theatrum judaicum. Denkspiele im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs der Moderne (review)

In this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study of the avant-garde, Galili Shahar argues that German modernist theater not only represented “ein Archiv der Moderne” (17), but that it was also an unparalleled site where the productive tensions of German and Jewish identity and difference played out. By way of a historically informed attention to the complexity of various dramaturgical motifs, concepts, and modalities of thought, Shahar pieces together the gallery of “Denkfiguren” at the core of German-Jewish discourses of modernism. These figures of thought were born in the avant- garde theater of the early twentieth century and included modes of social and political critique found in the dramas of expressionism, dada, and epic theater. Starting with figures of wandering and homelessness and concluding with alienation effects and new media technologies, Shahar shows how theatrical devices were variously adopted, refined, and deployed by a panoply of German-Jewish modernist authors, ranging from Ernst Toller, Sigmund Freud, and Else Lasker- Schüler to Gustav Landauer, Franz Rosenzweig, and Franz Kafka. At once encyclopedic in scope and perspicacious in analysis, Shahar’s study of theatricality opens up the field of German-Jewish modernism in many significant and downright surprising ways that, in turn, enable us to reassess the very concept of the modern.

Beginning with a methodological prelude, Shahar situates his book as a study of the movement of the avant-garde and the aesthetic discourses of modernism. What follows, however, is significantly different from the well-known intellectual histories of the avant-garde such as those by Peter Bürger and Peter Sloterdijk. Instead, Shahar is interested in how the techniques of the avant-garde and the very idea of the modern were saturated by the German-Jewish question. It is no coincidence, Shahar argues, that the most significant motifs of the avant-garde were figures of alienation, homelessness, wandering, and exile—all figures that were typified by the experience of the Jew in German culture. The fragment, the scream, the stutter, the grotesque, the foolish, and the uncanny were all dramaturgical devices that challenged civil society and enabled the creation of a new, critical perspective. In so far as Jewish thinkers took up these devices and techniques in their writings, they became “Agenten in der Kulturkritik der Moderne” (53).

The first chapter, dedicated to a gallery of figures who illuminate aspects of the “Theater der Wanderung,” begins with the stereotype of the eternally wandering Jew and the ways in which this medieval figure returned in modernist dramas as an emblem of critique from the outside. Through an analysis of the dramas of Ernst Toller, Shahar argues that the (Jewish) wanderer embodied a “Kritik an der Struktur der modernen Gesellschaft, am Bürgertum, aber auch an der nationalen Kultur und am Militarismus im Menschen, am Diskurs der Technik und nicht zuletzt an den ‘falschen’ Wegen der Emanzipation der Juden in Europa” (43). Elaborating on the significance of the figure of the wanderer, the traveler, and the foreigner in a series of authors, including Carl Sternheim, Theodor Lessing, Sigmund Freud, Ivan Goll, Walter Mehring, Lion Feuchtwanger, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Franz Werfel, Shahar concludes the first chapter by arguing that “[d]ie Wegfigur der Avantgarde ist der Botschafter eines kritischen Denkens” (104). This is because they spoke differently, embodied a different cultural perspective, and had to negotiate the territorial borders of inside and outside. Not unlike the argument made by Hannah Arendt in her famous 1944 essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” Shahar shows how Jewish authors of the avant-garde developed the praxis of cultural critique by shifting the accent and denying the pre-given structures of the social order.

With the exception of the fourth chapter on “Theater des Körpers,” each of the other five chapters focus on single authors (Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin) and the ways in which their ideas are indebted to dramaturgical discourses in German/Jewish modernism. While I cannot do...