious texts and therefore with Biblical Hebrew.188 One should, moreover, choose a teacher well versed in the Jewish tradition, ideally an Orthodox rabbi or a person of Orthodox background, and certainly not a pure “Modern Hebrew speaker”.189 Following the study of the Old Testament the student should move on to the Prophets with commentaries, the Talmud, and commentaries on the Halacha. An understanding of the Hebrew concept of commentary is deemed central. Only then should the new literature be approached, with particular emphasis on the Hebrew writings of Ahad Ha’am, Sholem Alechem, Agnon and Mendele Mokher Sfarim. Hebrew poetry, for example, should be studied only at an advanced stage, while the modern lyrics of Bialik should only follow the study of the Hebrew lamentations and the medieval Spanish poets and liturgy. Scholem concludes this manifesto by emphasising that one should study synthetically, and that the advanced student should concentrate on what he calls the “organising principles” [Ordnungsgehalt] of language and become acquainted with the works of the Science of Judaism.190 He adds that for the study of Rabbinic literature the role of the teacher, namely, his “transmission practice” is decisive.191 These closing remarks testify once more to the importance Scholem attributes to the relation between the Hebrew language and Jewish tradition. The advanced student is expected not only to have learnt Hebrew from both traditional Jewish texts and Modern Hebrew literature but also to acquire a sound overview of Jewish history as presented in the works of the Science of Judaism. In practice, the student is discouraged from undertaking the study of Hebrew by himself, since the act of transmission, as performed by the (ideally Orthodox) teacher, is regarded as part and parcel of this process of learning. Scholem’s emphasis on the study of Biblical Hebrew first and foremost through the Biblical text and its commentaries is founded on his understanding of the relationship between language and truth, more specifically between the

188 Ibid. 189 On Scholem’s beginner years as a Hebrew language student, see the chapter entitled “hit’orerut yehudit” (“Jewish Awakening”) in Me-berlin le-yerushalayim, 39–64. 190 The “synthetic style”, i.e., the learning and use of Hebrew with an awareness of the traditional texts that feed into it, is, according to Weidner, what Scholem also looked for in a Modern Hebrew writer (Weidner, 126). 191 SchTb II, 613–614 (1919).



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Hebrew language and the Torah. In 1917 Scholem defines Torah as the principle according to which things are formed. In Judaism, claims Scholem, this principle is recognisable as the language of God and in the human traditions. Torah is therefore understood as the integral of the religious traditions of Judaism from the beginning of time to the days of the messiah.192 Scholem’s definition of the Torah as the word of God that is recognisable in the human tradition is broad and inclusive. What Scholem believes to be exclusive is the relationship between the Torah and the Hebrew language, based on the fundamental relationship between language and truth. “For a truth has only one word, which expresses or indicates it. If it had two, then it would have multiple meanings. [...] If a truth had multiple meanings, then the functional relationship between language and truth would not be reversible. I am in no way inclined to accept this.”193 As the truth concept in Judaism, Torah can be explained only through itself and no German phrase can act as an adequate translation.194 In claiming the unequivocal relationship between word and truth and between Hebrew and the Torah, Scholem again rejects a metaphorical understanding of language, which views words as arbitrary and variable: “A symbol, which changes, does not symbolise the ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is not symbolised – God – unless in an absolute form and shape.”195 The Torah is not a symbol because the truth cannot be handed down symbolically.196 In his early comments on the relationship between Torah and language, Scholem repeatedly refers to the nineteenth-century Orthodox rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, who was among other things influential as a translator and 192 SchBr I, 89 (6 August 1917). 193 SchTb I, 433. 194 Scholem also writes that the Bible is not translatable (it is pure language), for translating the Bible would mean re-writing it, which is forbidden (“Kleine Anmerkungen über Judentum, Jena Winter 1917/18,” in SchTb II, 202). In a notebook dated 1918–1919 that discusses, among other things, the concept of justice in the Book of Jonah, Scholem contradicts his earlier claim and argues that the translation of the Bible is the redemption of languages. Moreover, the translation of Biblical prose and lamentations is understood as the “gift” of Zionist Jews to the German language, enabling and marking the farewell of Zionist Jews. The translation is even understood as an act of justice towards Germany (SchTb II, 346–347). 195 SchTb I, 433–434. See also Scholem’s “95 Theses on Judaism and Zionism”: “The law of the Talmudic dialectic is: The truth is a constant function of language” (SchTb II, 302). 196 SchTb I, 433. In a short piece entitled “On the Research of the Talmudic Scholars” (“Über die Forschungsweise der Talmudisten”), Scholem discusses the Talmudic view according to which language originates in the divine core beyond and before experience. In other words, language helped create heaven and earth, and was a condition for experience. The rabbis of the Talmud, according to Scholem, believed that in the language of absolute truth, the Torah, there is not one superfluous letter or word (SchTb I, 438–442).

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commentator of the Pentateuch. According to Scholem Hirsch was most significant because he based his perception on a theory of language, which has been neglected or even dismissed by Scholem’s contemporaries.197 In “Small Notes on Judaism” (“Kleine Anmerkungen über Judentum”) Scholem writes that Judaism “must be concluded from its language. This is Hirsch’s idea of Bible commentary.”198 Likewise Scholem states that “there is only one proof for Judaism: Language. This view is a paradox as long as its not developed.”199 These statements are clearly related to Scholem’s understanding of the interaction between language and tradition, as explored earlier; Judaism essentially means the on-going study and commentary of the Torah, the word of God. In order to reach an understanding of Judaism we must above all participate in this tradition, which comments on the divine word in human language.200 Scholem praises Hirsch’s commentary on and approach to language but condemns him for writing in German and therefore for bearing some responsibility for the dire “lack of language” [Sprachlosigkeit] that characterises his Jewish environment.201 Scholem himself does of course write on the importance of Hebrew in the German language and continues to do so after emigrating to Jerusalem in 1923. The following section of this chapter demonstrates the continuity and amplification of Scholem’s ideas and rhetoric with regard to contemporary Hebraist practices.

Jerusalem: Hebrew between Victory and Catastrophe In his attack on the language of Jewish and Zionist circles in Germany, Scholem also criticises the language of the yishuv as he encounters it in the journal Die Arbeit and the book Yizkor. Following emigration Scholem continues to denounce the Zionists for their instrumentalisation of language and the abandonment of 197 SchTb I, 406 (12 October 1916). The earliest diary entry on Hirsch dates back to 1913 (SchTb I, 11). In a short piece from a notebook dated 1918–1919, Scholem recognises Hirsch’s unique role in the context of nineteenth-century religious studies, which attempted to define a “theory of an idea” of Judaism. Hirsch, according to Scholem, withstood such ideas by identifying the centrality of language in Judaism and awarding the metaphysical dimension of Judaism its due position (SchTb II, 316–317). As a nineteenth-century Orthodox rabbi, Hirsch was particularly influential in promoting the Torah with derekh erets [the way of the land], i.e., considerate, respectful behaviour, and is considered one of the founders of so-called Neo-Orthodoxy. 198 SchTb II, 212. This statement reappears as the first of Scholem’s “95 Theses on Judaism and Zionism”: “1) Judaism is to be sought through its language” (ibid., 300). 199 SchTb II, 213. Compare ibid., 201. 200 Ultimately, however, Scholem claims that the messiah will be the foremost philosopher of language, for he will confirm Judaism through its language (SchTb I, 406 and 432). 201 SchTb II, 507.



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lament. This condemnation gradually acquires an apocalyptic imagery in which the paradigmatic rejection of the sacred meaning of words and of lament leads to the “retaliation of language”. In Scholem’s view lamentation only truly dissolves in the messianic kingdom when language is restored to its paradisiacal state.202 Yet Scholem believed in the infinite deferment of messianic redemption and the impossibility of achieving it through the historical return to the Land of Israel.203 Therfore he insisted that the language of lamentation must continue to exist as the expression of a perhaps eternal suspension between, what Dekoven Erzahi calls, “the ancient memory of domicile and the messianic promise of an (endlessly deferred) return.”204 In Scholem’s opinion empirical Zionism falsely assumed the historical return to the Land of Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language to be truly redemptive acts. In wishing to eliminate the culture of exile, the Zionists abandoned lamentation as the expression of instability and provisionality, adopting instead the utilitarian “prattle” of Modern Hebrew.205 Scholem not only desired to call the “Zionist bluff” but, more importantly, warned that the Hebrew language, which the Zionists believed they had transformed beyond lament, would retaliate against its speakers. It becomes clear that Scholem reapplies an existing vocabulary that testifies to a sense of (linguistic) crisis, one characteristic of the members of the third ‘aliya to which he belonged.206 Yet the writings he produced immediately after immigration generated an even greater sense of urgency and impending disaster, expressed, for example, in images of volcanic effluence and eruption. This terminology is likewise evidence of Scholem’s affinity with the themes of modernist European writing, thus suggesting that he “imported” them alongside his apocalyptic ideas. 207 On the other hand, “the quandaries of the historian’s own 202 Scholem writes: “In the foundation of the messianic kingdom lamentation will disappear” (SchTb II, 215). 203 See Scholem, “Zum Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum.” 204 Dekoven Ezrahi, “When Exiles Return,” 45. 205 Mosès reads the 1926 letter to Rosenzweig as a reflection of a personal – moral and ideological – crisis brought about by two opposing concepts of Zionism. In contrast to Zionism as a movement that called for a radical break with the world of Judaism, Scholem’s Zionism wished to break with assimilation. Mosès claims that Scholem viewed this dissonance as radically as the contradiction between an “ideology of rupture” and an “ideology of return” (Mosès, Angel, 171–182). 206 Muki Tzur, “Be-darkei shalom [In the Paths of Scholem],” Zmanim 61 (1997–1998): 88–96 [Hebrew]. 207 Robert Alter claims that Scholem exerted a steady interpretative pressure on his texts by applying key terms (e.g., abyss, dialectic, crisis and fire-blaze radiance) that are not necessarily intrinsic to his pre-modern material but coloured by a modernist historical vision (Robert Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” Poetics Today, 15/3 (Autumn, 1994): 429–442 (432)). On the other

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era”208 reach beyond Scholem’s European experience to his years as an immigrant in Palestine, where he viewed the historical victory of Zionism as imminent but the metaphysical redemption of the Jews as more and more elusive.209 Scholem explain in an interview from the winter of 1974–1975: “I came to see the force of dialectics only gradually, in the course of careful study, especially after I came to Eretz Yisrael and saw the contradictions in the constructive process here: the inner contradictions of the revival of the secular language and the silence overpowering the language. I did not learn dialectics from Hegel or the Marxists, but from my own experiences and from pondering the labyrinths of Zionism as I was trying to implement it.”210 It is in this context that Scholem’s apocalyptic vocabulary supersedes the earlier terminology of “prattle”, resulting at times in a style rich in pathos and overburdened imagery.

Premature Victory Scholem arrived in Jerusalem in September 1923. In October of the same year he was appointed manager of the Hebrew and Jewish Collection at the National Library in Jerusalem, and in 1925 became a member of the Institute for Jewish Studies at the newly founded Hebrew University. The last chapter of his autobiography implies that his absorption was smooth despite his extremely modest living conditions.211 However, Scholem’s direct encounter with the actual realisation of the Zionist project and especially his confrontation with everyday spoken Hebrew generated a series of texts that testify to an amplified sense of crisis, reflected in mythical and apocalyptic metaphors ranging from the golem and the witch of Endor to volcanic and abyssal afflictions. In attempting to decipher one of Scholem’s central texts from this period, Derrida argues that it is vital “to reconstruct the daily, concrete, pathetic landhand, scholars of Jewish mysticism grant a central role to images of effluence in mystical texts. See, for example, Melila Hellner-Eshed, Ve-nahar yotse me-‘eden: ‘al sfat ha-havaya ha-mistit ba-zohar [A River Issues Forth from Eden: On the Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2005) [Hebrew] and Joseph Dan, Ha-lev ve-ha-ma’ayan: mivḥar ḥavayot mistiot, ḥezyonot ve-ḥalomot; min ha-‘et ha-‘atika ‘ad yameinu [The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences] (Jerusalem: Keter, 2005) [Hebrew]. 208 Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” 431. 209 Weidner maintains that what we find here is not merely the predictable disappointment with the concrete realisation of a utopia. Specific experiences are also partly responsible for Scholem’s reflections on religion and politics (Weidner, 111). On the importance of the specific local conditions of exile, see Konuk, “Jewish-German Philologists in Turkish Exile”. 210 Gershom Scholem, “With Gershom Scholem: An Interview,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schoken Books, 1976), 36. 211 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, 193–224 [Hebrew].



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scape, but also the paradigmatic scene of this Berlin intellectual from the diaspora, living two cultures, familiar, as are so many others, with sacred nonspoken texts reserved for study and liturgy, and who all at once hears, in the Palestine of the 1920s, these sacred names in the street, on the bus, at the corner store, in the newspapers that everyday publish lists of new words to be inscribed in the code of secular Hebrew.”212 Derrida asks the reader to “imagine the desire and the terror in the face of this outpouring, this prodigious, unbridled prodigality that flooded everyday life with sacred names, language giving itself out, like a miraculous manna but also like the profanatory jouissance, in the face of which a sort of religious concupiscence recoils in fright.”213 Muki Tzur and Robert Alter agree that Scholem wrote from a standpoint of crisis in the present.214 According to Tzur, the immigrants of the third ‘aliya (1919–1923), to which Scholem himself belonged, “imported” with them the shared experience of the total crisis of European and Jewish culture. They had witnessed the transformation of “Sodom-Europe” beyond all recognition during the Great War. The War and the pogroms that followed resulted in utopian visions and apocalyptic fears on the individual and collective levels. Emerging from this background the people of the third ‘aliya were hoping to sever the ties between old and new, to bring about social upheaval and to replace existing systems of authority and regime in the hope of a new civilisation. Tzur describes Scholem’s own ‘aliya as the great “un-dialectical”, moral decision of his life, which nonetheless invited criticism and taught him dialectics. While Scholem regarded the decision to emigrate as absolutely moral, Tzur explains, he viewed the Zionist project as a historical phenomenon riddled with paradoxes, as well as necessary and calculated risks. What Scholem feared most was the Zionist historicist and progressive worldview, which combined messianic and apocalyptic ideas.215 Tzur maintains that it is within this context that Scholem watched with disgust how, on the one hand, Hebrew was distancing itself from its own sources by becoming functional, dynamic and poor, and, on the other hand, was clinging to its messianic-apocalyptic foundations. Confronted with this development, Scholem’s hope that the tension generated by a living language engaging with its own spiritual foundations might inspire the values of a Judaism in permanent renewal, seemed increasingly utopian.216 212 Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” 209. 213 Ibid. 214 According to Alter, this confirms Scholem’s affinity with the themes of literary modernism (Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” 438). 215 Tzur, 92–94. Alter claims that Scholem’s strong perception of the historical phenomenon as a radical paradox must also be read in the context of modernism (Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” 437). 216 Tzur, 92–94.

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Scholem himself suggests a certain continuity between his linguistic ideas before and after emigration. Two years after his arrival in Jerusalem, he reapplies earlier ideas on the language of lamentation and the book Yizkor in a piece entitled “January 1925: The Same as Always” (“Januar 1925: Dasselbe wie stets”). Scholem complains that “you will hear everything in this land, but not the sound of lamentation” and calls for silence and remorse.217 Like the language of martyrology in the book Yizkor, it is the language of a generation certain of its own victimhood that “asphyxiates” lamentation. This generation of self-proclaimed victims severs the ties to one of its greatest traditions. Scholem claims in this piece that the “generation in transition”, which is immediately confronted with the paradox of the transmission of tradition, should have embraced the language of lamentation, for it encapsulates precisely this conflict. Lamentation, claims Scholem, would have been the infinite linguistic expression of this generation’s ephemeral essence.218 In abandoning lamentation this generation in transition has lost the “repressed cry of the world’s destruction” [gebändigte Schrei der Weltzerstörung]219, the sign and seal that renders it recognisable to God. A community without a built-in nihilist dimension, Scholem writes, cannot survive the “eruption of the volcano”.220 In a tone filled with pathos, Scholem asks if his generation fears the unleashing of “ancient forces” or even tradition itself and the “legitimate categories of creative life”? “Or are we perhaps fleeing? ‫[ לאלוהים פתרונים‬le’elohim pitronim; God has the answers]”.221 The answer is to be sought in God and in Hebrew, the language of this expression. The conflicting linguistic concepts of prattle-propaganda and silence-lamentation correlate with Scholem’s notions of “visible” and “invisible” Zionism. In late 1924 Scholem wrote a piece entitled “Zionism will Outlive its Catastrophe” (“Der Zionismus wird seine Katastrophe überleben”).222 In this short unpublished text he declares that the time has come in which “the hearts need to decide between a Zionism whose purpose is the preparation of the eternal, and a Zionism of the Jewish state, which is catastrophic.”223 Here Scholem clearly favours a 217 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/54. This 1925 piece is also discussed by Weigel, 39. As already seen, in 1917 Scholem likewise criticised the development of a Zionist martyrology after translating the book Jiskor into German (SchTb II, 487). 218 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/54, 1. 219 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/54. 1-2. 220 Ibid. 221 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/54, 2. Scholem mentions Brenner again, claiming that no lamentation was composed on the occasion of his death (ibid.). 222 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/52. 223 Ibid.



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form of cultural Zionism that first and foremost aims at a spiritual renewal of the Jewish people in Palestine over a Zionism of state institutions. He deplores what he finds in Palestine, a petit bourgeois Zionism of “assemblies” that can barely wade through its own prattle.224 The petit bourgeois character Scholem encounters in the Zionism before him is destructive because “the drying up of language has dried up our hearts.”225 Scholem bemoans the fact that empirical Zionism has no true language and cannot therefore inscribe or take part in tradition. Yet He concludes in a more equivocal tone that “metaphysically, the battle, which Zionism has won in the world, we have lost in the land.”226 Scholem’s generation no longer knows which front is the decisive one before God.227 This Scholem describes in April 1926 as the “frustration of the victors”228 and continues to blame a Zionism of “assemblies” for endangering the Hebrew language precisely through its revival. Moreover, the mounts of articles, which document this victory, are seen as the “new Wailing Wall of Zion.229 Scholem applies the same vocabulary in a 1931 letter to Benjamin: “For years the despair of the victor has been the real demonism of Zionism; this is perhaps the most important world-historical task of the mysterious laws according to which propaganda (the substance of our defeat) works. The mountains of articles in which the intelligentsia documented our victory in the visible realm before it had been decided in the invisible realm – that is, the regeneration of language – are the true Wailing Wall of the new Zion”.230 The premature victory and its keen journalistic documentation are deemed catastrophic, emerging objects of mourning and lamentation.

224 Ibid. Scholem in this text refers to Siloam, a pool of water in Jerusalem that served as a reservoir. It was ascribed to the city’s defence system during the reign of Hezekiah (Kings 2, 20:20), but also mentioned in Isaiah and in the New Testament. See Wilfred R. F. Browning, “Siloam” in A Dictionary of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) www.oxfordreference.com/ view/10.1093/acref/9780199543984.001.0001/acref-9780199543984-e-1767 (accessed 26 May 2011). 225 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/52. 226 Ibid. 227 Ibid. 228 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/57, 1. In 1925 Scholem published an article on the demon king Bilar: “Bilar (Bilad, Bilid) melekh ha-shedim” [“Bilar, King of the Demons”]. Mada’ei ha-yahadut 1 (1925): 112–127 [Hebrew]. Scholem writes to Benjamin in 1931 that “Zionism has triumphed itself to death” (A letter quoted in Scholem, Friendship, 173). 229 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/57, 2. 230 Letter quoted in Scholem, Friendship, 173 (1 August 1931).

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Deferred Catastrophe In the texts from the immediate years after emigration (1923–1926) Scholem uses a language increasingly laced with mythical and apocalyptic imagery. In a short piece from Scholem’s archive, he likens Modern Hebrew to a golem, a body that has been revived without a spirit. He describes how, in becoming a daily vernacular the “soul” of this language has been lost. Rather than reviving Hebrew, claims Scholem, the Zionists have resuscitated a golem or an Esperanto, which will neither have the capacity nor the right to compete with English or Arabic. Scholem thus compares Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, commonly regarded as the sole revivalist of Hebrew in the Palestinian yishuv, to the witch of Endor, and dismisses the “miraculous” revival of Hebrew as the deceptive resuscitation of a ghost.231 Like the golem, which is initially controlled by its creator and fulfils given tasks, Modern Hebrew can grow beyond control and develop destructive capacities.232 This linguistic golem and the fate of its creator – the new language movement that has invoked a ghost rather than resuscitated a language – are the topics of Scholem’s 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig. The letter denounces the “demonic” courage of the renewers of language.233 Derrida stresses the uncanny dimension emerging form Scholem’s text when he describes the new language as a “nonlanguage, the frozen grin of a semiotics, a disincarnated, fleshless, and formally universal exchange value, an instrument in the commerce of signs, without a proper place, without a proper name, a false return to life, a shoddy resurrection” for the purpose of a “sinister masquerade”. 234 According to Derrida it is Scholem’s description of the careless invocation of a linguistic ghost that gives the letter 231 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/56c). Untitled and undated typescript grouped in the archive with “On Language: A Confession” (“Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache”) (1926) and “Language Confession” (“Sprachbekenntnis”) (1925). Benjamin Harshav’s study attempts to counteract the myth of the Hebrew revival as the “magic trick of one stubborn idealist (the mythologised Eliezer Ben-Yehuda)” (Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), ix). The witch of Endor is “the woman who was consulted by King Saul and who brought up the prophet Samuel from the dead, as told in 1 Samuel 28. […] The true meaning of the story is that the witch, by trickery, persuaded Saul that she had succeeded in bringing up Samuel.” (Louis Jacobs, “Witch of Endor,” in A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/ acref/9780192800886.001.0001/acref-9780192800886-e-755 (accessed October 2006). 232 Interestingly, language is what the golem cannot be given by its creator (Gershom Scholem, “Der Golem von Prag und der Golem von Rechovot,” in Judaica, 2:77–86). 233 In this context the use of the term “demonic”, which designates a partly divine, partly human creature, emphasises the danger of hubris, which is also true for the creator of the golem (see Scholem, “Der Golem”). 234 Derrida, “The Eyes of Language”, 210. In his typical close commentary style, Derrida adopts a dramatic tone filled with pathos similar to that of Scholem’s text under examination.



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its haunting quality and enforces the notion of a powerful language retaliating against its blind resuscitators. The letter’s message, however, is more complex. The abandonment of tradition through the profanation of the Hebrew language is deemed potentially catastrophic but at the same time impossible “for the people certainly don’t know what they are doing.”235 The language revivalists, according to Scholem, believe they have secularised the Hebrew language and that they “have done away its apocalyptic point.”236 Crucially, however, Scholem argues that this is clearly not true: “The secularisation of the language is no more than a manner of speaking, a ready-made expression. It is impossible to empty the words bursting with meaning, unless one sacrifices language itself.”237 In Scholem’s original German letter the secularisation or actualisation [Verweltlichung] of Hebrew are disparaged in French as a “façon de parler”.238 For the revived Hebrew of the Zionists remains a “ghostly language” that daily wakes the names charged with ancient religious meaning. Derrida dwells on the semantic and rhetorical effect of Scholem’s claim that the actualisation of language is a mere “façon de parler”. He explains that Scholem means by this that secularised language is a mere “manner of speaking” or, worse, a “nonlanguage”. Moreover, to speak of the secularisation of language is an empty phrase, since it does not genuinely take place. Scholem’s use of the French “façon de parler” multiplies the vehicular mode of the German language in which the letter is written and which functions as a kind of “third language” that permits the passage between sacred (Hebrew) and profane (German) language.239 A comparison of the titles of the early and final versions of the letter is also illuminative in this respect. The earlier title “A Confession on Language” [Sprachbekenntnis] refers more generally to language as such. The final version entitled “On Our Language: A Confession” (“Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache”) narrows the discussion down to “our language” – Hebrew, the language of the Jews, the language of Scholem’s generation, the language that Scholem believes both he and Rosenzweig should view as their shared language.240 The idea that secularisation does not really take place may explain why, in contrast to the earlier draft of the letter, Scholem seems to prefer the terms 235 Gershom Scholem, “On Our Language,” 168–169. 236 Ibid., 97. 237 Ibid. 238 Scholem, “Bekenntnis ueber unsere Sprache,” 215. 239 Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” 199–201 and 216. Derrida maintains that “this bizarre logic, at once contradictory and tautological, makes of the impossible the condition of possibility and of existence of the impossible; it speaks of the event of an impossible that consists in a ‘manner of speaking’” (ibid., 216). 240 “Sprachbekenntnis,” Archive 4˚ 1599/27-I/56.

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“becoming this-worldly” [Verweltlichung] and “actualisation” [Aktualisierung] over the term secularisation [Säkularisierung].241 This emphasis may also be related to Scholem’s notion of the danger inherent in the Jewish people’s “entry into world history” [Verweltlichung], in its “normalisation” through Zionism’s “premature” victory and the abandonment of tradition as reflected first and foremost in the revival of the Hebrew language. In a 1931 letter to Benjamin, Scholem admits that his relationship with empirical Zionism in its organised form has reached a crisis point and that he never believed “that there is such a thing as a ‘solution to the Jewish Question’ in the sense of a normalisation”.242 In the same letter Scholem repeats the idea that the historical, “visible” victory of Zionism cannot be equated with “metaphysical redemption”. What remains, concludes Scholem pessimistically, is “the productivity of one who is going down and knows it. It is this productivity in which I have buried myself for years.”243 The paradoxical concept of “the productivity of one who goes down” [Produktivität des Untergehenden] – reminiscent of the notion of lamentation as a creative force – is of course part and parcel of the belief in the vital interplay between destruction and revival. Since ultimately secularisation does not take place, Scholem concludes that “a generation that takes over the most fruitful part of our tradition – its language – cannot, though it may ardently wish to, live without tradition.”244 The coming generations, heirs to this ghostly language, will face the “eruption of the volcano” in the form of retaliatory language and will be obliged to choose between bowing to the force of tradition or going under.245 Thus the apocalyptic moment of “revenge” may lead to destruction but it simultaneously harbours the possibility of redemption. This dialectical notion is reinforced by Scholem’s choice of the metaphors “volcano” and “abyss”.246 The letter’s opening sentence – “This country is a 241 Ibid. 242 Quoted in Scholem, Friendship,172 (1 August 1931). 243 Ibid., 174. Mosès points out that Scholem confesses his disappointment at the concrete realisation of Zionism to Rosenzweig, with whom he shared a strong sense of “dissimilation” but who in contrast sought to achieve this process through the renewal of German Jewry and not necessarily through the revival of Judaism in the Land of Israel. Scholem’s confession may therefore be read as agreement with Rosenzweig’s concern about the false messianic potential inherent in political Zionism, which is coupled with alienation from its religious identity in search of normalisation at any price (Mosès, Angel, 179–181). 244 Scholem, “On Our Language,” 168. 245 Ibid. 246 Alter argues that for Scholem “abyss” is both destructive and energising. It points to the fact that the stability of the world is illusory, and that linguistic, conceptual, social and moral conventions reassure us of an orderliness that is not intrinsic to this existence (Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” 432–435).



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volcano, and language is lodged within it”247 – suggests imminent eruption and uncontrollable linguistic undercurrents.248 Derrida points out that the fall into the abyss is understood both as a catastrophic event and as the moment in which the true essence of language is recognised, since “language is name. The power of language is enclosed in the name; the abyss of language is sealed within it”249 The fall into the abyss is therefore a moment of lucidity contrasted with the blindness of the new language movement. Hence Derrida asks whether catastrophe is identified with the fall into the abyss or with staying on the surface of secular “nonlanguage”, and concludes that it is precisely this equivocacy that gives the letter its own apocalyptic tone as well as its power of fascination.250 We have seen that Scholem charges the “generation in transition” as a whole with the instrumentalist abuse of language, with the erection of a living-dead Esperanto. But we have also seen that the reversal of this linguistic disaster may be possible because beneath the communicative or profane dimension of language concealed meaning lives on. It is the magical or poetic function of language that continues to reveal its paradisiacal origin, as Scholem would explicitly claim in his 1970 essay on the language theory of the Kabbalah251: What the value and worth of language will be – the language from which God will have withdrawn – is the question which must be posed by those who still believe that they can hear the echo of the vanished word to which, in our times, only the poets presumably have the answer. For poets do not share the doubt that most mystics have in regard to language.252

247 Scholem, “On Our Language,” 168. 248 It is evident from the comparison of the 1925 and 1926 versions of Scholem’s “confession” that the final version grants language a less passive role in the catastrophic encounter with its speakers in favour of an active revolt [Aufstand] and retaliatory force. In his 1932 essay “Language” (“Die Sprache”), Karl Kraus similarly warns that language is fighting against its reduction to a purely aesthetic phenomenon with the “permanently threatening force of a volanic floor” (Karl Kraus, Die Sprache (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 371–373 (372)). Kraus also uses the image of the abyss in relation to the media and political arenas (ibid., 373). 249 Scholem, “On Our Language,” 169. Mosès and Derrida rightly point to the immediate influence of Benjamin’s linguistic theory on Scholem’s definition that “language is name” and the idea of the fall of language. According to Mosès the letter’s central thesis regarding the ontological decline of language as a result of surrendering its magical function in favour of its functionality is taken directly from Benjamin’s essay “On Language as such and on the Language of Man” (Mosès, Angel, 176). 250 Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” 202–203. Alter also maintains that the abyss should not be considered a dark space but rather a “theatre of spiritual sheer lighting, radiation, a volcano.” (Alter, “Scholem and Modernism,” 440). 251 Mosès, Angel, 175–177. 252 Scholem, “The Name of God,” 59–194 (194).

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The restoration of language, even by the poet, must be sought in solitude. Scholem believed that this solitary calling was potentially fulfilled by the Modern Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon. He was surrounded, in Scholem’s words, by an aura of solitude, weltschmerz, and delicate melancholy, which characterized his early writings.253 Scholem ascribes a central quality to Agnon, which he himself sought to attain in the course of his youth in Germany: solitariness. In the concluding section of this chapter, I will show that Scholem also ascribes to Agnon’s language and storytelling the crucial quality of lament.

3 Agnon: Hebrew at the Crossroads At the crossover between generations Stands the solitary preserver of tradition. 254 (Gershom Scholem)

The language of Agnon epitomises for Scholem the paradoxical relationship between destruction and redemption. In contrast to the “fallen” vernacular of the Zionist movement, Agnon’s apocalyptic, lamenting prose contains the very seeds of the restitution of language, and of its true renewal. Scholem’s 1967 article “S. J. Agnon – The Last Hebrew Classic?” examines Agnon’s writing in the context of Modern Hebrew literature and the paradox on which it was founded.255 According to Scholem, the language of this literature originated largely in the religious tradition but had secular ambitions.256 The article dwells on the conflict between the sacred and secular aspects of language that dominated Scholem’s reflections on language three to four decades earlier and draws on his early comments on Agnon’s work. The relatively appeasing tone in which the linguistic conflict and “fall” are discussed in this context is striking. This conciliatory mood stems from Scholem’s belief that in Agnon he has found a (last?) glint of redemption, a shimmer of hope for the restitution of language.257

253 Gershom Scholem, “Agnon in Deutschland: Erinnerungen” (1967), in Judaica, 2:122–132 (123). 254 Gershom Scholem, “Nachwort” (typescript, 1925), Archive 4° 1599/277-I/59. 255 Gershom Scholem, “S. J. Agnon – The Last Hebrew Classic?” in Jews and Judaism in Crisis, 93–116. 256 Ibid., 94. 257 I disagree with Weidner’s claim that Scholem’s language critique in relation to Agnon has lost its apocalyptic tone (Weidner, 140). Although there is a lessening in pessimism, Scholem’s identification of the Hebrew revival as a crisis point remains in tact.



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Most of the writings produced between 1910 and 1930 vigorously attack Zionist language policies in a style wrought with pathos and envision linguistic catastrophe and overall apocalypse.258 In the context of Scholem’s commentary on Agnon, however, and conspicuously in the 1967 article, he acknowledges that the Zionists also contributed positively to Modern Hebrew, since its literature worked towards forging a connection between the Diaspora with all its paradoxes and the new society emerging in Palestine.259 Scholem views Agnon’s literature as an exemplary encapsulation of the bridge between the Jewish Diaspora and the new life in Palestine, crowning Agnon in 1967 – a year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature – perhaps the “last Hebrew classic”. According to Scholem Agnon “can be the heir to the totality of Jewish tradition and have the chance to give the highest artistic form to the life of the Jewish people under the reign of tradition and under the impact of the historic forces that make its disintegration.”260 Scholem explains that while Agnon had consciously left the world of tradition he knew from his youth, he remained nonetheless fascinated by it. “He started from tradition, but only in the sense that he used it as his material”, writes Scholem and adds that from there Agnon continued on a “double-track”. On the one hand Agnon penetrated deeper into the grandeur and intricacies of tradition. On the other, he exposed the ambiguities of tradition and started from the insecurity and alienation of the modern Jew who “must – or fails to – come to terms with himself without the guiding lights of a tradition that has ceased to be meaningful.”261 The history of the publication and reception of Agnon’s work is also marked by tension and duality. Scholem mentions the absurdity of the fact that And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight, which deals with an Enoch-Arden motif in a strictly Hasidic framework, appeared in Hapoel Hatzair’s weekly, a publication greatly influenced by Tolstoi and the Russian agrarian socialist movement (Narodniki).262 And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight was first published in book form in Jaffa in 1912 by the supposedly atheist Modern Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner. According to Scholem in Brenner’s eyes this piece by Agnon was the first work of secular Hebrew literature, where Jewish tradition became a purely artistic medium.263 On the other hand, for the type-setter of the book, a follower

258 According to Weidner, in later writings Scholem acknowledges that the crisis of the Hebrew revival has already taken place and itself become “classic”. Consequently the dramatic pathos of a coming catastrophe is replaced by a quieter, more melancholy tone (Weidner, 143). 259 Scholem, “Agnon – The Last Hebrew Classic?” 94–95. 260 Ibid., 95. 261 Ibid., 103. 262 Ibid., 99. 263 Ibid.

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of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the work of Agnon was an authentic representation of Hasidic teaching and life.264 Weidner interprets Scholem’s admiration for Agnon as evidence that he does not equate the “profane” use of Hebrew per se with “holy language” abuse, for it is the rupture with tradition that renders it classic.265 Agnon reveals the beauty and wealth of the sacred language precisely by “fracturing” it, using irony and other heretical modes to give it new form.266 In another article Scholem explains that Agnon accomplishes this ironic, heretical mode by profaning the sacred or at least by secularising it through multiple refractions.267 Scholem recognises early on that Agnon manages to avoid the prattle of most Modern Hebrew writers. In 1928 Scholem argues that the only guarantee for the renewal of Hebrew, which is threatened by prattle and abuse, lies in the cohabitation of the worlds of past and future generations in the minds of the poets, as in the case of Agnon who is the true Jewish chronicler.268 What exactly distinguishes Agnon’s language? Weidner argues that with respect to Agnon, Scholem focuses on the loss of form in modern literature more than on the issue of secularisation. Yet according to Scholem, this loss of form and hence the “chaotic trend” in Modern Hebrew literature are inevitably linked to its alienation from tradition.269 Scholem believed that Agnon, who had a deep sense of form, was highly aware of this process and alarmed by the estrangement of Hebrew from tradition. Agnon sought to revive the Hebrew language and “worked for it in the quarries of tradition and through the potential of great

264 Ibid. 265 Weidner, 143. Weidner quotes Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah in this context: “Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the fallen tradition [verfallende Tradition] falls upon [verfällt auf] an object and when it is fallen [in Verfall] does its greatness become visible” (translated in David Biale, “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,” Modern Judaism, 5/1 (1985): 67–93 (71)). Mosès mentions in this context that “for Jewish mysticism, in fact, the semantic dimension of language appears only through human discourse; the specificity of meanings is linked to the multiplicity that characterises the material world in which man, as finite creature, is submerged. The divine language, on the other hand, as revealed in the text of the Torah, and especially in tis secret linguistic texture, is so general that it appears most evident in the form of abstract structures” (Mosès, Angel, 179). 266 Weidner, 143. 267 Gershom Scholem, “Über einen Roman von S. J. Agnon,” Neue Rundschau 76 (1976): 327–333 (331). 268 Gershom Scholem in “Das hebräische Buch: Eine Rundfrage,” Jüdische Rundschau, 4 April 1928, 202. 269 Scholem, “Agnon” (1976), 96.



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forms contained in it.”270 Agnon’s style, according to Scholem, is marked by “a singular stillness, by an absence of pathos and exultation”.271 Scholem was convinced that this unsentimental style and severe restraint were influenced by the extraordinary soberness of Rabbinic prose, which in combination with the “spirit of mourning” bridged the gap between old and new, enabling the restoration of language. Agnon thus rejected the “anarchic vitality, lawlessness and roughness of the new language”, which he discussed with irony and mockery in several of his stories.272 Earlier, in 1918, Scholem had contrasted the viability of Modern Hebrew prose with the impossibility of a Modern Hebrew poetic language. He claimed Modern Hebrew poetry to be one of the worst things he knows, a deception. For a language, which has been reduced to mere form, tempts the poets into writing sweet, babbling phrases. Solid new Hebrew literature can be achieved only in prose form as in Agnon, argues Scholem.273 Scholem expresses a more ambivalent position towards the exceptional poetry he finds in Bialik. As in his commentary on Agnon, Scholem places Bialik in the context of the paradoxes of the age and the dangers inherent in the renewal of language. He claims Bialik as a “necessary sacrifice at the altar of language renewal”. His poetry, Scholem argues, is inscribed with a deep medieval quality without, however, cresting the splendour of medieval Hebrew poetry, since it does not spring from the same depths. These paradoxes are again reflected in the blending of lament [Klage] and accusation [Anklage] in Bialik’s pogrom poems. Although a sense of “lament” is remotely detectible the poems express more explicitly a form of accusation. But “does he accuse things or language itself?”, asks Scholem. It remains likewise unclear to Scholem whether Bialik identifies the essence of the world with the essence of the word.274 In contrast to the lack of lament in Bialik, it is precisely the centrality of mourning in Agnon’s prose that renders it in Scholem’s eyes both apocalyptic and redemptive. Scholem describes how the appealing force of mourning, which characterises many of Agnon’s stories and especially “In her Youth”, shifts the real plot to an apocalyptic one and transfers the characters from the darkness of

270 Ibid., 95. Judaica, 2:90. This, according to Scholem, is another reason why Agnon chose to write in Hebrew rather than Yiddish, which is defined by its “anarchic vitality” (ibid., 96). 271 Ibid., 106. 272 Ibid., 96. Weidner argues that Scholem considers Agnon the epigone of classic forms, and by using these ironically, is likewise their profiteer and exploiter (Weidner, 142). 273 SchBr I, 167 (23 August 1918). 274 SchTb II, 375–376 (notebook August 1918–August 1919). On Scholem, Bialik and the Hebrew language, see: Galili Shahar, “The Sacred and the Unfamiliar: Gershom Scholem and the Anxieties of the New Hebrew,” The Germanic Review 83/4 (2008): 299–320.

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violence and blame to the light of redemption.275 In the novella Two Pairs Scholem finds the source of the restoration of language in its “lamenting word.”276 It is thus the “spirit of mourning” that in many of Agnon’s stories elevates the plot to an apocalyptic event, and guarantees the restitution and renewal of language.277 In spoken Hebrew, however, language renewal in this sense fails to take place. In a short unpublished piece from 1926 entitled “Notes on Hebrew and the Study of Hebrew” (“Bemerkungen über Hebräisch und Hebräischlernen”),278 Scholem claims once again that his generation, both in Berlin and Palestine, has failed to truly learn Hebrew. The grave disillusion with contemporary spoken Hebrew, however, is counteracted by the continued appreciation for literary Hebrew, which despite secularisation preserves the glint and permanent resonance of revelation, and which grants it eternal life.279 The “language of the book” possesses the “fullness and silence of true life” and secures renewal from within the canon.280 Scholem specifically mentions Mendele Mokher Sfarim’s literature and Bialik’s novella Lion’s Body as examples of the revival of language from within this canon.281 The writings of a distinctly small number of Modern Hebrew writers like Agnon, Bialik and Mendele prove to Scholem that the renewal of Hebrew is not all prattle and propaganda. What distinguishes their literature from the spoken vernacular is the renewal of language itself from within and not in alienation from Jewish canonical texts. What renders particularly Agnon’s Hebrew redeeming is that he crafted it from the “quarries of tradition”. Scholem’s acceptance of a form of Hebrew that has removed itself from its paradisiacal state and his appreciation for the revival of Hebrew as embodied by Agnon is mirrored in the ninth of his “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”: “Only that which is fragmentary can be spoken, just as the absolutely concrete cannot be realised.”282

275 Scholem, “Das hebräische Buch.” 276 Gershom Scholem, “Nachwort” (1925), Archive 4° 1599/277-I/59. 277 Ibid. 278 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/25. The archivist dated this manuscript and typescript to 1926. 279 Ibid. This confirms Derrida’s claim that Scholem is by no means convinced that the secularisation of language has fully taken place (Derrida, “Eyes of Language”). 280 Archive 4° 1599/277-I/25. 281 Ibid. 282 Translated in Biale, “Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms,” 67–93 (87).



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4 Conclusion On the occasion of Agnon’s seventieth birthday celebration in 1958, Scholem was asked to act as master of ceremonies. In his opening remarks, held in Hebrew, Scholem points to the high esteem in which he holds Agnon since they met in Berlin, when Scholem was nineteen years old and Agnon ten years his senior. The qualities he ascribes to Agnon reflect Scholem’s own ambitions with regard to Hebraist and Zionist revival, as they have been examined in this chapter. He describes Agnon as “a human being lost in the crowd, seeking out the crowd to find solitude”, a figure involved with the public but isolated within it, and a friendly converser who is also a man of books and an artist. Agnon, according to Scholem, is meticulous about each “cedilla and cedilla” of the Hebrew word, safeguarding it from the sitra aḥra (Aramaic for “other side” and in the mystical tradition, “the satanic side”) of language, which Scholem’s contemporaries have witnessed.283 Scholem’s praise for Agnon as the “solitary preserver of tradition” echoes his critique of Zionist language revivalism, whose mere aim it was to resuscitate Hebrew for the sake of false communitarian and nationalist goals, blindly seeking to render this holy language profane and instrumental. The loss of lament in the revived language is a central aspect of this process. It is this secularisation and instrumentalisation of language that is understood as the sitra aḥra of language. In contrast, Agnon is applauded as a rare protector of the Hebrew language, who painstakingly preserves each atom, or kots ve-kots, of the Hebrew word.284 By inserting these traditional Aramaic and Hebrew phrases into his speech Scholem both describes and replicates Agnon’s Hebrew style, which is steeped in Jewish sources. This chapter concluded with a description of why and how Scholem found solace in the contemporary Hebrew language of Agnon. The following chapter examines Werner Kraft’s championing of two protectors of the German language: Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus. Not unlike the impulse seen in Scholem, Kraft dedicated much of his scholarship to uncovering their battles against the diabolical aspects of language in contemporary German.

283 These opening remarks were given in Hebrew (my translation) and reprinted in Dan Laor, “‘Kol ma she-ha-lev rotse lomar ve-eino maspik lomar’: kolot me-mesibat yovel ha-shiv’im shel sh. y. ’agnon [‘All that the Heart wants to Say but has No Time to Say’: Voices from the Seventieth Birthday of S.Y. Agnon],” Alpayim 30 (2006): 221–247 (226–227) [Hebrew]. 284 Ibid.

II Werner Kraft: “Singing a Lost World”

Werner Kraft: “Singing a Lost World”

Werner Kraft A troubadour of the deepest stature He sings before the murky window of the softly veiled world If she truly is his immortal lover,– Don Werner is her reverent cavalier. Listen! The world is not lost – As long as a singer celebrates her in song! ...1 (Else Lasker-Schüler)

Werner Kraft was born in 1896 to Jewish parents in Braunschweig, Germany, and spent most of his childhood and youth in Hanover.2 His autobiography and excerpts from his diaries and correspondence reveal an early and keen interest in German literature. In the early 1910s, Kraft encountered the writings of Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus, two contemporary literary figures whose works were to determine Kraft’s own literary oeuvre up until he died in Jerusalem in 1991. His intensive engagement with their writings – complemented by his interest in the works of, most notably, Stefan George, Goethe and contemporaries, Hofmannsthal and Kafka – reveals Kraft’s intellectual and existential battles at various stages of his life: as a young soldier in crisis during the First World War, as a somewhat indecisive student and librarian in the Weimar years, and as a German-Jewish refugee and immigrant in Jerusalem from 1934 onwards. Two principal characteristics define these battles throughout Kraft’s life: increased awareness of spiritual demise and defiance of this downfall by literary and linguistic means. His defiance became evident after emigration in 1934, notably in the decades after the Second World War when Kraft’s own literary and scholarly oeuvre came to fruition. This chapter will attempt to answer the following questions: Why and how Kraft – a German-Jewish refugee in 1933, an exile and immigrant in Jerusalem since 1934 and an Israeli citizen since 1948 – persisted in producing works on German literature in the German language, and published them after 1945 in

1 The first three stanzas of Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem “Werner Kraft,” reprinted in Werner Kraft 1896–1991, ed. by Jörg Drews, Marbacher Magazin 75 (Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1996), 113. In the original German: “Ein Troubadour tiefsten Formats.| Er singt vor dem Wolkenfenster der leisverschleierten Welt.|| Ist sie doch seine unsterbliche Geliebte,– | Herre Werner ihr ehrerbietiger Kavalier. || Hört! die Welt ist nicht verloren –|So lang ein Sänger sie besingt!..” 2 Ulrich Breden, Werner Kraft (1896–1991): Bibliothekar und Schriftsteller, Kleine Schriften der Niedersächsischen Landesbibiothek 1 (Hildesheim: Verlag August Lax, 1992), 9–16.

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Germany, Austria and Switzerland; How this clinging to the German language was linked to his intellectual development before exile; More specifically, I will examine whether the evident continuities between Kraft’s oeuvre before and after 1933 can be defined as an act of defiance in the face of turmoil, and what adjustments were nonetheless undertaken to ensure such continuity in the face of flight, exile and linguistic dislocation. Kraft’s literary and scholarly endeavours only came to fruition in the early decades after the Second World War, when he began to publish his monographs on Borchardt and Kraus and to edit works by, among others, Ludwig Strauss, Else Lasker-Schüler and Carl Gustav Jochmann. These published writings constitute the main source of enquiry for Kraft’s intellectual and existential state during his years in Jerusalem. Primary sources on Kraft’s intellectual growth in the years before exile include his published memoirs and a small selection of letters and diary entries that appeared in various publications. These are complemented by unpublished sources – correspondence and early poems, prose and essays.3 An examination of Kraft’s writings from the different periods of his life brings central continuities to light. Not only does Kraft continue to write in German and on German literature, his literary figures of reference before and after emigration remain the same. In his autobiography Kraft describes how despite the circumstances of exile and the emerging catastrophe in Germany, he had no choice but to continue his oeuvre and “to create”, in his words, “from within sources of the German spirit and German language.”4 A German legacy, which Wolf Lepenies terms “the seduction of culture”, may help to explain Kraft’s loyalty to the ideas of spirit and language despite – or perhaps because of – such cataclysmic historical and political events as war and exile. For several centuries and under various political formations, the German people perceived themselves as a “cultural nation” and the concept of culture as separate from spheres such as politics, economy and technology. As such the German understanding of culture refers essentially to intellectual, artistic and religious facts.5 The “German seduction” is defined as the “tendency to see in culture a noble substitute for politics, if not

3 Some unpublished sources used are kept at the Deutsche Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach. Kraft’s original diaries, which are held at the Werner Kraft Archiv in the Kunst- und Literaturinstitut Hombroich, were unavailable to me. 4 Werner Kraft, Spiegelung der Jugend (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), 126. 5 Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. Lepenies refers to Norbert Elias’s seminal study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1976). See especially Chapter 1 entitled “Zur Soziogenese der Begriffe ‘Zivilisation’ und ‘Kultur’”.



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a better politics altogether.”6 As a result, “today the term ‘Weimar Republic’ still suffers from linguistic bruises, whereas ‘Weimar Culture’ is nostalgically remembered as a great promise that has remained largely unfulfilled.”7 According to Lepenies this “seduction” also explains the publication in October 1914 of the manifesto “To the Cultural World” (“An die Kulturwelt”) which crucially claimed, among other things, that the war was not against German militarism but against German culture, although German culture and German militarism were now seen as co-dependent.8 The writings of Rudolf Borchardt and especially his war-time speeches, which stressed a certain mental and cultural “steadfastness” against the enemy, exposed Kraft to this contemporary reincarnation of the “seduction of culture”.9 At the same time Borchardt’s alarm due to the “spiritual demise” in Germany (and in Europe in general) reached beyond specific war-time concerns or direct political affiliations. It was the “forecaster of decline” [Diagnostiker des Niedergangs] Borchardt and the “apocalyptic satirist” Karl Kraus who shaped Kraft’s early understanding of the concepts of culture, spirit and language.10 And although Kraft never explicitly defines the term “spirit” or develops a theory of language, his discussion of Borchardt and Kraus reveals the centrality of these concepts in his worldview – before and after emigration.11 Borchardt and Kraus provided Kraft with more than apocalyptic admonitions about spiritual demise. Their writings and concepts of language present unique examples of defiance against this perceived state of affairs. As Kraft himself notes in his studies, neither Borchardt nor Kraus presented a case of “total language scepticism”, an approach that was prevalent in contemporary philosophy and

6 Lepenies, 5. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Rudolf Borchardt, “Der Krieg und die deutsche Selbsteinkehr” (1914) and “Der Krieg und die deutsche Verantwortung” (1916) in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden: Prosa, ed. by Marie Luise Borchardt and Herbert Steiner, vol. 5, Reden und Schriften zur Politik (Stuttgart: Klett und Klett-Cotta, 1979), 217–264 and 301–325. 10 Martin Mosebach, “Was unter glücklicheren Umständen hätte sein können: Der Diagnostiker des Niedergangs – ein Symposium der Rudolf-Borchardt Gesellschaft in Berlin,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 July 1995, 29; Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 11 Kraft’s essay “Herz und Geist”, for example, traces the development of these ideas in German thought in the past three centuries, providing examples and quotations from prominent German philosophers and writers without, however, offering a systematic definition of terms (Werner Kraft, “Herz und Geist,” in Herz und Geist: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur deutschen Literatur (Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 1989), 7–22).

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literature.12 Instead, they were deeply sceptical and critical of the use of language in their day, and developed unique strategies to counteract this linguistic downfall. Borchardt’s idea of “language creation” [Sprachschöpfung], which underlies his Dante translation and Kraus’s battle against the journalistic jargon (and the media apparatus) by way of satire, were evidence for Kraft of the potential force of language and linguistic creation, albeit the critic may view them as tragic substitutes for direct political action or historical misfortune. Thus Leo Bersani, for example, claims that an underlying assumption of the “culture of redemption” is that the catastrophes of history matter less if they are “compensated for” in art, a process by which art is reduced to a major “patching function” and the “aesthetics of redemption” is generally understood as a correction of life.13 Above all in exile Kraft sought to “correct” his own biography and to recover an endangered culture and language through acts of writing and linguistic creation. By doing so Kraft undertook an “ideological reterritorialisation”, similar to several other German exiled intellectuals of this generation.14 Kraft was neither able nor sought to redeem the German culture and language, misappropriated by the Nazi regime, from within Germany, but attempted to serve as their “true” representative and protector in exile.15 The engagement of Kraft with his Jewish identity during his youth and early adulthood was mediated by his friendship with figures such as Gershom Scholem and Toni Halle but also by his perception of the Jewish affiliations of Kraus and Borchardt. Kraft’s estranged relationship to Judaism throughout this period was replaced by his nominal recognition in 1933 that he was not a German but a Jew. I will ask how flight and exile altered his approach towards his German-Jewish identity in the long term, and whether the lost country of his youth was transformed into a “sacred shrine” that could only be evoked and conserved by the persistent use of the German mother tongue and the study of its literature. Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi argues crucially in her study Booking Passage that for the “bereaved” the lost continent is a “construct of the imagination” that must be big enough in order to contain the objects produced by memory. These objects, whether seen as “metonyms of the submerged wholeness of the past or as the 12 Mauthner, Kritik der Sprache. 13 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–2. This is also quoted in Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2000), 144. 14 See Brender, “Franz Werfel’s Debate.” Brender, of course, cites Thomas Mann’s famous assertion “Wo ich bin, ist die deutsche Kultur” as exemplary of this ideological reterritorialisation (ibid., 99). 15 Ibid.



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fragmented, ever-surfacing but utterly elusive changelings of history, they are above all the test of the survival of remembered worlds as the legitimate domain of the imagination.”16 Dekoven Ezrahi discusses the diasporic Jewish poetics of catastrophe and exile (where Jerusalem functions as the “lost shrine” of the Jewish imagination and the Book of Lamentations provides a traditional premise for literary responses to this loss) as well as the transformation of the Jewish imagination following the “return” of the diasporic Jew to his sacred homeland. To the generation of returning Jews, Dekoven Ezrahi argues, Europe has come to replace Jerusalem as the ruined shrine of the Jewish imagination, a move that is replete with literary acts of pilgrimage and mimesis, or in other words, the creation of textual surrogates and replicas of the destroyed culture.17 While it would be difficult to locate Kraft specifically in the tradition of a Jewish poetics of exile as it existed in Europe, once in the equivocal exile of Jerusalem, Kraft indeed sacralised the lost country of his youth, which he most notably identified as the German spirit and German language. Moreover, Kraft’s literary and scholarly production can be read as a textual surrogate for this “lost continent”. In this chapter I apply the concept of “ark” to illustrate that Kraft perceived the very act of writing itself as a redemptive practice, even if it remained an “incomplete compensatory act”.18 Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem quoted above, which cherishes Kraft as a troubadour whose song saves the world from annihilation, mirrors Kraft’s own redemptive concept of the ark. In a 1975 speech given in Heidelberg, Kraft expresses his continuing fear of a potential “great flood”. His hope in facing this flood he expresses as follows: “May we, however, continue to passionately discuss the crisis of language in the ark, so that we do not forget language, the mother tongue!”19 This chapter will demonstrate that Kraft indeed “got through” flight and exile precisely by creating a safe “German ark” for himself, an isolated island within the volatile refuge of Jerusalem, where he discusses the literary works and linguistic approaches of, most notably, Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus.20 The first section outlines Kraft’s intellectual development in Germany, with particular emphasis on his early fascination with Borchardt and Kraus, and his emotional and mental crisis during the First World War. Kraft corresponded intensively with Gershom Scholem at this time. Their exchange provides an opportunity to examine Kraft’s approach to the question of Jewish identity. The second 16 Dekoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 179. 17 Dekoven Ezrahi, “When Exiles Return.” 18 Dekoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 180. 19 Werner Kraft, “Muttersprache und Sprachkrise,” in Herz und Geist, 22–34 (34). 20 The concept of “ark” in Walter Benjamin will be discussed in the second part of this chapter.

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part of the chapter accompanies Kraft into exile in Jerusalem and discusses both the initial hardships, which were typically expressed in terms of literary and linguistic dilemmas, and a possible solution, which he sought with inspiration from figures such as Else Lasker-Schüler and Walter Benjamin. The last part of the chapter attempts to understand Kraft’s literary oeuvre in exile by applying the idea of the “ark” and examining his discussion of the language crisis through his studies on Borchardt and Kraus.

1 Linguistic Dystopia and Restitution in Germany The most striking factors during Kraft’s youth in Germany are his early admiration for the writings of Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus, his personal crisis during army service as a paramedic and nurse in the First World War, and his estranged relationship to Judaism. The sources provide less obvious information on the exact reasons for his reservations about Judaism or his dislike of Jewish leading figures such as Martin Buber. Yet Kraft’s understanding of Borchardt and Kraus, both of whom provide him with confusing solutions to his Jewish identity, partly explains this reservation. Confusion and indecisiveness also plague other aspects of his life, such as his study and career choices. Kraft is painfully aware of his weakness, as expressed in letters to Scholem between 1917 and 1919. The following sections of this chapter examine Kraft’s progress in Germany and provide a brief account of his eventual flight from Germany to Palestine in 1933.

The Odd Couple: Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus and the First World War In his autobiography published in 1972, Kraft writes that in 1913 he read Rudolf Borchardt’s poem “Wannsee” with such rapture that he wonders whether in his times poets are still loved in this way.21 Borchardt (1877–1945) was born to a German family of Jewish descent from Königsberg and grew up in Moscow, Berlin and Vienna, but spent a large part of his adult years in Italy.22 His writings encompass a wide range of genres including public addresses, poetry, drama, short

21 Kraft, Spiegelung, 23. 22 See, for example, Jens Malte Fischer, “Rudolf Borchardt – Autobiographie und Judentum,” in Rudolf Borchardt 1877–1945: Referate des Pisaner Colloquiums, ed. by Horst Albert Glaser, Akten internationaler Kongresse auf den Gebieten der Ästhetik und der Literaturwissenschaft 4 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1987), 29–48.



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stories, novels, translations and literary treatises.23 Kraft’s early euphoria was kindled by Borchardt’s poems, which he read in the early 1910s in the Deutsche Almanach auf das Jahr 1907.24 This volume listed further works by Borchardt, such as “A Speech on Hofmannsthal” (“Rede über Hofmannsthal”) and “A Conversation on Forms” (“Ein Gespräch über Formen”), which according to Kraft greatly stimulated his imagination.25 From this time, writes Kraft, he collected everything he could find by Borchardt and read it with a devotion devoid of criticism. In his autobiography he describes how a new world, rich, never-ending, crooked and foggy began to open up to him.26 In 1914 after Kraft had published his first short review on Borchardt’s “Wannsee” (and on Stefan George) in the journal Die Aktion, he also began corresponding with Borchardt on literary and political issues, and met him personally in 1917 for the first time.27 This early admiration was to accompany Kraft’s literary and critical endeavours throughout his life, culminating in the post-war monograph he published on Borchardt in 1961.28 During the First World War, however, Kraft began to question Borchardt’s pro-war position and believed he recognised a worrying dissonance in Borchardt’s personality. In his account of the war, Kraft tells us that despite his temporary affinity with German cultural nationalism, which he encountered in Stefan George and in Borchardt’s wartime speeches including the 1914 address “The War and German Self-Reflection” (“Der Krieg und die deutsche Selbsteinkehr”), he did not enlist voluntarily in the German army.29 Kraft’s cousin, Paul Kraft, for example, opposed the war radically.30 Werner himself was enlisted in 1915 and from January 1916 served as a paramedic and nurse in Hanover-Herrenhausen and in Ilten near Hanover.31 During the war he made the acquaintance of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. His intensive correspondence with Scholem from the war years (the letters to Benjamin from this period are lost) testifies to a deep emotional and intellectual crisis in terms of his position on the war and his general faith in himself and his environment. In several letters from August and 23 See Rudolf Borchardt, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden, ed. by Marie Luise Borchardt and Herbert Steiner, 12 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett & Klett-Cotta, 1955–2003). 24 Deutscher Almanach auf das Jahr 1907 (Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1906). 25 Kraft, Spiegelung, 37. 26 Ibid., 38–39. Kraft also mentions buying the yearbook Hesperus with Borchardt’s first Dante translations. 27 Die Aktion 4 (1914). Kraft, Spiegelung, 67. 28 Werner Kraft, Rudolf Borchardt: Welt aus Poesie und Geschichte (Hamburg: Claassen, 1961). 29 Rudolf Borchardt, “Der Krieg und die deutsche Selbsteinkehr,” Gesammelte Werke: Prosa, 5:217–264. 30 Kraft, Spiegelung, 32–33. 31 Ibid., 42; Breden, 19.

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September 1917, for example, Kraft congratulates Scholem on his mental stamina and decisiveness, and on his ability to free himself from military service and bewails his own weakness and conformism in the face of events.32 In the following months he finds it hard to verbally express his deteriorating state and writes of his “trembling in the face of evil that is happening everywhere and especially to me.”33 In a further letter he describes his transfer back to a military hospital where he had previously served as “murder” and the hospital itself as “hell”.34 In one letter he expresses the wish to be sent to the front because “there is more life in the barbarity of war” than in the suffering that surrounds him.35 This hope was probably nourished by Borchardt, who, according to Kraft, conveyed to him the tempting message that he should watch the war front close up in order to “heal” his inner conflict. Kraft, however, remained indecisive about this.36 In his autobiography Kraft indeed describes himself as “torn” in all directions: He was pulled by Borchardt and his war enthusiasm; by Karl Kraus and his radical antiwar stance; by George who in his poem “The War” was both for and against the war; by Theodor Lessing who read to Kraft his anti-war poems directed against German intellectuals who were its proponents, especially Thomas Mann.37 The most notable conflict Kraft experienced was that between his incompatible idols, Borchardt and Kraus. In a letter from May 1918, Kraft tells Scholem that his brother Fritz has been missing on the war front in Palestine since April (he was later claimed to have been killed). In the same letter he lists the only happy moments he experienced during those harsh times: the appearance of new volumes of Kraus’s The Torch (Die Fackel) and a newly published list of Borchardt’s works.38 Kraft adds that he is of course aware of the “tragedy” of their coupling. He insists in a 1978 interview, however, that it was Kraus who served as his “never disputed moral guide” after he had read Kraus’s 1914 address “In these Great Times” (“In dieser grossen Zeit”).39 During the war Kraft also “begged” Scholem to subscribe to Kraus’s journal for its literary and political qualities.40 32 Werner Kraft to Gershom Scholem (Ilten, 16 August 1917 and 7 September 1917), National Library of Israel, Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 33 Kraft to Scholem (Ilten, 16 October 1917), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 34 Ibid. 35 Kraft to Scholem (Ilten, 4 October 1917), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 36 Kraft, Spiegelung, 44. In a letter to Scholem from 7 October 1917, Kraft writes decisively that he will not participate in the war (Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2). 37 Kraft, Spiegelung, 42. 38 Kraft to Scholem (Hannover, 29 May 1918), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 39 Werner Kraft, Ich bin an meinen Punkt gebannt: Werner Kraft im Gespräch mit Jörg Drews (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1978), 3 and 6. Kraus, “In dieser großen Zeit.” 40 Kraft to Scholem (Hannover, 29 May 1918), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2.



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Yet the correspondence from the early war years does not testify to a strict faith in Kraus either. Instead, it is evidence of Kraft’s searching and initial indecisiveness. Whereas his cousin, Paul Kraft, and his friend, Gershom Scholem, appear to him to be strong and decisive opponents of the war, Kraft sees himself as weak and conformist, at one time even considering the battlefront as a promise of self-redemption. As the war progresses and finally ends, Kraft has a clearer sense of what he calls Borchardt’s “equivocal personality” and perhaps even “lack of character”.41 The more the times decline into the abyss, writes Kraft, so does the presence of Kraus strike him as a marvel, solace, confirmation but also as a curse. Mainly, he provides Kraft with immediate joy.42 This chapter gradually reveals how Borchardt and Kraus served as unique examples of the “forecaster of decline” and the “apocalyptic satirist”.43 Kraft specifically recognises in these contrary figures not only their grave admonitions but also the creative capacities that resulted from their doomsday diagnoses. In the course of the war and its aftermath, he distanced himself from Borchardt’s pro-war position – without ceasing to admire his literary achievements – and identified more closely with the anti-war position expressed by Kraus. The Kraft-Scholem correspondence reveals Kraus and Borchardt as the pre-eminent influences on Kraft’s early literary and political inclinations but also on his approach to Jewish identity. In his letters to Martin Buber and Scholem, Kraft does not discuss this approach at length. They are nonetheless instructive as they are written to people with explicitly Jewish (and Zionist) inclinations, to which Kraft responds.

Kraft and the German-Jewish Predicament Kraft’s early correspondence indicates that despite his declared detachment from Judaism, the encounter with contemporary Jewish public figures such as Martin Buber and his friendship with fellow German Jews such as Gershom Scholem and Toni Halle (later Kraft’s sister-in-law) demanded of him a certain engagement with his Jewish identity. As will be shown, his approach is mediated by his admiration for Borchardt and Kraus, on the one hand, and his dislike for public figures like Martin Buber, on the other. Grete Schaeder, the editor of Buber’s published correspondence, claims that Kraft’s early letters to Buber from 1917 reflect great inner distress and the battle 41 Kraft to Scholem (Freiburg, 10 January 1920 and 9 June 1920), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 42 Kraft to Scholem (Freiburg, 9 July 1919), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. In an earlier section of the same letter Kraft discusses his idea of the poetical and of the joke in Kraus’s writing. 43 Mosebach, “Der Diagnostiker des Niedergangs”; Timms, Kraus (1989).

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for a firm intellectual anchor and place. His “guardian angels” at this time were Borchardt and Kraus who as Jews (by descent or birth) became “masters and protectors of the German word.”44 Having examined Kraft’s letters to Scholem from the same period it can confidently be claimed that Kraft was plagued by mental and emotional distress, and that he fought to acquire a stable spiritual anchor in the world. As will be shown Kraus and Borchardt – individually and as a pair – provided Kraft with confusing rather than sound answers regarding Jewish identity, exacerbating the conflict between a single and double identity that allegedly affected the Jewish poets of his generation when they gradually became aware of the paradox that “the mind of the Jewish poet was tied to the German word”.45 In his letters to Scholem from 1917–1923 Kraft congratulates his friend on the Jewish New Year. However, this strikes the reader as being primarily a gesture of politeness towards the addressee, whose strong Jewish identity Kraft does not share. In fact, Kraft believes that the approach of his correspondent to Judaism constitutes a gulf between them. Although Kraft in 1917 admits to Scholem in one letter that he is unable to establish a relationship to Judaism, in another he writes that he has always been tragically aware of the fact that he is Jewish.46 The “tragedy” of this awareness stems from his largely adverse approach towards Jews and Judaism during this period. In a 1919 letter Kraft acknowledges once again that he knows nothing about Judaism and that the resultant chasm between himself and Scholem is filled with a “silence not fully explained”. This situation saddens Kraft as does his compulsion to think of Jews and Judaism with hatred even when knowing that this is wrong.47 This “hatred” seems to be based on Kraft’s internalisation of anti-Semitic stereotypes that wonder about the fact that Jews pray to God while at the same time being obsessed with money, as he puts it in one letter.48 It must be noted, however, that despite a small number of harsh statements against all that is Jewish, Kraft’s relationship to Judaism was far more ambiguous. The above declaration of aversion is preceded, as mentioned above, by Jewish New Year wishes to Scholem and followed by the suggestion that Scholem should visit the local Herzl club in Hanover.49 A year later Kraft continues to contemplate his relationship with Judaism and concludes in a further letter to his friend that 44 Grete Schaeder, introduction to Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten, ed. by Grete Schaeder, vol.1, 1897–1918 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1972–1975), 50. 45 Schaeder in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1:50. 46 Kraft to Scholem, (Hanover, 15 December 1917 and 29 December 1917), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2 47 Kraft to Scholem (Hanover, 23 September 1919), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.



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his Judaism now consists of the willingness to help bear the curse, which has befallen the Jewish people, and at the same time of the inability to help lift this curse.50 Kraft seems willing at best to recognise that he is Jewish but has no desire to actively participate in his fate. This reductionism may originate from Kraft’s early understanding of the confusing positions held by Kraus and Borchardt. As Jens Malte Fischer shows, Borchardt stylised himself – particularly in his autobiographical works – as having no homeland [heimatlos]. In other words, Borchardt claims to have had no hometown, family home or family and to have learnt very late that he had a home country. Consequently all of these voids were compensated for and occupied intellectually.51 Fischer argues that Borchardt consciously compensated for his Jewish descent (which he allegedly never mentions in his autobiographical writings) and Bohemian background with his intellectual and spiritual oeuvres.52 Borchardt dismisses racialist theories and instead bases his understanding of belonging to the German nation on mental, cultural and linguistic aspects, thus keeping in line with the idea of the nation as based on its culture and language. According to Fischer, in Borchardt’s eyes Judaism ceased to exist after one was baptised and after the process of a mental assimilation with the German mind, culture and language had been faithfully completed.53 Since Borchardt’s ancestors were baptised about sixty years before his birth – Borchardt nonetheless tended to present his Jewish origins as existing in a mythical, distant past – he adamantly rejected any allusion to his own Jewishness.54 Fischer is of the opinion, however, that this approach does not hold up as evidence for the Jewish self-hatred that Borchardt was accused of by contemporaries such as Theodor Lessing and Willy Haas.55 And the 1943 essay “On the German Jewish Question” (“Zur deutschen Judenfrage”), Fischer claims, is for the most part proof of Borchardt’s unrealistic, unworldly understanding of current events and of his stubborn conviction that he is not and never was a Jew.56 In contrast to Borchardt, Karl Kraus was born into a Jewish family but renounced his affiliation to Judaism in 1899. He entered the Catholic Church in 1911, but abandoned it in 1923. “This chronology”, Edward Timms writes, “abounds in contradictions” and, as in Borchardt’s case, led to his association

50 Kraft to Scholem (6 October 1920), Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. 51 Fischer, 30. 52 Fischer refers us to Friedrich Gundolf’s 1910 definition of Borchardt’s early Dante translations as “stationäres Deutsch eines russischen Juden” (ibid., 34). 53 Ibid., 39–40. 54 Ibid., 41. 55 Ibid., 37–40. 56 Ibid., 43.

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with Jewish self-hatred.57 According to Timms, Kraus’s claims about the prominence of men of Jewish origin in the commercial, financial and media world of Vienna are in reality a severe case of identity crisis.58 Perhaps again similar to Borchardt, Kraus attempted to “define a role for himself [as moral crusader, artist and later satirist] that transcended racial (and social) affiliations.”59 He explicitly disavows his Jewish reputation in the 1913 essay “He is After All a Jew” (“Er ist doch e Jud”) by denying that he possesses any so-called Jewish characteristics.60 On the other hand, it seems that Kraus outwardly concealed his conversion to Catholicism, mostly to avoid destroying the effectiveness of his satire, which required doctrinal and confessional independence (he finally disclosed his conversion to his readers in 1922).61 Kraft’s early perception of Kraus and Borchardt’s Jewish affiliations is demonstrated in a series of 1917 letters addressed to Martin Buber as the editor of the journal Der Jude. Kraft complains in one letter that Kraus was only mentioned once in this journal. More importantly, Kraft presents himself to Buber as a Jew in a new, allegedly “Krausian” version. This Judaism is “free” for it is not hindered by the Jews themselves, writes Kraft. His love for Kraus, explains Kraft, results from the fact that Kraus experiences the “world conflict of the spirit” in linguistic terms and because Kraus might be the only Jew who possesses a German heart and is therefore “organically linked” [organisch verknüpft] to it.62 Kraft declares his admiration for Kraus first of all for his ability to experience the spiritual predicament of the world in linguistic terms. The second aspect of his admiration – the assertion that Kraus the Jew has a German heart – is less coherent. We are obliged here to ask what Kraft means by “organic relation”; whether he infers that Kraus has no cause to pursue a relation to “Germanness” because in contrast to most Jews he is “organically” or “naturally” German; and whether he accordingly believes that he himself possesses a “German heart”, and denies the potential conflict with his Jewish descent. Here Kraft’s relationship with his second “guardian angel”, Rudolf Borchardt, may provide greater insight. In another letter to Buber, Kraft challenges Buber’s

57 Timms, Kraus (1989), 237. 58 Ibid., 238. 59 Ibid., 239. 60 Karl Kraus, “Er ist doch e Jud,” in Schriften, ed. by Christian Wagenknecht, vol. 4, Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989), 327–334. 61 Timms, Kraus (1989), 241 and 243. 62 Kraft to Buber (11 March 1917) in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1:476. In the next letter to Buber (17 March 1917) Kraft refers to the poem “Gebet an die Sonne von Gibeon” and the words “die Juden hindern mich am Leben und darum am Judentum” (ibid., 1:481).



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refusal to include Borchardt in Der Jude.63 This protest mirrors Kraft’s own relationship to Germanness in mental or spiritual rather than “intrinsic” terms. In the letter Kraft explains with pathos how his deep and holy passion for German art determined his written request to Buber and that he realises, through Borchardt’s translation of Tacitus’s Germania, that he owes Borchardt his very being.64 Kraft furthermore expresses his deep concern about the fact that the spirit during his day has been destroyed by its “double”.65 Once again Borchardt emerges as the literary figure who acts as the prophet of spiritual demise and, to Kraft’s mind, at the same time embodies a pure, passionate spirituality so rarely found in the midst of this disintegration. Kraft feels connected to German art and the German spirit through figures like Goethe, Hölderlin and Borchardt, and adopts the latter’s lament.66 Kraft’s insistence, it must be clearly stated, that Borchardt and Kraus – both of Jewish descent but not (or no longer) of the Jewish faith – be included in a journal bearing the explicit title Der Jude and founded by a prominent German-Jewish leader, is telling either of Kraft’s naiveté or of his wish to redraw set boundaries. Kraft’s 1917 announcement to Scholem that he endlessly loves German art, Goethe and Rudolf Borchardt and that he feels deep hatred for Buber may well stem from Buber’s refusal to accept Kraft’s “Jewish” parameters.67 In other words, Buber’s unwillingness to include Kraus or Borchardt in Der Jude or to understand Kraft’s version of a “Krausian” Jew probably contributed greatly to Kraft’s antagonism towards Buber in particular and to his feeling of alienation from Judaism in general. For in contrast to his friend Scholem, who by this time had also gradually distanced himself from Buber, Kraft did not pursue any related alternatives, such as the independent study of Jewish sources. Scholem’s reply to Kraft was highly rhetorical and radical: He states that he never sought a relationship to values whose legitimacy is entrenched in the essence of German and that the German language itself disappears next to 63 In his reply to Kraft (15 March 1917) Buber explains that this decision was based on Borchardt’s person and his cultural and political orientation, and specifically on his assertion that he was not of “Jewish blood” (Buber, Briefwechsel, 1:477–478). 64 Kraft to Buber (17 March 1917), in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1:479. On the relationship between Kraft and Borchardt during the First World War, see specifically Kraft, Spiegelung, 37 and 52; Drews, “Kraft und Borchardt,” in Rudolf Borchardt und seine Zeitgenossen, ed. by Ernst Osterkamp, Quellen und Forschung zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte 10 (244) (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 27–44. 65 Kraft to Buber (17 January 1917), in Buber, Briefwechsel, 1:479–480. 66 For a more detailed discussion of Borchardt as “Diagnostiker des Niedergangs” and his emphasis on spiritual renewal, see the second part of this chapter. 67 Kraft (8 August 1917) in SchBr I, 92.

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the Hebrew, which he has begun to speak and which his children will speak.68 Moreover, while Scholem and Kraft continuously discuss – and agree to differ on – Kraus’s writings, their contrary positions on Borchardt lead to a crisis in their relationship. In 1918 Kraft deeply regrets discussing Borchardt’s works with Scholem after realising that he dismisses him on moral grounds and as a result even considered aborting a plan to visit Scholem in Jena.69 Their deep disagreement on Borchardt helps to understand their respective approaches towards German and Hebrew. In a diary entry from October 1917, Scholem repeats a conversation with Kraft. The latter is quoted as saying that “the German heart stands against the Jewish spirit, that silence is opposed the word.”70 Scholem disagrees vehemently because he believes that the “Jewish conception of the word includes silence” and that the spirit and heart cannot be separated.71 To this Kraft apparently answered that “only because you [Scholem] are German do you want to be silent in Hebrew” and that Scholem would not strive for this if he were Jewish.72 In distinguishing what is “German” and what is “Jewish” Kraft applies the dichotomies between heart and intellect and word and silence. Scholem denies the existence of these dichotomies in the Hebrew language, for he believes that the Jewish idea of language includes silence. Kraft composed a poem in the 1960s based, as he explains, on the above 1917 dialogue. Almost fifty years after their initial conversation and thirty years after his arrival in Jerusalem, Kraft admits that he is still unable to be silent in Hebrew (and hence, in Scholem’s understanding, to speak this language). He nonetheless expresses the hope of reaching his friend in the German language, for the gulf between them – created precisely by their respective linguistic and spiritual affiliations – does not diminish Kraft’s loyalty to Scholem.73 Between 1917 and 1960, Kraft and Scholem both underwent dislocation and re-settlement in Jerusalem,

68 SchBr I, 94. 69 Kraft to Scholem (Hannover, 30 July 1918), ARC 4 1599 01 1457. 1 and 2. 70 Scholem, Diaries, 185. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. Scholem continues: “This is not so. The German ususally doesn’t keep silent in German, but is just silent. What we seek is the rhythm of the Torah in silence, and this is what we mean by being silent in Hebrew. A part of the Torah is silence, but not silence beyond the Name. The Torah is silent in symbols and speaks through being, while the German speaks in symbols and is silent in being” (ibid.). 73 The poem appeared in Werner Kraft, Kleinigkeiten (Bonn: Georg Heusch Verlag, 1985), 34. See also Scholem’s letter to Kraft (18 October 1917) in Gershom Scholem, Briefe an Werner Kraft, ed. by Werner Kraft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 40–42.



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leaving behind the original setting of their 1917 conversation. A brief description of the years prior to Kraft’s flight in 1933 is now due.74

Student and Librarian between the First World War and 1933 In the years between military service, which ended in 1919, and his flight in 1933, Kraft completed his academic studies and, not least for financial reasons, began his career as librarian. While undertaking German and Romance studies in Freiburg in the years 1919–1920, Kraft attended lectures by Husserl, who according to his autobiography and letters to Scholem made a considerable impression on him. He began to train as librarian in Berlin in 1920 and to write his doctoral dissertation at the University of Frankfurt. In 1925 he was awarded a doctorate for his dissertation, which researched the motif of the pontifex Johanna (“Die Päpstin Johanna: Eine motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung”).75 The choice of topic was inspired by Rudolf Borchardt’s 1920 poem “Annunciation” (“Verkündigung”), the first part of a planned trilogy entitled The Pontifex Jutta.76 In a letter to Borchardt, Kraft demonstrates his fascination with the way in which Borchardt stripped the Jutta motif off the theological, legendary and historical deposits and through beautiful linguistic transformation uncovered its original, always valid and eternal meaning.77 In 1928 Kraft was employed at the Formerly Royal and Provincial Library in Hanover, from which he was finally dismissed in October 1933 under the Nazi “Civil Service Restoration Act”.78 In his diary Kraft notes that he lost his employ74 Few primary sources are available on Kraft’s life and writings between the years 1920–1933. Compared to a whole series of publications from the 1950s onwards, Kraft published little during the inter-war period. 75 Werner Kraft, “Die Päpstin Johanna: Eine motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung,” PhD diss. (University of Frankfurt a.M., 1925). The bulk of the dissertation is devoted to the literary engagement with the “Jutta-Motiv” in the works of Achim von Arnim and Rudolf Borchardt. However, it also provides an account of earlier literary treatises of this subject and the role of Lessing, for example, in the development of this motif. 76 In several letters to Scholem from the early 1920s, Kraft briefly discusses his intention to write on this topic. See Kraft to Scholem (3 December 1920 and 13 March 1921), Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Arc 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. Kraft also mentions his decision to write about “Verkündigung”: Kraft to Borchardt (Hamburg, 3 March 1921), DLA, A: Borchardt. HS.1990.0008. 77 Kraft to Borchardt (Hamburg, 3 March 1921), DLA, A: Borchardt. HS.1990.0008. This early interpretation of Borchardt’s writing as granting language an almost messianic force, is replaced in Kraft’s post-war publications on Borchardt by the view that in Borchardt’s writing language ultimately serves his understanding of history. 78 Breden, 39.

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ment as a “non-Arian”79 Kraft later writes in his autobiography that only after 1933 did he completely understand that he was not German but Jewish.80 It was also at this juncture in Kraft’s life that he personally attacked Borchardt for his political views and his attitude towards his own Jewish origins in a 1933 letter. Kraft writes about the grotesque fact that as a person whose Jewish descent is indisputable and whose beliefs conflict with contemporary racial theory, Borchardt is willing to act as a cultural representative of Germany and to take upon himself the moral and mental responsibility for this act.81 At the bottom of the letter Kraft writes that the deepest word that has been spoken during his lifetime stems from the Jew Franz Kafka: “The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support”.82 With this quotation Kraft denounces what he previously so admired in Borchardt – his life-long quest to be submerged in the German spirit, which, as we have seen, partly functioned as compensation for Borchardt’s Jewish descent. In his reply Borchardt forbids Kraft to discuss him as Christian or as German, and continues to insist that “racial” Jews do not exist. Moreover, Borchardt asserts, what makes the Jews a Jewish people is not comprehensible to him, despite all contrary claims made either by Jews or Germans.83 Although Kraft may have nominally recognised that he is Jewish and in this context attacked Borchardt’s continued denial of his Jewish origins and his clinging to the spirit as a foothold in the world, Kraft continued to embrace the very same idea. Kraft’s bibliophile activities, for example, during his employment at the library in Hanover enabled him to create a bridge between his previous identity, which now seemed lost, and his future oeuvre in exile. In the course of his employment in Hanover, Kraft had the opportunity to view and collect material by forgotten and anonymous writers, some of which he included in his post-war anthology Recovery (Wiederfinden).84 In 1932 or 1933 he likewise discovered Carl Gustav Jochmann’s nineteenth-century The Decline of Poetry (Die Rückschritte der Poesie), which led to publications on Jochmann in 1967 and 1972, and which fed into his own views on language, cultural decline and practices of recovery.85

79 Quotation from Kraft’s diary (20 April 1933) in Breden, 39. 80 Kraft, Spiegelung, 11–12. 81 Kraft’s letter from 6 April 1933 is quoted in Drews, “Kraft und Borchardt,” 37. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 38. 84 Wiederfinden: Deutsche Poesie und Prosa, selected by Werner Kraft, Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 4 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1954). 85 On the discovery, see Kraft, Spiegelung, 152; Breden, 35. The publications are: Carl Gustav Jochmann, Die Rückschritte der Poesie, ed. and introduced by Werner Kraft (Frankfurt a.M.:



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In Kraft’s introductions to the two Jochmann publications he recognises Jochmann as a significant emigrant, “citizen of the world” and independent person who gained his intellectual education through his homelessness.86 In terms of Jochmann’s linguistic ideas, it is important to note that Kraft drew a link between Graf von Schlabrendorf, who greatly influenced Jochmann, Jochmann himself and Karl Kraus. This thread discloses Kraft’s own multi-layered practice of discovery and recovery: Kraft uncovered not only the Jochmann manuscript, but also Schlabrendorf’s only partially surviving reflections on language as recorded by Jochmann. In his reading of Jochmann and his circle Kraft makes an explicit comparison between the battles of Schlabrendorf and Kraus against the respective contemporary “anti-language forces” of the ruling powers in society. Schlabrendorf, explains Kraft, voiced his admiration for the German language while accusing the German nation of living and acting outside its language.87 A link to Kraft’s examination of Borchardt’s linguistic quest may also be found here. Schlabrendorf, as Kraft shows, bewailed the withdrawal of the audial aspect of language in favour of its visual, printed and more unified form, and Jochmann similarly wished to counter the dominant German of Luther.88 As we shall see Borchardt, especially in his Dante translation, wished to circumvent the language of Luther by creating an archaicist pre-Lutheran German dialect. Moreover, in selecting the texts for the collection Wiederfinden Kraft enacted what he believed Schlabrendorf, Jochmann, Kraus and Borchardt called for, namely, a diversified German language and literature which reaches beyond its contemporary unifying forces and canons in order to redeem the vivacity and freedom of the creative mind. Thus Kraft set texts by anonymous or forgotten authors next to texts by Goethe, Jean Paul and other canonical German writers. Between the discovery of the Jochmann manuscript and its publication, however, Kraft reluctantly relocated from his country of birth. In May 1933 he sent his son Paul Caspar to Palestine and in June of the same year he travelled to Stockholm via Lüneburg, Eckernförde and Kiel in search of refuge. He then continued via London to Paris, where he remained until July 1934. In August of that year he arrived in Jerusalem with his wife Erna and daughter Else. The last chapter of his autobiography describes the difficulties of his initial years in exile. Although “exile became home” the hardship of the new beginning was great. Both the material and mental lifelines had been severed, writes Kraft. Although Insel, 1967); Werner Kraft, Carl Gustav Jochmann und sein Kreis: Zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte zwischen Aufklärung und Vormärz (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1972). 86 Kraft in Jochmann, Rückschritte, 10; Kraft, Jochmann, 2. 87 Kraft, Jochmann, 149. 88 Ibid., 237 and 378.

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he had moments of joy and a unique circle of friends, no one could help him in being what he believed he was: a poet and writer in the German language. Kraft describes that he attempted to continue drawing on the sources of the German language and spirit despite the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people in Germany. It was immensely hard and sometimes it even seemed ridiculous, according to Kraft, to “write into the void” year after year.89 In what follows I will attempt to establish more clearly how Kraft sought to continue creating from within the German spirit and in the German language despite the material, mental and emotional hardships of exile. It will be shown that Kraft’s literary preferences and foci remain largely the same as in Germany, although his lengthy literary treatises published in the decades after the Second World War indicate refinements and adjustments in his evaluation of literary and linguistic phenomena. Kraft’s admiration for Borchardt and Kraus remains central. In Germany Kraft adopted them as a paradoxical pair of apocalyptic visionaries, while in exile their doomsday visions – coupled, crucially, with their passion for the constitutive forces of language and literature – provided Kraft with the faith and the means to keep and protect his own understanding of the “German spirit”.

2 Exile in Jerusalem Jürgen Nieraad argues that German-Jewish writers who were members of the fifth ‘aliya (1933–1939) faced common difficulties in the new country of their settlement. They had either published in Germany or seemed at least to be at the beginning of a writing career. After emigration they were severed from their readership and its cultural life. Nieraad therefore rightly claims that it was only natural that they would attempt to develop a German-speaking cultural life in their new homeland, expressed in the founding of German-language journals, publishing houses, and cultural and literary circles.90 These activities notwithstanding, each writer had to rely on himself in the attempt to preserve and further his linguistic and literary identity and experienced temporary resignation and muteness when attempting a cultural leap. In very few cases, claims Nieraad, did they successfully bridge between their old and new homelands.91 89 Kraft, Spiegelung, 126. 90 Nieraad (1987), 95. For a similar discussion, see also Mark H. Gelber, “Deutsch-zionistische Literaten im ‘Heimat-Exil’” and Margarita Pazi, “Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur Israels,” 95– 110 and 81–94. 91 Nieraad (1987), 95–96.



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Kraft was unable or unwilling to adopt Hebrew as his creative language. Within this difficult state of affairs Nieraad nonetheless describes him as a “fortunate” case because he maintained not just his scholarly activities but even more so his challenging existence as a poet and even found an audience, in spite of and against the influences and anticipations of a culturally, socially and linguistically foreign environment.92 In 1987 Nieraad describes Kraft as sitting in the Rahavia neighbourhood of Jerusalem where he energetically recollects, recites and tells of George, Borchardt, Kraus, Benjamin and Lasker-Schüler. He quotes Kraft in asserting that as a 37-year old arriving in Palestine there was no choice: despite the historical turmoil, the German language and spirit remained his centre.93 Seen from the vantage point of the ninety-year-old Kraft and his literary and scholarly achievements, he may indeed be described as a “fortunate” case. Yet how did Kraft perceive his situation and future prospects during the first years of exile?

“Writing into the Void” The rupture in Kraft’s life is expressed in the choice to end his autobiography, Reflection of Youth (Spiegelung der Jugend), which he completed in 1972, with the crucial year of his arrival in Jerusalem in 1934. In the final chapter of the book Kraft quotes from Parcival in order to stress that a rupture between him and happiness had ensued and that his life had become a decayed edifice.94 Kraft admits that at times he was also happy and that he attempted to anchor both experiences in writing: “I served the word in a room whose centre was a desk.”95 He believed that by “serving the word” – a task that Kraus cried out for in his work96 – he could transform the “decaying structure” of his life into an ark of safety. As we saw earlier, Kraft’s life prior to 1934 does not provide evidence of an entirely carefree youth. Both his own experiences and the doomsday visions of writers like Borchardt and Kraus increased his awareness of the spiritual demise around him even before his exile. It could be argued, however, that the idea of a dialectic between destruction and redemption became crucial in exile, since it provided the basis for spiritual survival. Kraft likened the co-existence of the salvaging and 92 Ibid., 97. 93 Ibid., 96–97. 94 “Zum Bruche war’s gekommen | Zwischen ihm und der Freude; | Sein Leben ward ein morsch Gebäude” (Kraft, Spiegelung, 126). 95 Ibid. 96 “Die Sprache” writes Karl Kraus, “ist die einzige Chimäre, deren Trugkraft ohne Ende ist, die Unerschöpflichkeit, an der das Leben nicht verarmt. Der Mensch lerne, ihr zu dienen!” (Karl Kraus, “Die Sprache” (1932), in Schriften, vol. 7, Die Sprache, 371–373 (373)).

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destructing forces to the beautiful waterfall in Ein Gedi by the Dead Sea, which is surround by the barren stone desert: “To flood the desert of death with the water of life is the aim of all ethical endeavour of the spirit”, concludes Kraft.97 In this context, is Jörg Drews correct in maintaining that Kraft’s published conversations with Martin Buber from the years 1941–1965 reflect the tragedy of two “Yeckes” who continue their conversation in and about the German spirit as a matter of course?98 From a selection of Kraft’s diaries from the years 1934–1936, it seems that his clinging to what he perceived as the German spirit was indeed tragic – and as he himself noted, perhaps tragically ridiculous – but never surprising because it functioned as his anchorage in the turmoil of flight and exile.99 With unprecedented self-confidence Kraft writes in Jerusalem in 1935: “My assimilation to the German spirit is so free of problems, so that I feel free and happy as a Jew, without the slightest mental burden, in contrast to Borchardt, and even Kraus.”100 At the same time he rejects several of the German-Jewish trends he encounters in Palestine. He writes, first, that “the sight of German Jews who sing about the Loreley under the starry night of Jerusalem is disgusting.”101 Secondly, he claims that the return to Palestine is not a homecoming.102 Thirdly, having observed life on kibbutz Beth Zera, Kraft concludes that although he may admire the commitment shown by its members, their way of life results in the demise of the spirit. Kraft writes that he could not live the mandatory, meaningless, heroic communal life in Beth Zera.103 In contrast he believes that his loyalty to what is “textual” saves his intellect or spirit from fading.104 Despite his conviction in the superiority of the “written word”, he does question the correlation between his own writing and life 97 Kraft, Spiegelung, 127. 98 Jörg Drews, afterword to Werner Kraft, Spiegelung, 129–144 (140). 99 From early on, however, Kraft recognised that there could be no return to the past or to territorial Germany. See, for example, his diary note on Lasker-Schüler’s tragic belief that she could return to the Romanisches Cafe, and if it still stood, she would be more lonely there than in Jerusalem (Werner Kraft, “Else Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Werner Kraft 1923–1945,” selected by Volker Kahmen, in Else Lasker-Schüler 1869–1945, ed. by Erika Klüsener and Friedrich Pfäfflin, Marbacher Magazin 71 (Marbach a.N., 1995), 377–362 (346) (5 August 1941)). 100 Werner Kraft, “Von Paris nach Jerusalem: Aus den Tagebüchern von Werner Kraft; 1933– 1936,” selected by Volker Kahmen, in Werner Kraft 1896–1991, ed. by Jörg Drews, Marbacher Magazin 75 (Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft,1996), 59 (Jerusalem, 8 January 1935). 101 Kraft, “Von Paris,” 56 (Jerusalem, 18 August 1934). 102 Ibid., 61 (Jerusalem, 7 June 1935). Compare with Kraft, Spiegelung, 126. 103 Kraft, “Von Paris,” 61 (Jerusalem, 4 May 1935). Kibbutz Beth Zera in the Jordan Valley was founded in 1921 by a group of Jewish pioneers from Central and Eastern Europe. See www. betzera.org.il (accessed 20 May 2007). 104 Kraft, “Von Paris,” 60 (Jerusalem, 26 March 1935).



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circumstances. To Kraft a constant, flowing language consciousness seems more vital than other types of experiences.105 Moreover, the perceived gap between his experiences and his writing is reflected in the incongruity of the author’s current environment and his roots, which leads to an existential crisis: “The landscape is great. But I do not stem from here. Eventually the steady catastrophe of my existence will break out. I often think of death. But I admit that I am not ‘prepared’ to die. After all, it is empty in and around me.”106 Like other immigrant writers, Kraft challenges the “ethos of ingathering”. Dekoven Ezrahi’s explanation seems fitting here: “The sun provides no balm because the abandoned world of childhood represents no wasteland. The horror of the survivor’s discovery that his world has been utterly effaced can only be surpassed by the discovery that it has been completely preserved.”107 As will be shown, Kraft populated the empty landscape he found himself in with imaginary and real companions, reterritorialising them in an act of defiance against the isolating conditions of exile and against the general downfall of the German spirit.

“Imaginary Companions” and a German “Ark” in Exile In 1925 Rudolf Borchardt advised his young admirer Werner Kraft in a letter that remained unsent to employ all the powers of his imagination in order to populate the barren landscape of his life with imaginary companions who were denied to him by external circumstances.108 Borchardt’s advice demonstrates the link or continuity between Kraft’s early life in Germany and later years in Palestine and Israel. Borchardt stylised himself as an archetype poet, isolated and withdrawn from modern society and its perceived spiritual downfall. Having corresponded with and met Kraft for over a decade, Borchardt probably recognised in his young devotee a similar feeling of isolation and loneliness. Borchardt could not have predicted, of course, that from 1934 Kraft would find himself in the augmented solitude of exile in Jerusalem. Borchardt’s letter – although unsent – and his constructive advice has nonetheless served Jörg Drews to illustrate Kraft’s “strategy of survival” in exile. Drews claims that in the years 1934–1954 Kraft did in fact 105 Ibid., 62 (Jerusalem, 17 February 1936). 106 Ibid., 57 (Jerusalem, 2 September 1934). 107 Dekoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 182. 108 Rudolf Borchardt, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Gerhard Schuster and Hans Zimmermann, vol. 5, 1924–1935 (Munich: Edition Tenschert bei Hanser, 1995), 112. Also cited and discussed in Jörg Drews, “Kraft und Borchardt,” 42–43. On this letter and “imaginary companions”, see also Jörg Drews, “Der ‘große Goethe’ und seine ‘Lücken’: Notizen zu Werner Krafts Goethe Lektüre,” in Kraft, 131–139.

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surround himself with “imaginary companions”, among them Borchardt himself.109 During this period Kraft’s youthful fascination with the writings of Kraus and Borchardt came to fruition: their monographs were published in 1956 and 1961 respectively.110 During this period Kraft also researched and wrote his books on Kafka (published 1968), on Carl Gustav Jochmann (published 1972), as well as poetry and prose volumes.111 To Kraft the very act of writing became a practice of compensation and recovery. With the above mentioned volumes, Kraft built “mimetic sites out of the ruins of original space”112 and colonised them with his immortal, imaginary companions with whom he undertook his “battle for the spirit” [Kampf um den Geist]. In his autobiography Kraft thus declares that “the battle for the spirit continues, without Walter Benjamin. With him! I continue my conversations with him, as if he were alive.”113 In late 1944 Kraft likewise replied to the idea of the exiled poet Else Lasker-Schüler to establish a literary club by suggesting a “club of the immortals” with Goethe, Schiller, Karl Kraus as participants.114 In 1956, twenty years after the death of Karl Kraus, Kraft claimed that Kraus lived on through the spirit of his satire, and that he, Kraft, wished to pass on his immortal legacy by introducing his works to a new generation.115 In the poetry volume 36 Contemporaries (36 Zeitgenossen) Kraft includes thirty-six German writers from Goethe through Hölderlin, C. G. Jochmann, Wilhelm Lehmann, Theodor Adorno and Robert Walser back to Goethe. While only some of these writers were contemporaries of Kraft, they functioned as his imaginary or real, but always immortal “contemporaries”, and as saviours of the world.116 The title of the volume alludes to the Jewish legend of lamed vav zadikim [thirty-six righteous men]. According to Gershom Scholem it is a widely spread Jewish legend about thirty-six righteous

109 Drews, “Kraft und Borchardt,” 42–43. 110 Werner Kraft, Karl Kraus: Beiträge zum Verständnis seines Werkes (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1956); Kraft, Borchardt. 111 Werner Kraft, Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); Kraft, Jochmann; Poetry and prose volumes of Kraft include Wort aus der Leere: Ausgewählte Gedichte (Jerusalem: Manfred Rotschild Verlag, 1937); Figur der Hoffnung: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1925–1935 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1955); Der Wirrwarr (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1960); Zeit aus den Fugen: Aufzeichnungen (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1968). 112 Dekoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 145. 113 Kraft, Spiegelung, 68. 114 Kraft, “Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Kraft,” 361 (20 November 1944). It is not clear whether “ihre Gedichte” refers to the poems of Lasker-Schüler or those by Goethe, Schiller and Kraus. 115 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 9–10. 116 Werner Kraft, 36 Zeitgenossen (Bonn: Heusch Verlag, 1985).



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men on whom the fate of the world depends, even if they remain unknown.117 Another source explains that according to the Jewish legend, thirty-six is “the minimum number of righteous men alive in any one generation required to prevent the destruction of the world.”118 In what follows I will discuss two of Kraft’s friends and later “imaginary companions” – Else Lasker-Schüler and Walter Benjamin. Like Kraft they became exiles and inspired his strategies for survival and his fight for the German spirit and language. Although Kraft had already been an admirer of Lasker-Schüler’s poetry in Germany, it is not clear when exactly they met personally in the late 1930s. They most probably met for the first time during Lasker-Schüler’s visit to Palestine in 1937 and developed friendlier relations after her permanent settlement in Jerusalem in 1939.119 In a diary entry from November 1937 Kraft reported having attended a literary event in which the poem “My Blue Piano” (“Mein blaues Klavier”) was recited and which impressed him as the peak of poetic lamentation of the “ruffian” world since Hitler’s rise.120 From a further selection of diary entries it seems that Lasker-Schüler did not merely help Kraft mourn over a world lost, but encouraged his own “redeeming” acts when she wrote of him: “Listen! The world is not lost – as long as a singer sings it! ...”121 Kraft comments in his diary that in her poem she understood his relation to the world like no one else and that she therefore remains his “immortal lover”.122 Sharing his sense of loss she wished to restore at least a fragment of this world through such activities as the establishment of the literary club Der Kraal.123 Kraft regarded Lasker-Schüler herself as a “ruin”, which, however, provides a glimpse of a golden past and magnificent edifice.124 This metaphor may serve to define Kraft’s own oeuvre in exile: the attempt to recover the great edifice of the German spirit and the German language by protecting their most treasured ruins or fragments – literary figures became Kraft’s imaginary companions, some also his personal friends.

117 Gershom Scholem, “Die 36 verborgenen Gerechten in der jüdischen Tradition,” in Judaica, 1:216–225 (216). 118 See the reference for “Lamed Vav Zaddikim,” by John Bowker, in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), www.oxfordreference.com/ view/10.1093/acref/9780192800947.001.0001/acref-9780192800947-e-4204 (accessed 17 May 2007). 119 See Kraft, “Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Kraft,” 339–342 (1923–1932). 120 Ibid., 342 (15 November 1937). 121 From Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem “Werner Kraft” reprinted in Drews, Kraft, 113. 122 Kraft, “Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Kraft,” 362 (9 February 1945). 123 See, for example, Nieraad (1987), 95. 124 In the epilogue to Lasker-Schüler’s works, Kraft quotes an anonymous source with whom he agrees (Werner Kraft, afterword to Gesammelte Werke, by Else Lasker-Schüler, ed. by Werner Kraft, vol. 3, Verse und Prosa aus dem Nachlass (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1961), 149–165 (50)).

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Another inspirational companion in the “battle for the spirit” was Walter Benjamin. Despite several arguments between Kraft and Benjamin – due among other factors to their disparate opinions on Borchardt and the “Jochmann controversy” – Kraft mentions Benjamin as one of the figures who fascinated him from their very first encounter.125 Benjamin also features as a key source for the analyses in some of Kraft’s major works published after World War Two. How might Benjamin have influenced Kraft’s exilic experience? Albrecht Schöne shows that the exiled Benjamin set out to build an “ark”, most explicitly in his edited collection of letters German People (Deutsche Menschen). The collection was first published in book form in 1936 under the pseudonym Detlef Holz.126 Schöne sought to understand the nature and purpose of the edifice created by Benjamin’s collection and found the answer in an unpublished comment to the first letter. Here Benjamin claims that all chosen letters have in common a humanistic approach, which he believes can be described as German and which must be called back into existence especially in the face of those who in contemporary Germany “govern the word”.127 Schöne emphasises that in this context “calling back into existence” does not merely mean retrieving something from one’s memory as a past event but also rendering it effective in the present.128 Schöne concludes that Deutsche Menschen applies Benjamin’s sixth historical thesis: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”129 125 After Benjamin had published Jochmann’s Rückschritte der Poesie with an introduction in the 1939 volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Kraft asked the journal’s editorial board to identify him as the original discoverer of Jochmann’s text, which he had apparently lent Benjamin when they re-met in Paris in 1937, with the request that Benjamin not publish on this topic. Benjamin denied this. The editors of Benjamin’s works argue that in spite of several inconsistencies in Benjamin’s letters with regard to this matter, the exchange between Benjamin and Kraft was partly oral and partly based on letters that have been lost, and therefore no definite conclusion can be drawn on the controversy (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2,3:1397–1403). In the Marbacher Magazin series an account of the “Jochmann controversy”, which led to a fallout between Kraft and Benjamin, is also offered (Marbacher Magazin 75, 87–111). 126 Walter Benjamin, “Deutsche Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften, 4:149–234. 127 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:955. Reprinted also in Albrecht Schöne, “‘Diese nach jüdischem Vorbild erbaute Arche’: Walter Benjamins Deutsche Menschen,” in Juden in der deutschen Literatur: Ein deutsch-israelisches Symposium, ed. by Stéphane Mosès and Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 350–365 (355). On the concept of Noah’s Ark in German-Jewish thought, see also Christoph Schmidt, “Nachwort: Text und Arche; Die Arche Noah zwischen Mythologie und Theologie,” in Arche Noah: Die Idee der “Kultur” im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs, ed. by Berhard Greiner and Christoph Schmidt, Rombach Wissenschaften. Reihe Cultura 26 (Freiburg: Rombach, 2002), 403–413. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid.; Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, 4: 389–400 (391).



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Schöne does not apply the term “ark” externally but refers to several personal dedications written by Benjamin in copies of the book for family and friends. Benjamin describes the collection to his sister as an “ark built according to a Jewish model”130 and in the copy for Siegfried Kracauer Benjamin similarly writes: “for S Kracauer | this ark| which I built| when the great fascist flood| began to rise.”131 In 1937 Benjamin dedicated a copy to his friend Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem in Jerusalem: “May you, Gerhard| for the memories of your youth| find a chamber in this ark,| which I have built| when the great fascist flood| began to rise.”132 According to Schöne, the Jewish aspect of this ark (although the letters were written by non-Jewish Germans) lies in the fact that Benjamin envisaged the collection as a messianic “glimmer of hope”. In other words, the ark Benjamin built according to the Jewish archetype and into which he salvaged these letters was a “symbol of redemption.”133 Kraft himself uses the symbol of the redeeming ark in his already-mentioned 1975 speech “Language and Mother Tongue” (“Sprache und Muttersprache”), and expresses the hope that this ark might reverberate with the echo of the mother tongue and represent a safe haven for a discussion of the language crisis. In fact, the echo and the discussion are perhaps the very conditions that render this ark safe – and redeeming – in the first place. It is not clear whether Kraft knew that Benjamin perceived his collection Deutsche Menschen, and perhaps his entire oeuvre during his years in exile, as a form of ark built in the face of the “fascist flood”. Yet Kraft’s non-fictional works, which are characterised by long quotations from original works and sparse references to the relevant secondary literature, refer to Benjamin’s analyses more frequently than to those of any other literary scholar. Moreover, his 1954 collection Wiederfinden is reminiscent of Benjamin’s attempt “wieder hervorzurufen”, namely to retrieve or evoke. Kraft’s “companions” not only inspired him to create a German “ark” and accompanied him in his battle against spiritual demise. Borchardt and Kraus also provided the basis for discussing the “crisis of language”, which Kraft defined as a central redeeming practice of this ark.

130 Schöne, 355. 131 Ibid., 364, n. 26. 132 Reprinted in Schöne, 359. 133 Ibid., 357.

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3 A  German Ark in Jerusalem: Language, Criticism and Translation A German Ark in Jerusalem: Language, Criticism and Translation

The third part of this chapter examines more closely Kraft’s exploration of his two key “imaginary companions” – Rudolf Borchardt and Karl Kraus. Having shown the effect these two companions had on Kraft’s crisis during the First World War and on his early German-Jewish identity, I now turn to his interpretation of their linguistic ideas. In granting a decisive role to the examination of their writings on language, Kraft carried out what he later preached: one should passionately discuss the crisis of language in the ark in order not to forget language, and especially the mother tongue.134

Karl Kraus: Positive Language Critique There seems to be a consensus among Karl Kraus scholars that an understanding of Kraus’s view of language presupposes close acquaintance with the entire spectrum of his writings. This would include, to mention the most obvious examples, his essays on Nestroy and Heinrich Heine, his book Language (Die Sprache), which contains Language Teaching (Sprachlehre) and a series of short essays dealing explicitly with the topic of language, satirical pieces as they appear in Die Fackel, drama and prose such as The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) and Third Walpurgis Night (Dritte Walpurgisnacht), as well as poems and aphorisms that engage with language as topic and medium in a more implicit manner.135 The following aphorism by Karl Kraus is often quoted in the literature on his view of language: “The German language is the deepest, German speech the shallowest”.136 Here Kraus engages with the topic of language on two levels. Firstly, he declares his simultaneous faith in and dismay at the German language. And secondly, he distinguishes between language [Sprache] and speech [Rede], which solves the seeming paradox of this declaration. Indeed, this aphorism has been used in Kraus literature to illustrate both his particular relationship to the German language and his allegedly instinctive distinction between the potential of language as a whole [Sprache] and actual speech [Rede].

134 Kraft, “Muttersprache und Sprachkrise,” 34. 135 See Kraus, Schriften; Kraus, Die Fackel (1899–1936). 136 “Die deutsche Sprache ist die tiefste, die deutsche Rede die seichteste” (Kraus, Die Fackel (1915): 406–412, 152). Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Kraus are my own.



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Kraus’s relationship with the German language is also reflected in his 1910 essay “Heine and the Consequences” (“Heine und die Folgen”), in which he laments “how easily one becomes sick in Paris! How the morals of the German sensitivity for language slacken!”137 Kraus accuses Heine of creating a hybrid legacy of German and Romance “spiritual un-culture” by importing the “French disease” of the feuilleton into the German-speaking world.138 Similar to the aphorism quoted above, Kraus’s accusation against Heine mirrors two central features of his thinking on language: his particular affinity to the German language and his critique of its usage. In the essay on Heine, moreover, Kraus primarily attacks the journalistic use of language. Kraus’s criticism of the journalistic jargon and political propaganda of the day triggered and sustained many of his writings, as evident in his satirical journal Die Fackel, which appeared from 1899 to 1936. In his 1912 essay “Nestroy and the Ensuing World” (“Nestroy und die Nachwelt”), Kraus sums up his view on the media “machine”. He bewails how since fifty years the spirit enters the machine and exits in print form – thinned down, spread out, destroyed. The supplier, writes Kraus, loses, the donees become poorer, and the agents make a living.139 Kraus attacks an entire apparatus in which the artist and his creative mental faculties are eradicated, the reader is consequently not stimulated, yet the journalistic agent makes his ends meet.140 Kraus claims in the same essay that in comparison to Nestroy’s satire, in which language laughs at itself and uncovers the origin of linguistic clichés, the print industry and its editorials endanger mental creativity more than any form of political censorship.141 More specifically, Kraus believes that Nestroy is the first German satirist in whom “language itself thinks about things” and frees language from “catalepsy”.142 In return for Nestroy’s creativity and his freeing language of its rigid conventions – clichés and hollow phrases – language grants him thoughts.

137 Karl Kraus, “Heine und die Folgen” (1910), in Schriften, 4:185–210 (186). Kraus also writes in this essay, for example: “The German language is a spouse who writes poetry and thinks only for the one who can provide her with children.” (ibid., 187). 138 Ibid., 185–186. 139 Karl Kraus, “Nestroy und die Nachwelt” (1912), in Schriften, 4:220–240 (221). Nestroy and Heine and their reception feature almost as reverse examples in both of Kraus’s respective essays. While Kraus establishes Heine as the “father” of the German feuilleton, it is precisely this feuilleton that is accused of the annihilating reception of Nestroy’s satire. 140 In this particular essay Kraus bewails Nestroy’s reception in the press as detrimental to Nestroy’s satirical spirit and language. In general Kraus believes this to be the fate of the creative spirit in a world where the mass-media industry rules. 141 Kraus, “Nestroy,” 230 and 236–237. 142 Ibid., 230.

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How are we to understand the relationship between language and thought in Kraus? In the essay on Heine, Kraus uses the term “pre-formation of thoughts” [Präformiertheit der Gedanken] and explains that “the thought is in the world but one does not own it. The prism of material experience diffuses it into elements of language, and the artist forms them into a thought”.143 Similarly, “From language we get everything, for everything that can become thought is in it. Language stimulates and provokes, like the female, spawns desire and with it the thought.”144 While Kraus seems to believe that the thought is generally pre-formed [präformiert] and that language acts as a source or stimulus, the exact relationship or interaction between language and thought remains ambiguous: is language ultimately source or medium of the thought? Multiple interpretations have been produced due to the fact that aphorisms such as “Because I take the thought by the word, does it [the thought] emerge” are not accompanied by a systematic theory of language.145 These interpretations range from simplistic equations between language and thought to the attribution of a mystical language vision in which word and thing, signifier and signified, are bound in an ontological, metaphysical union. Yet as intensive readings of Kraus’s writings have shown, his use of terms is not always consistent nor is his view of the link between language and world as extreme as it would appear at first glance.146 It would seem, moreover, that what makes Kraus’s writing on language so appealing is precisely its lack of system and transparency, and the fact that, in Kraft’s words, Kraus thinks about language in language and the reader needs to artificially extract the meaning from the linguistic form.147 This leads directly to Kraft’s understanding of Kraus’s view of language, mainly as it is presented in his 1956 monograph Karl Kraus. It exposes Kraft’s engagement with central issues in Kraus such as the language-thought relationship, satire, the critique of the press, and the German language. It will be examined whether Kraft finds a clear definition for these issues or whether his study mirrors Kraus’s unsystematic and often inconsistent ideas. A brief survey of Kraus studies at the end of this section will help to evaluate Kraft’s analysis. Like 143 Kraus, “Heine,” 201 and 202. 144 Ibid., 187. 145 “Weil ich den Gedanken beim Wort nehme, kommt er” (Karl Kraus, Schriften, vol. 8, Aphorismen, 236). 146 Bill Dodd, “Karl Kraus’s Reputation as Language Critic in the Light of ‘Linguistically Grounded Language Criticism’,” in Reading Karl Kraus: Essays on the Reception of “Die Fackel”, ed. by Gilbert J. Carr and Edward Timms (Munich: Iudicium, 2001), 235. Dodd points out that in Kraus the phrases “Speech [Sprechen] and thinking are one” and “Language [Sprache] and thinking are one” do not correspond entirely. 147 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 188.



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many other Kraus commentators, Kraft recognises that the potency of Kraus’s writings in general and his statements on language in particular – whether in poems, essays, or aphorisms – calls for their quotation rather than paraphrase or explanation in the interpreter’s text. Hence in the chapter “Language and Language Critique”, Kraft interweaves numerous quotations from Kraus into his own text.148 He chooses to quote, among others, Kraus’s poems “After Twenty Years” and “The Rhyme”, and passages from the essay “Language” as an illustration of Kraus’s view on the link between word and reality, language and character or thought, and the significance of “linguistic doubt” [Sprachzweifel]. In general, as he reiterates in a 1978 interview, Kraft admired Kraus for his battle against purely aesthetic, “amoral” writing and for seeking a bond between language and character, word and thought, namely a poethics [Etho-Poesie] that does not distinguish between the purely aesthetic qualities of a poem and its underlying ethical premises.149 In the 1956 monograph on Kraus, Kraft attempts a more thorough analysis of the way in which Kraus links language and thought in the concept of “linguistic thought” [Sprachgedanke] – an aspect of Kraus’s thinking on language that Kraft feels had been neglected in the Kraus literature. Kraft himself identifies the following statement from Taken by the Word (Beim Wort Genommen) as Kraus’s core belief: “From the word does the young thought leap at me, and it in turn forms the language, which created it”.150 Kraft explains this as the belief in a correlation between thought and word: the thought exists only in and through language, which created it. Kraus had no interest in developing this view systematically, adds Kraft, but he was no doubt convinced that the linguistically pre-formed thought (the linguistic thought) incorporated all theoretical conceptualisation.151 The term “correlation” used by Kraft reflects his conviction that Kraus believed in the linguistically pre-formed thought [der sprachlich präformierte Gedanke] in contrast to the perhaps more general pre-formation of the thought [Präformiertheit der Gedanken], to which Kraus subscribes in his essay on Heine. Kraft does, of course, recognise that Kraus did not develop a systematic theory of the correlation between word and thought. He believes, moreover, that only the outcome of linguistic and philosophical enquiries could ultimately prove or disprove Kraus’s conclusion. Yet Kraft himself refrains from consulting phil148 This is somewhat typical of Kraft’s writing style in general, and in particular where he attempts an “introductory” work such as in his book on C. G. Jochmann. 149 Kraft, Gespräch mit Drews, 19. 150 “Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rückwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf” (Kraus, Schriften, 8:134–135). 151 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 180.

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osophical or linguistic debates when he asserts that only the “thought reaches through the uppermost aesthetic level of stimulation and its appearance in generating essential beauty.”152 Without referring to any psychological studies, does Kraft claim that it is not the emotion but rather the thought that is expressible in language. The significance of Kraus’s “Sprachgedanke” therefore transcends all philosophic or linguistic authority in the role that it grants to thought in poetry. In Kraus the thought supposedly has the capacity to raise poetic creations and rhyme sequences from banality. Kraft bases this interpretation on an aphorism which argues that what raises a banality to a thought is precisely the thought itself, and on Kraus’s rhyme theory.153 In the poem “The Rhyme” Kraus claims that the rhyme is the place of encounter between two thoughts that are in agreement.154 Kraft explains that good rhymes reach beyond their aesthetic banality to the realm of thought. Even “old” rhyme sequences can be revived if the encounter of two thoughts is achieved. Kraft links this idea in turn to Kraus’s concept of “the birth of the old word” and recognises that Kraus was not interested in the historicity of a word but rather in its “ever-present constitutive force” [schöpferische Aktualität]. According to Kraft, the old word is in Kraus’s view the used word, which suddenly “opens its eyes.”155 The historicity and seeming banality of a word is thus superseded by its timeless potential to be revived. Kraus’s belief in the potential of language as a whole stands in stark contrast to the shallow phraseology he encounters daily in the Viennese newspapers. This tension is expressed in one of the mottos to his book Language: “My language belief doubts before all roads that lead to Rome”.156 Kraft uses this motto and several statements from the essay “Language” (in the volume of the same name) to demonstrate that Kraus’s language criticism always questions and doubts positively, not negatively.157 According to Kraft the positive, constructive nature of the “linguistic doubt” that questions conventional linguistic forms, i.e., clichés and shallow phrases, is not a form of (total) language scepticism and certainly not a symptom of a language crisis.158 In tandem with Kraft’s basic understanding of Kraus, the “linguistic doubt” that Kraus preaches is shown to have a clear moral 152 Ibid., 181. 153 “Der Gedanke ist das, was einer Banalität zum Gedanken fehlt” (Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 181). 154 “Er ist das Ufer, wo sie landen| sind zwei Gedanken einverstanden” (Karl Kraus, “Der Reim” (1927), in Schriften, 7:323). 155 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 182. On Heine, for example, Kraus writes: “The secret of the ancient word was foreign to him” (Kraus, “Heine”, 210.) 156 “Mein Sprachglaube zweifelt vor allen Wegen, die nach Rom führen” (Kraus, Die Sprache (1997), 8). 157 Kraft, Kleinigkeiten, 90. 158 Ibid., 89; Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 189.



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aspect. In “Language” Kraus asks explicitly whether we can imagine anything more morally apt than the “linguistic doubt”. And further on in the same piece Kraus argues that the doubt is the great moral gift given to humanity by language. This linguistic questioning grants humanity the opportunity to delay or constrain a type of “progress” that would otherwise lead to its downfall, but humanity has rejected this gift.159 Apart from quoting passages from this essay to illustrate the link between the Krausian “linguistic doubt” and moral aptitude, Kraft makes no attempt to elaborate on the nature of this link. What is clear is man’s moral responsibility to employ his sceptical faculties – bestowed on him by language – in order to save humanity. Kraus’s linguistic doubt is not only evident in apocalyptic statements about the end of humanity and the salvaging capacity of language. Redemption appears also to mean correction in its most pedantic, grammatical sense. The book Language includes Kraus’s “Language Teaching” (“Sprachlehre”), in which he corrects and discusses grammatical and other linguistic mistakes he seeks out in the newspapers. In commentaries like “How does it happen” [Wieso kommt es], “That and Which” [Der und welcher], “Then and How” [Als und wie]160 Kraus dwells, for example, on the question “How does it happen [Wieso kommt es] that only few know that this expression is wrong?”161 Kraft believes that despite its appearance of extreme pedantry, Kraus’s “Language Teaching”, does not preach a static linguistic system and that he distanced himself from the so-called “new linguistics” [neuere Sprachwissenschaft], which in its tenacious clinging to linguistic rules failed to acknowledge the existence of a “linguistic essence” [Sprachwesen].162 Kraft shows this in connection with Kraus’s approach to German, which he admired as the language with the greatest wealth of thought and the greatest “space for doubt” between words.163 According to Kraft, Kraus expresses at this point the correlation between language and spirit, or in other words, the fact that the spirit imposes itself on the changing verbal expressions.164 Kraus is not referring to the arbitrariness of language, but rather to the (perhaps structural) relationships between the inner components of a sentence and the relationships between the linguistic components and thought or spirit. Kraus believes in the existence of linguistic rules which are simultaneously present and absent for

159 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 189; Kraus, Die Sprache (1997), 372. 160 Kraus, Die Sprache (1997), 22, 139–149, 222–223. 161 “Wieso kommt es| dass die wenigsten (Sprecher und Schreiber) wissen, dass diese Wendung falsch ist?” (Kraus, Die Sprache (1997), 22). 162 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 190. 163 Kraus, Die Sprache (1997), 372. 164 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 190.

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the “sake of the spirit” which interchangeably employs their absence or presence in order to assert itself.165 The fact that the results of Kraus’s linguistic enquiries are case-specific and cannot be generalised may coincide with the very “life” of language, which academic scholarship with its own means and methods has not been able to see or discover.166 Kraus’s emphasis on the gap between grammatical aptitude and a “feel for language”167 is mirrored in Kraft’s own diary entries from the early 1940s in which he writes, for example, that beauty and poetry are at their best when they defy metric rules. Yet these rules must exist and concur in the defiant act.168 He illustrates this via a stanza from the admired poem “My Blue Piano” on which he comments that while Else Lasker-Schüler clearly knows German, her incorrect use of the dative-case with the German word “wider” [against] is far more effective than its correct accusative use would have been.169 In order to better evaluate Kraft’s reading of Kraus, a brief comparison with the general post-war reception of Kraus as a language critic is due. A useful starting point is Helmut Arntzen’s article “The Kraus Reception after 1945”, in which he attempts a general typology of the Kraus reception after the Second World War.170 Arntzen rightly locates Kraft’s 1956 monograph on Kraus within the “affirmative reception” of the 1950–1960s, which sought to provide an introduction to Kraus’s overall oeuvre.171 Although this early post-war reception has been dismissed as apologetic and even hagiographic, Arntzen argues that affirmation generally characterises the genre of introductory works.172 More specifically, Arntzen praises Kraft’s 1956 study for its focus on Kraus’s language and language critique, which follows a series of biographical sketches. At the same time he deems problematic the overall picture that emerges from Kraft’s monograph: the last part of the book, which comprises about a third of its volume, provides interpretations of poems by Kraus, leaving the false impression that Kraus was first and foremost a poet rather than a satirist or language critic. Indeed, even in the chapter on language and language critique, which has been examined 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid., 191. 167 Ibid., 190. Kraus, “Es (Abdeckung des Subjekts)” (1921), in Die Sprache, 70–77 (71). 168 Kraft, “Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Kraft,” 358 (17 September 1943). 169 Ibid., 342 (15 November 1937). 170 Helmut Arntzen, “Die Kraus-Rezeption nach 1945. Eine Typologie,” in Reading Karl Kraus, 173–182. 171 See also Kraft’s 1952 edited volume entitled Karl Kraus: Eine Einführung in sein Werk und eine Auswahl, Schriftenreihe der Klasse der Literatur: Verschollene und Vergessene (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1952 172 Arntzen, 176. Arntzen contrasts this type of reception with the “ideological” reception prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s (ibid., 178).



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above, Kraft discusses the importance of Kraus’s writings on language (e.g., the relationship between language and thought) to our understanding of poetry. This emphasis is reflected in Kraft’s volume Time out of Synch (Zeit aus den Fugen), in which he writes that “the poem must fail, if the thought lames language, in the same way that it must succeed if language creates feet for the thought, on which the ‘linguistic thought’ can stand.”173 In the first case Kraft necessarily deems the poem a failure because thought and language are not in tune. In a successful poem, on the other hand, language elevates the thought to what is perceived as the superior “Sprachgedanke”. In the 1978 interview with Jörg Drews, Kraft once again confirms Kraus not only as his moral authority but also as his guide to evaluating poetry.174 He understands moral authority and good poetry as inseparable within Kraus’s view of language. How do other post-war scholars evaluate this aspect of Kraus’s thought? Secondary literature seems unanimous about the significance of language in Kraus’s thinking, evident both in the linguistic attention he grants to his literary production and in the role that language plays in his overall worldview.175 Kraus scholarship also generally agrees that he did not formulate his views on language systematically nor in scientific (linguistic) or philosophical terms. This in turn has led to disagreement about how to describe Kraus’s overall linguistic views and endeavours: language mysticism, panlogism, “language magic” [Sprachmagie], ethical language teaching, language critique etc.176 Early commentators tended to use simplistic terms such as language mysticism to describe an alleged Krausian belief in the metaphysical equation of word and world.177 Bill Dodd shows in his article how post-Saussurean critics, in contrast, avoided such sweeping statements and instead employed their linguistic terminology to ascribe to Kraus an instinctive differentiation between langue (language as a whole) and parole (actual speech). Dodd maintains that major Kraus scholars (and linguists) particularly appreciated Kraus’s criticism of parole or actual linguistic usage, defined as “style critique” [Stilkritik] or “language use critique” [Sprachverwendungskritik] in contrast to, for example, “critique of language as system” [Sprachsystemkritik].178 173 Kraft, Zeit aus den Fugen, 219–220. 174 Kraft, Gespräch mit Drews. 175 Jay Bodine, “Karl Kraus’s Conception of Language,” Modern Austrian Literature 8 (1975): 267–314 (267). 176 Josef Quack, for example, gives a short discussion of these different views in Bemerkungen zum Sprachverständnis von Karl Kraus (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1976), 177–200. 177 Quack, 178–184. 178 See Dodd, 231–246. For the most part Dodd discusses the post-Saussurean studies of Hans Jürgen Heringer and Peter von Polenz.

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In the light of these studies Kraft does not emerge as entirely consistent. He recognises that while language lay at the heart of Kraus’s thought, it was never developed systematically – either because Kraus was unable to undertake such an endeavour or simply uninterested.179 On closer examination of several aphorisms and poems, Kraft concludes in the space of five pages that the idealised relationship between word and essence in Kraus is social rather than abstract;180 that some of Kraus’s statements are based on a mystical worship of the word as the only instance that provides meaning;181 that to Kraus world and word belong ineluctably together;182 that due to the decadent state of the world, only the word remains ascertainable to the mind and acts as a measure of this world;183 that in Kraus the word has both metaphysically creative qualities as well as socially destructive and constructive capacities.184 Finally, Kraft does recognise, perhaps unknowingly, Kraus’s distinction between langue and parole (without using this terminology) as in “language” and “speech”. The relationship between these two concepts, Kraft explains, is not aesthetic but real, since Kraus’s “language” and “speech” are the “positive” and “negative” expressions of language as a whole. The identification of both as parts of language as such results, Kraft believes, in Kraus’s furious battle against the “unholy script” (the press) for the the sake of “holy language”.185 Thus in comparison to post-Saussurean readers who value Kraus’s language critique as practical and parole-oriented, Kraft in the end considers Kraus’s critique of “shallow speech” as part of a larger critique of language for the sake of language as such. Jay Bodine in his study on Kraus’s concept of language employs a Saussurean and structuralist terminology yet he emphasises the mental or associative aspect of linguistic relationships in Kraus. By analysing key Krausian concepts like spirit, phantasy and origin, Bodine attempts to demonstrate that Kraus understood the link between word and thing in psychological terms. Bodine claims, in other words, that to Kraus the relationships between signifier and signified are essentially associative and that language as a whole is a system or structure of mental associations.186 Kraft, in contrast, understands Kraus’s linking of word and object in social rather than psychological terms, and does not attempt such 179 Kraft, Kraus: Beiträge, 174. 180 Ibid., 176. This reading of Kraus may be attributed to the fact that Kraft understood C. G. Jochmann as Kraus’s forerunner. 181 Ibid., 177. 182 Ibid., 178. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid., 179. 186 See Bodine, “Karl Kraus.”



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a comprehensive analysis as Bodine provides. Although Kraft does not develop his view of Kraus’s alleged social agenda, he shows an awareness of the political aspect of the latter’s view on language. The concrete political focus of Kraus’s critique of the media and of public discourse is emphasised by Edward Timms in a chapter of his Kraus study devoted to “the chimera of language”. The emphasis on Kraus’s political stance once again stresses language critique as parole-oriented, while also showing its affinities to the Orwellian critique of “double-speak” or the mosaic style of apocalyptic scriptures.187 In sum it may be argued that Kraft’s 1956 monograph does indeed serve as an introduction to Kraus’s work. As such, the chapter on language and language criticism shows an awareness of central issues in Kraus’s writings on language. At the same time Kraft does not develop a more systematic or intensive reading of Kraus the language critic, as we find it in studies by other commentators mentioned above. Kraft’s brief analyses of crucial poems and aphorisms as well as quotes from Die Sprache do not seem grounded in any linguistic or psychological discipline. His statements, while sometimes overlapping with the conclusions of other scholars, rather appear more intuitive and at times inconsistent. Kraft’s contribution lies largely in defining Kraus’s “linguistic doubt” as positive language critique and in the attempt to place Kraus within the wider legacy of language scepticism while crucially denying that Kraus experienced a crisis of language as such. This is the position that he also attributes to Rudolf Borchardt.

Rudolf Borchardt: Language, Decay and Restoration Kraft finds an equivalent to Karl Kraus’s one-man battle against “immoral writing” in Rudolf Borchardt’s literary oeuvre. In Kraft’s eyes Borchardt and Kraus were prime examples of writing that sets out to fight against immoral polemics and empty phrases.188 According to Kraft in his battle against the literary anarchism and spiritual decay of his times Borchardt displayed and stylised himself as a wanderer who feels lost like a guest in his own country. Borchardt thus formulated a solitary position that defies and transcends the chatter, anarchy and tyranny, which have befallen the German spirit during his times.189 In his essay “On the Poet and the Poetical” (“Über den Dichter und das Dichterische”) Borchardt indeed laments the alienated and solitary state of the poet – himself surely included – since the advent of the nineteenth century. Borchardt argues 187 Timms, “The Chimera of Language,” in Kraus (2005), 137–156. 188 Kraft, Borchardt, 407–408. 189 Ibid., 94.

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that after centuries, even millennia, in which the poet combined within his persona also the priest and the law-giver, the poet in contemporary society has been isolated from the spheres of religion, law and even music.190 This isolation has been exacerbated by the increasingly rigid and constrictive nature of society since the nineteenth century, which has led the poet to seek further solitude, quiescence and withdrawal.191 Poetry is thus like a “self encapsulated disease within the host body”192 and has become completely homeless.193 These features are understood as alarming signals of the spiritual demise in Germany and in Europe in general. In his writings as philologist and poet, Borchardt both lamented and attempted to counteract this state of affairs. The sense of loss expressed by this “foreseer of decline” did not originate from his experiences in the battlefields of Europe alone, nor was it confined to military and territorial defeats.194 As poet, philologist and public speaker, Borchardt stressed far more the catastrophic withering of the German tradition and language. He mourned, among other things, the demise of German local dialects in favour of the standardisation of language and the legacy of German nineteenth-century Romanticism.195 This sense of decay became Borchardt’s driving force and led to the idea of “creative revolution” [schöpferische Revolution]. The latter combined the philological and poetical capacities of Borchardt in the construction of fictitious linguistic forms of German. By creating such phantastical linguistic constructs, which were nonetheless based on decades of philological research and experimentation, Borchardt hoped to counteract the actual course of history in which certain linguistic forms were abandoned in favour of others. To Borchardt linguistic and poetic creation thus became a means of fighting contemporary spiritual downfall. The most notable example of such a philological and poetic enterprise is Borchardt’s translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. Apparently his translation wished to undo what Borchardt experienced as an extremely painful and wrong linguistic development, namely the suppression of Upper German [Oberdeutsch] 190 Rudolf Borchardt, “Über den Dichter und das Dichterische,” in Gesammelte Werke: Prosa, 4:55. 191 Ibid., 60. 192 Ibid., 67. 193 Ibid., 63. 194 Mosebach, “Der Diagnostiker des Niedergangs.” 195 For a description of this process, which notably took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (due, for example, to the institutional needs of the emerging nation state as well as the needs of the German “Bildungselite”), see Peter von Polenz, “Allgemeine Sprachnormierung,” in Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 3, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 229–263.



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after the decline of the Staufer Dynasty and the victory of the Prague bureaucratic language.196 Borchardt himself used the term “allusion” [Anspielung] to describe his translation as “the realised allusion to an ideally possible and historically lacking piece of writing, which Germany’s national history has not granted us.”197 This undertaking, Borchardt himself admits, is the work of a person who desires the impossible, for it traces the gaps and holes in a history whose course was not taken.198 Borchardt describes how he was obliged to first of all question the idea of historical progress, which dominated nineteenth-century German historiography, and to doubt the trustworthiness of certain literary traditions.199 He tells us, moreover, that he had first read Dante in Pisa in 1904 but that his reception of this masterpiece was transformed once he had abandoned Middle-High-German poetry and studied instead the dialects [Mundarten] of Dante’s times.200 In the epilogue Borchardt describes his translation as an appeal against the alleged “death” of the German Middle Ages and its linguistic diversity, as declared by nineteenth-century historiography in its attempt to construe Luther as the mythical German “language creator” [Sprachschöpfer].201 This appeal seemed theoretically hopeless until Borchardt encountered, as he describes, a form of preLutheran German language still spoken in a village near Basel. There, Borchardt tells us, he found again and still, the “old austerity”, the “melting roundness” of the sentence, the “unconditioned primate of cumulative, heavy accents” in contrast to the pedantic, temporal “museum-perfection” of post-Lutheran German.202 Borchardt perceives Dante as the saviour of the Italian Middle Ages, and believes that due to Luther the German Middle Ages and especially the language of the German fourteenth century were lost. Borchardt wished to “counteract” or compensate for this linguistic loss with his own constructed language. This language he describes as invented but not arbitrary. It is, rather, a historical sketch, a construction based on given historical data, even though never written or spoken quite like this. It is in short a “historical parallel-language” to Lutheran German.203 According to Borchardt it was necessary to create this would-be language because the pedantic post-Lutheran New High German – “a book language

196 Christoph König quoted in Mosebach, “Diagnostiker des Niedergangs.” 197 Rudolf Borchardt, “Epilegomena zu Dante II: Divina Commedia. Konrad Burdach zum siebzigsten Geburtstag” (1929), Gesammelte Werke: Prosa, 6:472. 198 Ibid., 473. 199 Ibid., 477–486. 200 Ibid., 485–488. 201 Ibid., 493–505. 202 Ibid., 508. 203 Ibid., 510–511.

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without ears or voice”204 – would not have been able to revive the “lost soul of the Middle Ages”.205 This project, admits Borchardt, resulted in more than mere translation. Rather it became a task of linguistic creation in the hope for the “revived enunciation [Neuerklingen] of woken voices from the living abyss of our folklore, which from now on must never be silent again.”206 Borchardt felt that he was called to this task not only for the sake of lost voices from the past but perhaps even more so for the sake of current and future German generations.207 Through projects like the German Dante, Borchardt indeed attempted to “counter the suffocating banality of the present with the presence of the great epochs of the past.”208 Borchardt’s epilogue is crucial in order to understand why he consciously set out to provide a translation that is the entire opposite to Stefan George’s contemporary translation, which seems more intelligible to the modern reader. Despite the “archaising” language created by Borchardt, the underlying theory may be identifiable as modern (or partly “Benjaminian”) because the author Borchardt does not attempt to serve the individual reader by providing a decipherable message.209 Rather, he wished to provide a specific linguistic form that would serve the greater cause of the German spirit. This is the point at which Borchardt and his interpretation by Kraft become particularly relevant to my examination. As the “foreseer of decline”, language creator and self-proclaimed saviour of the German spirit, Borchardt offers another example of a writer caught between tradition and modernity, wishing to counteract the withering of tradition in a supposed one-man battle that combines the scholarly tools of philology and modern translation theory. Secondary literature, however, seems to discuss Borchardt’s Dante project only partly in this context. Two examples are provided by George Steiner and Franck Hofmann. Steiner discusses Borchardt’s Dante only briefly as a unique but not rare example of archaism. He stresses Borchardt’s belief that “the past was not immutable” and his idea “of translation as having a unique authority against time and the banal contingency of historical fact.”210 Steiner explains that the resulting “creative retransformation” is not “antiquarian pastiche”, but rather 204 Ibid., 518. 205 Ibid., 522. 206 Ibid., 525–526. 207 Ibid., 529. 208 Mosebach, “Diagnostiker des Niedergangs.” 209 Compare Benjamin’s theory of translation, which claims that a translation, like any other work of art, is first and foremost a form, and as such not intended to serve the reader (Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, 1:253–263). 210 Steiner, Babel, 356–357.



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an active, even aggressive intrusion on the seemingly fixed fabric of the past. The “archaicist” thus imposes his will on the past, dumping from history or adding to it in the perspective of hindsight.211 The object of the exercise, of this “linguistic fiction”, Steiner writes, was to generate consequences for the present and future of the German spirit.212 In other words, “here the hermeneutic of appropriation is meant not only to enrich the translator’s native inheritance but to change it radically. Translation is made metamorphosis of the national past.”213 Franck Hofmann recognises to some extent the intrusiveness upon the past but wishes to refute claims that Borchardt’s agenda was primarily political. In his article “Literary Annexation?” Hofmann concludes that Borchardt’s translations are first of all works of the imagination in which Borchardt attempted not to force a historical, ethnic or geo-political relationship with, in the case of Dante, the heritage of Provence, but a mental and spiritual dependence.214 As such, the Dante translation was meant as an imaginary basis for the recovery of literature from Dante to Stefan George in the service of the inner stability of the German people.215 Other existing studies ignore possible political motives altogether and focus entirely on poetical or philological aspects of Borchardt’s work. Lucia Mancini, for example, establishes the Dante translations of Borchardt and George as two opposite utopias, expressed in their respective uses of poetry and language. Mancini lists detailed lexical and syntactical comparison points between the two versions to illustrate that the translation served George as a means of enriching his own poetical language and that Dante was chosen by him as the ideal poet in exile who takes on prophetic qualities.216 Borchardt’s translation, in contrast, is understood as an attempt to create a fictitious, archaising language through which Dante’s historical period can be evoked. The translator unites rediscovered masterpieces of the past with the spirit of the present.217 These opposite visions are reflected, as Mancini wishes to demonstrate, in George’s syntactically minimal, lean language, on the one hand, and Borchardt’s strong syntactical efforts, on the other. Both aim to revive a common European memory and to

211 Ibid., 357. 212 Ibid., 357–358. 213 Ibid., 359. 214 Franck Hofmann, “Literarische Annexion? Borchardts Übersetzung zwischen Politik und Phantasma,” in Dichterische Politik: Studien zu Rudolf Borchardt, ed. by Kai Kaufmann, Publikationen zur Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Neue Folge 4 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 187. 215 Ibid., 187. 216 Lucia Mancini, “Rudolf Borchardt und Stefan George: Übersetzer von Dantes ‘Divina Commedia’,” in Borchardt: Pisaner Colloquium, 321–346. 217 Ibid., 335.

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create a link between a dead past and a multiple present through a utopian form that is nonetheless grounded in tradition.218 Hans-Georg Dewitz focuses on Borchardt’s translation alone. After a short review of existing secondary studies he stresses the “aporia of a seemingly backwards looking creative act”.219 Dewitz goes on to examine the translation from a philological perspective, refuting the common claim that it was written in a form of Middle High German and suggesting that it was closer to Early High German [Frühhochdeutsch]. He distinguishes between archaising elements that merely serve the creation of a “historicising costume” and a genuine form of archaicism that integrates these elements into a living, functional linguistic organism with an effective composition.220 Dewitz argues that Borchardt’s use of past vocabulary (especially that of mountain dialects or “Gebirgsmundarten”) reaches its limits where its potency cannot be revived within the linguistic context of the entire piece.221 The archaicising function of Borchardt’s text is thus limited and primarily of poetic value, partly because in contrast to original lyrical texts from the period it results in a more free and individual language, thus gaining creative independence from the original.222 Whereas Mancini seems to accept Borchardt’s declared intentions at face value, Dewitz distinguishes between Borchardt’s ambitions and concrete results in emphasising the poetical, if not archaising, relevance of the translation. He quotes Borchardt’s own words in stating that the latter produced at most an allusion to the irretrievable. Dewitz concludes that the irresolvable aporias of the “irretrievable” do not necessarily lead to a negative evaluation of the translation. Rather, these aporias can be appreciated as fertile and inspirational artistic motives.223 The above studies provide focused albeit relatively narrow perspectives on Borchardt’s Dante translation: they discuss his efforts within the respective boundaries of translation theory and hermeneutics, philological adequacy or literary theory. As will be shown below, Kraft, who discusses the translation in the context of his larger Borchardt monograph, manages to place it within the context of Borchardt’s more comprehensive ideas of poetry and German history, and against the background of his biography. At the same time some of his conclusions clearly overlap with the arguments presented above.

218 Ibid., 340. 219 Hans-Georg Dewitz, “Rudolf Borchardt: ‘Dante Deutsch’; Zur Aporie und Apologie einer Hybride,” in Borchardt: Pisaner Colloquium, 347–365 (348). 220 Ibid., 354. 221 Ibid., 354–355. 222 Ibid., 356. 223 Ibid., 361.



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Kraft’s 1956 volume on Borchardt, which predates the above studies by several decades, includes a large biographical section and analytical chapters on Borchardt’s ideas of history and literature. On the one hand, this allows him to place the Dante translation in the wider context of Borchardt’s oeuvre. On the other hand, and in contrast to the studies of Mancini or Dewitz, Kraft undertakes only minute syntactical or philological analyses of the translation. His examination tends to focus on the ideas underlying the translation, to which he explicitly applies theoretical concepts found in Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation. Kraft presents the Dante translation as Borchardt’s attempt to return to and restore a perceived ideal of German and European culture that existed in the past. He thus explains that to Borchardt Deutschtum is first and foremost the awareness of a national legacy and tradition, and not a birth-right.224 His study presents the Dante translation as an expression of Borchardt’s ideal German heritage. Not unlike later studies of the translation discussed above, Kraft finds it useful to compare the Borchardt and George translations. Similar to Mancini, Kraft’s comparison underlines the contrasting linguistic approaches of these two poets: most notably the conflict between George’s New High German literary language, which envisions a new start, and Borchardt’s ideal of an organic progression from medieval German. Kraft explains moreover that George identified with Dante as timeless genius, whereas Borchardt identified with Dante as medieval poet.225 Hence Borchardt mobilised the literary history of the entire Middle Ages in order to gain a close picture of Dante from the sources. Kraft argues that as a result Borchardt translated Dante as though he himself were a medieval poet, whereas George translated into the language of his “identity experience”.226 He questions Borchardt’s assumption – apparently shared by some of Borchardt’s contemporary critics – of the incapacity of the German language of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Mommsen, or the language of the new sciences, to provide an adequate translation. Thus George, as Kraft notes, translated into his own individual language but nonetheless remained within the boundaries of contemporary New High German.227 In the attempt to understand the linguistic idea underlying the translation, Kraft necessarily refers to Borchardt’s ideas of German history and culture, and his 224 Kraft, Borchardt, 42. 225 Ibid., 148. 226 Ibid., 151–152. Kraft quotes from the translations of George and Borchardt to illustrate the difference. For example, George: “Da ich so stand an niedren ort vertrieben |Hat meinem blick sich Einer dargeboten |Der schien durchs lange schweigen stumm geblieben.” Borchardt: “Die weil ich scheitern ward in feigen grund, |stund mir fürn augen Einer, der wie blöde |von schweigen, das ihm lang verschloss den mund” (ibid., 465–466). 227 Ibid., 484.

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wish to conserve them through the revival of their perceived origins.228 According to Kraft, Borchardt traces the roots of German culture to the European cultures of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words, Borchardt searches centuries beyond Luther and his linguistic legacy of so-called New High German, and reaches back to the Germanic peoples of Tacitus’s time and the German Middle Ages.229 Kraft, it should be noted, rejects Borchardt’s approach to German history and his alleged dismissal of the philosophy of history in general. In evaluating Borchardt’s linguistic experiment as expressed in his Dante translation, Kraft refers to Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation in “The Task of the Translator”.230 Conscious deviation from the original Dante is explained by Kraft through a necessary practice of renunciation when translating, for “only by faithfully looking at the original can the poet reach the greatest aim of fidelity: to look away from it.”231 This paradoxical statement, adopted from Benjamin, leads Kraft to disagree with Borchardt’s claim that all translations must “destroy” the original.232 Borchardt’s claim is thus “a rampant, aggressive description of the real matter: that no translation may aim at the original, that everyone, in order to reach it, must aim away from it.”233 The alternative approach, according to Kraft, is demonstrated by the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation, which he believes adheres exclusively to the original text, both theoretically and practically.234 Kraft quotes Benjamin’s idea of the “interlinear version” in explaining the essential translatability of sacred texts: “For to some degree, all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true above all of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype of all translation.”235 Only by simultaneously “looking at” and “looking away from” the original text can a truly loyal translation be achieved. The faithful translation engages, moreover, with the “life” of the original. Benjamin’s theory, Kraft explains, is based on a specific philosophy of history which maintains that the task of the philosopher “consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life 228 Ibid., 394. 229 Ibid., 456. 230 Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, 209. 231 Kraft, Borchardt, 468. 232 Ibid., 468, n. 1. See Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 259–260. According to Benjamin translation should rather aim to be “transparent”: “it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium to shine upon the original all the more fully” (ibid., 260). 233 Kraft, Borchardt, 468. 234 Ibid. For the Bible translation, see Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1936). 235 Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 263.



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of history.”236 Borchardt, on the other hand, dismisses any philosophy of history, acknowledging only the ”historicity of history”.237 In comparison to Benjamin, who derives his central ideas of loyalty, freedom, form and “pure language” philosophically, Borchardt develops the idea of the historical function of his translation and of Dante’s attitude towards the Romance and Germanic Middle Ages without establishing the philosophical ground of his efforts.238 Kraft adds that Borchardt’s desire to “fill a historical gap” and his relentless philological efforts fail to “leave history behind” and to recognise that the translation is in fact based on the endurance and lasting fame of the original, which inevitably experiences a certain maturation.239 Here Kraft again uses Benjamin’s concepts of “after life”, “fame” and “maturing process” in his overall evaluation of Borchardt’s experiment. Kraft also applies concepts from Benjamin’s translation theory in order to distinguish between Borchardt and Kraus’s alleged language mysticism. He criticises Borchardt’s reticence to leave history behind rather than recognising the source of the “Sprachgedanke” in the word, for the beginning like the end belong in history, if the latter is regarded not in “historical” but rather in “messianic” terms.240 The comparison with Kraus reflects the way in which Kraft understands the unique linguistic practices of Kraus and Borchardt. Kraft claims Kraus as the “linguistic antipode” to Borchardt, since the former does not transgress the boundaries of the fallen language of his times, in the belief that the spirit could nonetheless penetrate this sunken language and achieve genuine linguistic creation.241 Kraft concludes that their mutual rejection stems from their different understanding of history and language. For Borchardt’s ideas on language stem from his broader ideas on German culture and on history generally.242 In Kraft’s view Borchardt regards language ultimately as a tool that serves history in general and German culture in particular. Relying on Borchardt’s epilogue to the Dante translation Kraft argues that its trigger is not Dante himself but the German medieval poet who had to be created to fill a historical gap, or the “forgotten soul of the Middle

236 Ibid., 255. 237 Kraft, Borchardt, 468. 238 Ibid., 469. 239 Ibid., 467–473. 240 Ibid., 473. 241 Ibid., 487. 242 Ibid. Elsewhere, however, Kraft does find glimpses of Borchardt’s belief in the constitutive forces of language when the latter refers to Sappho: “das Wunder ist, dass, wenn sie diese Worte spricht, das Wasser wirklich aufspringt und das Wachstum aufgeht. Was sie sieht, sieht sie zum ersten Male, und wir haben es nie vorher gesehen. Es entsteht durch sie, denn es ist ihr widerfahren und sie tut es uns an” (ibid., 488).

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Ages” that needed to be evoked.243 Yet in the end “the translator must become poet, the constructed language a living one, the Middle Ages the present, reproduction production, Italian German and Dante’s poem must become Borchardt’s poem”, writes Kraft.244 Like Dewitz, Kraft wishes to evaluate the Dante translation as a piece of poetry in its own right, in isolation from underlying philological practices and conceptual limitations. It remains unclear, however, whether Kraft believes Borchardt to have achived a poem in its own right, an original creation in a language that is German and living. Moreover, from Kraft’s general fascination with Borchardt it would seem that he applauds the latter’s overall mission to counteract a perceived spiritual and linguistic downfall. To Kraft the literary figures discussed in this section became the “imaginary companions” who inhabited his “German ark” and helped to conceptualise its underlying redemptive and conservationist ideas. Kraft viewed them in their own ways as “rebels of the spirit”.245 Despite their often disparate opinions on matters of war, German culture and Jewish descent, Kraft emphasised their attempt to redeem the German spirit. Thus Borchardt’s linguistic archaicisation, as an attempted intrusion on the past, may not have seemed so far removed from Benjamin’s attempt “to evoke” [wieder hervorrufen] the humanistic German values found in the letters of his Deutsche Menschen. Likewise, Kraft recognised the differences in the messianism and archaicism of Kraus and Borchardt, but admired in both their missionary zeal to restore a lost moral essence or historical gap in the German language.

4 Conclusion The opening words to Kraft’s 1975 speech “Mother Tongue and Language Crisis” define the effect of the mother tongue by referring to a lullaby of the nineteenth century poet Friedrich Rückert. Kraft describes how Rückert remembers being a “bad boy” who could not fall asleep without the lullaby of his mother. Later, when he grew taller than her, he learnt to sing it to himself. Yet what remains, according to Rückert, is the “distant echo” or “lingering sound” [Nachklang] of what she had sung and so the mother still sings to him.246 This quote reflects Kraft’s own veneration of the mother tongue in general and his clinging to the German language in particular. Moreover, Kraft shares Rückert’s lament for the 243 Ibid., 470 and 480. 244 Ibid., 481. 245 Also the title of Kraft’s volume Rebellen des Geistes (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968). 246 Kraft, “Muttersprache und Sprachkrise,” 22–23.



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loss of the “original language” or the mother’s voice, substituted only by a distant echo. Kraft suffered this loss not only as a grown child who left his parental nest. Dystopian linguistic ideas in European and German thought of the early twentieth century and linguistic dislocation due to flight and exile after 1933 present two levels that amplified his sense of loss and his urge for recovery. As I have shown, Kraft encountered contemporary apocalyptic ideas mainly in the writings of Borchardt and Kraus, who formulated them in linguistic and literary terms. The idea of the “fall of language” and the “isolation of the poet” in contemporary society stirred dystopian fears in the young Kraft, exacerbated also by his personal war-time crisis. At the same time Borchardt and Kraus did not present examples of “total language scepticism” and their language crises resulted in restorative linguistic experiments and satire. It seems, therefore, that once Kraft was exposed to the extreme challenges posed by his linguistic dislocation and intellectual isolation through exile, he did not sink into silence or literary paralysis. Rather, he struggled to capture the “echo” of his endangered mother tongue as it reverberated in the language of his “imaginary companions” and from the walls of his constructed ark. Two related linguistic acts define Kraft’s redemptive idea of the ark: firstly, the discussion of the language crisis and, as such, the discussion of language in language; secondly, the active evoking of language and especially of the mother tongue in order to save them from oblivion. In the face of the dilemmas and hardships suffered by Kraft in the first half of the twentieth century – most notably his German-Jewish identity and his experience of the First and Second World Wars followed by flight and exile – and in view of his literary and linguistic idols, Kraft sought and found restitution and redemption in language. Serving as a refuge, Kraft’s ark is nonetheless maintained by the existence of stormy seas encapsulated in metaphorical and existential language crises and their overcoming. Ludwig Strauss, examined in the final chapter of this book, likewise celebrated language as anchorage in the world yet simultaneously encouraged the rocking of the boat with his polyglot dialogue.

III Ludwig Strauss: Polyglot Dialogue and Parody Ludwig Strauss was born to a Jewish family in Aachen in 1892.1 He published his first poems in the journal The Present Time (Die Gegenwart) in 1908 and continued to write poetry until his death in Israel in 1953.2 While Strauss perceived himself primarily as a poet he in fact published extensively in other genres as well. With the influence of his brother Max and his friend Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, he became active in German Zionist circles from 1912, and began to publish political essays and translations of Yiddish literature. He also wrote numerous poetological essays on Hölderlin and German literature in general. After emigration to British Mandate Palestine in 1935, he expanded this prolific oeuvre and began to compose Hebrew and bi-lingual poetry and translate Hebrew literature into German. The wealth and diversity of Strauss’s literary oeuvre is guided by his persistent conviction of the vitality of words and language, and by his belief in the central and diverse role of dialogue. Strauss’s 1940 poem “The Vivid Words” (“Die lebendigen Worte”) from the volume Homely Present Time (Heimliche Gegenwart) begins with the line “Word am I and word are thou,| God brings us into dialogue”.3 The poem captures crucial aspects of Strauss’s approach to language for it claims the emergence of I and Thou from a conversation created and conducted by a transcendent being. As such the poem demonstrates Strauss’s debt to the dialogical thinking of Buber and to the linguistic ideas of Rosenzweig, the latter manifest in images of the “flow” of language and the idea that “language lives us.”4 Moreover, on the occasion of Strauss’s sixtieth birthday in 1952 Buber rightly acknowledged Hölderlin’s impact on Strauss when he wrote a commentary on Hölderlin’s passage “since a conversation we are” (“Seit ein Gespräch wir sind”). Buber’s interpretation confirms his own and Strauss’s affinity to Hölderlin by emphasising that “we ourselves are the conversation [Gespräch], we are being spoken” and “our 1 Unless otherwise stated, the following biographical dates and information are taken from the chronology provided in StGW IV, 692–696. 2 Strauss published under the pseudonym Franz Quentin for a brief period around 1910–1911. 3 The first two lines of the poem in the original are: “Wort bin ich, und Wort bist du,| Gott spricht uns einander zu” (StGW III.1, 419). 4 In his essay “On the Spirit of the Hebrew Language” (“Vom Geist der hebräischen Sprache”) Rosenzweig claims that “one lives in language” [man lebt in der Sprache] (Franz Rosenzweig, “Vom Geist der hebräischen Sprache,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 3:719–721 (719)). In the last paragraph of the essay Rosenzweig speaks of the “spirit of God” which is “poured into the ready container of language” [gegossen in das bereitstehende Gefäß der Sprache], as well as of other concepts alluding to the flow and continuum of language such as “influx” [Zustrom] and “flow of time” [Zeitfluss] (ibid., 719–720).

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being-spoken [Gesprochenwerden] is our being”.5 These ideas, as will be shown, find expression in Strauss’s political and poetological essays, and in his polyglot writing following emigration.

1 Hebraism and Dialogue in Germany The triad of Ludwig Strauss, Martin Buber and Friedrich Hölderlin defines the first part of this chapter, which discusses two genres of Strauss’s writings in Germany during the period 1910–1940, political essays and poetological treatises, and in extension analyses his novella The Mediator (Der Mittler). Beyond the biographical and familial relationship between Buber and Strauss, the triadic connection between the three writers runs in multiple directions.6 Strauss’s political essays and his championing of Hebrew demonstrate his close affiliation to Buberian Zionism. His early poetry and major poetological essays reflect a strong inspiration from the dialogical and mediatory ideas found in both Buber and Hölderlin. In turn, Strauss’s analysis of Hölderlin’s poetry and thought employs Buberian dialogical ideas. Buber on his part interpreted and applauded Strauss’s literary oeuvre with the same tools and in relation to Hölderlin’s poetry. Following Tuvia Rübner it can therefore safely be argued that in Strauss Hölderlin and Buber meet.7 For Strauss’s writings can be read as dialogical on two levels: first of all, they employ dialogical and mediatory ideas as analytical tools, and, secondly, the texts themselves act as loci of dialogue and mediation. In his first published letter to Martin Buber of 6 August 1913, Strauss declares that Buber’s Daniel gave him endless joy.8 In the letter Strauss contrasts his admiration for Daniel with his deep dislike for Goethe’s Truth and Poetry (Dichtung und Wahrheit). Strauss describes how in comparison to the lusty, foreign and factually confusing allure of Goethe’s work, his immediate approval of Daniel was accompanied by a sense of liberation.9 The declared alienation from Goethe is contrasted with the discovered affinity to Buber’s form of Judaism. He announces Daniel and Buber’s Three Speeches on Judaism as expressions of his very own 5 Martin Buber, “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind,” in Werkausgabe, 83. For an elaboration on Buber’s and Strauss’s Hölderlin reception as reflected in these pieces see Lina Barouch, “Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue,” Naharaim 8/2 (2014): 289–307. 6 Strauss’s second wife Eva was Buber’s daughter. 7 Tuvia Rübner in StGW IV, 468, n. 16. 8 Briefwechsel Buber – Strauss, 19. Strauss’s affinity to Buber has been confirmed by several studies. See, for example, Itta Shedletzky, “Fremdes und Eigenes,” 173–183; Rübner in StGW IV, 468, n. 16. 9 Briefwechsel Buber – Strauss, 20.



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Judaism.10 This early letter, which marks the beginning of a relationship spanning forty years, reveals the immense influence of Buber on Strauss and his generation, as well as the complexity of Strauss’s German-Jewish identity.11 Adopting Buberian terminology, Strauss nonetheless questions some of Buber’s underlying ideas. In a letter dated 7 November 1913, Strauss agrees with Buber’s linking of terms like unity, action, future and blood with the idea of a “Jewish soul” but rejects their relation to a “divine substance”.12 The fervent adoption of Buber’s cultural message, which nonetheless voices unambiguous doubts about Buber’s theological ideas, places Strauss in the mainstream reception of Buber during this time. Distinctly evident is the search for renewed ethnic pride, which does not require the retreat from general culture. This constellation helped Strauss to continue pursuing his German literary oeuvre while simultaneously championing the culture of Ostjuden and the Hebrew language. At the same time the constant reviewing of his German-Jewish identity was not free of crisis or contradiction.

Political Writings: Language and Mediation There has been debate about the extent to which Strauss’s combination of Germanness and Judaism in Germany, and of German and Hebrew after emigration, was genuinely free of conflict. Werner Kraft, for example, argued that Strauss lived in both worlds without a German-Jewish crisis tarnishing either: In the poet Strauss there were till his death an independent German Jew and a Jewish German who did not suppress each other.13 However, Itta Shedletzky gives weight to Strauss’s early struggle with his German-Jewish identity. She maintains that his early political essays should not be read as political programmes or agendas but rather as private confessions and expression of an unsolved and almost insolu-

10 Ibid. 11 In his article Arndt Kremer shows that the image of the “twin natures blended” [geeinte Zwie­natur] had been adopted from Goethe’s Faust II by the acculturationist, Jewish-liberal Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens for its presumed confirmation of a German-Jewish symbiosis. Kremer examines the question of Goethe’s “geeinte Zwienatur” in Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem with particular reference to their approaches to Hebrew and German in “Unvereinbare Zwienatur(en)? Das Problem der Dualität bei Martin Buber und Gershom Scholem und ihre Einstellung zum Hebräischen und Deutschen bis 1918,” Naharaim 2 (2008): 236–264. 12 Briefwechsel Buber – Strauss, 21. 13 Kraft quoted in the epilogue to StGW III, 791.

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ble dilemma.14 Despite apparent efforts to settle this dilemma, Strauss may have actively chosen to live and create within an unsolved dynamic, because it allowed him to continue to pursue his calling as a German poet and simultaneously submit to his Jewish “fate”, as Buber phrased it.15 Compromises and mediations were nonetheless discussed in his essays. In 1913 Strauss contributed an essay to the volume On Judaism (Vom Judentum), published by Bar Kochba, the association of Jewish students in Prague.16 To the Prague German-Jewish community questions of mediation, language and identity were crucial at this time.17 Scott Spector defines Prague German Jewry as a “Middle Nation” that was obsessed with the act of mediation, especially in its practice of translation from Czech to German. Spector argues, for example, that Max Brod identified his Jewishness with his mediatory role, and that Jews were often identified by the Czech population as “mediators between the Czech people and humanity.”18 Mediation, commonly understood as a secondary activity, could thus be redefined as a primary aesthetic practice, for the translators not only seemed to bridge the gap between the peoples in Prague but simultaneously carved out a space, whose national poets they could become.19 As contributor to Vom Judentum, did Strauss similarly perceive himself as a type of mediator? What do subsequent political essays reveal? A close examination of Strauss’s political writings, which were published during the 1910s and 1920s in several German-Jewish and Zionist newspapers and journals, confirms that he engaged with two interrelated issues of mediation. He sought firstly an inner-Jewish mediation that would bridge between what he called “Western Jewish intel14 Shedletzky, “Fremdes und Eigenes.” Tuvia Rübner’s position will be discussed in the second part of this chapter, which examines Strauss’s bilingual writing. See Rübner, “Ludwig Strauss – Dichter in zwei Sprachen,” in Ludwig Strauss, 97–117. 15 Martin Buber, “Authentische Zweisprachigkeit,” in Werkausgabe, 6:89–92. 16 Vom Judentum: Ein Sammelbuch, published by Bar Kochba – Verein jüdischer Hochschüler in Prag (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1913). In this chapter I refer to Strauss’s essay “Die Revolutionierung der westjüdischen Intelligenz” as it is reprinted in StGW IV, 455–460. 17 Alongside articles by Bar Kochba members, Buber, Gustav Landauer, Karl Wolfskehl and several other Jews from Germany also contributed essays to the volume. 18 Scott Spector, “Middle Ground – Translation, Mediation, Correspondence,” Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Kafka’s fin de siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 198–213 (198). See also Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Dimitry Shumsky, “Historiografia, leumiyut ve-du-leumiyut: yahadut chekho-germanit, tsionei prag u-mekorot ha-gisha ha-du-leumit shel hugo bergman [Historiography, Nationalism and Bi-Nationalism: Czech-German Jewry, the Prague Zionists and the Origins of the Bi-National Approach of Hugo Bergman],” Zion LXIX (2004): 45–80 [Hebrew]. 19 Spector, 198.



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ligentsia” [westjüdische Intelligenz] and a presumed authentic Jewish tradition, manifest mainly in the culture of Ostjudentum, from which the former had been alienated. Initially Strauss believed that this mediation required a “withdrawal” from all non-Jewish surroundings, but soon he realised that this prerequisite was unfeasible and possibly undesirable. He consequently sought to reconcile his Jewish and German identities. The second aspect of his mediation efforts resulted therefore in the technical distinction between culture and politics, i.e., between German culture [Deutschtum] and German citizenship. This distinction, Strauss seemed to believe, would enable the German Jew to live a conflict-free existence as a Jewish national of German citizenship.20 Yet Strauss applied this distinction neither to his own literary endeavours nor to his private life. He did begin to channel some of his efforts towards Jewish culture by learning Hebrew and translating Yiddish literature, but he never turned his back on German culture with the aim of becoming merely of German citizenship.21 The bulk of his literary production remained loyal to the German language and anchored in its literary legacy. The gap between theory and practice, along with the ideational ambiguities in the writings themselves, are perhaps the strongest proof not only of the unfeasibility of fully retreating from the mother tongue and its cultural heritage but also of the eventual acceptance of a multi-faceted identity and its constant renegotiation. The simultaneous loyalties to Hebrew and to German are a specific example of this acceptance. In 1913 Strauss had not yet reached this conclusion.

Language and Inner-Jewish Mediation In the 1913 essay “The Revolutionising of Western Jewish Intelligentsia” Strauss calls for a radical turning away from any notions of symbiosis between Jews and the non-Jewish culture surrounding them. He bewails the outcome of Jewish assimilation in the nineteenth century in his claim that it led to the retreat of the Jew from his own language and into the arms of a foreign tongue.22 “One’s own language” is termed “authentic contents”, whereas “foreign language” is understood as “empty form.” Strauss argues that Western assimilated Jewry has lost all Jewish content and merely kept an abstract, alienated form, which has been

20 On the distinction between culture and politics, see Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture. How this affected the acculturation efforts of the German Jewish population, see Mosse, “A Cultural Emancipation,” 1–20. 21 It is evident from his correspondence with Buber that by 1917 Strauss was already learning Hebrew intensively (Briefwechsel Buber – Strauss, 55). 22 StGW IV, “Die Revolutionierung der westjüdischen Intelligenz,” 455. See also Shedletzky, “Fremdes und Eigenes.”

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filled with “foreign” cultural contents. This differentiation between linguistic form and content evokes Buber’s distinction between the content and form of a nation’s intellectual life or consciousness in his 1909 speech titled “The Hebrew Language” (“Die hebräische Sprache”) held at the congress for Hebrew language and culture in Berlin.23 Buber declares here that in order to easily gain an overview of the different phenomena of a nation’s life it is best to distinguish between form and content.24 Immediate, daily life phenomena are divided into “forms of life” and “life content”, whereas a nation’s intellectual phenomena are split into “forms of consciousness” [Bewusstseinsformen] and “contents of consciousness” [Bewusstseinsinhalte].25 Moreover, the form of a nation’s intellectual life or consciousness is defined as its language.26 Buber states that while contents change with time, form endures. Perhaps this is why Strauss claims that while Western Jewry has kept forms of Judaism, it lost all Jewish contents. Strauss himself makes an awkward attempt at incorporating a Jewish terminology in the 1913 essay when he quotes the Biblical story of the curses pronounced on Mount Ebal.27 He writes that for his generation of Western Jews this curse has materialised for the “foreign contents” of its life has turned against it.28 Strauss’s somewhat surprising and inept use of the Biblical passage reveals rather than corrects his own alienation from tradition, and locates him within the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia that he criticises. His call for change, not least in the fields of language and custom, seems nonetheless convincing. Strauss thus laments the way in which for his generation language and customs prevent communication with other Jews and bewails that Judaism remains unappreciated because it is measured by foreign means.29 Strauss alludes to Ostjudentum, which in the next paragraph is described as a great, novel and invigorating force, a potentially revolutionising inspiration for Western Jewry in the face of its “curse.”30 Strauss understands the revolutionary return to Jewish roots as more than the political and institutional renewal of the national movement, and is thus in

23 Buber’s speech appeared in two parts in 1910: Jüdische Rundschau: Allgemeine Jüdische Zeitung (JR), 15/2, 14 January 1910, 13–14 and 15/3, 21 January 1910, 25–26. 24 Buber, “Die hebräische Sprache,” JR 15/2, 13. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Deuteronomy 27. 11–13. 28 Strauss, “Die Revolutionierung,” StGW IV, 456–457. 29 Ibid., 457. 30 Ibid.



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line with the cultural forms of Zionism propagated by Buber and Ahad Ha’am.31 According to Strauss a true revolution would fill the abstract, formal traits of national Jewish identity with a specific content, namely, with Hebrew and Yiddish as everyday vernaculars. 32 Language would link Western Jewry to the centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and increasingly in Palestine and would enable a revolution.33 In other words, language would serve as a mediator between the Western Jews, their Jewish heritage and their Jewish brethren in the East and in Palestine. In his 1909 speech on the Hebrew language, Buber likewise explains language as the only enduring “form of consciousness” of national life, and as the guarantor of a nation’s temporal and spatial continuity.34 For what turns a crowd of congeneric individuals into a national community is language.35 In representing the diachronic and synchronic unity of a nation, language is deemed the “form of unity of national life” [die Einheitsform des Volkslebens].36 Hence what endangers the Jewish nation more than anything else, Buber continues, is that Hebrew has lost its living continuity and that it has ceased to link all elements of the nation with one another.37 This is particularly crucial since the Jewish nation lacks two other central elements that guarantee its unity and continuity: land and a “normal national life”.38 These ideas are replicated and expanded in Buber’s lecture series Three Speeches on Judaism, in which he claims land, language and customs as the three constant, community- and nation-building elements, all of which the Western, acculturated Jew in the Diaspora lacks.39 In the speech on the importance of Hebrew, language is deemed particulary important because it 31 See, for example, Achad Ha’am, Am Scheidewege: Gesammelte Aufsätze, trans. by Israel Friedländer, 2 vols. (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1916). 32 Strauss’s distinction between linguistic form and content remains volatile. As in his poetological essays, which are also examined in this chapter, language is ultimately understood as both form and content. 33 “Die Revolutionierung,” StGW IV, 459. 34 Barbara Schäfer provides a critical assessment of the Hebräische Konferenz in Berlin in 1909, by pointing, for example, to the simple fact that Buber held this speech in German, an aspect that Buber himself addressed in his opening remarks to the speech (Barbara Schäfer, “Hebräisch im zionistischen Berlin,” in Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt, ed. by Michael Brenner, 68–75). 35 Buber, “Die hebräische Sprache,” JR 15/2, 13. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Buber writes: “Auf diesen drei konstanten Elementen seines Erlebens, Heimat, Sprache und Sitte, baut sich das Zugehörigkeitsgefühl des Einzelnen zu einer Gemeinschaft auf.” Moreover, “Alle Elemente, die ihm die Nation konstituieren, sie ihm zu einer Wirklichkeit machen könnten, fehlen [dem Westjuden] alle: das Land, die Sprache, die Lebensformen” (Martin Buber, “Drei

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is perceived as an enduring form in contrast to the ever-changing and withering contents of national life. For this reason, and due to the perception of Hebrew as the “arch-language” [Ursprache] that creates a link to a Jewish “pre-history” [Urzeit], Buber presents the Hebrew language as a vital condition for any form of Jewish revival in his time, although he ironically does so in the medium of the German language. Strauss similarly claims Hebrew and Yiddish – in their spoken and literary forms – to be hard evidence for the existence of the Jewish nation.40 He promotes both Hebrew and Yiddish as the national languages indispensable to the historical continuity, spatial unity, and cultural and spiritual revival of the Jewish people. How does Strauss combine these ideas with his poetic oeuvre? I will now turn to several other political essays in which Strauss seeks a solution to this dilemma.

Politics, Cultural Hybridity and Bi-Lingualism The idea of a radical return to Jewish roots in the 1913 piece on the revolutionising of Western Jewish intelligentsia is complemented by Strauss’s contribution to the so-called Kunstwart-debate of 1912 (“Kunstwart-Debatte”). This 1912 debate followed a controversial article by the German-Jewish author Moritz Goldstein in the journal Der Kunstwart. Goldstein described Jewish cultural activity in Germany in essentially secondary terms. He bewailed that Jews “administer” the “spiritual goods” of a nation which does in fact deny the Jews the right to do so.41 In Strauss’s contribution to this debate he denounces the coupling of Judentum and Deutschtum as a highly volatile “hybrid culture” [Zwitterkultur].42 On the other hand, Strauss attempts to solve this predicament by making the pragmatic, technical distinction between politics and culture. In the acute context of World War One, Strauss’s 1914 essay “Reich-Fidelity and Nation-Fidelity” (“Reichstreue und Volktreue”), which appeared in the Jüdische Rundschau, stresses that nationalism – understood as the cultural and private matter of a given population group – does Reden über das Judentum,” in Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden (Cologne: Joseph Melzer, 1963), 12 and 14). 40 Ludwig Strauss, “[Kunstwart-Debatte],” in StGW IV, 439. In Buber we read: “Was eine Menge gleichgearteter Individuen erst zur Volksgemeinschaft macht ist die […] Geschlossenheit ihres Verkehrs […], die Sprache” (Buber, “Die hebräische Sprache,” JR 15/2, 13). 41 Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnaß,” Der Kunstwart 25 (1912): 281–294. 42 “[Beitrag zur Kunstwart-Debatte],” StGW IV, 439–447. In the second of his “Drei Reden” Buber presents Judaism as a fundamentally dual or polar phenomenon, which seeks unity in its very essence (Buber, “Drei Reden,” 19–21). At the same time, however, Buber calls the Jews to free themselves of their divided nature and their foreign rule in order to reach this unity (ibid., 18).



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not conflict with civic duties to the state or with the war efforts of German Jews.43 In an idealising tone somewhat typical of early-war writing, Strauss describes the war as a potentially cleansing and liberating force, giving way to a new era in which national groupings are granted cultural freedom within the larger domain of the state.44 Due to the strict distinction between culture and politics Strauss denies any difficulty in promoting Jewish nationalism, including the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, in the framework of the German state. Strauss declares in 1912 that on the national and personal levels literary Hebrew has become an increasingly viable option, while German remains indispensable. He admits that he himself seeks an access to Modern Hebrew literature while he will have to continue writing in German. For it would be ridiculous, writes Strauss, to reject the German language, which has become an integral part of Jews. In order to become “whole” it is, however, necessary to place Judaism in the centre.45 Allowing the acquisition of Hebrew without the abandonment of German naturally undermines Strauss’s argument against hybrid culture. Strauss describes the German language as “having interwoven itself” within the German Jew, thus avoiding any suggestion of an aggressive act of appropriation either by language or its speakers. 46 In this essay Strauss’s rigid distinction between culture and politics, and between the cultures of Deutschtum and Judentum, gives way to the recognition and acceptance of a bi-lingual existence. Hybrid culture and bi-lingualism, Strauss insists in a further essay, do not necessarily result in purely “mediating” or secondary cultural practices. Strauss thus attempts to undermine contemporary claims, such as the one’s made by Goldstein, that the only positive contribution of Jews to culture is their “mediating activity” like translation or the promotion of “original” creative artists. He attacks Julius Bab’s 1911 article on the role of Jews in contemporary German poetry for attributing such mediating activity to the racial character of the Jews. Strauss describes this form of agency instead as a symptom of Jewish assimilation and a temporary lack of freedom.47 Moreover, the often reproductive rather 43 This early position stands in stark contrast to Strauss’s post-war piece entitled “Brief eines Frontsoldaten an sein späteres Ich”, which was first published in 1947, although it may have been written as early as 1930 or 1931. It was later included in “Buch des Todes” of the semi-autobiographical prose volume Fahrt und Erfahrung (StGW I, 358–365 and 594). 44 “Reichstreue und Volkstreue,” in StGW IV, 481–484 (484). Originally published in the Jüdische Rundschau 19/41–42 (1914). On Buber’s opinion on the role of Jews in World War One, see “Die Losung,” Der Jude 1 (1916): 1–3. 45 “[Kunstwart-Debatte],” StGW IV, 447. 46 Ibid., 440. 47 Julius Bab, “Der Anteil der Juden an der deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart,” Kölnische Zeitung, 17 December 1911, 1–2. Reprinted in Mitteilungen des Verbandes der jüdischen Jugendvereine

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than original talents of German-Jewish poets stems not from their Jewishness but results rather from having given up so much of their Judaism.48 In order to combat the “mental enslavement” that defines also Bab’s article, the German Jews must search for their inner freedom. Strauss seeks an environment in which a correspondence exists between “external” cultural contents and “inner” forces of the soul, and believes it can be found in Ostjudentum.49 This inner freedom is no longer equated with the total abandonment of “human culture” [Menschheitskultur]. In a further article Strauss accuses Bab of attempting to mutually assimilate what is German and what is Jewish and instead suggests Ahad Ha’am as a role model and perhaps greatest essayist of Modern Hebrew literature. He is a good “national Jew” and nonetheless steeped in European culture, which deeply affects his work, writes Strauss. He concludes that the Ostjuden don’t “Europeanise” but rather welcome the cultural accomplishments of Europe into their “Jewish-Oriental culture”. Therefore separation from general culture is not necessary, while Jews need to finally create their own place within it. Referring again to Bab, Strauss admits that this process would not result in denying the force of the culture in whose language the spirit exists.50 In Ahad Ha’am Strauss discovers a role model who allows him to live and create within a wider culture while increasing his commitment to Jewish culture. Important in this constellation is the Jews’ mastery of their own cultural space, in contrast to the “mental enslavement” he attributes to ideas such as those found in Bab. This view presents a more complex and pragmatic Strauss than the one we encounter in the essay on the revolutionising of Western-Jewish intelligentsia: a German-Jewish writer who wishes to combine his newly discovered Jewish roots with his immersion in German culture. In the context of his negotiation with the dyadic essence of German-Jewish culture, Strauss also attempts to differentiate between Jewish and German art. He attributes primarily mental elements to the former and sensual to the latter. He writes that the German artist captures the sensual form and imagines the spirit in it, while the Jewish artist experiences the mental being and creates from within it the sensual world. The sensuality of the Song of Songs is thus in fact highly un-sensual.51 In an essay on Arnold Zweig he Deutschlands 3/12 (1912): 3–9. Ludwig Strauss, “Ein Dokument der Assimilation” (1913), in StGW IV, 448–453. 48 Strauss, “Dokument der Assimilation,” in StGW IV., 449. 49 Ibid., 453. In Buber’s words this would be the correspondence between the “objective” and “subjective” situation of the Jew (Buber, “Drei Reden,” 16). 50 Ludwig Strauss, “Entgegnung,” in StGW IV, 461–466 (463). This article originally appeared in Die Freistatt as a response to Bab’s article, from which Strauss quotes in the last line of the paragraph (Julius Bab, “Assimilation,” Die Freistatt 1/3 (1913/14): 171–176 (176)). 51 “[Kunstwart-Debatte],” in StGW IV, 445.



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similarly argues that the poetry of the German Jews expresses the same divide that defines their life: this poetry is mentally Jewish yet non-Jewish in its appearance, namely in its language and contents.52 It remains unclear how we are to distinguish between mental being, language and content, and hence between the writer’s German and Jewish essences. In his political writings Strauss produces numerous and often contradictory statements on questions of language and culture. These contradictions reflect the unceasing confusion and insoluble hybridity of Strauss’s twin culture. Strauss’s 1913 novella The Mediator neatly engages with the question of German Jewry by dwelling on questions of language and original creativity.

The Mediator: Identity, Literature and Language The narrator of The Mediator is David R., a nineteen-year-old German Jew who describes himself as a dreamy teenager with a physically weak constitution and a keen interest in writing poetry. The novella, constructed as an autobiographical report on David R.’s own life, is composed in jail while David awaits the verdict of a trial in which he is accused of murdering his female neighbour. Beyond the brief description of his life, David R. claims to have performed two pitiful roles among his peers: of the passionate poet and of a weak and peculiar youth who was bullied, but because he was different – he was a Jew, he never felt wronged.53 The murder victim, David’s non-Jewish female neighbour, had witnessed one of his aggressive reactions to bullying peers when he was twelve years old. As a witness she remained in David’s mind almost as an enemy for several years until, in his late teens, he gradually perceived her as a mysterious and attractive woman. A single intimate encounter between the two neighbours on the day of her murder inevitably leads to David’s implication in the case despite his supposed innocence. Once in custody David confesses (more than once) to a crime he probably never committed and his efforts to withdraw this confession remain futile. The fact that David provides a report on his life (the novella’s plot) and composes a (fictional) confession to murder reflects the strong desire to construct and record his own fate. He wishes to rule both his life and art, or in other words to become a free, original creator and the judge of his own destiny. Can we presume that David’s surname R. stands for “Richter” (judge)? These motifs clearly resonate with Strauss’s political writings and his call to abandon the “mental enslavement” of the assimilated German Jews in favour of a return to original creativity. 52 Ludwig Strauss, “Die Dichtung Arnold Zweigs,” in StGW IV, 472–473. 53 Ludwig Strauss, Der Mittler, in StGW I, 13–26 (14).

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Language is given a particularly central role in this constellation. Whereas the early parts of the novella refer only briefly to David’s Jewish identity, the third part grants acute consequences to a single Yiddish utterance by David’s mother when she visits him in prison. David describes how she quietly told him she could not believe he had done it, and while stroking his hair called him first “my boy” and then, like never before, “my Dovidle”. These words, describes David, opened an infinite wound in him and he started imagining his grandparents who were old rural Jews. He remembered them as simple, strict and joyful people in whose home he spent happy holidays. He imagined how his grandmother likewise called her husband “my Dovidle” and therefore felt included in the line of pious and hardworking ancestors.54 Here Yiddish – the common vernacular of East European Jews, yet a language rarely uttered by the assimilated generation of David’s mother and for the first time heard from her by David himself – mediates between David, a post-assimilatory German Jew, and his ancestors. The gentle uttering of “Dovidle” resuscitates David’s memory and imagination of and his connection with past generations of European Jews who not only used Yiddish as their common language but, he believes, led a simple rural life free of confusing intellectual ambitions that cloud the judgement between good and bad, reality and dream. Yet although David hopes that reestablishing the connection with his ancestors will correct his own judgement, he remains incapable of withdrawing his false confession to the murder. As he reads his own false statement aloud, word for word, he becomes aware of the words’ “illusion” [Blendwerk], their power to appear real. To him these words are inscribed with the sign of truthfulness and fidelity.55 His very own fictional words seem truthful, above all when they are spoken, as is the Yiddish utterance of his mother. David’s ultimate loyalty is not to his re-discovered ancestors, but to his own newly discovered ability to construct a reality, the truth, through words. In once again (falsely) admitting that “everything is true”, David shows that his primary loyalty is to himself as storyteller and writer. Whereas Yiddish bears a potential but shaky mediating role between the German-Jewish teenager, David R., and his rural Jewish ancestors, language as such provides David the storyteller – both as confessor to the crime and as narrator of the novella – with the ability to construct reality and perform as its ultimate judge. We are left with the uncertain meaning of “mediator” that emerges from this novella.56 It avoids the clichéd mediatory function often allotted to the German 54 Ibid., 24. 55 Ibid., 24–25. 56 Since Strauss questions the mediatory role often ascribed to the German Jews, it may be possible to associate the title of the novella with the likewise questionable mediatory role assigned



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Jew and in its final account views neither David himself nor the Yiddish language as mediators between David’s generation and its Jewish ancestry. Dieter Breuer argues that Strauss understands poetry as the aesthetic redemption of a culpable reality.57 The poet is understood as mediator, not between a higher truth and mankind but as a mediator between a “dark ground” and ideal beauty, as a redeemer of earthly life in art.58 Indeed, within the framework of the novella David’s inability to declare himself innocent is translated into an absurdly redeeming choice through which David is able to compose his own fate through words and their illusory force. In Strauss’s poetological treatises examined below the poet is also granted a mediatory role between a higher being and humanity.

Poetological Treatises: Poetry as Dialogue Half of Life With its yellow pears And wild roses everywhere The shore hangs into the lake, O gracious swans, And drunk with kisses, You dip your heads In the sobering holy water. Ah, where will I find Flowers, come winter And where the sunshine And shade of the earth? Walls stand cold And speechless, in the wind The weathervanes creak.59 (Friedrich Hölderlin)

In 1950 Ludwig Strauss wrote an essay on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Half of Life”. He employs the dialogical terminology of address, affiliation and converto Goethe’s Mittler in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. I thank Gabi Motzkin for pointing this out to me in response to a paper I presented in January 2007. See Goethe, “Die Wahlverwandschaften,” in Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, vol. 6, Erzählende Dichtungen (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1958), 305–594. 57 Dieter Breuer, “Zur Poesieauffassung von Ludwig Strauss,” in Ludwig Strauss, 77–87 (84). 58 Ibid., 84. 59 Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, trans. by Michael Hamburger, ed. by Jeremy Adler (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 171.

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sation reminiscent of Buber in contrasting the first and second strophes of the poem.60 Strauss illustrates how the first strophe is fully formed as an address, while in the second strophe the solitary I speaks into the winter void and finds no reply. While the world was previously all language, now it is silent before the I. In the first strophe, continues Strauss, the I lived in relation to the environment and only here could it become loud. Once this environment and relationship disappear the I is expelled into a solitary monologue, into exile and winter.61 The following section illustrates in greater detail that by employing diverse dialogical ideas found in Buber and Hölderlin as analytical tools, Strauss’s poetological essays act as loci of the encounter and dialogue between these two figures.62 From Strauss’s immediate fascination with Buber’s Daniel we can assume that he was inspired by its mystical tone and corresponding dialogical vocabulary. In the introductory paragraph of the 1913 edition of Daniel, the narrator describes how during a stroll at sunset he stops at the edge of a field and leans his walking stick against a tree trunk. This twofold contact – the first where he holds the stick, and the second where the stick touches the tree trunk – evokes a “conversation”, for human speech is likened to this stick.63 From as early as 1913, Strauss interprets poetry as an “encounter” [Begegnung], “relationship” [Beziehung], and “community” [Gemeinschaft] on several levels.64 On the macro-level poetry is defined as an encounter between an absolute being and the poet-mediator who realises this being in the world in the form of the poem. Moreover, in stressing the auditory quality of poetry Strauss defines the poem as an encounter between the poet and the hearer, whereby the poem often receives the form of an address. On the micro-level the orality or spokenness of the poem also results in its definition as an encounter between the word sounds and the mental content of the human hearer (poet and listener), who functions as the only possible forum for this encounter due to the location of language within him. 60 On the explicit Buberian analysis in Strauss, see Bernd Witte, “Messianische Gemeinschaft: Friedrich Hölderlin im Werk von Ludwig Strauss,” in Ludwig Strauss, 199–213. Witte argues that several sections of Strauss’s essay on “Half of Life” demonstrate how Strauss recognises in Hölderlin’s poem Buber’s dialogical principle (ibid., 211). 61 Ludwig Strauss, “Friedrich Hölderlin: ‘Hälfte des Lebens’” (1950), in StGW II, 254. Strauss analyses earlier drafts of the poem such as “Die Rose” and here likewise uses terms such as address and dialogue [Zwiesprache] (ibid., 256–257). 62 As already mentioned, Rübner suggests this encounter but does not develop it any further (Rübner in StGW IV, 468, n. 16). 63 “[D]enn wie jener Stab ist die Rede des Menschen” (Martin Buber, Daniel: Gespräche von der Verwirklichung, in Werke, vol 1, Schriften zur Philosophie (Munich and Heidelberg: Kösel and Lambert Schneider, 1962), 9–76 (11). In this short fragment the ideas of “real speech” [echte Rede] and “addressed calling” [zugewandte Anrede] are also explained. 64 See also Rübner in StGW IV, 468.



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The Poet-Mediator In the early 1913 essay “Reflections on the Being of Poetry” (“Erfahrungen über die Existenz der Dichtung”), Strauss contemplates the transcendental origin of poetry and the task of the poet in this constellation. He cherishes poetry as the earthly expression of an absolute being and as such likens it to a religious practice.65 The task of the poet is to grant this absolute being a material existence. The working poet clearly senses, according to Strauss, that poetry has existed independently from him as an abstract, transcendent being. The poet is merely granted the right to sense this existence and is given the task to provide poetry with an earthly presence.66 In this essay Strauss declares his belief in poetry as the mystical encounter between the poet and an absolute poetic being, and his conviction that the poetic essence exists in the relationships of things rather than in the things themselves.67 Sixteen years later in 1929 Strauss published the essay “Man and Poetry” (“Der Mensch und die Dichtung”) in Buber’s journal The Creature (Die Kreatur). In this essay Strauss reiterates his belief in the myths of God, who gives man his spirit, of the muse, who awakens song in him, and of the voice, which inspires and guides him.68 As a result Strauss believes himself to share with Goethe, Chuang Tse and Schiller the conviction that the “poems make the poet” and that a “right” poetic form exists, which the poet receives. In other words, despite the fact that forms of language, thought and emotions may change over time, the poet knows that there is one specific and appropriate poetic form.69 Strauss is deeply concerned about the fallen state of poetry and the poet in contemporary society, but he does not preach a static notion of poetic language and form. The awareness of historical circumstances results, rather, in a search for the form appropriate to the historical period in question. This adequate form is governed by “rules of rightness” [Gesetze einer Richtigkeit], which Strauss ambiguously defines by way of negation: these rules are neither “laws of a reality” nor “laws of psychology”.70

65 Ludwig Strauss, “Erfahrungen über die Existenz der Dichtung,” in StGW II, 9–13 (11). 66 Ibid., 9. Bernd Witte claims that here the German Classic notion of the poet as a unique individual and genius is adopted and transformed through the George legacy. The function of poetry is no longer perceived merely as the aesthetic education of the human being through contemplative reception of the work of art, but rather as the transformation of each individual through an active poetic practice (Bernd Witte, “Ludwig Strauss als Germanist,” in Ludwig Strauss, 89–95 (89–90)). 67 Strauss, “Erfahrung über die Existenz der Dichtung,” in StGW II, 9–13 (9). 68 Strauss, “Der Mensch und die Dichtung,” in StGW II, 19–31 (19). 69 Ibid., 21. 70 Ibid., 27.

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The poet is thus also understood as mediator between the poetic essence and changing historical conditions. In “The Poet in the Times” (“Der Dichter in der Zeit”) of 1927 Strauss laments the fallen status of the poet in contemporary, purpose-driven society, which excludes divine and “primary” forces such as poetry from public life and renders the poet without purpose and meaning.71 In such conditions, which evoke Hölderlin’s mythology of a “benighted age”,72 the poet will continue to live in involuntary banishment rather than in chosen solitude.73 Strauss ends this essay with an admonishing and pathos-filled tone by claiming that humanity has exhausted its own potency and will have to return to the dethroned powers. In his contemporaneity it is the poet who keeps the junction open so that the historical present and the eternal forces may meet, and the one who protects the spark of humility before the primordial forces in order to rekindle the human soul.74 In tandem with Hölderlin’s ideas of a “benighted age”, on the one hand, and Buber’s vocabulary of “renewal”, on the other, Strauss expresses his belief in a return of the ancient forces not by way of a reactionary restoration but by keeping the path open for their renewal in the hands of the poets.75 The poet is thus granted a mediating role between the potent ancient forces and contemporary humanity. Hölderlin’s understanding of the poet as a vigilant mediator between the gods and humanity is clearly conjured up here. Adrian Del Caro shows how Hölderlin’s poems “To the Fates” and “To the Young Poets” demonstrate his faith in a transcendent existence that is a prerequisite of poetry.76 In “To the Young Poets” Hölderlin addresses his fellow poets as “brothers”, asking them to remain humble as the Ancient Greeks were, by acknowledging the divine origin of poetry. Poets are thus asked to love the gods and their fellow human beings and to show respect for nature by entering into a dialogue with them rather than preaching and wishing to master over them.77 The poet’s role in “joining”, as Del Caro terms it, is central in other poems such as “The Poet’s Vocation” and “Bread and Wine”.78 While most 71 Ludwig Strauss, “Der Dichter in der Zeit,” in StGW II, 14–18 (17). 72 See David Constantine, “1800–1802: The Coherent Years,” in Hölderlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 152–181. 73 Constantine, Hölderlin, 18. 74 Ibid. 75 Constantine shows the triadic structure of Hölderlin’s mythology, which contains an ideal past, a benighted present and an ideal future. This constellation expresses the hope that the spirit of the “New Hesperia” will be an incarnation of the ideal past, embodied by Ancient Greece (Constantine, Hölderlin, 163–167). 76 The opening lines of “To the Fates” address these “fates” directly and as such both acknowledge their powerful role and establishes a dialogue with them (Hölderlin, Selected Poems, 7). 77 Hölderlin, Selected Poems, 15. 78 Adrian Del Caro, Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 25.



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mortals remain “asleep” in the face of the age of “godlessness”, it is the responsibility of the poet to remain actively open and prepared to receive the “gods”. In “The Poet’s Vocation” Hölderlin thus addresses the poet as a hybrid creature, likening him to the demigod Bacchus (Dionysus) or a “day’s Angel” for his ability to join the divine and the mortal, especially during an age in which “Too long now things divine have been cheaply used| And all the powers of heaven, the kindly, spent.”79 Yet humbleness and conviviality are continually stressed.80 The idea of the poet’s vocation as mediation between gods and humanity within the context of a “benighted age” runs through Hölderlin’s poetry, both in hymns like “As on a Holiday ...” and in elegies such as “Bread and Wine”, “The Poet’s Vocation” and “The Poet’s Courage”.81 These ideas resonate in Strauss’s poetological reflections and are complemented with the emphasis given to the oral essence of poetry.

The Orality of Poetry and its Reception Assume not that the poem exists in the book! The signs there are like an architect’s plan on paper. Only the poem in your ear and in your soul is the built, real house.82 (Ludwig Strauss)

We have seen that in “Reflections on the Being of Poetry” Strauss declares his belief in the dialogical origin of poems, or in other words, their creation out of the relationship between poetry’s transcendental being and the poet. The dialogical 79 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. by Michael Hamburger, bilingual edition with a preface, introduction and notes (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967), 175. In “Bread and Wine” we similarly read: “But, my friend, we have come too late. Though the gods are living,| Over our heads they live, up in a different world. | Endlessly there they act and, such is their kind wish to spare us, | [...] For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, | Only at times can our kind bear the full impact of gods” (ibid, 249). And it is here that poets are particularly called to duty: “Bread is a fruit of Earth, yet touched the blessing of sunlight| From the thundering god issues the gladness of wine. | Therefore also the poets in serious hymns to the wine-god, | Never idly devised, sound that most ancient one’s praise” (ibid., 251). See also Del Caro, 41. 80 Hölderlin in the “Poet’s Task”: “Nor is it good to be all too wise. Our thanks| Know God. Yet never gladly the poet keeps| His lore unshared, but likes to join with| others who help him to understand it.” (Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 177). See also Del Caro, “The Poet’s Role in Joining: Geselligkeit and Coexistence,” in Hölderlin, 25–30. 81 See Constantine, Chapters 9 and 11 on the elegies and hymns respectively, as well as Peter Szondi, “Der andere Pfeil: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des hymnischen Spätstils,” in HölderlinStudien: Mit einem Traktat über philologische Erkenntnis (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 37– 62. Szondi writes that the poem “As on a Holiday ...” determines the status of the poet in relation to the divine sphere (ibid., 57). 82 Ludwig Strauss, “Wintersaat,” in StGW I, 266.

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quality of poetry is confirmed in the definition of the poet and his readers as “hearers”, whose thoughts and feelings are evoked by the words of the poem, and especially their sound.83 Strauss adds that the ideal hearer of the poetical words should not have any other contents in his mind other than those necessary for the creation of poetry.84 The “true” poet-hearer moulds the poetic material into an artistic form that is non-arbitrary by isolating it from any non-poetic phenomena and purposes. This “formal plan”, explains Strauss, is based on a clear belief in the correlation between material and form.85 The form of words is crucially their sound and the meaning and sounds of words are governed by the same artistic order: if poetry is to be perfect then the artistic order, which governs the meaning of words, must be identical to the order which regulates the sound.86 Strauss’s understanding of the hearer, which he discusses in greater detail in “Man and Poetry”, reveals his ideas on language and word in general. The role of the hearer is crucial for only in the concrete sound does the word have its full sensory existence.87 When hearing a poem for the first time each word sound evokes conceptions of and associations with objects, feelings and deeds, and their interrelations. In fact, only through the meeting of the evoked mental contents and the concrete sound does the word come into existence.88 A mutually dependent relationship is proposed between the evocation of mental content by the word sound and the creation of the word. Furthermore, the word of poetry embodies the inseparable unity between sound and meaning, in contrast to mere communicative language in which the sound functions only as a sign, which is forgotten once the hearer has understood the message.89 This calls for an inquiry into the nature of poetry’s receiver and reception. Strauss clearly states that it is the task of the hearer to realise the poem in the world, just as it once was the task of the poet.90 The poet and all the following hearers of the poem are required to be in an active state of “readiness” or “inspiration” [Eingebung] if they are to grant the poem an earthly existence. The soul and the senses must be still, receptive and free of will but at the same time fully present so that each word sound can be fully and purely experienced and receive the intended mind content of

83 “Existenz der Dichtung,” in StGW II, 9. 84 Ibid., 10–12. 85 Ibid., 9. 86 Ibid. See also Ludwig Strauss, “Zur Bedeutung von Rhytmus für Drama und Bühne,” in StGW II, 46–65 (46 and 51) on Strauss’s disbelief in purely aesthetic art and chaos. 87 Strauss, “Der Mensch und die Dichtung,”, in StGW II, 21. 88 Ibid., 22. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid.



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the word.91 Due to his fundamental belief in the transcendental aspect of poetry, Strauss assigns the receiver an active yet unassuming role, reflecting once more the claim that “poetry makes the poet” [ich werde gedichtet] rather than “the poet creates poetry” [ich dichte].92 Therefore he states that the realisation of the poem, which means true listening, appears also as a creative process on the hearer himself.93 Buber similarly grants the auditory, oral essence of the text primary importance. In the context of his writings on Hasidism, as briefly discussed in the chapter on Scholem, Buber demonstrates the auditory quality of Rabbi Nahman’s teachings and their reception.94 Rabbi Nahman’s teachings acquire significance by virtue, firstly, of their oral nature (the student is a “hearer” and not a “reader”) and, secondly, of their dialogical character according to which both teacher and student are perceived as hearer-receivers and the boundary between them is blurred. Essays written in the context of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation likewise emphasise the spokenness of the Biblical text, and the necessary link to its dialogical character.95 In “Biblical Humanism” (1933) Buber writes that “only that man is a Hebrew man who lets himself be addressed by the voice which speaks to him in the Hebrew Bible.”96 The immediacy of the Biblical word is explained by its essential spokenness, which is traced back to its very creation: the word happens, it is spoken.97 In fact the only being of the word is its spokenness, while all being of being objects originates from the spokenness of the Biblical word. 98

91 Ibid., 23. Strauss thus concluded this section of the essay with the following statement: “Dichter und Hörer – das ist nicht: Schaffender und Empfangender, sondern: Entdecker und Bewahrer; beide empfangen im Schaffen, beide schaffen im Empfangen” (ibid., 24). 92 Strauss attributes this view to the Weimar Klassik and to the anti-Romantic satire of the nineteenth century (“Mensch und Dichtung,” in StGW II, 19 and 28). 93 Ibid. 94 Martin Buber, “Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman,” in Die Chassidischen Bücher (Hellerau: Jakob Hegner, 1928), 3–126 (28). 95 See Karl-Johan Illman, “Buber and the Bible: Guiding Principles and the Legacy of his Interpretation,” in Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Syracuse University Press, 2002), 87–100. In the same volume, see also Dan Avon, “Limmud and Limmudim: Guiding Words of Buber’s Prophetic Teachings,” 101–119. 96 Martin Buber, “Biblical Humanism (1933),” in The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. by Asher Bieman (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002), 46–50 (47). 97 Ibid., 49. 98 Ibid. In “The Language of Botschaft” (1936) Buber likewise declares that “everything in scripture is genuine spokenness” (in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig: Scripture and Translation, trans. by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 27–39 (28)). Buber here attempts to illustrate in greater detail how, for example,

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Buber’s “Biblical Humanism” recognises language as an event in the making, as a dynamic, mutual relationship. It gives preference to the hearer and messenger of the word rather than to its master.99 These ideas are indeed invoked in Strauss’s poetological reflections. Like Buber’s “Hebrew Human Being” (who is more than a Hebrew-speaking human being) the poet and hearer of poetry are required to be in a state of openness and active receptivity. Similarly to Buber, Strauss identifies the essence of poetry first and foremost as a multi-faceted relationship. And in affinity to both Buber and Hölderlin, Strauss praises the hearer-receiver of the word, defining the poet as a crucial agent or messenger of the word rather than granting him mastery over it.100

Poetry and Language: Creative Encounters in the Human Mind Strauss’s understanding of poetry as a dialogical practice places his poetological ideas not only in relation to the thought of Buber and Hölderlin, but also establishes it as an interesting precursor to reader-response concepts developed several decades later. Rather than recognising the literary text as a final, given product, reader-response theory generally emphasises the realisation of the text in the interaction between the authored text and the reader’s response (but refrains from referring to an absolute, transcendent source of poetry or emphasising the spokenness of a literary text).101 Wolfgang Iser states that literary work has two poles: artistic and aesthetic. The artistic is the author’s text and the aesthetic is the realisation accomplished by the reader. “In view of this polarity”, Iser argues, the text “cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or the subjectivity of the reader.”102 Rather, the actualisation of the text is the product of an interaction between the two.103 The text is thus understood as a “dynamic happening”, existing only as a potential reality until it activates the experience of the reader.104

elements of “phonetic rhythmic paronomasiastic method” (word repetition or “lauthafte Wiederholung”) are used in the Bible to achieve narrative expression (ibid., 29). 99 Buber, “Biblical Humanism,” 49–50. 100 Both Strauss and Buber distinguish between “Jewish” and “German” art. Buber makes the comparison between the spokenness and dialogical quality of the Biblical word as “happening” and the Athenian monological, crafted word as “construct” (Buber, “Biblical Humanism,” 49–50). 101 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980). 102 Ibid., 21. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 22.



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Hence the literary text is first and foremost a means of communication and the process of reading essentially a form of dyadic interaction.105 Reminiscent of Strauss, reader-response theory attempts to understand the mental processes involved in the reader’s experience. Among others, Iser speaks of a “passive synthesis” in the reading process in which mental images act as a basic feature of ideation. Syntheses take place at the threshold of consciousness and can thus be called “passive syntheses” (in Husserl’s terms) and should be distinguished from those that arise from predications or judgements.106 While Iser develops his theory in relation to a range of existing linguistic and psychological studies, Strauss offers a more intuitive idea of the processes that take place in the human mind when a poem is received and “reproduced.” Beyond the idea of the dyadic interaction in which a poem is realised, I am interested here in Strauss’s locating of language in the human mind. “Man and Poetry” discusses the human mind as the only possible location for the creation of the poem. The human mind is the meeting point at which the “objective” mental process of poetic creation takes place. In this creation process the words are the building blocks, while the mind is the construction site, the only site where the necessary relationship between the various aspects of the poetic work can emerge. The subjective process sets in once the hearer responds to the objective process in critical and emotional ways that are “external” to the actual poem.107 In sum, Strauss understands poetical creation as a process of encounters and relationships that takes place in the human mind. He does not base his definitions on existing psychological studies, and indeed his conclusions remain lacking: he argues, for example, that psychological rules, which he omits to specify, effect word associations, and that only “aesthetic rules of poetry” [Gestaltgesetze der Dichtung], understood as neither psychological nor logical, decide the value of word associations and rhythm within the poetic form.108 The perfect poem is described in “Deed and Poetry” (“Tat und Dichtung”) of 1932 as a spirited linguistic body or a fully organised body of language in which the mind is truly at home.109 Mind and formal organisation are given equal weight. In the end Strauss speaks of a feeling for the right poem: its words, their order, rhythm and rhythm orders in the piece as a whole.110

105 Ibid., 66. 106 Ibid., 135. 107 Strauss, “Mensch und Dichtung,” in StGW II, 24–25. 108 Ibid., 27. 109 Strauss, “Tat und Dichung,” in StGW II, 32. Strauss also claims that the “right” form of a poem ultimately means “a form system so complete in itself” (ibid., 33). 110 Strauss quotes Buber from a conversation with him in “Mensch und Dichtug,” in StGW II, 20.

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The obvious centrality of language to poetic creation emerges in Strauss’s definition of the poem as “spirited body of language” [beseelter Sprachleib or Sprachkörper]. Yet as an idea the poem exists independently from the poet who realises it as a linguistic construct.111 Several ideas on language and poetry converge here. The origin and existence of poetry in its ideational mode are continuously understood as transcendental, and independent of the poet. Yet the realisation of a poem in the world occurs in the poet’s mind, where language and mental content are located. The auditory quality of the poet’s outer or inner voices is stressed, as is the dual character of the word, which simultaneously evokes and receives the content. The interaction between the idea and the poet that generates the poem takes place in the poet’s mind in language. Ultimately, according to Strauss, the poem finds its real existence only in the human being. The laws of the poem are therefore understood as identical to the laws of the human’s mind in question.112 How are the life-changing experiences of emigration and linguistic dislocation in 1935 expressed in Strauss’s work? He continues to publish fervently in German also after emigration, displaying a great deal of continuity in his oeuvre as a poet, prose writer, translator and literary scholar. At the same time his engagement with polyglossia – and among other things his response to new sounds of words from multiple languages – and his writing in both German and Hebrew grant his dialogical thinking novel forms and experimental modes.

2 Polyglossia and Parody in Palestine ei hasafa ba abi’a et kol asher bi? shte sfotai hen zug sfatav shel libi.113 (Ludwig Strauss, Hebrew original) Which is the language (lip), in which I can say all that is in me? My two languages (lips) are the pair of lips of my heart. (Ludwig Strauss, in translation)

The Arie Ludwig Strauss Archive at the National Library in Jerusalem holds two bi-lingual notebooks from the early 1940s, which clearly manifest poetic German-Hebrew contact zones within his oeuvre.114 The layout and contents of these 111 Ibid., 33. 112 Ibid., 34. 113 In the original this hand-written inscription is in Hebrew letters with diacritics (Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel, The Arie Ludwig Strauss Archive (LSA), Arc. Ms. Var. 424/1). 114 LSA, Arc. Ms. Var. 424/1.



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notebooks is significant because they include German and Hebrew poems and drafts. The German section begins at the left side of the notebook, whereas the Hebrew begins at the right side and the inner covers are inscribed in the respective languages. The left-hand inner cover of the first notebook reads “Ludwig Strauss, poems 1940” in German. The right-hand inner cover is inscribed with “Ludwig Strauss, poems, Ben-Shemen” in Hebrew, and is followed by the Hebrew verses quoted in the epigraph above.115 The Hebrew original uses a word play where “language” and “lip”, both safa in the singular form, are morphologically distinguishable only in their plural forms (safot and sfatayim, respectively, they appear in the above poem in their possessive forms as sfotai and sfatav). With their German and Hebrew counterparts, these notebooks can be imagined as Strauss’s German-Hebrew lip-pair – perhaps best translated into German, as Buber undertook it, with the single lexeme “Lippenpaar” – in the period after emigration.116 In the following I will ask if this lip-pair indeed speaks in one voice and how Strauss may possibly speak in a single yet bi-lingual voice; How Strauss’s two languages interact as lip-pair and whether the blank pages in the middle of each notebook symbolise an unbridgeable gap between the two lip-languages; I will examine if their “mutual echoing” is conceivable only if a certain distance remains and whether this idea of mutual reverberation – introduced in a different poem discussed below – implies a less symbiotic relationship between the two languages than the German-Jewish pair of lips; Finally, I explore how these bi-lingual concerns redefine Strauss’s writing after emigration and potentially allow him to find a new voice in a space where he could have easily been “lost in translation”. Israel’s national poet Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) was born in Würzburg as Ludwig Pfeuffer and moved with his family to British Mandate Palestine in 1935. Nili Scharf Gold has described Amichai as “hiding in between two languages” – between his German mother tongue and the acquired Hebrew of his poetry and prose.117 Scharf Gold argues more specifically that in becoming Israel’s national poet, Amichai underwent a “harrowing linguistic conversion” that disguised his linguistic roots.118 Chana Kronfeld offers a more subtle interpretation, which 115 Among the German handwritten poems in the notebook are “Heimliche Gegenwart” and “Nächtliche Fahrt” dated 1944 and “Verantwortung” and “Dionysische Elegien”, all of which were written in the Ben-Shemen Youth Village where Strauss lived and taught for several years. The Hebrew poems are mostly dated from 1944 onwards and were written in Ben Shemen, Haifa and Jerusalem (LSA, Arc. Ms. Var. 424/1). 116 Strauss’s verses were translated into German by Martin Buber in, “Authentische Zweisprachigkeit,” Werkausgabe, 91. 117 Scharf Gold, Yehuda Amichai. 118 Ibid., 105.

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better demonstrates the complexity of Amichai’s engagement with his mother tongue. Kronfeld argues that Amichai’s German mother tongue shines through his Hebrew poetry, albeit in a very elusive way.119 Amichai arrived in Palestine at the age of eleven, Strauss at the age of 47. After emigration he experimented with diverse options of polyglot dialogue such as translation, parody and laughter. Rather than locating himself in the space between two or more languages, Strauss explored and enacted the dynamics created in their encounters. Strauss’s understanding of language and multi-lingual contact resembles the dynamic definition of culture and inter-cultural relations suggested by Pratt’s “contact zones” and by Wolfgang Iser’s description of culture as a multi-layered process rather than a self-contained entity, where constant shifts between high and low culture, and between centre and periphery represent the very life of culture. The shifts themselves, Iser explains, turn out to be the centre of culture, making mutuality a dominant term in understanding what happens in intra- and cross-cultural intercourse: “Mutuality is an interrelationship, which to a large extent constitutes what it has connected. As cultures are not clear-cut givens, let alone holistic entities, their encounter inevitably results in mutual moulding.”120 Since cultures are viewed as “something in the making” or as processes rather than unified texts, modes of cross-cultural interchanges can be described as fusion, conversion, assimilation, appropriation and even syncretism.121 In the case of Strauss, culture and language are indeed perceived as “something in the making”, with inter-linguistic contact emerging in his writings as a diversified, intricate conversation, albeit not always conflict-free. Strauss’s ideas resonate those of Rosenzweig on Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, German and “Jewish German”, and on translation. Underlying Rosenzweig’s ideas is a fundamental assumption about the diachronic and synchronic fluidity of language. Klaus Reichert thus interprets the Rosenzweig-Buber Bible translation as “an attempt at colonising the space between two cultures by resorting to double-edged strategies.”122 The question, adds Reichert, is “how to be self and how to be other, how to have two voices – separated by more than two thousand years – in a single word, to exfo-

119 I thank Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi for her reference to Chana Kronfeld, “Yehuda Amichai. On the Boundaries of Affiliation,” in On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 143–158. 120 Wolfgang Iser, “Coda to the Discussion,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 294–304 (300). 121 Ibid. 122 Klaus Reichert, “‘It Is Time’: The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation in Context,” in Translatability, 169–185 (181).



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liate self and other as places of mutual translatability, letting the Hebrew appear as a possibility of German, the German appear as a transformation of Hebrew.”123 Exploring Strauss’s Hebrew poetry, which emerged in the mid-1930s, Shimon Sandbank has shown such double-edged strategies in Strauss’s writing after emigration. Sandbank analyses a series of poems written in both languages. In several cases the precedence of the Hebrew version is illustrated by Hebrew-specific word plays, rhymes and musical patterns (e.g., tsimud and mitslol, coupling and tonality), which clearly build the core of these poems. It is obvious that the Hebrew poem “el ha-mifrats” preceded the German version “An die Bucht” (“To the Bay”). Sandbank demonstrates this by pointing to the rhyme yad–shad [hand–bosom], which constitutes the musical core of the Hebrew poem. Strauss probably conceived shata [to place] from the sound of shad, and from its meaning (bosom), generated ḥazi [my bosom]. The latter, in turn, led to ḥazi [look!]. Strauss thus used the medieval Hebrew forms of tsimud such as ḥazi–ḥazi or yiplu–yikhlu.124 While such features are absent from the German counterparts, Sandbank generally argues that Strauss’s search for a musical core stems from his German poetry. Here Sandbank rightly mentions Strauss’s frequent use of alliteration or stave rhyme, and the influence of Hölderlin and George. In other words, in his Hebrew poems Strauss explored the possibilities of realising in his new language the forms he knew so well in his first language.125 The unique success of Strauss’s Hebrew poetry, as Sandbank argues, is due to the fact that he did not transpose the linguistic ploys en masse from German to Hebrew, but instead relied on his own efforts to find specifically Hebrew ways of expressing his lyrical tem123 Ibid. 124 Sandbank points to various word plays such as tsimud or sound patterns like mitslol, which define the Hebrew originals but do not exist in their German counterparts. He accordingly claims the following four out of five poems, written in both languages, to have originally been conceived in Hebrew: “el ha-mifrats” (“to the bay”), “aviv ‘al gva’ot ha-shomron” (“spring in the Samarian hills”), “be-zohar ha-zahir” (“in the lucid light”), “be-hiradmekh” (“as you fall asleep”). In contrast, “himnon le-asya” (“a hymn to Asia”) was first conceived in German. The Hebrew originals appeared in Aryeh Ludwig Strauss, Sha’ot va-dor: shirim [Hours and Generation: Poems], (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1951), 9, 27, 47 [Hebrew]. For Sandbank’s analysis, see “Ariye ludvig strauss: ‘perek-tehilim shav li-gvulo’ [Arie Ludwig Strauss: ‘A Psalm Returns Home’],” in Shte brekhot baya’ar: ksharim u-makbilot bein ha-shira ha-‘ivrit ve-ha-shira ha-eiropit [Two Pools in the Woods: Hebrew Poetry and the European Tradition] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1976), 83–102 [Hebrew]. Strauss’s own account on the conception of “el ha-mifrats” and its translation into German as “An die Bucht” appears in “Über die Entstehung eigener Gedichte,” in StGW IV, 351– 361 (355–357). I have chosen not to examine this brief text here, since it has already been analysed by Sandbank (“A psalm returns home”) and Rübner (“Zwei Sprachen”). 125 Sandbank shows that Strauss attempted, for example, to compose Alcaic or Sapphic verses in Hebrew following Hölderlin and his own attempts in German (Sandbank, 94).

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perament.126 Since the latter was primarily musical he searched for appropriate tools inherent in the Hebrew language in general and in Biblical and medieval Hebrew poetry in particular. Examples of these tools are sound similarities that arise from grammatical endings with musical advantages, and the varieties of coupling (tsimud), which generate sound plays as a result of word plays. The former, Sandbank explains, is frequent in German and especially in George, but is far more common in Hebrew.127 In the analysis below I refrain from examining Strauss’s Hebrew poetry in more depth. The German and bi-lingual texts I have chosen, however, display Strauss’s unique poetical temperament and philological aptness in carefully conducting a complex polyglot dialogue. Strauss reveals his overarching approach toward his polyglot environment and bi-lingual creation after emigration in several central texts: the poem “Thank You to the Poet from the Translator” (“Dank des Übersetzers an die Dichterin”), dedicated to Leah Goldberg in 1948, the semi-autobiographical account “A Psalm Returns Home” (“Ein Psalm kehrt heim”), and the bi-lingual poems in Small Night Watches (Kleine Nachtwachen). What emerges from these texts is the belief in the essential fluidity of language, in the messianic potentialities of translation and in the defiant force of polyglot writing.

Mutual Echoing: Leah Goldberg, Language Renewal and Translation The following poem was written in the context of Strauss’s translation of Leah Goldberg’s Hebrew poems into German in the second half of the 1940s: Thank You to the Poet from the Translator From Ludwig Strauss Through holy language did your quiet song emerge, How easily! Thus breaks through an old tree stem The quiet, light flame of spring foliage Cladding it with young life. Who like you invited pain to dance, Who like you helped the greatest weight levitate, And dissolves the deep wringing, rustling, trembling In the soft glint of a woman’s smile? And as to me, living in my two languages, Each reverberating the other – How both listened to your note! 126 Ibid., 100. 127 Sandbank notably mentions George’s preference for the ending “en” (ibid., 101).



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Like the feather light, brilliant green of March That covers a dark tree crown, So did your language win over my heart.128

Strauss and Leah Goldberg met on the sea journey to Palestine in January 1935.129 Goldberg was to become a prominent Hebrew poet and literary scholar, and in 1952 succeeded Strauss at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Strauss undertook the Goldberg translations at a time of intensive engagement with Classic and Modern Hebrew literature that culminated in an essay collection in the Hebrew language, which was to become a standard text book in the field of Hebrew and comparative literature. It includes essays on Biblical Psalms, the medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, and the contemporary Hebrew writers Agnon and Bialik.130 The translation of Goldberg’s Hebrew poems must be read in the context of Strauss’s settlement in Palestine, his growing engagement with Hebrew literature and his own Hebrew poetry, while remaining a prolific German poet and scholar of European literature. How is this reflected in the above-quoted poem? The primary answer lies in its dialogical nature, which occurs on several levels. The title of the poem addresses Goldberg with a thank-you and establishes the multi-dimensional, dialogical relationship between poet and translator: the dialogue between two creative individuals, between multiple languages, between original poem and translation. The body of the poem confirms the dialogical forms introduced in the title by depicting the conversation between several languages: between Ancient, “holy” Hebrew and the Modern Hebrew in which Goldberg writes; between the languages of the poet and languages of the translator; between the poet-translator’s own two languages, German and Hebrew.131 These dialogues are affirmed by a number of thematic and formal elements.

128 For the original see appendix A. 129 Letter from Leah Goldberg to Tuvia Rübner (Tel Aviv, 4.10.1955), Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel, Leah Goldberg Archive, Archive 4° 1655. 130 On the conception of the translations, see the editor’s notes in StGW III, 765. See Aryeh L. Strauss, Be-darkei ha-sifrut: ‘iyunim be-sifrut israel u-besifrut he-‘amim [Studies in Literature] (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1975) [Hebrew]. The collection includes an opening note by Leah Goldberg. In addition to German writers such as Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist, Strauss also discusses Russian, ancient Greek and French literature in this volume. 131 Another polyglot conversation may also be alluded to (and I thank Yfaat Weiss for her comments to me on this poem): Goldberg, who was born in Königsberg in 1911, was not only a Hebrew poet but a prolific translator of Russian. In her writings we can assume the conversation between Ancient and Modern Hebrew as well as that between Russian and Hebrew.

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In the first strophe Strauss describes an intricate process in which Goldberg’s “quiet song” simultaneously breaks through and away from the Ancient “holy” language. Strauss likens this poetic process to the growth of new leaves in spring, which break through the ancient tree trunk in a quiet, yet fervent manner and clad it with new life. This suggests an interdependent relationship in which Modern Hebrew breaks through but remains attached to Ancient Hebrew. For its part the ancient language experiences a form of rejuvenation. The idea of linguistic rejuvenation, also discussed by Strauss in his political essays, is complemented by the idea of “lightness”. In contrast to the holy and severe weightiness of traditional Hebrew stressed and revered, for example, by Scholem, Strauss pays tribute here to the delicate, graceful new Hebrew written by Goldberg, which nonetheless emerges from and remains attached to its traditional roots. In the second strophe, however, Strauss acknowledges the grave birth pains of this new language and the abyssal stirrings that define its ancestor. The “wringing, rustling, trembling” of Ancient Hebrew is in fact considered a vitally productive force, which Goldberg is able to redeem in her poetry as a levitation or smile. Strauss thus describes a paradigmatic interaction between ancient and new, between abyssal tumult and cheerful, soft levitation. The concluding strophe suggests that the poet-translator’s heart is ultimately captured by the light-green foliage of spring that is Goldberg’s language. The dialogue between the languages of Goldberg and Strauss is stressed particularly in the third strophe. Strauss’s German mother tongue, primary creative language, target language of his Goldberg translations, and the language of the current poem, is the first language in question. The second is his Hebrew language, acquired later in life but nonetheless a further language of his artistic expression as well as an object of study, and the original tongue of the Goldberg poems. By using the gerund “lebend” [living] Strauss emphasises the permanency and flux of “living in both his languages.” He claims not to drift in and out of one or the other but rather to live in both simultaneously. While both converse with each other, they also listen to the sound of Goldberg’s poetic language. In using terms like “Echo” [echo] and “horchen” [listen] Strauss underlines the audial quality of the multi-directional linguistic encounter described and adheres to his poetological treatises. Using lexical and grammatical tools Strauss carefully and deliberately establishes the superiority of dialogue and mutuality in this strophe. Hence he opens the strophe with the combination “und mir” [and as to me] thereby connecting “mir” [myself] with Goldberg from the previous strophe. Strauss’s choice of the passive, receptive and relative dative pronoun “mir” [me] rather the “ich” [I] confirms the existence and tangibility of the self as dependent on the relationship with another. The rhyming gerunds “lebend” [living] and “gebend” [giving] at the end of the first two lines pronounce this



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dialogical “state of being” as something given and continuous. This rhyme is combined with the stave rhyme meinen–beiden [to my–both] in line one, and beide –deine [both–your] in line three, which grant the strophe a stretched and heavy tone. The impression of weightiness is confirmed in the last strophe, where Strauss compares his own language to the Ancient Hebrew depicted in the earlier strophes: it is likened to the dark crown of an old tree, which in the early spring month of March is slowly covered by bright green foliage of Goldberg’s language. This spring awakening is already established in the last line of the third strophe: the absurdly static constellation of Strauss’s mutually reverberating languages is shattered once they “actively listen to” [horchen auf] the sound of Goldberg’s poetry. The impact of Goldberg on Strauss’s Hebrew poetry would merit a study of its own. Shimon Sandbank has confirmed this influence in a number of Strauss’s Hebrew poems. Goldberg herself had reservations about the trace of her voice in Strauss’s German translations of her own poetry.132 “Thank You to the Poet from the Translator” confirms rather the continuity of Strauss’s own poetic temperament, as it maintains the musicality and particularly the alliterative forms that characterise his German poetry. The linguistic techniques used in this poem support Strauss’s explicit statements on mutuality and dialogism. As Strauss himself claimed, assonance unifies the lines and as such, fulfils an “architectural” role in the poem.133 In fact assonance causes words in a single line and even those in separate lines to reverberate each other. In line one of strophe one, for example, heiliger, dein and leises are linked, as is leicht from the following line.134 The same is true in line two of the original: aus, Baumes, and Baumes and Stamme, which in turn reverberate in Frühlinglaubes and Flamme in the third line, respectively. Words such as “Baumes” and “Frühlinglaubes” thus resonate both the au and e syllables in neighbouring words and adjacent lines. 132 According to Yfaat Weiss, Goldberg expressed substantial doubts about the quality of Strauss’s translations despite their friendship. Weiss quotes Goldberg in a letter to a friend: “I have the impression that to a great extent Strauss gave my poems his style [...]. It is very hard for me to judge whether the translation gives an idea of how I really write. Although he recreated the meaning of the words and the rhythm with absolute faithfulness, they have become completely different poems” (Goldberg in a letter to Hünke von Podewils dated 6 July1962, as quoted and translated in Yfaat Weiss, “‘Nothing in My Life Has Been Lost’: Leah Goldberg Revisits Her German Experience, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 54/1 (2009): 357–377 (362)). Sandbank claims, albeit without a detailed examination, the influence of Goldberg’s poetry on some of Strauss’s own Hebrew poems (Sandbank, 228, n. 5). 133 Strauss, “Pirkei tehilim [Psalm Chapters],” in Studies in Literature, 86 [Hebrew]. Strauss explains that alliteration is necessary if the highly flexible meter common in Hebrew poetry is to remain balanced. 134 The translation of the words reads: holier, your, quiet, easy.

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As Goldberg herself suggests Strauss’s translations of her poetry do not genuinely resonate the careful listening he optimistically implies in the 1948 poem.135 Ironically, it is Strauss’s less successful translations that reveal his search for the form and musicality he believed would transcend cultural and linguistic borders. Most obvious are Strauss’s efforts to retain the rhyme patterns of the original at the expense of other considerations. In “Night Reward” (“Preis der Nacht”) – note the continuing interest in nocturnal subjects – Strauss freely translates the semantic meaning of guf meushar [joyous body] as “Leibes Lust” [body’s lust], which rhymes with “Brust” [bosom] in the previous line.136 Strauss’s typically frequent playing with verbal, adverbial and adjectival prefixes likewise penetrates his translations. In “Shortened Sonnet” (“Verkürzte Sonette”) Strauss translates lelo ‘anenet [without clouds] as “entwölkt” and ‘osher ha-priḥa [the abundance of blossom] as “erblüht” [already bloomed].137 On the other hand, Strauss’s efforts often strike the reader as arduous. The use of prefixes with verbs to replace Hebrew nouns often results in an overladen syntax where the original is composed of short, simple verses. Kirvat-gufot rogeshet ve-ilemet [bodily closeness, impassioned and silent] is thus translated by Strauss as “Wie sich Leiber stumm einander neigen” [how bodies silently recline towards each other].138 And the simple noun amar [said] is translated as “erhob Gesang” [began to sing], in order to rhyme with “Klang” [sound], which replaces the simple verb hayta [was].139 In other cases Strauss seems, perhaps understandably, unable to find an appropriate translation for Hebrew phrases.140 He translates ḥatumei sefatayim [of sealed lips] as “[mit] verschlossenem Munde” [with a sealed mouth] and ḥamsin as “Glutwindhof”, both of which fail to communicate the etymological and cultural nuances of the original.141 Subtle word plays employed by Goldberg are also dismissed in favour of rhyme. Goldberg’s use of the verb heflig [sailed] which denotes that the lovers’ ship and heart have “sailed” away, is translated as

135 Yfaat Weiss, “Goldberg”, 362. 136 Strauss thus creates the rhyme sequence ABAB for the second stanza. Goldberg’s sequence in that stanza is in fact ABBA. See StGW III, 545; Leah Goldberg, Ktavim [Writings], ed. by Tuvia Rübner, rev. ed., vol. 2 (Bnei Brak: Sifriat Poalim, 2009), 53 [Hebrew]. 137 StGW III, 546. Goldberg, Writings, 36. 138 StGW III, 546; Goldberg, Writings, 37. 139 Ibid. 140 In Strauss’s own poems from Land Israel we find several more successful usages of local terms and phrases. He decides, for example, not to translate “Chamssin” in the title of one of the poems (StGW III, 343), and uses “Orangenhain” to denote the citrus grove (ibid., 340) and “Dünenhang” [dune sloap] for the prevalent landscape of the coastal region of the country (ibid., 333). 141 StGW III, 546–547. Goldberg, Writings, 39.



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“fahren” [depart]. Strauss converts a simple, short line such as habet: hine hefliga sfinatenu [See: our ship has now sailed] into “Sieh: da fährt unser Schiff und lässt das Land” [See: our ship leaves the land] thereby generating a rhyme for “Strand” in the following line.142 Likewise, heflig libenu ke-’ale nidaf [our heart sailed like a fallen leaf] is translated into a more awkward, complex structure: “Ein Blatt im Wind, entfährt das Herz uns weit” [A leaf in the wind, our heart escapes us far]. By using “(ent)fahren” [escape; depart] for heflig [sailed away] Strauss fails to convey the original impression of quiet lamentation.143 The 1948 poem to Goldberg encourages the reader to search for the suggested echoes also in Strauss’s translations, in his Hebrew poetry and even in his later German poetry. In “A Psalm Returns Home” (“Ein Psalm kehrt heim”), discussed in the following section, Strauss expands or perhaps even surpasses the idea of echo by introducing diverse encounters between four different languages within a single text.

Messianic Reverberation: Linguistic Passage and Homecoming Like the poem “Thank You to the Poet from the Translator”, which includes an explicit autobiographical dimension, “A Psalm Returns Home” is taken from the semi-autobiographical collection Journey and Experience: Stories and Sketches (Fahrt und Erfahrung: Geschichten und Aufzeichnungen).144 By discussing, in German, the “homecoming” of a Biblical Psalm this account captures several central questions that arise from Strauss’s multi-lingual environment after emigration and from his German-Jewish identity. Sandbank argues that the chronicle illuminates Strauss’s path from Germany to the Land of Israel, from the poet’s German to his Hebrew production. In his view, Strauss perceived this path as a homecoming in the deepest sense: as if his entire creative life had revealed itself as mere translation until it finally returned to its origin.145 I will show that “A Psalm Returns Home” depicts a more complex constellation, one that is multidirectional, polyglot and charged with messianic postulations. The opening and concluding sentences of the text wrap it in a dual time frame: historical and messianic. The opening sentence locates the scene in the specific historical setting of a movie theatre in British Mandate Palestine during World War Two. The concluding sentence minimises the significance of time in 142 Goldberg, Writings, 39; StGW III, 547. 143 Ibid. 144 This text first appeared in the journal Lynkeus 2 (1948–1951). 145 Sandbank, 83.

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relation to eternity in a messianic suggestion. In extension the text offers three correlated forms of displacement: temporal suspension, spatial dislocation and linguistic transposition. On the spatial level the immediate battle front of World War Two is twice removed: the protagonist is sitting in a movie theatre in the Middle East, where he learns about the bombardment of an English countryside town. The linguistic dimension of dislocation is what Strauss finds most shocking and meaningful. He describes the multilingual scenario of the movie in which the language of speech was English, that of the subtitles French and for natives who did not know both “world languages” a narrow strip at the edge of the picture provided the text in Hebrew.146 Strauss emphasises the marginality and modesty of the Hebrew text, which “in the italics of a colonial people” accompanied the pictures and speech, thereby aesthetically celebrating the attitude of the rulers in the face of danger.147 Yet the political supremacy of the English and French “world languages” is superseded as soon as the priest in the bombarded church recites the twenty-third Psalm. In the following quote Strauss describes his own horror while introducing the languages involved. The descriptive sentences are German in Strauss’s original version, the quotes from Psalm 23 first in English translation and then in transliterated Hebrew: His text was the twenty third psalm, the appeal of unwavering faith, which the priest held up against the open sky from within the wide hearts of the community: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. I looked at the stripe on the margin and was shocked. There it was written: Gam ki eléch begé zalmawet, lo irá ki atá imadí.148

Strauss goes on to note that the psalm must have travelled through many countries, while its words remained translation and were probably recognised as no more than that. Strauss describes how in the current setting a reversal occurs for here the marginal, accompanying verses are suddenly returned home and reveal themselves as origin and centre. The black writing, continues Strauss, “came aflame with cryptic force. The original word appeared and disappeared at the margins of the plot, which continued without realising that for a moment translation had become original and original translation.”149 The charged moment of homecoming, of re-translation and of reterritorialisation transported Strauss into a state of fright and at the same time provided 146 “Ein Psalm kehrt heim,” in StGW I, 325. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. Interestingly, here the English translation is described as recited aloud in the movie, while Hebrew appears in flashes of writing on the margin of the screen.



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him with a glimpse of the messianic: “Just for a moment – then everything continued in its normal order, but an abysmal grin now hovered above it: eternity’s painful-gentle mocking of time.”150 The ephemeral, messianic flash that strikes in the act of (re-)translation grants the interaction between languages a messianic quality, especially when the Hebrew language and a Biblical text are involved. What is the status of German in this shifting constellation of dominant and peripheral tongues, in the dialogue between earthly and metaphysical languages launched by Strauss? Perhaps German has been assigned a mere vehicular role in this text, side-lined to a back-stage position in the same way that the historical events of World War Two are discussed via geographic locations other than Germany and its immediate war front. Did Strauss wish to protect his German language from abuse in the face of grave historical events by quietly denying it a central position, and by doing so awarded the German language a timelessness more commonly reserved for Hebrew? If so, how is the interaction between German and Hebrew to be understood? Tuvia Rübner claims that “A Psalm Returns Home” is the only prose piece from Journey and Experience in which the Jewish-German predicament is discussed, and in which the German-Jewish “twin spirit” [Zweigeist] of the poet, his ability to reflect Occident in Orient and vice versa, becomes apparent.151 Rübner also emphasises Strauss’s ability to reveal “the epiphany of the meaningful” in the seemingly ordinary, or in other words, to uncover the timeless in concrete intercultural connections between world religions, which calls for responsible historical action.152 He also claims that to Strauss mutual understanding never meant a Hegelian dissolution of opposite poles in favour of a qualitatively “higher” synthesis of contradictions but rather the preservation of the self in recognition of the other.153 Yet Strauss’s text illustrates how incomplete the path towards universal understanding remains in the face of Babel’s linguistic and epistemological chaos during World War Two and its aftermath. “A Psalm Returns Home” does not offer a constellation where the German and Hebrew languages (or indeed the other languages involved) experience a form of mutual cancellation. While the exact relationship between Hebrew and German in this text remains elusive, Strauss’s approach to Hebrew is explicit: it is origin and core. When considering

150 The last words of the original are: “[D]er schmerzlich-zärtliche Spott der Ewigkeit über die Zeit” (Strauss, “Ein Psalm kehrt heim,” in StGW I, 325). 151 Rübner in StGW I, 596–597. 152 Ibid., 597. 153 Ibid. In this way, Rübner continues, Strauss remains connected to the Jewish tradition of commentary that preserves rather than abandons earlier traditions in favour of those that came later.

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also his political writings it can be argued that Strauss here makes a choice by recognising the existence of a linguistic home within the polyglot world he re-enacts. Moreover, while the shifting relationships between the languages in the text take place in historical arenas, the act of translation provides access to a metaphysical echelon, and grants the Hebrew original the opportunity to return home from the travels and translations as experienced by the twenty-third Biblical Psalm. The linguistic dimension clearly dominates over the interreligious element discussed by Rübner. In reality, as might be expected, Strauss’s Hebrew writings never replaced his German oeuvre. After emigration Strauss continued to publish fervidly in German, while simultaneously publishing a series of poems and essays in Hebrew. The texts of greatest interest to my enquiry remain those in which Strauss deliberately generates a close encounter between Hebrew and German. In these texts Strauss avoided creating two separate, parallel linguistic worlds or a synthesis of the two, but instead developed a mode of writing in which the polyglot dialogue is paradigmatic. The messianic “grin” and “mockery” that emerge from the polyglot interaction in “A Psalm Returns Home” return in the macaronic and parodic forms of the bi-lingual poems examined next.

Bi-Lingual Poems: Nocturnal Encounters between German and Hebrew The poems examined in this section are taken from the cycle Urban Night Watches (Städtische Nachtwache, 1936), the first part of Small Night Watches. Sayings in Verse (Kleine Nachtwachen. Sprüche in Versen, 1937). Strauss wrote Small Night Watches while on duty as a night guard in Jerusalem and later in Kibbutz Hazorea at a time of growing Arab-Jewish hostilities in the country.154 Many of the poems in Urban Night Watches are bi-lingual in as much as Strauss wrote the majority of the text in German with Hebrew (and Yiddish) insertions. How do German and Hebrew interact within the single poem and within the cycle in general? More specifically, I examine whether and how the Hebrew insertions act as dissonant disruptions or as harmonious inclusions; if a hierarchy or power struggle between the two languages is audible; I ask if German is necessarily centre and Hebrew periphery or whether an alternative constellation is established, where the Hebrew text is the heart of the poem, wrapped or perhaps trapped by the German verses that surround it. Finally, I explore the function of humour and parody generated by polyglot puns. A close reading reveals that in these poems Strauss construes and examines multiple possible conversations between the two languages rather than enforc154 StGW III, 749–750.



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ing a single consistent pattern of bi-lingual interaction. The variety of encounters reflects the diversity of experiential contexts. Strauss establishes the link between experience and poetry in the motto of the cycle: “A fully private, almost secret, | New Small Night Watch, | (For you cannot do without rhymes, | not even on a watch rooftop)”.155 Beyond the immediate participation in night watches, Strauss also drew on a diversity of other actualities: the linguistic dislocation of an immigrant poet from Berlin, Jewish-Arab hostilities in the country and impressions from his new urban surroundings. To Strauss these experiences were first and foremost audible and their overlapping necessarily resulted in a linguistic constellation that is constantly in the making and humorously hybrid. It seems that Strauss generally attempted to compose an autobiographical meta-narrative defined as dynamic and naturally polyglot.156 The parodic element of the polyglossia that emerges in Urban Night Watches reveals a novel and subversive aspect in Strauss’s writing.157

155 The original: “Ganz private, fast geheime,| Neue Kleine Nachtwache| (Denn es geht nicht ohne Reime,| Selbst auf einem Wachtdache)“ (StGW III, 369). 156 It is tempting to refer to Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and dialogisation when examining Strauss’s autobiographical self-styling in the polyglot context. Bakhtin defines heteroglossia with respect to the novel as follows: “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogised). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages and speech types, its dispersion into rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogisation – this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel” (Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: For Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422 (263)). Although Bakthin’s model engages with forms of the modern novel and excludes most poetic genres, I would claim that Strauss’s bilingual poems contribute to his autobiographical meta-narrative in the same way that heteroglossia defines the modern novel according to Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s model may be most useful for understanding the humorous, parodic aspect of the poems in Strauss’s cycle. As will be shown, the encounters between the two languages act in a similar way to Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia of the clown”, a carnival in which no language can claim to be an “authentic, incontestable face” and all language are, rather, exposed as masks (Ibid., 273). 157 See Strauss’s 1918 parodies on George, which he wrote in cooperation with Albrecht Schaeffer and which were received as subversive and even as unacceptable by some of his contemporary readers (StGW III, 688–691).

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Night Watch: Suspended between Two Worlds Strauss chose versions of the title Night Watch (Nachtwache) several times throughout his poetic oeuvre.158 In 1933 he published the poetry volume Night Watch (Nachtwache), which included poems from the years 1919–1933 and the 1929 poem of the same name. The latter engages with the hybrid and demonic state between sleep and wakefulness.159 Small Night Watches, published by Schocken in 1937, thus established a link between Strauss’s poetic oeuvre in Germany and his writing after emigration. The titles, motifs and at times parodic language of Small Night Watches imply a connection with several German works from the nineteenth century, namely, Hölderlin’s poem “Bread and Wine” (a later version of which was titled “The Night” – “Die Nacht”) and the 1804 Menippean novel Nachtwachen (Night Watches) published under the pseudonym Bonaventura. Although Strauss does not specifically refer to Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen, the novel’s parodic motifs and language help to understand the parodic aspect in Strauss’s cycle.160 Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson portray the “Menippean discourse” as a hybrid and parodic mode of writing that challenges cultural and political boundaries and tests linguistic and poetic conventions.161 The most commonly claimed feature of the Menippean discourse has been a mixture or farrago of prose and verse, of styles and of tones.162 Strauss indeed defines the texts of Small Night Watches as “sayings in verse” [Sprüche in Versen] and applies central Menippean techniques that combine high and low style, the humorous with the serious, the parodic and the macaronic.163 Does the farrago and inclusiveness of 158 In the motto of Small Night Watches, Strauss engages with his continuous state of “Wache” in a humorous way: “Ich glaube fast, dass ich noch im Grabe,| Wer weiß, gegen wen oder was, Nachtwache habe.” (I almost think, that even in the grave, | who knows against whom or what, I will still be on watch duty”) (StGW III, 366). 159 Ibid., 285. 160 For an elaboration on the motif of the night in these cycles of Strauss see Lina Barouch, “Heim(at)liche Nacht. Die mehrsprachigen Gedichte Ludwig Strauss’ aus den Jahren 1936 bis 1937 in Palästina,” Exilforschung 32 (2014): 259–275. 161 Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23 (2002): 291–326. 162 Milowicki and Wilson, 301. 163 The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines “macaronic” as follows: “Originally, comic Latin verse form characterized by the introduction of vernacular words with appropriate but absurd Latin endings: later variants apply the same technique to modern languages. The form was first written by Tisi degli Odassi in the late 15th century and popularized by Teofilo Folengo, a dissolute Benedictine monk who applied Latin rules of form and syntax to an Italian vocabulary in his burlesque epic of chivalry, Baldus (1517; Le maccheronee, 1927–1928). He described the macaronic as the literary equivalent of the Italian dish, which, in its 16th-century form, was a



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Small Night Watches result in a disruptive discourse that dissolves boundaries and edges toward the anarchic, as Milowicki and Wilson would expect? By including German and Hebrew within a single text, Strauss indeed generates playful juxtapositions that dissolve linguistic, cultural and poetic boundaries. The linguistic puns highlight Strauss’s sense of linguistic hybridity in a humorous, parodic tone, and, as mentioned, reveal a mildly subversive aspect of his writing and thought.164 The title Small Night Watches displays Strauss’s initial Menippean intention. Nocturnal exchanges are a recurring feature in Menippean discourse, according to Milowicki and Wilson, as is the essential, self-conscious deflation achieved simply through the attribute “small”. This self-deflation is reached in both Strauss and Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen by establishing the hybrid character of the author or narrator as poet-turned-night watchman.165 As already seen, in the motto of the cycle, Strauss insists that he cannot avoid composing rhymes, even while stationed on a rooftop. In the first poem of the cycle he confirms this ironic self-deflation in likening his own “dear head” to one of the cactus pots placed on the roof: “On a roof top stand| Four flowerpots with cacti. | In between stands my dear head| As fifth cactus pot”.166 In Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen the narrator is a former poet, who due to external circumstances has become a night watchman. The language and motifs of his monologues explicitly parody the poet as such, his writing and his audience. Early on in Bonaventura’s first night watch (the novel is divided into sixteen night watches) the night guard proclaims himself to be a “satirical stentor” placed in the way of the poet’s dreams of immortality by reminding him of time and transience. Similarly, in the eighth night watch the poet’s idealist attempts at completing a tragedy are juxtaposed with the satirical prologue of a tomfool. The night guard presents the poet as a grotesque and somewhat pathetic figure. He describes his nocturnal ascent to the poet’s attic where he watches the latter’s fermenting and quenching whilst feverishly formulating his scorn against humanity as self-proclaimed apostle.167 The narrator crude mixture of flour, butter, and cheese. The Baldus soon found imitators in Italy and France, and some macaronics were even written in mock Greek (“macaronic,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v., www.britannica.com/art/macaronic (accessed 27 September 2010)). 164 The Schocken Library series which originally published this cycle claims that Kleine Nachtwachen reflects the impressions and dream visions and anxieties of such night watches with the help of grotesk, satirical verses alongside contemplative and poetic lines (Strauss, Kleine Nachtwachen: Sprüche in Versen, Bücherei des Schocken Verlags 83 (Berlin: Schocken, 1937)). 165 As seen in the section on Strauss’s poetological treatises, he shared with Hölderlin the belief in the humbleness of the poet. 166 The original: “Auf eines Daches Brüstung stehn| Vier Blumentöpfe mit Kakteen.| Dazwischen steht mein werter Kopf| Als fünfter Kaktusblumentopf” (StGW III, 370). 167 Bonaventura, 66.

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continues with an ironic account of how the poet’s “entire genius” attempts to complete a tragedy in which instead of a choir that represents the great minds of mankind, a tragic tomfool, a “grotesque, terrible mask”, comes forward and reveals a darker side to life: the tragic poet holds the beautiful face of humanity with his “iron fist” in front of a concave mirror where it acquires wild, distorted features and reveales its darkest depths in the gorges of its skin.168 In Small Night Watches Strauss assumes the tomfool’s part by being both poet and night watchman, each role relativising and parodying the other. In one of the cycle’s poems he devalues the seriousness with which artists regard themselves and their work: “In poetry, dear reader, this becomes condensed, | for art is serious, and life is jolly nonesense”.169 Here Strauss subverts conventional notions of life and art, parodying life as “damn jolly” and art as serious. This hybrid and self-ironic foundation paves the way for the playful mirroring of Germany and Jerusalem, of German and Hebrew, within the cycle and its poems. In a monolingual poem Strauss exposes the Jerusalemite doubles of the Grimm Brothers’ “Bremer Stadtmusikanten”: “City musicians you find here too: | Cat, dog, cock and donkey, all four| These Jerusalem beasts| Aren’t lazier than their Bremen peers”.170 The doubling is affirmed by rhyming “Jerusalemer” with “Bremer” in the original German. In a further poem from the cycle the beastly city musicians are replaced by forceful nocturnal spirits that take over the poet’s mind: I notice: here all kinds of spirits appear, Who in turns take control over my mind, They quickly talk me into an idea, Then rapidly rush me into a blackout, They soon haunt down My dreams and laments Like cloud wisps under the moon. Although I try to fend them off, I soon get carried away And am likely to write it all down the next day.171 168 Ibid., 66–67. 169 The original: “In der Dichtung, lieber Leser, konzentriert sich das eben,| Denn ernst ist die Kunst, und verdammt heiter ist das Leben” (StGW III, 379). 170 StGW III, 370. As Rübner points out, this poem refers to the Grimm Brothers’ “Bremer Stadtmusikanten”. The personification and elevation of animals to musicians is another element of the Menippean discourse, since it breaks down existing hierarchies between culture and nature, human and animal. 171 In the original: “Ich merke: hier spukt es von allerlei Geistern, | Die wechselweise meines Geists sich bemeistern, | Mich bald in einem Einfall beschwätzen, | Mich bald zu einem Ausfall hetzen, | Bald meine Träume und Klagen| Wie Wolkenfetzen| Unterm Mond hinjagen. | Noch will ich mich wehren, schon lass ich mich treiben| Und morgen werd ichs wohl niederschreiben.”



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Ironically, and in tandem with the general self-deflation already mentioned, the poet’s night watch does not render him truly vigilant. While the above poems introduce ideas of a humorous, beastly mirror-cacophony and overpowering nocturnal phantoms, the bi-lingual poems of the cycle carry out diverse polyglot encounters. How does the encounter between the two languages in the poem take place? Does a dissonant Hebrew enter a well-established German text? Is the status of German endangered or is a harmonious status quo achieved? It is in the already familiar nocturnal setting, in the hybrid state between wakefulness and sleep, that the poet loses guardianship over his own pen, thus enabling the entry of Hebrew into his poem: “A feather, well practiced after daily preaching, | Got rid of its author’s tutelage to the extent| that he escaped her completely. | She continued writing. shum nezek lo nigram.”172 The insertion of the transliterated Hebrew term shum nezek lo nigram [no harm done] renders the form of the poem and its message equivocal. The independent pen may now be writing in Hebrew but merely in transliteration, thereby retaining a strong formal link with the rest of the poem. This Hebrew insertion, which could be understood as an aggressive intrusion, states that “no harm has been done”. Strauss integrates Hebrew into his writing in a complex and ambivalent manner, as the self-proclaimed harmlessness of the insertion is inevitably accompanied by a sense of rupture. On the one hand, Strauss confirms the insertion’s semantic meaning of “harmlessness” with the help of several formal aids. He smoothens the transition from German to Hebrew by transliteration, places the transliterated term at the end of a line that begins in German and lets the Hebrew nigram rhyme with the German “kam” [came] from the previous line. The Hebrew words, on the other hand, are not integrated into the syntax of the German text. The Hebrew expression follows a full stop and appears at the end of a line that concludes the entire poem. Inserting the Hebrew into the middle of the poem or the middle of a line would have required innovative syntactical manipulation. Strauss does not seem to seek this here, perhaps precisely in order not to “cause any harm” to the established German portion of the poem.

(StGW III, 370). Here Strauss picks up on his own 1929 poem “Nachtwache” (StGW I, 285) and on Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” (Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 120–125). 172 In the original: “Eine Feder, geübt durch tägliche Predigt,| Hatte sich der Vormundschaft ihres Schreibers soweit entledigt,| Dass er ihr vollständig abhanden kam.| Sie schrieb weiter. Schum nesek lo nigram” (StGW III, 372). In the original Schocken edition of Kleine Nachtwachen Strauss provides translations and explanations of the Hebrew expressions used. “Shum nesek lo nigram” was, according to Strauss, an expression used in official reports during the 1936 upheavals in Palestine (Strauss, Kleine Nachtwachen, 57).

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Several other poems, however, emphasise the dissonant and disruptive, although often also humorous, essence of their polyglot juxtapositions. For there is no denying that “language itself […] can undercut, by injecting an unexpected linguistic polyglossia into a previously controlled dialogue.”173 Like the Menippean discourse that permits the inclusion of radically disparate texts within an (antagonistic) matrix, Strauss collects polyglot and heteroglot expressions (official, market-place colloquial, newspaper) and playfully experiments with their interaction.174 “Fouling one’s own nest” is in fact the question raised in the following poem of the cycle, which comments also on its predecessor: “‘He fouls his own nest ...’ – | It looks ugly like the pest”.175 Strauss here inserts a common expression in quotation marks, treating it as a “foreign voice” juxtaposed to his own. Strauss explicitly distances himself from the purist ideas alluded to and suggests that you may truly clean your own nest by sweeping all the dirt into the centre. It remains unclear whether this pile of dirt resembles the cacophony indicated but subtly avoided in the previous poem. The political and linguistic aspects of “fouling one’s own nest” are given an antagonistic tone in the next, bi-lingual poem of the cycle. Thematically the poem is concerned with a Jewish extremist campaign against the purchase of Arab produce in the context of Jewish-Arab hostilities in the country. In 1936 the Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine broke out.176 During this period Jewish labourers called for the boycott of Arab labour and produce in favour of “Hebrew labour” [‘avoda ivrit]. Strauss’s poem parodies the Jewish extremist position that considers a “melon hostile” [die feindliche Melone] by labelling it as the “produce of murderers”: Allow me to praise the unknown one On whose iron forehead the iron word has grown! This accomplishment merits a crown! Who deserves if it not he Who the enemy melon Reveals as totseret ha-mratsḥim.177 173 Milowicki and Wilson, 303, n. 13. 174 Ibid., 307 and 311. 175 In the original: “‘Er beschmutzt sein eigenes Nest ...’ – | Hässlich scheint es wie die Pest” (StGW III, 372). 176 See Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977). 177 Lasst mich den Unbekannten preisen, | Dem in eiserner Stirn wuchs das Wort von Eisen! |Dem Verdienste seine Krone! |Wem gebührte sie, wenn nicht ihm, |Der die feindliche Melone| Entlarvt als tozeret hamrazchim” (StGW III, 372). In his notes to the original edition Strauss writes that this expression, which he defines as one of many concurrent “word excesses”, was also



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By choosing to insert the actual Hebrew expression for “the murderers’ produce” Strauss extends his political parody (on Jewish-Arab relations) onto the (German-Jewish) linguistic plane. Questions that arise are whether Strauss indeed mocks the possibility that a Hebrew expression may commit an act of aggression against the German text; Whether we are confronted with the absurd possibility that “the murderers’ produce” is not only in the Hebrew language but the very Hebrew language itself (in contrast to shum nezek lo nigram). It is likely that the absurd perception and declaration of literature and art produced by Jews as hostile under the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung also contributed to Strauss’s mocking tone in this poem. In reverse, German was considered the language of murderers among segments of the yishuv during the Nazi regime and its aftermath. Strauss thus manages to reduce the ruthless yet absurd message of “totseret ha-mratsḥim” – enhanced by the stark phonetic character of the consonants t and ts (in contrast also to the soft-sounding “Melone”) – to its cultural and political relativity. In this poem Strauss draws on heterogeneous cultural, political and linguistic sources known to him in order to reveal the absurdity and relativity of any extremist position. Strauss achieves his parodic tone by applying the German usages of “iron” (“iron forehead” and “iron word”) in order to stress the uncompromising, stubborn quality of the political opinion in question. The parodic tone is reinforced when we visualise the metallic, lifeless quality of the “iron forehead” in contrast to the ripe, soft “hostile melon”. In this poem the Hebrew expression is incorporated into the syntax of the German sentence with the assistance of “as” to produce “Reveals as totseret ha-mratsḥim.” In addition, in the original “ha-mratsḥim” rhymes with “ihm” [he or him] at the end of the fourth line of the poem thus integrating it beyond mere transliteration. In contrast to these integration techniques, the phonology of the poem is heavily punctuated by the harsh sound of the foreign expression. As in the previous bi-lingual poem, Strauss presents bi-glossia in all its complexity.

Pun in the Polyglot Poem The intricate polyglot relations experienced by Strauss are given a humorous twist in another poem, which revolves around a word play mixing Hebrew, German and Yiddish. Strauss transforms a banal misunderstanding into an innovative, creative pun to show the humorous, but nonetheless revealing, aspect of polyglossia, in contrast perhaps to the more grave political aspects uncovered in the used in the Jewish press (Strauss, Kleine Nachtwachen, 57). Please note that in my translation and running text I use the ALA transliteration system and not Strauss’s original transliteration.

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poem previously discussed. I provide the English translation of the entire poem here: An old man descended my stairs today, He called one word in a hundred sounds, Said, sung, snored, shouted It in many changing ways. First it sounded like “al tezaken!” to my ear – I got a fright and listened astounded. How does this message reach me from the street Consecrated in a unique way In the individually invented augmentative form? Yet when the old man called once more, Then I understood just “alte Sachen!” And shock turned into laughter. Should it remain misunderstood forever, The message is nonetheless undamaged. And even if he insists on its original meaning – To me his original warning applies: do not grow old!178

The particular misunderstanding stems from a triad encounter between German, Hebrew and Yiddish. The amusing cacophony responsible for this puzzlement is first of all audial (in another poem in the cycle described as “Noise of the chatter choirs” [Lärm der Schwätzerchöre]179): the old man uttering the misunderstood expression called, said, sang, croaked, reverberated it in a “hundred sounds” and in “various changing forms”. Even before offering us his polyglot pun Strauss describes the old peddler in Bakhtinian carnivalesque terms. The verb “geschnarrt” [croaked; snored] suggests, albeit subtly, a grotesque physicality, a key feature in Menippean satire. It is, moreover, the old, chanting peddler who descends to the perplexed poet-hearer at the bottom of the staircase. Strauss thus complements polyvocality with the reversal of alleged “high” and “low” culture, resulting also in a determined act of self-deflation by the poet. This self-depreciation is nonetheless conditioned by the philological aptness required for a complex polyglot poem. In the hearer’s expectation of a Hebrew utterance his mind constructs a semantically and syntactically absurd order: al tezaken!, “Do not grow old!”. Strauss the poet skilfully exploits the innovative potential of language and the possibility of generating new meaning via an “individually invented syntax” [den

178 For the original see appendix B. 179 StGW III.1, 372.



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eigens erfundenen Intensiv].180 In the second stanza, however, careful listening uncovers the bare and banal meaning of this initially puzzling message, revealing its German and Yiddish origin as “Alte Sachen!” [old or second-hand merchandise]. Strauss the philologist links the combined semantic and phonetic elements of the Hebrew and German-Yiddish utterances: al tezaken and “Alte Sachen” not only sound similar but are both concerned with the idea of aging. In other words, what must have originally been a spontaneous confusion is substituted in the poem by an intentional linguistic transposition that partially aligns the meaning and sound of the source and target languages. Thus Strauss offers an utterance that reverberates the sound and meaning of all three languages. This practice once again reminds us of Bakhtin’s understanding of the parodic. According to Bakhtin, an author can make use of another individual’s word for his own purposes by inserting a “new semantic orientation” into a word that already has (and keeps) its own orientation. The two semantic orientations or voices are thus present in a single word.181 Parody and more specifically laughter are understood as ways of splitting, doubling and mocking or as decentralising forces that resist all dogma and unitary, monoglotic language. It is impossible for the author – and this we have seen in other poems of Small Night Watches – to claim absolute power over his voice or text.182 According to Bakhtin, in the comic novel the author’s relationship to language is in constant oscillation. The comic style demands of him a perpetual toing and froing in relation to language, constant (abrupt or gradual) shifts between the applied “common language” (such as “alte Sachen”), the direct authorial word and the parodic stylisation of generic languages (e.g. “shum nezek lo nigram”).183 Strauss’s use of “al tezaken” can be understood as a version of the Bakhtinian parodic, subversive utterance by breaking existing linguistic boundaries and merging several distinct languages and voices in a single utterance, thereby distancing the author from language and complicating his relationship to the literary language of his time.184 Linguistic manipulation as illustrated in the doubling of “al tezaken” – “alte Sachen” is not only a result of the creative powers expected of a poet but a common phenomenon in so-called Israeli Hebrew, which, according to some 180 Strauss explains that “al tesakén!” is the uncommon “Intensivkonjugation” rather than the simple form “al tiskan” thus displaying a keen interest in Hebrew grammar (Strauss, Kleine Nachtwachen (Schoken), 57). 181 See Dragan Kujundzic, “Laughter as Otherness in Bakhtin and Derrida,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. by Michael E. Gardiner, Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 4:39–60 (52). 182 Kujundzic, 42 and 49. 183 Bakhtin, 302. 184 Ibid., 309.

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linguists is hybrid by nature. The case of the so-called “multisourced neologism” is defined as “a neologism that preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the parallel expression” in the source language, by using pre-existent target language (which is in fact the second source language) lexemes or roots.185 As a result of its productive morphology, Israeli Hebrew lends itself easily to such transposition: it has consonantal roots that can be fitted into dozens of potential noun, verb and adjective patterns.186 Thus the producer of “phono-semantic matching” can easily find a pattern with a vowel sequence similar to that of the matched lexical item of the first source language.187 Yiddish and German are cited as two languages, which in combination give rise to “phonetical transposition” into Israeli Hebrew.188 In the written poem, it should be noted, the utterances are never merged into a single expression but retain their separate status. In causing “alte Sachen” and “al tezaken” to echo each other, Strauss first of all conducts the conversation in his poem between German, Yiddish and Hebrew. In this conversation Strauss also enacts the mutual mirroring of future and past, and of Zion and the Diaspora. These ideas conjure up elements in Rosenzweig’s essay “On the Spirit of the Hebrew Language”.189 Rosenzweig discusses the Hebrew language as a continuum between ceremonial and everyday language, between past and present. In his view, Hebrew remains forever young and always in “time-flow” [Zeitfluss]. He claims the terms “already” [schon], “still” [noch] and “no longer” [nicht mehr] as the great unrests in the “clock of world history”. This, he explains, is the language of the prophets for whom the future is not a “somewhere” but is rather “still in the making.” Due to this unrest the future does not let the past rest either by merely saying that “it was”.190 According to Rosenzweig this language is revolutionary, dynamic and constantly in the making, and as such it reflects history in all its upheavals. He thus writes that “we” inject into the scholarly, neatly commented world of facts “our revolutionary future”, which wears the gown of the past, which in turn wears the gown of the future 185 Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), 3. 186 Zuckermann (2003), 68. 187 Ibid. In another poem from the cycle Strauss uses the German plural form for Hebrew words to create “Chaluzzen” (from the Hebrew word ḥaluts or pioneer) and “Kwuzzen” (from the Hebrew word kvutsa meaning a communal agricultural settlement) (StGW III, 378). 188 Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Israelit safa yafa: az eize safa ha-israelim medabrim? [Israeli, A Beautiful Language: Hebrew as Myth] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008), 165 [Hebrew]. Zuckermann shows, moreover, that language purists wish to deny the existence of such hybrid transpositions by attempting to prove the etymology of the word from within the target language. 189 Rosenzweig, “Vom Geist der Hebräischen Sprache.” 190 Ibid., 720.



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and as such our “Werderuf” [creating word] of religious hope.191 This non-purist concept of language applies to German as well, for Rosenzweig claims that German Jews like himself speak their own German, a Jewish German, in which the rightful reverberations of Hebrew can be heard.192 However, the continuity between German and Hebrew reaches its limit in un-translatable Hebrew expressions, which Rosenzweig believes should be kept in the original.193 In Strauss’s lip-pair of “Alte Sachen!”– “al tezaken!” the linguistic and diachronic continuum extends to the spatial and cultural planes. The expression “Alte Sachen” represents a remnant of the East European Jewish peddler selling second-hand merchandise, and as such symbolises Jewish existence in the Diaspora. In contrast, the absurd order “al tezaken!” reflects the modern Zionist ethos of youth and renewal. In other words, Strauss lets the images of the Diaspora and the “new” Zion mirror each other and generates a continuum between the two. In line with his translations from Yiddish, which aim first and foremost to provide access to the world of the Ostjuden, Strauss dismisses neither the culture, nor the language of Ostjudentum, nor the rightful existence of the Diaspora Jew as such.194 He thus attempts not only to introduce the Yiddish language and culture to a German and German-Jewish readership but generally to link Yiddish with German and with Hebrew, and to create a connection between the various cultural experiences underlying these languages: the cultures of Ostjudentum and German Jewry in the Diaspora and the emerging yishuv in Palestine.195 At the same time, the parodic, humoristic aspects revealed in Small Night Watches suggest the poet as an innovative, creative philologist and cultural 191 Rosenzweig writes: “In die wissenschaftlich sauber auseinandergelegte Welt der ‘Gegebenheiten’ [setzen wir] unser revolutionäres ‫‘[ עתיד‬atid; future], das das Kleid der Vergangenheit, unser ‫‘[ עבר‬avar; past], das das Kleid der Zukunft trägt, unsern Werderuf der gläubigen Hoffnung” (ibid., 721). Similarly, “Das Hebräische ist mehr: es ist die Sprache in der die Einheit der Weltgeschichte überhaupt, der Gang von Anfang zum Ende, in die Welt gerufen ist und allein gerufen werden konnte. Und wir sind die Erben und Träger dieser Sprache. Wir sind die, die in Kraft dieser Sprache ihr ‘Noch nicht’ in die Geschichte hineinrufen. ‫[ יש תקווה‬yesh tikva; there is hope], es gibt noch eine Hoffnung und eine unerfüllte” (ibid., 721). 192 Ibid., 720. 193 Rosenzweig mentions, for example, the Hebrew expressions ‫[ מצוה‬mitsva] and ‫[ צדקה‬tsedaka], commonly translated as “commandment” and “charity”, respectively (ibid., 720). 194 See Strauss’s epilogue to his translations of Jizchak Leib Perez: Chassidische Erzählungen in StGW I, 532–536. This corresponds with Strauss’s political essays emphasizing the role of Ostjudentum in the context of Jewish revival. 195 It must be added that in the context of Strauss’s literary studies after emigration, he also wrote on Biblical and medieval Hebrew literature. See, for example, Strauss, ‘Al shlosha mizmorim mi-sefer tehilim [On Three Biblical Psalms] (Jerusalem: The Department For Child and Youth Immigration, 1954) [Hebrew].

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 Ludwig Strauss: Polyglot Dialogue and Parody

thinker rather than an appeasing mediator between languages and cultures, one who wishes to illuminate the complexities and conflicts inherent in such dialogue. In suggesting a continuum between Diaspora existence and Zionist revival in Palestine, between the heteroglot German and Hebrew languages, Strauss rebelled against a number of contemporary cultural and political agendas: against language purists from either side, against Jewish political extremism in Palestine and against the modern Zionist ethos of youth and renewal, which wished to sever the ties to Jewish Diaspora culture. The bi-lingual and polyvocal axis of the poems neither suggests nor produces a monstrous cacophony or harmonious polyphony. Instead, Strauss presents the essential complexity and fluidity of bi-lingual writing. This would confirm Tuvia Rübner’s claim that Strauss’s “bi-lingualism” [das Zweisprachige] should not be mistaken for comfortable appeasement or the attempt to achieve a “mild harmony”, with each side surrendering its character and essence.196 In other words, Strauss’s claim that he lives in both his languages, which echo each other, does not postulate reciprocal cancellation or neutralisation but rather denotes mutual permeation, which is neither cacophonous nor harmonious but of diverse potentialities.197 According to Rübner, Strauss never ceased to believe in language, which to him was “twin language” [Zwiesprache] of Jewish and German, Hebrew and German, German and Yiddish as well as the twin language of Palestinian landscape and German poetry as embodied in the volumes Land Israel and Small Night Watches.198 In the latter cycle his “twin language” is complemented by an intricate bi-lingualism. The intentional complexity of Strauss’s bi-lingual poems, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, undermines any suggestions of a crisis-free and stable existence in two worlds.199

196 Rübner, “Zwei Sprachen,” 97–117 (98, 101). Dialogism in the Bakhtinian understanding can be interpreted as a field of conflictual and conflicting discourses rather than as a Gadamerian conversation of fusion and symbiosis (See Wlad Godzich, “Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions,” in Bakhtin, 2:3–13 (13). 197 Rübner, “Zwei Sprachen,” 101. 198 Ibid., 112. 199 Kraft quoted in StGW III, 791.



Conclusion 

 169

3 Conclusion In a 1952 newspaper tribute to Strauss on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Leah Goldberg discusses his Hebrew poetry volume Hours and Generation (Sha’ot va-dor). Goldberg quotes Strauss’s observation that “the Hebrew language had chosen him.”200 This short, simple statement captures Strauss’s more complex approach to Hebrew, German and language in general. The conviction that the Hebrew language had chosen him (rather than it being chosen by the poet) reflects Strauss’s belief in the transcendental origin of language and poetry, both of which find their realisation in the poet’s work. Strauss reflected on these ideas in his poetological treatises, which were inspired by Buber’s dialogical thinking, Hölderlin’s poetry and thought, and psychologistic associations reminiscent of later reader-response theories. Influential was also Strauss’s political awareness, which contributed to the recognition of his fate as a German Jew. In Germany, nascent aspects of Strauss’s bi-lingualism emerged in his theoretical and political writings, and in his novella The Mediator. The latter skilfully weaves Yiddish into the German text, thereby acting as a precursor to the bi-lingual poems written after emigration. According to Goldberg, Strauss was like a pioneer who approached without detour the soil of the land and its language. It was, Goldberg explains, the “tongue of the cypress tree” and of medieval Jewish poetry that spoke to him.201 In Jerusalem, Kibbutz Hazorea, in the youth village of Ben-Shemen, Strauss wrote his bi-lingual verses, reflected on the polyglot environment of the yishuv and composed his Hebrew poems. This heterogeneous, polyglot endeavour was not crisis-free, nor did Strauss portray it as such. The parodic tone of Small Night Watches, which at first sight strikes us as lighthearted and humorous, in fact relativises prevalent political dogmas and linguistic canons related to Strauss’s German-Jewish identity and to the political and linguistic tensions in contemporary Palestine. At closer examination, Strauss’s strenuous Goldberg translations reveal the difficulties of linguistic and literary dislocation. Buber poignantly claimed that Strauss’s unique bi-lingualism, namely his continued writing in German and his new poetic creations of Hebrew poetry after emigration, represents a significant turning point in the history of ideas:

200 Leah Goldberg, “‘Al ha-mas’a la-or shel ha-meshorer ariye ludwig strauss: le-yovelo hashishim [Arie Ludwig Strauss’s Journey to the Light: On his Sixtieth Birthday],” ‘Al hamishmar, 21 October 1952, 5 [Hebrew]. 201 Ibid. Goldberg rightly points to the German poetry volume Land Israel, which was conceived after Strauss’s first visit to Palestine and before his final settlement there.

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 Ludwig Strauss: Polyglot Dialogue and Parody

the exodus of the Jewish spirit from German culture.202 In examining the writings of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss it is crucial to consider the cataclysmic historical developments that followed the Nazi ascent to political power, namely, the flight and systematic persecution and murder of millions of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust. Yet my examination shows that these catastrophic events did not result in a clear-cut exodus of the Jewish spirit from German culture. As the cases of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss demonstrate, this exodus was as complex and intricate a process as the fluid hyphenated identity, the cultural and linguistic “inbetweeness” of German Jews before 1933. With the help of their unique counterlanguages, all three writers defied simplified dichotomies such as German and Jewish, exodus and homecoming.

202 Buber, Werkausgabe, 6:89.

Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language

Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language

Averting one’s eyes is, in the final resort, the easiest and most pleasant means, although an illusory one, of escape from danger; in situations where keeping one’s eyes open constitutes the danger there really exists no securer refuge, and “Moses did well to conceal his face.”1 (Haim N. Bialik)

In the 1915 Hebrew essay “Revealment and Concealment in Language” Haim N. Bialik argues that language has been reduced to a barrier against a great, dark void, which humanity cannot confront without endangering itself. Bialik discusses the reduction of language to a form of concealment in a combination of modernist, nihilist and traditional Jewish vocabularies of tehom [abyss] and blima [void].2 These metaphors call to mind Scholem’s 1926 letter to Rosenzweig, a resemblance confirmed by the parallel images of volcano and abyss in Scholem’s letter and Bialik’s statement that “some words were like high mountains of the lord, others were a great abyss”.3 Indeed, both texts, whose comparison would merit a separate discussion, engage with the concealing and distracting powers of fallen language and the blindness of its speakers. While in this particular essay Bialik avoids the national perspective in favour of a metaphysical one, Scholem’s 1926 letter explicitly dwells on the danger of reducing sacred Hebrew to a national vernacular of everyday communication, thereby stressing the ways in which empirical and theological issues are deeply entwined in the Hebrew language.4 In general, my discussion of approaches to language uncovers a simultaneous engagement with the correlated metaphorical and cultural-political aspects of language in the counter-writs of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss. The metaphor of blindness and its relation to forms of written dissent makes for a palpable turn to Israeli Mizrahi poetry of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Mizrahi discussions on the politics of language in Israel repeatedly replace the original letter ‫[ ב‬vet] in the word ‫‘[ עברית‬ivrit; Hebrew lan1 Bialik, 133. An interesting comparison between the idea of the metaphoricity of language in Bialik and in Nietzsche’s “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” appears in Yadin Azzan, “A Web of Chaos: Bialik and Nietzsche on Language, Truth and the Death of God,” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 179–203. 2 See Robert Alter, introduction to Bialik, 127. My use of the expression “the eyes of language” in the title of the conclusion alludes to Derrida’s article “The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano”, which is discussed in relation to Scholem’s 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig in Chapter 1. 3 Bialik, 130. 4 Alter, introduction to Bialik, 127.

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 Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language

guage] with the letter ‫[ ו‬vav] to generate ‫עיוורית‬.5 While the pronunciation remains ‘ivrit, the alternative spelling incorporates the adjective ‫[ עיוור‬blind] to create the hybrid neologism ‫ עיוורית‬or “blind Hebrew language”.6 Modern Hebrew in Israel is thus defined as a flattened or historically and culturally blind language.7 Recognised as a founding father of Israeli Mizrahi poetry, Erez Biton was born to Moroccan Jewish parents in Algeria in 1942 and emigrated to Israel in 1948. An accident at the age of eleven left him permanently blind, and Biton’s poetry employs a combination of actual and metaphorical blindness in order to break down existing categories that distinguish between “Israeliness” and “Moroccanness”. Blindness is thus used to undo the hegemonic order in favour of an envisioned “Mediterranean” culture.8 Biton’s poetry has been described as a constant movement of exploration in the darkness of the Mediterranean basin in search for new definitions.9 While certain scenes in Biton’s poetry picture a child subjected to blindness10, in general the poet emerges as a “blind-seeing” subject of ultimate authority who causes disorder in real and metaphorical spaces of categorisation and who reclaims the Moroccan identity initially lost together with his sight.11 Cancelling the dichotomy between hegemonic Israeli and Moroccan immigrant cultures and identities reflects the centrality of migration and exile in Biton’s poetry, partly expressed in bi-lingual writing. Moroccan is present alongside Hebrew as “rubbles” of language for it is performed and translated into Hebrew in various ways such as parenthesis, footnotes and phrases.12 Scholars avoid reducing Biton’s poetry in general and his use of Moroccan in particular, to a form of mere protest to Israeli Hebrew canon and acknowledge it as a defiant work of

5 Hebrew writing without diacritics uses the double-“vav” and “yod” for pronunciation. 6 The Hebrew word for “blindness” [‘ivaron] has alternatively been spelt with a “vet” rather than a “vav” to create the parallel hybrid noun “Hebrew blindness”. 7 See, for example, Clarice Harbon, “Ba‘ateti ba-‘ivrit [I Kicked the ‘Blind Hebrew’],” Haaretz, 28 May 2010, Culture and Literature, 3 [Hebrew]. 8 Hadas Shabat-Nadir, “‘Yeled bli panim’: ‘al ha-‘ivaron be-shirat erez biton [“A Boy without a Face”: On Blindness in Erez Biton’s Poetry],” in Ana min al-magrab: kriot be-shirat erez biton [I am from the Maghreb: Reading Erez Biton’s Poetry], ed. by Ktzia Alon and Yochai Oppenheimer (Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Hameuchad, 2014), 115–146 (115–117) [Hebrew]. 9 Ibid., 117. 10 For example, in the poem “lihiyot oreg” (“Being a Weaver”) as quoted in Shabat-Nadir, 118– 119. 11 Ibid., 120–121. 12 Haviva Pedaya, “Erez biton: poetika shel hagira, modusim poetiyim ve-modusim shel ‘ani’ [Erez Biton: Poetics of Migration, Poetical Modes and Modes of the ‘I’],” in Reading Biton, 61–78 (64, 68) [Hebrew]. See, for example, Biton’s poems “taktsir siḥa” (“Summary of a Conversation”) or “imi meshadelet tsipor” (“My Mother Calling a Bird”) as quoted in Pedaya, 66.



Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language 

 173

art that links the local with the universal.13 As such Biton’s poetry is claimed as a radical alternative to the predominant ethos of Modern Hebrew poetry, which wished to break with religious tradition, with the languages of the Diaspora and with Arab culture.14 In contrast, Biton’s poetry does not seek disconnection with the past, but rather attempts a constant reappraisal of the moments of migration and crisis. Moroccan Arabic in Biton’s poetry is therefore not mere protest within the Israeli context, it is much more a continuation of Moroccan, bi-lingual metruz poetry.15 Among the younger generation of Israeli Mizrahi poets you find Viki Shiran, Mois Ben-Harosh, Sami Shalom Chetrit or Clarice Harbon, the latter of whom describes how she “kicked ‘blind Hebrew’” following the process of linguistic acculturation imposed on Mizrahi or Arab-Jewish immigrants in Israel. Her parents’ generation had internalised non-Arabic pronunciation of Hebrew and Harbon herself grew up feeling exiled in this Hebrew language, for it contained nothing of “her own”.16 She “fled” to the English-speaking environment of the United States in order to escape the constant delegitimisation of her linguistic resistance which she experienced in Israel. In the USA she was content with the safety of a double foreignness: foreign in a new place and estranged from Hebrew. According to her account, creating in English allowed her to deal with the pain of feeling foreign within the Hebrew language, since it freed her from its monopoly. This process enabled Harbon to gradually create in Hebrew again. “This time, however,” explains Harbon, “Hebrew did not squeeze me into its measurements. Instead, I modified it to suit my new, liberated dimensions.”17 As a second-generation immigrant, Harbon thus set the opposite process in motion that her parents had undergone. In order to return to Hebrew and its Arabic affiliation, and connect to a Hebrew of “her own”, she had to carry the hidden (Moroccan) Hebrew of her parents back overseas and even further west than its origin. She describes how she confined the “blind Hebrew” imposed upon her and instead liberated the Hebrew she and her parents had been forced to hide and abandon. Explicitly contrasting herself to Yehuda Halevi, Harbon claims that she did not discover her Eastern (literally mizrahi) heart in the East, but found it in the West 13 Ibid., 61. 14 Almog Behar, “‘Bo min ha-pina el bamat ha-bamot’: ‘al ha-leshonot be-shirato shel erez biton [‘Emerge from the Corner to Centre Stage’: On the Languages in Erez Biton’s Poetry],” in Reading Biton, 147–194 (184–185) [Hebrew]. 15 Ibid., 186. Metruz is North-African bilingual poerty that combines Hebrew and Arabic. See, for example, Efraim Hazan, “Ha-rek’a ha-du-leshoni le-tsmihat shirey metruz (rikma) be-tsfon-afrika [The Diglossic Backround of Metruz Poetry in North Africa],” Peamim 30 (1987): 23–30 [Hebrew]. 16 Harbon,“Ba‘ateti ba-‘ivrit”. 17 Ibid. My translation.

174 

 Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language

and with the help of English. The mixing up of East and West is amplified by her descent from the Maghreb, which specifically denotes Morocco but derives from the Arabic word for west. The poetic accounts of Biton and Harbon express deliberate albeit painful forms of reterritorialisation of a Moroccan Hebrew within the contexts of Israel and the USA, respectively. Through “double foreignness” and a blindness-turned-alternative-vision the poets challenge existing ideas about East and West, and redefine the concepts of mother tongue and homeland by describing their relationship as highly conflictual, hybrid and dynamic. The analogies to the relationship of German Jews to German and Hebrew are self-evident, and my brief turn to Mizrahi poetry in Israel responds in part to the want of what Derrida called a “Sephardic version” of the German-Jewish discourse on language, monolingualism and the “language of the host”.18 As we have seen, German-Jewish ideas of home, exile and mother tongue reveal uneasy struggles, attempts to reterritorialise German in Palestine and later Israel in the face of the Nazification of language in Germany, as well as resistance to the linguistic agendas of political Zionism by way of bilingual poetry or through the return to a Hebrew that incorporates a subterranean tradition of silence and lament. In Bialik, Scholem and Mizrahi poets like Biton and Harbon the metaphor of blindness gives diverse expression to the predicaments of language as such and of Modern Hebrew in particular. Yet ‘ivrit is equally perceived as deaf. The Mizrahi discourse resists denial of the Arabic and Sephardi heritages, a denial at its most symptomatic in terms of pronunciation (for example the non-pronunciation of the guttural letters ‘ayn and ḥet in favour of ayn and khet). As we have seen, the rejection and elimination of dialects in favour of a purist, standardised, literary High German was similarly resisted in the writings of Strauss and Kraft. Moreover, Strauss emphasised the audial aspect or spokenness of poetry, indebted partly to the dialogical ideas of Buber. In a short text on Stefan George Strauss depicts the audial experience of poetry as a formative linguistic event. Strauss describes how, when hiking in the high mountains, “it sometimes happened that in the thin air my ear perceived all the sounds damped.” He became mindful of this light dampening just as he descended into thicker air and the “stream, which up to then rustled lightly and quietly” next to him suddenly “announced itself with full boom” to the re-opened ear causing fright as if from sudden lightning. “As a boy”, concludes Strauss, “I likewise heard with joy and fright the formerly 18 In Monolingualism of the Other Derrida asks what the Sephardi version of Rosenzweig’s reflections on the question of Jews and “their” foreign language would be. See Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other Or: The Prothesis of Origin, trans. by Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 79.



Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language 

 175

dull sounds of language when I read, only half understanding, verses of George for the first time.” 19 Bialik’s essay similarly chooses the audial experience of thunder as a primary linguistic event, albeit in an attempt to describe the initial process of human naming in general.20 In Scholem the “ears” of language, like its “eyes”, are elevated to a transcendental sphere by underlining the subterranean, silent aspect of language and of Hebrew in particular. In Strauss silence is equated with darkness or night, as in his poem “Edge of Silence”, with which I opened my introduction. Yet at the edge of silence and night emerge the word and the shape rather than a dangerous void. Thus the edge or meeting point between silence and word remain an originary, productive axis. In Kraft’s view the great flood of history, in the form of linguistic oblivion, can be prevented precisely by discussing the crisis of language rather than ignoring or concealing it. In their individual understandings of a “benighted age”, the subjects of my study perceived contemporary language as at least partially blind and deaf to its sacred and transcendental sources, and to its pluralistic heritage. At the same time they believed that language also held the key to its own restitution and affirmed poets as the guardians and evokers of suppressed language. Bialik makes the common distinction between communicative and poetic language to assert this task of the poet: “The masters of poetry are forced to flee all that is fixed and inert in language. […] Using their unique keys, they are obliged themselves to introduce into language at every opportunity – never-ending motion, new combinations and associations. The words writhe in their hands; they are extinguished and lit again.”21 The above discussions on blind language and blind ‘ivrit capture, I would argue, central questions examined in this book. As German Jews and as writers, Scholem, Kraft and Strauss partook in the broader discourse of the “vernacular nation” and, as such, ascribed to language a critical role in forming the identity of a nation and the integration of minorities or immigrant communities. The conflictual and productive character of the linguistic narrative of the GermanHebrew contact zones is substantiated by the counter-writs of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss. For their counterlanguages engage with phenomena such language revival, language standardisation and purism, and linguistic adaptation, both before and after emigration. Moreover, the writings of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss illustrate the tensions between and mutual permeation of the ideas of 19 Ludwig Straus, ‘Wintersaat’, in StGW I, 274. 20 Bialik, 131. On the relationship between sensory perception and the development of language at the turn of the twentieth century, see, for example, Ernst Mach, Die Principien der Wärmelehre: Historisch-kritisch entwickelt (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1896), 406–432. 21 Bialik, 136–137.

176 

 Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language

sacred and secular language, tradition and modernity, past and present, exile (or diaspora) and home, between mother tongue and acquired language. The movements between both languages break down existing definitions and boundaries in attempts to recover, reformulate, restore and redeem language from its multiple fall. Edward Said describes a condition in which the exilic writer or intellectual is constantly in suspension, “curmudgeonly disagreeable” and resistant to accommodation. This definition helps in denoting the existence of uneasy, conflictual and crisis-prone qualities and intentions in negotiating between the multiple identities and languages of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss. Here Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia assists in understanding the volatile, hybrid, dialogical and conflictual conditions he ascribes to modern culture and language and to the language of the novel.22 As I have shown, other genres of writing may equally express this volatile state, and the hope of transcending or resolving it. These forms include Scholem’s apophatic and apocalyptic texts on the languages of lamentation and retaliation, Kraft’s reterritorialising efforts encapsulated, among others, in his post-war monographs on Karl Kraus and Rudolf Borchardt, and Strauss’s parodic, bi-lingual poetry. The idea of counterlanguage has contributed to recognising the defiant, performative potential in concrete languages and in the particular texts examined. Individualised, partial language crises as a result of the specific contemporary usages of German and Hebrew were overcome by pertinent counter-writs. It can therefore be argued that crisis, as a turning point, was seized as an opportunity for re-volt, re-turn, re-birth.23 Likewise, linguistic dislocation entailed the capacity to arrest or liberate the creative and defiant qualities inherent in language. Dislocation meant that the dynamics “between German and Hebrew” were transferred to the entirely new linguistic setting of the yishuv. This rupture amplified and accentuated existing linguistic ideas. The counteractive ideas that Scholem, Kraft and Strauss pursued during their youth and early adulthood in Germany reached a new intensity after emigration. Their confrontation with Modern Hebrew in the streets of Jerusalem and in the kibbutz was stark, and the separation from the German-speaking environment incisive.

22 Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” I39–136. See, as mentioned earlier, also the idea of homelessness, for example, as reflected in the form of the novel discussed by Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans. 23 On the semantic chain of “re-” as in re-turn, re-birth, re-surrection, with respect to language in the discussion of Scholem’s 1926 letter to Rosenzweig, see Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” 208–209.



Conclusion: The Eyes and Ears of Language 

 177

Bialik’s metaphor of the “ice-walker” captures this linguistic condition.24 In contemplating the situation of the poets, Bialik asks to what the poet may be compared: “To one who crosses the river when it is breaking up, by stepping across floating, moving blocks of ice. He dare not set his foot on any one block for longer than a moment, longer than it takes him to leap from one block to the next, and so on. Between the breaches the void looms, the foot slips, danger is close …”25 Some poets, continues Bialik “‘enter in peace and leave in peace,’ crossing in safety from one shore to the other, ‘for the Lord preserveth not merely the simple’.”26 The potential wakefulness and consciousness of the poets in the face of a threatening void is not necessarily self-destructive. Here, himself in the role of the poet, Bialik employs a traditional Jewish vocabulary in order to undo it. He relativises the high risk attributed to “entering the pardes [orchard]”, or mystical union with the divine,27 and contradicts the Biblical Psalm that states “the Lord preserveth the simple”.28 It is precisely this continuous movement above, between and beyond the “breaches” that generates the counterlanguages of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss.

24 The image of the “ice-walker” may in turn evoke the figure of the tightrope dancer in Nietz­ sche and Kafka. Kafka alludes to the image of the tightrope walker in his 1921 letter to Max Brod and in connection with the “impossibilities” encountered by the German-Jewish writer (Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, ed. by Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 337–338 (338)). In Nietzsche the image of the tightrope and the figure dancing on it appears in “Zarathustras Vor­ rede,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 4, Also sprach Zarathustra I–IV (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), 3–22 (10–11). On a discussion of existentialist ideas underlying the image of the tightrope walker, as found for example in Nietzsche, Kafka and Klee, see Janice McCullagh, “The Tightrope Walker: An Expressionist Image,” The Art Bulletin 66 (1984), 633–644. 25 Bialik, 137. 26 Ibid. 27 Bialik alludes to the Babylonian aggadah about four rabbis who entered the pardes (in search of a mystical union with the divine) and only one of them returned alive and well. See John Bowker, “Pardes,” in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) www.oxfordreference.com (accessed 22 September 2011). 28 Psalms 116.6.

Appendices Appendix A Dank des Übersetzers an die Dichterin Von Ludwig Strauss Aus heiliger Sprache brach dein leises Lied Wie leicht! So bricht aus alten Baumes Stamme Des Frühlinglaubes leise, helle Flamme, Die ihn mit jungem Leben überzieht. Wer führte so wie du den Schmerz zum Tanze, Wer machte so wie du das Schwerste schweben Und löst der Tiefe Ringen, Rauschen, Beben In eines Frauenlächelns weichem Glanze? Und mir, in meinen beiden Sprachen lebend, Der einen aus der andern Echo gebend – Wie horchten beide auf bei deinem Tone! Wie über alten Baumes dunkle Krone Das flügelleichte, lichte Grün im März, So kam mir deine Sprache übers Herz.1

Appendix B Ein Alter stieg heute herab meine Stufen, Hat in hundert Tönen ein Wort gerufen, Gesagt, gesungen, geschnarrt, geschallt In vielerlei wechselnder Gestalt. Erst klang mirs wie “al tesakén!” ins Ohr – Aufschrak ich und lauschte erstaunt empor. Wie kommt solche Botschaft mir von der Straße Und noch geweiht in besonderem Maße Durch den eigens erfundenen Intensiv? Doch als der Alte wiederum rief, Da verstand ich nur “alte Sachen!” Und aus dem Staunen wurde Lachen. Doch heiße sie immer auch missverstanden, Die Botschaft wird dran nicht zuschanden. Und mag ers, wie ers meinte, halten – Mir gilt sein Mahnwort: nicht veralten!2 1 StGW III, 543. 2 Ibid., 375–376.

Bibliography 1 Archival Sources Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. [Untitled typescript]. Archive 4° 1599/277-I/56c. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Bemerkungen über Hebräisch und Hebräischlernen.” Archive 4° 1599/277-I/25. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Januar 1925: Dasselbe wie stets.” Archive 4° 1599/277-I/54. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Nachwort.” Archive 4° 1599/277-I/59. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Sprachbekenntnis.” Archive 4˚ 1599/277-I/56. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Die Verzweiflung der Siegenden.” Archive 4° 1599/277-I/57. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Gershom Scholem. “Der Zionismus wird seine Katastrophe überleben.” Archive 4° 1599/277-I/52. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Leah Goldberg Archive, Archive 4 ° 1655. Jerusalem, The National Library of Israel. Ludwig Strauss Archive (LSA). Arc. Ms. Var. 424/1. Jerusaelm, The National Library of Israel. Werner Kraft. Letters to Gershom Scholem. ARC. 4° 1599/ 01/1457/1 and 2. Marbach, Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA). Werner Kraft. Letters to Rudolf Borchardt. A: Borchardt. HS.1990.0008.

2 Published Sources Works by Werner Kraft

Kraft, Werner. 36 Zeitgenossen. Bonn: Heusch, 1985. —. Carl Gustav Jochmann und sein Kreis: Zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte zwischen Aufklärung und Vormärz. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1972. —. Der Chandos Brief und andere Aufsätze über Hofmannsthal. Darmstadt: Agora Verlag, 1977. —. Introduction to Die Rückschritte der Poesie und andere Schriften, by Carl Gustav Jochmann, edited by Werner Kraft. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1967. 7–32. —. “Else Lasker-Schüler in den Tagebüchern von Werner Kraft 1923–1945.” Selected by Volker Kahmen. In Else Lasker-Schüler 1869–1945, edited by Erika Klüsener and Friedrich Pfäfflin. Marbacher Magazin 71. Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1995. 337–362. —. Figur der Hoffnung: Ausgewählte Gedichte 1925–1935. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1955. —. Franz Kafka: Durchdringung und Geheimnis. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968. —. Gespräche mit Martin Buber. Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1966. —. Herz und Geist: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur deutschen Literatur. Vienna and Cologne: Böhlau, 1989.

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—. Ich bin an meinen Punkt gebannt: Werner Kraft im Gespräch mit Jörg Drews. Munich: edition text+kritik, 1978. —. Karl Kraus: Beiträge zum Verständnis seines Werkes. Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1956. —, ed. Karl Kraus: Eine Einführung in sein Werk und eine Auswahl. Schriftenreihe der Klasse der Literatur: Verschollene und Vergessene. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1952. —. Kleinigkeiten. Bonn: Georg Heusch, 1985. —. Afterword to Gesammelte Werke, Else Lasker-Schüler, edited by Werner Kraft. Vol. 3, Verse und Prosa aus dem Nachlass. Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1961. 149–165. —. “Die Päpstin Johanna: Eine motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung.” PhD diss., University of Frankfurt a.M., 1925. —. Rebellen des Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968. —. Rudolf Borchardt: Welt aus Poesie und Geschichte. Hamburg: Claassen, 1961. —. Spiegelung der Jugend. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. —. “Von Paris nach Jerusalem: Aus den Tagebüchern von Werner Kraft; 1933–1936.” Selected by Volker Kahmen. In Werner Kraft 1896–1991, edited by Jörg Drews. Marbacher Magazin 75. Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1996. 51–64. —. Wiederfinden: Deutsche Poesie und Prosa. Selected by Werner Kraft. Veröffentlichung der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 4. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1954. —. Der Wirrwarr. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1960. —. Wort aus der Leere: Ausgewählte Gedichte. Jerusalem: Manfred Rotschild, 1937. —. Zeit aus den Fugen: Aufzeichnungen. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1968.

Works by Gershom Scholem

Scholem, Gershom. “Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache” (1926). Reprinted in Stéphane Mosès. Der Engel der Geschichte: Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994. 215–217. —. “Bilar (Bilad, Bilid) melekh ha-shedim [Bilar (Bilad, Bilid), King of the Demons].” Mada’ei ha-yahadut 1 (1925): 112–127 [Hebrew]. —. Briefe an Werner Kraft. Edited by Werner Kraft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. —. Dvarim be-go: pirkei moreshet u-teḥiya [Explications and Implications: Writings on Jewish Heritage and Renaissance]. Edited and compiled by Avraham Shapira. 2d ed. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1976 [Hebrew]. —. Mi-berlin le-yerushalayim [From Berlin to Jerusalem]. Jerusalem: Am Oved, 1982 [Hebrew]. —. Von Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen. Trans. by Michael Brocke. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1997. —. The Fullness of Time: Poems. Edited by Steven M. Wasserstrom and Richard Sieburth. Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2003. —. “Das hebräische Buch: Eine Rundfrage.” Jüdische Rundschau, 4 April 1928, 202. —. Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. Edited by Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. —. Judaica. 6 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1963–1997. —. Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem 1913–1919. Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2007.



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—. A Life in Letters 1914–1982. Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. —. “The Name of God and the Theory of Language in the Kabbalah.” Translated by Simon Pleasance. Diogenes 79&80 (1972): 59–194. —. “On Our Language: A Confession.” Translated by Ora Wiskind. In Stéphane Mosès. The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem. Translated by Benjamin Harshav. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. 168–169. —. Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1975. —. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

Works by Ludwig Strauss

Briefwechsel: Martin Buber – Ludwig Strauss 1913–1953. Edited by Tuvia Rübner and Dafna Mach. Frankfurt a.M.: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1990. Strauss, Ludwig. Kleine Nachtwachen: Sprüche in Versen. Bücherei des Schocken Verlags 83. Berlin: Schocken, 1937. —. ‘Al shlosha mizmorim mi-sefer tehilim [On Three Biblical Psalms]. Jerusalem: The Department For Child and Youth Immigration, 1954 [Hebrew]. —. Sha’ot va-dor: shirim [Hours and Generation: Poems]. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1951 [Hebrew]. —. Be-darkei ha-sifrut: ‘iyunim be-sifrut israel u-be sifrut he-‘amim [Studies in Literature]. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1975 [Hebrew].

Works by Other Authors

Achad Ha’am. Am Scheidewege: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Translated by Israel Friedländer. 2 vols. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1916. Alon, Ktzia, and Yochai Oppenheimer, eds. Ana min al-magreb: kriot be-shirat erez biton. [I am from the Maghreb: Reading Erez Biton’s poetry]. Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Hameuchad, 2014 [Hebrew]. Alter, Robert. Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. —. “Scholem and Modernism.” Poetics Today 15/3 (1994): 429–442. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Arntzen, Helmut. “Die Kraus-Rezeption nach 1945: Eine Typologie.” In Reading Karl Kraus: Essays on the Reception of “Die Fackel”, edited by Gilbert J. Carr and Edward Timms. Munich: Iudicium, 2001. 173–182. Aschheim, Steven. Scholem, Klemperer, Arendt: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Avon, Dan. “Limmud and Limmudim: Guiding Words of Buber’s Prophetic Teachings.” In Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Syracuse University Press, 2002. 101–119. Azzan, Yadin. “A Web of Chaos: Bialik and Nietzsche on Language; Truth and the Death of God.” Prooftexts 21 (2001): 179–203.

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 Bibliography

Bab, Julius. “Der Anteil der Juden an der deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart.” Kölnische Zeitung, 17 December 1911, 1–2. Reprinted in Mitteilungen des Verbandes der jüdischen Jugendvereine Deutschlands, 3/12 (1912), 3–9. —. “Assimilation.” Die Freistatt 1/3 (1913/14): 171–176. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259–422. Barouch, Lina. “The Erasure and Endurance of Lament: Gershom Scholem’s Early Critique of Zionism and Its Language.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 21/1 (2014): 13–26. —, “Heim(at)liche Nacht. Die mehrsprachigen Gedichte Ludwig Strauss’ aus den Jahren 1936 bis 1937 in Palästina,” Exilforschung 32 (2014): 259–275. —. “Hölderlin in Jerusalem: Buber and Strauss on Poetry and the Limits of Dialogue.” Naharaim 8/2 (2014): 289–307. —. “Lamenting Language Itself: Gershom Scholem on the Silent Language of Lamentation.” New German Critique 111 (2010): 1–26. —. “Ludwig Strauss: Polyglossia and Parody in Palestine.” Naharaim 6/1 (2012): 121–147. Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940. Edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. —. Gesammelte Briefe. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Vol. 1, 1910–1918. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. —. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989. —. Selected Writings. Edited by Markus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Betten, Anne, and Miryam Du-nour, eds. Sprachbewahrung nach der Emigration – Das Deutsch der 20er Jahre in Israel: Texte und Untersuchungen zum gesprochenen Deutsch. Phonai 45. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000. —. Wir sind die Letzten: Fragt uns aus; Gespräche mit den Emigranten der dreißiger Jahre in Israel. Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1995. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. 2d ed. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982. —. “Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary.” Modern Judaism 5/1 (1985): 67–93. Bialik, Haim N. “Revealment and Concealment in Language.” Translated by Jacob Sloan. Introduced by Robert Alter. In Modern Hebrew Literature, edited by Robert Alter. New York: Behrman House, 1975. 127–137. Bieman, Asher. Introduction to Werkausgabe, by Martin Buber, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäfer. Vol. 6, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, edited by Asher Bieman. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003. 9–68. Bodine, Jay. “Karl Kraus’s Conception of Language.” Modern Austrian Literature 8 (1975): 267–314. Bonaventura. Nachtwachen [1804]. Leipzig: Reclam, 1990. Borchardt, Rudolf. Gesammelte Briefe. Edited by Gerhard Schuster and Hans Zimmermann. Vol. 5, 1924–1930. Munich: Edition Tenschert bei Hanser, 1995.



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—. Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden. Edited by Marie Luise Borchardt and Herbert Steiner. 12 vols. Stuttgart: Klett und Klett-Cotta, 1955–2003. Breden, Ulrich. “Werner Kraft in der ‘Vormals Königlichen und Provinzialbibliothek Hannover’ 1928–1933.” In Werner Kraft 1896–1991, edited by Jörg Drews. Marbacher Magazin 75. Marbach a.N.: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1996. 28–34. —. Werner Kraft (1896–1991): Bibliothekar und Schriftsteller. Kleine Schriften der Niedersächsischen Landesbibliothek 1. Hildesheim: August Lax, 1992. Brender, Edwige. “‘Neither as a Cowboy nor as a Goldhunter, but Simply as a Refugee’: Franz Werfel’s Debate with his American Publishers, Translators and Adapters.” In Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, edited by Alexander Stephan. Exile Studies 11. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. 97–119. Brenner, Michael, ed. Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. —. Introduction to Münchener Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur: Zur historischen Gestalt Gershom Scholems 2 (2007): 5–8. —. The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Breuer, Dieter. Zur Poesieauffassung von Ludwig Strauss. In Ludwig Strauss 1892–1953, edited by Hans Otto Horch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995. 77–87. Brod, Harry. “The German-Jewish Hyphen: Conjunct, Disjunct or Adjunct?” In Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity, edited by Roy Jerome. New York: SUNY Press, 2001. 91–103. Buber, Martin. “Biblical Humanism (1933).” In The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, edited by Asher Bieman. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2002. 46–50. —. Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten. Edited by Grete Schaeder. Vol. 1, 1897–1918. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1972. —. Die Chassidischen Bücher. Hellerau: Jakob Hegner, 1928. —. Daniel. In Werke. Vol. 1, Schriften zur Philosophie. Munich and Heidelberg: Kösel / Lambert Schneider, 1962. 9–76. —. Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr. Translated by Esther Cameron. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univesity Press, 1985. —. Ekstatische Konfessionen. 2d rev. ed. Berlin: Schocken, 1923. —. “Die hebräische Sprache.” Jüdische Rundschau: Allgemeine Jüdische Zeitung, 15/2, 14 January 1910, 13–14 and 15/3, 21 January 1910, 25–26. —, ed. Jiskor: Ein Buch des Gedenkens an gefallene Wächter und Arbeiter im Lande Israel. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1918. —. Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden. Cologne: Joseph Melzer, 1963. —. “Die Losung.” Der Jude 1 (1916): 1–3. —. “The Language of Botschaft.” In Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig: Scripture and Translation. Translated by Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. 27–39. —. The Tales of Rabbi Nachman. Translated by Maurice Friedman. New York: Avon, 1956. —. Werkausgabe. Edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäfer. Vol. 6, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, edited by Asher Bieman. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003. Buber, Martin, and Franz Rosenzweig. Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung. Berlin: Schocken, 1936. Buck, Theo. Muttersprache, Mördersprache. Celan-Studien 1. Aachen: Rimbaud, 1993.

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Ferber, Ilit, and Paula Schwebel, eds. Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter 2014. Fischer, Jens Malte. “Rudolf Borchardt – Autobiographie und Judentum.” In Rudolf Borchardt 1877–1945: Referate des Pisaner Colloquiums, edited by Horst Albert Glaser. Akten internationaler Kongresse auf den Gebieten der Ästhetik und der Literaturwissenschaft 4. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1987. 29–48. Funkenstein, Amos. “The Dialetics of Assimilation.” Jewish Social Studies 1/2 (1995): 1–14. Gelber, Mark H. “Deutsch-zionistische Literaten im ‘Heimat-Exil’.” In Deutsch-jüdische Exil- und Emigrationsliteratur im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Itta Shedletzky and Hans Otto Horch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993. 95–110. —. “The Hebraic Poetics of German Cultural Zionism: an ‘Umlaut’ over the ‘Vav’.” In Integration und Ausgrenzung, edited by Mark H. Gelber, Jakob Hessing and Robert Jütte. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009. 171–180. George, Stefan. Gesamtausgabe der Werke: Endgültige Fassung. Vol. 10/11, Dante: Die Göttliche Komödie; Übertragungen. Berlin: Bondi, 1932. Gilman, Sander L. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Godzich, Wlad. “Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions.” In Mikhail Bakhtin, edited by Michael E. Gardiner. Vol. 2, Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought. London: Sage, 2003. 3–13. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Die Wahlverwandschaften.” In Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften. Vol. 6, Erzählende Dichtungen. Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1958. 305–594. Goldberg, Leah. “‘Al ha-mas’a la-or shel ha-meshorer arie ludwig strauss: le-yovelo ha-shishim [Arie Ludwig Strauss’s Journey to the Light: On his Sixtieth Birthday].” ‘Al Hamishmar, 21 October 1952, 5 [Hebrew]. —. Ktavim [Writings], ed. by Tuvia Rübner, rev. ed. Vol. 2. Bnei Brak: Sifriat Poalim, 2009 [Hebrew]. Göttsche, Dirk. Die Produktivität der Sprachkrise in der modernen Prosa. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenaeum, 1987. Greenberg, Uri Zvi. “Dvora be-shovya [Dvora in Her Captivity].” Davar, 26 February 1926, 2–3 [Hebrew]. Handelman, Susan A. Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem & Levinas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Harbon, Clarice. “Ba‘ateti ba-‘ivrit [I Kicked the ‘Blind Hebrew’].” Haaretz, 28 May 2010, section Culture and Literature, 3 [Hebrew]. Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993. Hazan, Efraim. “Ha-rek’a ha-du-leshoni le-tsmihat shirey metruz (rikma) be-tsfon-afrika [The Diglossic Backround of Metruz Poetry in North Africa].” Peamim 30 (1987): 23–30 [Hebrew]. Hellner-Eshed, Melila. Ve-nahar yotse me-‘eden: ‘al sfat ha-ḥavaya ha-mistit ba-zohar [A River Issues Forth from Eden: On the Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2005 [Hebrew].

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Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie. In Werke, edited by Ulrich Gaier, Vol. 5, Schriften zum Alten Testament, edited by Rudolf Smend. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993. 661–1308. Hofmann, Franck. “Literarische Annexion? Borchardts Übersetzung zwischen Politik und Phantasma.” In Dichterische Politik. Studien zu Rudolf Borchardt, edited by Kai Kaufmann. Publikationen zur Zeitschrift für Germanistik. Neue Folge 4. Bern: Peter Lang, 2002. 183–203. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. “Ein Brief.” In Hofmannsthal: Selected Essays, edited by Mary E. Gilbert. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955. 105–115. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Poems and Fragments. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Bi-lingual edition with a preface, introduction and notes. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967. —. Selected Poems. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Edited by Jeremy Adler. London: Penguin Books, 1998. —. Werke, Briefe, Dokumente. Munich: Winkler, 1969. Ibn-Zohan, Itamar. Polysystem Studies. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, and Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Idel, Moshe. “A. Abulafia, G. Scholem, and W. Benjamin on Language.” In Jüdisches Denken in einer Welt ohne Gott, edited by Jens Mattern, Gabriel Motzkin and Shimon Sandbank. Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000. 131–138. Illman, Karl-Johan. “Buber and the Bible: Guiding Principles and the Legacy of his Interpretation.” In Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, edited by Paul MendesFlohr. Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Syracuse University Press, 2002. 87–100. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980. —. “Coda to the Discussion.” In The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 294–304. Jacobson, Eric. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Janik, Allan, and Stephen Toulmin Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Kafka, Franz. Briefe 1902–1924. Edited by Max Brod. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Kieval, Hillel J. Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Kings 2 20.20. Konuk, Kader. “Jewish-German Philologists in Turkish Exile: Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach.” In Exile and Otherness: New Approaches to the Experience of the Nazi Refugees, edited by Alexander Stephan. Exile Studies 11. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. 31–47. Kraus, Karl. “In dieser großen Zeit.” Die Fackel 404 (1914): 1–19. —. Schriften. Edited by Christian Wagenknecht. Vol. 4, Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989. —. Schriften. Edited by Christian Wagenknecht. Vol. 8, Aphorismen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. —. “Die Sprache.” Schriften. Edited by Christian Wagenknecht. Vol. 7, Die Sprache. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987 —. Die Sprache. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997.



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Index

Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 15, 98 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef 48, 58, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 149 Ahad Ha’am 6, 37, 50, 58, 129, 132 Amichai, Yehuda 15, 16, 145, 146 Arendt, Hannah 8, 14 Bab, Julius 131, 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 157, 164, 165, 168, 176 Bar Kochba (Organisation) 11, 126 Ben-Chorin, Shalom 14 Ben-Harosh, Mois 173 Benjamin, Dora 46 Benjamin, Walter VIII, 8, 12, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 48, 52, 53, 56, 65, 66, 68, 69, 81, 82, 83, 89, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 112, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120 Benjamin, Walter – German People [Deutsche Menschen] 100 Benjamin, Walter – “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” 30, 32, 34, 38, 44 Benjamin, Walter – “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy” 31 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 66 Bergmann, Hugo 14 Bernfeld, Siegfried 52 Bialik, Haim N. 39, 48, 58, 73, 74, 147, 149, 171, 174, 175, 177 Biton, Erez 172, 173, 174 Blau Weiss (Blue White) 51, 52 Bonaventura 158, 159 Borchardt, Rudolf 11, 21, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 176 Borchardt, Rudolf – Dante translations 80, 83, 87, 93, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119 Borchardt, Rudolf – “On the Poet and the Poetical” [“Uber den Dichter und das Dichterische”] 111

Brauer, Grete 31 Brenner, Yosef Haim 55, 64, 71 Brod, Max 14, 126, 177 Buber, Martin 6, 10, 11, 12, 21, 23, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 96, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 169, 174 Buber, Martin – bible translation 118, 141, 146 Buber, Martin – Daniel 124, 136 Buber, Martin – Ecstatic Confessions 35, 36 Buber, Martin – The Tales of Rabbi Nachman 36, 37, 141 Buber, Martin – Three Speeches on Judaism [Drei Reden Über das Judentum] 10, 11, 124, 129 Celan, Paul 15, 19, 20, 27 Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 125 Chetrit, Sami Shalom 173 Cohen, Hermann 27 Derrida, Jacques 8, 16, 18, 47, 48, 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 74, 165, 171, 174, 176 Freud, Sigmund 8 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 27, 168 George, Stefan 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 19, 21, 22, 77, 83, 95, 114, 115, 117, 137, 147, 148, 157, 174 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 77, 89, 93, 97, 98, 124, 125, 135, 137, 149 Goldberg, Leah 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 168, 169 Goldstein, Moritz 130, 131 Gordon, Aaron David 55 Grimm, Jakob 4, 160 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm 160 Gundolf, Friedrich 87 Haas, Willy 87 Halevi, Yehuda 56, 149, 173



Index 

 195

Halle, Toni 80, 85 Hamann, Johann Georg 3, 4, 57 Hapoel Hatzair 54, 71 Harbon, Clarice 172, 173, 174 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 62, 155 Heine, Heinrich 5, 102, 103, 104, 106 Herder, Johann Gottfried 3, 4 Herzl club 86 Heymann, Harry 30 Hildesheimer, Israel 50 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 51, 59, 60 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 2, 7, 9, 77, 83 Hölderlin, Friedrich 89, 98, 123, 124, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 147, 158, 159, 161, 169 Holz, Detlef (Pseudonym), see Benjamin, Walter 100 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 3, 4, 57 Husserl, Edmund 91, 143

Lotze, Hermann 29, 30 Luther, Martin 28, 93, 113, 118

Jochmann, Carl Gustav 21, 78, 92, 93, 98, 100, 105, 110

Rilke, Rainer Maria 7, 29, 31 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen 16 Rosenzweig, Franz VII, 11, 16, 20, 21, 24, 26, 47, 51, 56, 61, 66, 67, 68, 118, 123, 141, 146, 166, 167, 171, 174, 176 Rübner, Tuvia VII, XI, 12, 15, 124, 126, 136, 147, 149, 152, 155, 156, 160, 168 Rückert, Friedrich 120

Kafka, Franz 7, 8, 10, 21, 22, 48, 77, 92, 98, 126, 177 Kant, Immanuel 16, 27, 168 Kaufmann, Fritz Mordechai 123 Klee, Paul 177 Kraal 99 Kracauer, Siegfried 101 Kraft, Else (Aliza) 93 Kraft, Erna 93 Kraft, Fritz 84 Kraft, Paul 83, 85 Kraft, Paul Caspar 93 Kraus, Karl 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 21, 24, 35, 46, 47, 48, 53, 54, 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 119, 120, 121, 176 Landauer, Gustav 35, 126 Lasker-Schüler, Else 9, 14, 29, 31, 77, 78, 81, 82, 95, 98, 99, 108 Lehmann, Siegfried 49, 51 Lehmann, Wilhelm 98 Lessing, Theodor 84, 87, 91

Mann, Thomas 80, 84 Mauthner, Fritz 6, 35, 36, 80 Mendele Mokher Sefarim 58, 74 Molitor, Franz Joseph 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 117, 171, 177 Nordau, Max 55 Orwell, George 111 Paul, Jean 29, 93 Pfeuffer, Ludwig, see Amichai, Yehuda 145 Quentin, Franz (Pseudonym of Ludwig Strauss) 123

Said, Edward 15, 176 Saussure, Henri de 109, 110 Schlabrendorf, Gustav, Graf von 93 Shiran, Viki 173 Simon, Ernst 11, 14 Strauss, Eva (née Buber) 124 Strauss, Max 123 Sturmann, Manfred 14 Vogel, Manfred 14 Volksheim 49 Walser, Robert 98 Wandervogel 52 Weltsch, Robert 10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 6 Wolfskehl, Karl 126 Zweig, Arnold 14, 132, 133