Abstract

The following study investigates tensions between the German and Jewish cultural traditions in Gertrud Kolmar’s narrative A Jewish Mother (Die jüdische Mutter, 1999), which the poet wrote between 18 August 1930 and 1 February 1931. Both traditions, as I will show, present themselves in the topography of Kolmar’s Berlin as increasingly insufficient and progressively marked by the rise of National Socialism. My analysis of different spatial projections will demonstrate that even before the rise of the Third Reich, Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother reveals the “German Jewish symbiosis” as an illusion. I further explore how Kolmar’s text rejects the contemporary adoration of German literary masterpieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a canon highly admired not only by the German Jewish Bildungsbürgertum (the educated upper-middle class) but also revered by the poet’s own family. In the confrontation of geographic metaphors and popular citations, Kolmar’s prose text shows an increasingly violent society at the end of the Weimar Republic.

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