Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times

Mapping Modernity: Jews and Other German Travelers

131 Mapping Modernity: Jews and Other German Travelers Nils H. Roemer I n the nineteenth century, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, Jews in German lands received civic liberties. With the granting of equal rights, the political status of Jews radically changed, their religious practice modernized, and their culture was transformed . Identifying themselves to a large extent with the emerging German middle class and its culture, Jews in Germany became in many ways Germans with one difference: they remained Jewish. As travelers to America, Jews did not markedly differ from other Germans . Indeed, Jews, like other Germans, became increasingly mobile. Not “only the privileged few had ventured abroad,” as Stefan Zweig observed in his memoirs.1 Moreover, the celebrated Jewish writers, journalists, novelists, and artists from central Europe partook in the debate over America’s virtues and vices, published their travelogues for a wide and diverse audience, and intensely reflected on Jewish life in the larger American urban centers. Yet their curiosity, literacy, and intellectual mobility strike a familiar chord with Yuri Slezkine’s characterization of Jews as “Mercurians,” whom he views as moderns par excellence.2 To many Jewish travelers, visiting the United States offered an opportunity to compare and contrast it with Europe, the Soviet Union, and Palestine. Whereas the United States commonly stood for capitalism , liberalism, equality, and the ideology of the melting pot, the Soviet Union promised to solve and overcome class, ethnic, and religious differences by promoting a new, radically secular Yiddish Jewish culture during the 1920s, in contrast to Zionists’ aspirations in Palestine, who labored to forge a new Hebrew national Jewish community.3 Surveying these different locations, Arthur Holitscher, Egon Erwin Kisch, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Nils H. Roemer 132 and Hermann Struck became highly mobile itinerant writers, who explored for themselves and their readers these new worlds. Unlike many other German travelers to the United States—who in their own way do not form a cohesive group, but are differentiated by gender , class, and politics—most of the more famous Jewish travel writers of the early twentieth century never fully committed themselves to any of the competing ideologies of liberalism, communism, and nationalism. Kisch remained critical of the United States, and Holitscher’s enthusiasm about America quickly waned. Their endorsement of the Soviet Union had its limits too and their political leftist orientation remained eclectic and unorthodox . Roth combined his celebration of Europe and his infatuation with Paris with his nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his dismissal of America with his ambivalent hopes for the Soviet Union. Roth never endorsed Zionism, while Holitscher’s hopes for Palestine diminished. The famous illustrator Struck discovered the grandeur of New York’s skyscrapers , but found solace in images of eastern European men and also in Palestine’s landscapes. Even in Stefan Zweig’s writings, defenses and celebrations of Europe grated against a romantic approach to America. A marginal and global perspective shaped the Jewish travelers’ intellectual and political uncertainty and distinguished them from other German tourists in America. Like many other Jewish intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, their liminality resists classification and describes them at the same time.4 Indeed, travel formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural , political, and national boundaries. The travelers’ cosmopolitan competencies —the arts of crossing, translation, and hybridity—situated them and their readers in a global context.5 To survey foreign places became a way to experience, situate, and think about the self and the community. The German Jewish journalist, satirist, and writer Kurt Tucholsky instructed travelers to let go and open themselves to new experiences, and the perceptive sociologist Siegfried Kracauer observed that travel “granted access to the Beyond.”6 Crossing the Atlantic brought Jews and other Germans into contact with a decisively different society that encapsulated other concepts and models of modernity, Jewish cultures, and identities.7 Yet, travelers’ descrip- Mapping Modernity 133 tions often combined confidence with a sense of crisis, and enchantment with critical distance. They traversed freely and often ambivalently over the conflicting American terrain of modernity. Moreover, America during the 1920s significantly lost its appeal for many travel writers. Traveling therefore became more often a search than an experience of homecoming, a search that testified not only to a great deal of curiosity but betrayed a profound sense of not feeling at home at home. In his path-breaking essay...