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This book is devoted to the study of the bilingual “parallel poems” of Ludwig Strauss (Aachen 1892 ˗ Jerusalem 1953) created between 1934 and 1952 in Palestine/Israel and which exist in two variants, a Hebrew and a German version, one of which is the original and the other a self-translation. The aim of this study is to compare the versions and their interpretation based on Strauss’s theoretical essays on poetry and translation, his political writings and works of literary criticism. Special attention is paid to Strauss’s concept (linked with the idea of messianic redemption) of poetry as a “fore-image” of a future true community of men and as “the earthly expression of the Absolute” directed at interpreting divine revelation and its “translation” into human language. In examining Strauss’s experiments with self-translation, by which he aimed at establishing a dialogue between languages, and between people and nations, this study considers the two processes of translation: from divine speech into human language and from one human language into another.
Insightful look at the interactions between German and migrant Jewish writers and the creative spectrum of Jewish identity
Agnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional “objects” of his life, in particular his “father-teacher,” his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after her and his adopted “home-land” of Israel. Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to “sublimate” his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the emotional character of his literary canon, his ambivalence to his family and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”
Romancing Fascism argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour. In this analysis of allegory as a function of modernity, what is made clear is the difficulty, if not impossibility, of definitively determining the genealogical antecedents of intellectual trends, particularly those considered pernicious to clear thinking. Thus Kerr-Koch takes a wide-ranging approach to the analysis of allegory as it is treated by three controversial writers whose works flank the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the middle and late periods of what we call modernity—Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These three writers have been chosen because they have been at some point recuperated for a theory of ‘postmodernism', a term that for some theorists represents liberal free play, and for others represents a lack of rigour and a pernicious corruption of thought.
Martin Buber's Life and Work is a complete reprint of Maurice Friedman's monumental three-volume biography. Friedman covers Buber's life from his work on I and Thou to the challenges of Nazi Germany and prewar Palestine. He charts Buber's activities on behalf of Jewish-Arab rapprochement, his dialogue with Dag Hammarskjold, and comments on the philosopher's last years, his death, and his legacy to world Jewry.
"This short book offers a dazzling new interpretation of Paul Klee's most famous work: his Angelus Novus (1920), which was purchased by Walter Benjamin and became the model for his Angel of History, a figure saturated with Jewish mysticism that he introduces in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 2014 the celebrated American artist R. H. Quaytman made a surprising discovery about Klee's work when she examined it at the Jewish Museum in Israel. She realized that Klee had carefully pasted the Angelus down over another image, a face, leaving just a finger's breadth of it showing. Through forensic science and lots of sleuthing it was determined that face belonged to Martin Luther. Behind the Angel of History tells the story of how Quaytman solved the mystery of who lurks behind Klee's angel. It then plunges into questions about why a face long hidden beneath another picture might matter. The book travels through a tangle of loaded conversations among images-from Klee's Angelus to Benjamin's own drawing of a crucified angel, from Klee's Angelus to Quaytman's own layered panels meditating on its secret"--
In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, it seemed there was no place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Germany — the two languages and their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when placed side by side on opposing pages, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Comprised of essays on literature, history, philosophy, and the visual and performing arts, this volume explores the mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as separate or even as diametrically opposed. From Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Berlin, the essays gathered here shed new light on the painful yet productive relationship between modern German and Hebrew cultures.
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Volume 7 of the Posen Library captures unprecedented transformations of Jewish culture amid mass migration, global capitalism, nationalism, revolution, and the birth of the secular self Between 1880 and 1918, traditions and regimes collapsed around the world, migration and imperialism remade the lives of millions, nationalism and secularization transformed selves and collectives, utopias beckoned, and new kinds of social conflict threatened as never before. Few communities experienced the pressures and possibilities of the era more profoundly than the world's Jews. This volume, seventh in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, recaptures the vibrant Jewish cultural creativity,...