When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German–Jewish Literature (review)

The problems of "center-periphery" arguments are many: the one is always more interesting than the other; the center always defines the periphery or the other way around; and the author who uses this model always takes one side against the other. And that not always consciously. Vivian Liska, a distinguished scholar of Paul Celan and modern Jewish thought who teaches at the University of Antwerp, presents a study of modern Jewish thought at the periphery that is "a symptom of a lack of inner wholeness and coherence associated with what is generally called the 'modern crises in identity'" (1). For Liska, following Homi Bhabha, such a position is neither center nor periphery but "inbetweenness" (7). And she finds such a position compulsively repeated from Herzl's late tales to Kafka, Nelly Sachs, and Celan and through to contemporary Austrian-Jewish writers such as Robert Menasse. A "symptom" of the malaise of modern Jews caught between center and periphery? But of what disease is this a symptom?

The very notion of standing "between" is only a recapitulation of the older center-periphery model with a postmodern twist: "between" is a self-conscious position that allows Jewish writers of a certain moment in time and space to suspend their sense of belonging. But if this is a symptom of a malaise, Liska does not offer us an explicit cure, as the disease seems to be productive rather than destructive. Its product: the high-charged, modern literary text.

The difficulty with such an argument is obvious. Between what and what? Why is this malaise "Jewish"? Is it a good thing that the most creative Jews selected for their creativity by Liska suffer from this Jewish disease? She claims the same kind of authenticity for the "inbetweenness" of these writers as those who argue for writers who are canonical do for theirs. Their disease is the product of their "inbetween" position and it is a good thing.

Let me tell a story. Many years ago I was with a German Jewish friend, who had been born in Poland, on a trip back to Plaszow, the reconstituted suburb of Krakow, crystallized for the modern imagination in Schindler's List. We were having dinner in the mikva, the medieval ritual bath, which had been transformed into a "Jewish-style" restaurant. Our waiter had a skullcap and side locks (peyas) and was dressed in a version of the garb associated with ultra-Orthodox Jewry. My dining companion asked in Polish in the course of the meal whether the waiter was Jewish and was answered with a smile: "Oh, I'm not Jewish, but I feel Jewish." A bit of this is present in the self-consciousness that Liska attributes to her stable of "in-between" writers. They "feel Jewish," as a symptom of their modernity.

But of course the shoe is on the other foot in modern German literature. Certainly Alfred Döblin states in 1934 that the Nazis made him (born a Jew but without any sense of Jewish identity) into a Jew; yet by the 1940s he is a practicing Buddhist. Likewise the clearly non-Jewish, anti-fascist Bavarian folk novelist Oscar Maria Graf demands that he be put on the register of banned Jewish books after 1933 out of a sense of solidarity with his Jewish colleagues.

Liska is presented with a bit of a problem. She wishes to constitute "Jewishness" not as religious authenticity, which she seems to imply is beyond modernist self-doubt. (Any critical reading of Samson Raphael Hirsch or Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas or even Joseph Soloveitchik will quickly cast doubt on that notion.) But she also wants to suggest that Jewishness goes beyond merely a communitarian moment of identity formation, which is, of course a problem if you see Jewishness as independent of the nation-building impulse of Zionism. Yet in doing so her exemplary Jewish writers are suddenly in no way special; instead, they...