Fremde Gemeinschaft: Deutsch-Jüdische Literatur der Moderne (review)

Much has been written regarding Kafka’s struggles with his German Jewish identity and the complexity of his Jewishness. In this revised German version of When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Jewish Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), Vivian Liska revisits Kafka’s identity crisis, but also digs deeper into his writings and uncovers Kafka’s estrangement or even alienation from the Jewish community. The unmasking of Kafka’s persistent and continuing “ambivalence toward communities in general and toward the Jewish community in particular” (9), via both well-known and little-known works such as journal entries and letters, buttresses Liska’s argument that the anguished relationship to Judaism not only informed the writings of German Jewish writers of the twentieth century but also provided the context for their unusual literary approaches to the subjects of community and self. While Liska’s discussion of Kafka’s struggle with the collective “we” encompasses the first part of her five-part study and provides the framework for her book, the subsequent parts examine literary responses by other major German and Austrian Jewish writers to their own marginalization within religious, ethnical, social, and ideological communities.

The broad scope of the book and the close readings of works, informed by historical events, Jewish identity, and tradition, thus offer a fresh perspective not only on Kafka but also on significant Jewish German and Austrian writers and poets from the turn to the end of twentieth century: Elke Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Ilse Aichinger, Robert Schindel, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Menasse. Thematically, Liska’s chapters are as diverse as they are intersecting, ranging from a discussion of Lasker-Schüler’s poetical treatment of biblical women to a review of Holocaust remembrance in contemporary literature by Austrian Jewish authors. Where Liska’s fifteen chapters interlink is the writers’ engagement with their own or their protagonists’ Jewish identity.

However, while Liska’s writers find themselves at the margins of the Jewish community, the assumption that her discussion will turn to the notion of community and each writer’s struggle to define his or her place in that community leaves one slightly disappointed in some of the chapters. In her reading of Celan’s poem “Vor einer Kerze,” for example, Liska only vaguely and somewhat unconvincingly harks back to her initial thesis. Some chapters even feel completely unrelated to Liska’s idea of “uncommon communities” and the self, as becomes apparent in the final part of her book, in which she discusses Kafka’s influence on and reception by writers like Celan and Aichinger. In sum, the chapters are at times strung loosely together thematically by discussing writers whose works, for the author, best express “the modern crisis of identity” rather than the notion of the collective “we.” It becomes obvious that most of the chapters present individual projects that have previously been published as articles or book chapters. A conclusion, absent from Liska’s book, would have offered her the opportunity to draw connections among the individual chapters and back to her initial thesis.

While the book lacks coherence, it offers writing and literary scholarship of high quality. The value of Liska’s book lies in thorough textual analyses and occasionally fresh insights into a variety of German-speaking Jewish writers and poets from the twentieth century, as for example Ilse Aichinger’s relationship with the Gruppe 47. Moreover, this German edition presents two new chapters, namely an examination of Walter Benjamin’s complex idea of and fateful relationship with Europe in the midst of the approaching catastrophe, as well as an exploration of the recently released correspondence and “uncommon relationship” between Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Thus this study certainly has its merits, mostly due to Liska’s close readings of unconventional texts by some of the most significant Jewish writers of the twentieth century. The book offers the literary scholar who specializes in any of these writers a new perspective...