Rahel Varnhagen – Heinrich Heine – Franz Kafka:

Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), and Franz Kafka (1881–1924) are symbolic names of a modern Jewish »activist« canon. This is emphatically evident in Hannah Arendt’s famous essay »A Hidden Tradition,« a text first published in English during the Holocaust in 1944 and subsequently in German in 1948. It highlights none other than the writings of Heine, Kafka, and Varnhagen as crystallization points of a theory of Jewish existence in modernity. Aside from Arendt, many other readers tried during and especially after the Nazi destruction of Jewish life in Europe to understand their own times through an engagement with the lives and works of these three »pariah figures.« These readers included Max Brod, Margarete Susman, Gershom Scholem, Käte Hamburger, Ludwig Marcuse, and Hans Mayer. The prominent position of literature in modern Jewish self-contemplation and historical reflection is not only reflected in books, essays, and articles, but also in correspondence and diaries – and not least of all in complicated transmission histories. It is precisely in these recurring efforts dedicated to the archives of writings by Heine, Kafka, and Varnhagen – through acts of salvaging, preserving, and rediscovering – that Jewish reactions to the upheavals of the twentieth century and to the fundamental questioning of Jewish existence are manifested.

This seminar is dedicated to gestures of preservation and the appropriation of traditions as connected with forms of existential self-positioning and analyses of the present. These take place within the Jewish community and in engagements with non-Jewish discourses, often precisely in decisive contradiction to these discourses. The seminar examines individual documents of preserving tradition, lectures, appropriations, and analyses in their ideal and material continuities and above all discontinuities in the first years and decades after 1945.

Literature: Ausgangspunkt: Hannah Arendt, Sechs Essays. Die verborgene Tradition, hrsg. von Barbara Hahn, Göttingen 2019; dies., Rahel Varnhagen – Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin, hrsg. von Barbara Hahn, Göttingen 2021; Dietmar Goltschnigg/Hartmut Steinecke (eds.), Heine und die Nachwelt. Geschichte seiner Wirkung in den deutschsprachigen Ländern, Bd. 2: 1907-1956, Berlin 2008; Bd. 3: 1957-2006, Berlin 2011; zur Einführung eignen sich zudem: Steffen Höhne/Ludger Udolph (eds.), Franz Kafka: Wirkung und Wirkungsverhinderung, Köln, Weimar, Wien 2014; Bernd Witte, Jüdische Tradition und literarische Moderne: Heine, Buber, Kafka, Benjamin, München 2007; Manfred Engel/Dieter Lamping (Hgg.), Franz Kafka und die Weltliteratur, Göttingen 2006; Dieter Lamping, Von Kafka bis Celan. Jüdischer Diskurs in der deutschen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen 1998.

Open for senior students: no