The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity (review)

Barbara Hahn's The Jewess Pallas Athena, beautifully translated by James McFarland, offers an unusually rich and engaged account of German Jewish modernity and its cultural production, its poetry and its intellectual life broadly conceived. And her account is gendered. It makes explicit the central role of German Jewish intellectual women in the production of German modernity. Hahn does this by focusing on the work and words, both public and private, that animated these women's cultural production. Hahn uses the figure of "the Jewess Pallas Athena" who comes to us via the poet Paul Celan as a way into and through this rich tradition. As Hahn explains, "She [the Jewess Pallas Athena] accompanies German-Jewish history, from its start in the middle of the eighteenth century to the time after 1945 when Jewish women driven out of Germany dared to look back. Look back on a country in which they had been raised, whose language and culture they had shared. A country from which they had flown and to which they could never come home again" (pp. 12–13). In other words Hahn begins with the earliest salonières and concludes her study at the end of the 1960s with the death of one of the last of the writing women in this tradition, the poet Margarete Susman. And, in the end, Hahn brings us back to where she began, connecting Susman intimately with the work of Paul Celan. As Hahn so powerfully demonstrates, the relationship between Celan and Susman itself painfully enacts the last breath of this cultural legacy. By looking carefully at some of the poems Celan wrote explicitly for Susman and the correspondences between them, Hahn shows how, together, Celan and Susman were able to mark the end of this legacy of German Jewish letters.

It is fitting that the poetic muse at the heart of this book is Paul Celan. Celan's poetry marks the utter loss of this once vibrant culture even as his figure of the Jewess Pallas Athena is nevertheless still able to usher us into the lost world he mourns. As a literary scholar, Hahn enables her readers to enter into not only Celan's poetry but this broader literary and philosophical tradition. As Hahn makes clear, German Jewish modernity is both a deeply intimate and a profoundly public culture. Hahn offers readers unique access to the letters and journal entries that make explicit these imbrications. She allows us to witness the intimate and oh-so-public face of the Jewess Pallas Athena as she expressed herself in German for almost two centuries. In every chapter Hahn offers us access to the relationships that animate all the writing and creative production of these intellectual women. But this is not all she does.

Using the figure of the "Jewess" Hahn also offers readers "[a] theoretical reconstruction of culture that investigates the different connotations of this word, so freighted with contradictory meanings" (p. 13). Hahn uses the words and the interactions among these women as well as the various intellectual men with whom they were in ongoing and engaged conversation to ask broader questions about the way Jewish women figured in the project of modernity and their unique place in German letters. She shows the positive as well as the more freighted negative attributes associated with the figure of the German Jewess.

Although there is now a growing body of scholarship on German Jewish thought, German Jewish letters, and even the role of Jewish women in German culture—including work by Paula Hyman on Jewish women and modernity, by Harriet Freidenreich on the place of Jewish women in German universities and professions, by Marion Kaplan on German Jewish feminists and middle-class German Jewish life more broadly, as well as numerous studies of the Salon women of Berlin, including work by Marsha Rozenblitt and many others—¹ Hahn offers readers a very different approach to this legacy. Hers is...