Title: Rachel Seelig. Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. xiv + 225 pp.
Abstract: Reviewed by: Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933 by Rachel Seelig Marc Caplan Rachel Seelig. Strangers in Berlin: Modern Jewish Literature between East and West, 1919–1933. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. xiv + 225 pp. The parameters of Rachel Seelig’s outstanding new monograph on Jewish literatures in the Weimar era, Strangers in Berlin, were first defined by the erev–World War I periodical Die Freistatt (The sanctuary), which appeared between April 1913 and June 1914 under the editorship of Fritz Mordecai Kaufmann. Transcending Kaufmann’s Zionist roots, the journal was dedicated to creating a “free space,” a nonpartisan model for Jewish culture at odds with the Palestine-focused and Hebrew-dominated politics of Zionism. As Seelig writes, “Showcasing German poetry and essays alongside Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, Die Freistatt was the only publication of its kind to encourage German Jews not only to read East European Jewish texts but also to learn Jewish languages. By attributing equal cultural value to German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, Kaufmann aimed for nothing less than a ‘radical revision and regeneration of west European Jewry’s view of the Jewish present’” (57). Seelig follows this trilingual and inclusive approach in her own work, recognizing that the allure of Berlin resides in how aesthetic and ideological formations came into contact with one another via their serendipitous proximity in the metropolis. Strangers in Berlin is a dense, elegant survey of four poets at work in Weimar-era Berlin. Seelig begins with the German-and Hebrew-language poet Ludwig Strauss, a son-in-law of Martin Buber and, after relocating to Palestine in 1935, a member of the dissident, largely German Jewish Zionist movement Brit Shalom that advocated Arab-Jewish coexistence in Palestine. The next chapter considers Moyshe Kulbak, a leading Yiddish modernist who repudiated his Berlin experiences when he relocated to Soviet Minsk at the end of the 1920s; the following chapter concerns Uri-Zvi Greenberg, who shed his iconoclastic Yiddish expressionism and adopted both the Hebrew language and an extreme version of Revisionist Zionism during his single year in Berlin, 1923. The book ends with Gertrud Kolmar, a Berlin native and, later, Holocaust victim, who wrote only in German. In her afterword, Seelig discusses the legacy of Weimar [End Page 238] Germany for the significant Hebrew-speaking diaspora living in Berlin today. Seelig’s study is thus both wide-ranging and focused, considering the social landscape of Berlin as a meeting ground for Jewish languages and literatures in transit, as well as the aesthetic and ideological characteristics of individual poets and their poetry. In contrast to other global centers of Jewish literature, such as New York, Berlin never functioned as anything other than a way station among ideological options bringing Jews to America, Palestine, or (back to) the Soviet Union. Berlin nonetheless experienced a population explosion following the First World War, as more than a million new residents poured into the city, both German citizens and refugees from the East. Within German-language culture, moreover, Berlin experienced a new ascension with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Vienna’s decline as a cultural center. It was an awkward role for Berlin, which previously had been seen as a rough-and-tumble, provincial, and seedy city. The transition could only be achieved with a comparably tumultuous redefinition of German-language culture. Simultaneously, Jewish literature experienced a sea change brought about by the new cosmopolitanism of its readers, new contact among languages, and at-times perilous ideological struggles among Yiddish-language, Hebrew-language, and other national-language world views. Seelig’s study navigates cogently among all of these tensions. The chapters on Moyshe Kulbak and Uri-Zvi Greenberg are the highlights of Seelig’s work. In opposing ways, both felt compelled to repudiate their Berlin experience. When he arrived in Germany, Kulbak was already one of the most accomplished lyric poets in east European Yiddish literature. By the time he left Berlin, four years later, the influence of German culture had inspired him to write an idiosyncratic epic poem, “Raysn,” about Jewish farmers in Belorussia; a tragic drama about the messianic pretender Jacob Frank; and a sui generis...
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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