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Reviewed by:
  • Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains
  • Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains. By Todd Samuel Presner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. xl + 368 pages + 29 b/w illustrations. $45.00.

The photo on the dust jacket of Presner's book, abandoned railroad tracks ending amidst gravel, grass, and birch trees, is suggestive of the destination of the "mobile modernity" with which European Jewry has become associated—at first as its initiating force and ultimately as its victim. Although not envisioned as a foreseeable end point, as some interpreters would have it, Auschwitz looms large in this publication. The cover image contains familiar motifs of Holocaust history, literature, and film, just to mention the works of Raul Hilberg, Claude Lanzmann, and Ruth Beckermann, names that do not occur in the publication at hand. Ironically, the dust cover photo of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains was not taken at a Nazi death camp but at the ruins of Berlin's famous Anhalter Bahnhof, a site highly emblematic of the fateful synchronicities of modern Central European history, as Presner argues. Evoking Auschwitz by way of a destroyed Berlin landmark signifying modernity corresponds to the postmodern assumptions upon which rest the insights conveyed in the book at hand. In the course of his seven thematically interconnected essays Presner tries to establish a synchronistic web featuring the Anhalter Bahnhof as a major site of modernity and the site of mass transports of Jews from Berlin to the East during the Nazi era as the geographic epitome of Nazi Germany's defeat because of the vicinity to other momentous sites, and of Berlin as a divided and reunited city. In the first essays, the Anhalter Bahnhof—as a remnant of all these layered pasts, memories, and associations—frames the discussion of oppositions, dialectics, and paradoxes. Early on the author questions the "necessity of chronology," arguing that the past is "always subject to present legibility and recognizability" (17). Referring to Greenblatt and Moretti, he sets forth the concept of a "geography of cultural studies" to develop an alternative approach to the past in the absence of notions of historical realism or progress.

Presner's central concern is the interactive dialectic of Jewishness and Germanness, Jews and Germans, revealed by way of multi-leveled comparative analyses involving historical personalities and literary/philosophical bodies of text. Foregrounded are familiar names: Celan and Heidegger; Heine and Hegel; Heidegger and Arendt; [End Page 590] Freud and Sebald. The theoretical underpinnings of discussion of these figures are suggested by references to Benjamin, Freud, Adorno—the original texts largely unmediated by critical scholarship. Associating personalities and discourses with global sites, Presner suggests connectivities arising from the mobility of people, the transport of cultural information, and responses to both. Claiming a new approach with new analytical categories, Presner, bold as Canetti in by-passing intellectual predecessors, by and large ignores the research and critical debates that shaped the current discussions about German-Jewish history and culture—Gay, Reinharz, Gilman, Herf, Zipes, Rosenfeld, Alter, Bilski, Diner, just to name a few—and relegates other important critics, Sorkin and Brenner, to footnotes.

The most glaring omission in his essays is the category of gender, without which a discussion of issues of modernity, mobility, and intercultural contact or conflict lacks credibility; the time when the experience and insights of Hegel, Heine, Celan, or Heidegger could be passed off as universally applicable and male paradigms were assumed to be the norm has passed. Quite aside from the fact that Presner's couplings to explore Jewishness and Germanness may seem arbitrary, the omission of German Jewish and non-Jewish women intellectuals is a glaring shortcoming of this otherwise rather stimulating book. Hannah Arendt as the lone token female discussed in the absence of feminist scholarship will simply not do.

Keeping the obvious gender bias or gender blindness in mind, Presner's book does present thought-provoking insights, for example in the Heine-Hegel essay. Likewise, introducing geography and the concept of mobility studies to German Cultural Studies is an intriguing enterprise, even though Presner's topical approach and the connections he tries to establish, especially in conjunction with the motif of the Anhalter Bahnhof...

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