Noah Isenberg. Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Viii + 232 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-2502-2.
Reviewed by Rochelle Tobias (Department of German, Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-German (October, 2001)
German-Jewish Responses to Modernity
German-Jewish Responses to Modernity
The early twentieth century saw a stunning revival of interest in Jewish folklore among German-Jews. The popularity of such works as Buber's Tales of Rabbi Naham (1906) or Micha Josef bin Gorion's Sagen der Juden (1913) testify to this trend, as do the impassioned entries concerning the mystical dimensions of Judaism and Zionism in the anthology Vom Judentum (1913) published by the Bar Kochba Academy in Prague. In his eloquent study Beyond Redemption and Doom, Noah Isenberg interprets these and related phenomena as signs of a search for community in the face of the alienating effects of modernity and, more particularly, urbanization. Beginning with Ferdinand Toennies's distinction between "Gemeinschaft" and "Gesellschaft," Isenberg claims that these two terms shaped not only German discussions of national identity, but also German-Jewish reflections on Jewish identity. Indeed, he argues that the oppositions between community and society, city and countryside and finally spirit and blood found a parallel in German-Jewish discourse, which pitched the assimilated culture of German Jews against the shtetl culture of "Ostjuden" with alarming regularity. This opposition, as Isenberg is quick to point out, was based largely on an idealization of Eastern Jews. Nonetheless of interest to him is the rhetorical force this distinction had for German Jews during the interwar period who, on the one hand, grew up post-Emancipation and enjoyed the benefits of citizenship and who, on the other, faced a growing wave of antisemitism which some would say culminated in National Socialism.
Isenberg's inquiry is divided into four chapters or what he calls "case studies": the first on Kafka's remarks on Yiddish and the Yiddish theater in his non-fictional works; the second on Arnold Zweig's Das ostjuedische Antlitz (The Face of Eastern Jewry); the third on Paul Wegener's film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World); and the fourth on Walter Benjamin's theory of memory and its relation to Judaism, in particular as expressed in his chronicle Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (A Berlin Childhood around 1900). With the exception of the third chapter, the study addresses specific examples of Jewish "self-fashioning" (p. 6) or self-representation which for Isenberg are symptomatic of "Jewish identity formation" (p. 6) in the Weimar Republic. The interpretation of Wegener's film represents a departure from this pattern to the extent that it is the only chapter which considers the representation of Jews by non-Jews as well as nascent antisemitism. Isenberg justifies the inclusion of this case study on the grounds that Wegener's film identifies the city with the Jew. He notes, for instance, that the buildings in Wegener's ghetto city are made to look like stereotypically Eastern Jewish (pp. 94-102). Nonetheless given his emphasis in every other chapter on the ways in which Judaism figures as a lost ideal it is difficult to see how this one work fits within his larger argument about the ways in which German-Jews perceived themselves.
The strength of Isenberg's study lies in the clarity of exposition. Each chapter is written as an individual essay with an eye toward the past as well as the present in an apparent effort to show the persistence of certain questions in contemporary debates. Nowhere is this done more successfully than in the chapter on Benjamin, where Isenberg moves from a discussion of the architecture of memory in Benjamin's work to a meditation on Dani Karavan's memorial Passages at Port Bou (Spain), the site where Benjamin took his life in 1940. This dual focus renders Isenberg's book accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. At the same time it weakens any historical claim about German-Jewish identity in the interwar period. Key points from the introduction are never taken up in the text, most notably the claim that the debate on Jewish identity unfolded in the context of discussions of German national identity. This claim is provocative precisely because it reverses a trend that views the German-Jewish dialogue in light of the Holocaust, amounting to a teleological approach to history. In his epilogue Isenberg even notes that this is one of the dangers of the field. The intersection of the discourses on German and Jewish identity would provide a rich starting point for an inquiry into the 'crisis of identity' for German Jews, but in the absence of any historical evidence this intersection remains largely a suggestion, one which in fact contributes to the teleology Isenberg seeks to challenge.
The second weakness of the project is the lack of a clear distinction between modernity, which is primarily a historical category, and modernism, which is primarily an aesthetic one. Although Isenberg subtitles his book "The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism," his main concern is how German-Jewish artists responded to the "crisis of community" (p. 14) in the modern period. What is in fact striking about his readings of Kafka, Zweig and Benjamin is that all three emerge as anti-modernist figures, searching for an ideal (be it a language, a community or a past) opposed to urban life and technology. While the search for transcendence is an indisputable aspect of modernism, it is the form this search took which distinguishes modernism from romanticism as well as from popular works hailing the virtues of native culture. In lieu of an analysis of form, Isenberg focuses on the manifest content of the works he cites. Thus Kafka's peculiar comment in his lecture on Yiddish that if you submit to Yiddish "it will frighten you, yet it will no longer be fear of Yiddish but of ourselves" (cited on p. 46) goes unaddressed, even if this alignment of Yiddish with the uncanny is what distinguishes the remark as a modernist statement. Likewise Benjamin's vignette "Sexual Awakening" in A Berlin Childhood, in which Benjamin recounts how on Rosh Hashanah he gets lost on his way to the synagogue and experiences sexual desire for the first time, is treated exclusively as a statement about the competing demands of the sacred and the secular, of Judaism and city life. Yet in this passage Benjamin hints at least twice that he may be dead or, more pointedly, that he may have vanished from collective memory (including the Book of Life) in an extraordinary convergence of death and awakening, oblivion and life.
Isenberg's inquiry, however, is not primarily literary but cultural, and in this he succeeds. In Beyond Redemption and Doom he demonstrates with erudition and sensitivity that the question of Jewish identity is central to German-Jewish culture in the modern period.
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Citation:
Rochelle Tobias. Review of Isenberg, Noah, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5576
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