The Middleman: Ludwig Strauss’s German–Hebrew Bilingualism

Shortly after immigrating to Palestine from Germany, Ludwig Strauss composed an ode to the bay of Haifa, which was soon enfolded into the volume Land Israel (1935), the poet’s extended paean to his new home. Although “An die Bucht” was initially published in German, Strauss actually produced two versions of the poem—one in German and one in Hebrew. In this article I trace the development of Strauss’s German–Hebrew bilingualism as part of his vision of a continuous, multilingual national “Jewish canon.” Situating his project within the broader discourse on the role of the Jew in German culture that unfolded during the first part of the twentieth century, I explore Strauss’s attempt to divest from German culture in favor of cultivating a pan-Jewish (alljüdisch) identity. Yet analysis of Strauss’s process of simultaneous auto-translation between German and Hebrew reveals that his poetic achievement surpasses his ideology. Strauss’s German–Hebrew bilingualism was less an act of uprooting than a process of cross-fertilization, an ongoing attempt to inhabit the border between languages and landscapes as an alternative cultural space.