1. DIALECTICS AT A STANDSTILL

The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past.   —Franz Kafka, 1910

1.1 Franz Schwechten, Anhalter Bahnhof, Berlin (1881). Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York

AS THE TERMINUS of the first major, long-distance railway line to open in a German state, the Anhalter Bahnhof has always had more than just an incidental connection to the city of Berlin and its liminal geography as a point of entry to eastern, western, and southern Europe. From the moment it opened in 1840 until its destruction more than a hundred years later, the station served as a testament to the dizzying arrival and violent departure of German/Jewish modernity. In its built forms one could discern the triumph of technologies of modernization, the emergence of Prussian expansionism, the national hopes invested in a unified Germany, the primacy placed on transcendent size and speed, the ideals of cosmopolitanism coupled with fears of transmigration, the reality of an interconnected world of commerce and material exchange, and this world’s destructive capacities. Even in its present ruin it is a witness to both the volatility of the twentieth century and the hopes and fears of the nineteenth. Its history runs straight through German/Jewish modernity, and, recursively, the history of German/Jewish modernity runs straight through its history.

Walter Benjamin certainly recognized the railway station’s significance when he immortalized its technological greatness and immense scale in recollecting his childhood in Berlin: “The ‘Anhalter’ refers to the name of the mother cavern of all railways; it is where the locomotives are at home and the trains have to stop. No distance was further away than when fog gathered over its tracks.”¹ To Benjamin the Anhalter Bahnhof was the reality of that marvelous and equally dubious nineteenth-century dream of progress characterized by, among other things, the possibility of connecting to a faraway place. It was where Franz Kafka arrived from Prague when he visited Felice Bauer in Berlin; it is also where Paul Celan stopped over on his way to Paris from Czernowitz on the day after November 8/9, 1938. In the 1930s thousands of Jewish children were sent on trains from Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof to safety outside of Germany; in 1941–42 the station was used to gather elderly Jewish “transports” who were deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt.

If the “arcade” counts as the best material witness to nineteenth-century Paris, as Benjamin famously argued in his massive historiographic fragment, The Arcades Project, surely the railway—perhaps Berlin’s Anhalter train station—would have to count as the best material witness to German/Jewish modernity. It was, after all, the railway that literally unified Germany in the late nineteenth century and connected Berlin to Western and Eastern Europe in the twentieth—in splendor, emancipation, and horror. In fact, the history of the very first railway line constructed in a German state is punctuated by the entanglement of German modernity and Jewish modernity. In 1835, the year in which a six-kilometer railway track opened between Nuremberg and Fürth, Jews were not allowed to reside in Nuremberg, although they could do business in the town, provided they were accompanied by a German citizen and did not stay overnight. At this time Jews comprised nearly 20 percent of the population of Fürth, a town that also boasted a Jewish university, two synagogues, and a Hebrew press. Encouraged by their local rabbi, Jews from Fürth invested in the railway construction project and became the first commercial travelers to take the train to work in the German town that barred them citizenship. German and Jewish, modernity and mobility became wed to one another.

Over the course of the next century, the railway emerged as an embodied, transitional space emblematic of both the emancipatory hopes and the destructive nightmares of an epoch. Not unlike the latent mythology of the arcade, the rapid expansion of the railway was driven by its unprecedented capacity to produce capital and facilitate transnational material transport. It became a “dream space” of modernity, displaying and exchanging the fetishized objects of a capitalist economy. Both the railway and the arcade thus became the symbols and proof of their epochs: Railways represented progress because they were the technological realization of mobility, speed, and exchange. They also became the first mode of transportation to move the masses, from the formation of mass politics to the implementation of mass deportations. And, finally, both the arcades and the railways eventually fell out of favor, overtaken by some other formation imagined to be faster, more fashionable, more progressive, more opulent, and more destructive.

The heady heydays of the arcades and the railway may be over, but their constitutive dreams are still legible in the surviving remains. The physical ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof and its varied cultural testimonies may be all we are left with, but it is from these remains that we can map the cultural geographies of German/Jewish modernity. The Anhalter Bahnhof represents a paradigm of modernity, one that is already grafted, as a dialectical image, onto these cultural geographies. In its ruins “German” and “Jewish” are inextricably bound to one another, stretching far beyond the space of Berlin or the German nation, and “modernity” betrays itself as a persistent dialectic of enabling and checking mobility. Through the multiple encounters, strange tensions, and mediated interactions between German and Jewish, the cultural geography of this book emerges on the trains traveling on the tracks running to and away from the Anhalter Bahnhof.

WHAT IS GERMAN/JEWISH?

German/Jewish modernity begins with the slash, the cut, the decision, the divider. The separatrix refers to the line between the two words German and Jewish, the cut that separates them. The meaning of the separatrix is ambiguous: it may locate an opposition, as in German versus Jewish, it may signify simultaneity, as in both German and Jewish, and it may call upon a choice, as in German or Jewish. At the same time that the separatrix announces a kind of distinction, the relationship between the distinguished terms is characterized by an unresolved tension, a back-and-forth that is never subdued or sublated into a third term. Instead the two terms exist in permanent tension, moving with respect to one another, but never turning into something higher. In every case the separatrix indicates the dialectical movement of a finitely structured relationship that must be articulated according to its historical specificity.

Jacques Derrida first articulated the logic of the separatrix in his early attempts to explain the processes of deconstruction.² The work of deconstruction is to mercilessly search out the operations of the separatrix—the divider between text and context, inside and outside, primary and ancillary—and undercut its attempts to ground meaning, establish foundations, and stabilize truth by exposing the presuppositions and ideologies behind the very distinction. As Jeffrey Kipnis points out, Derrida attempts to “twist” the separatrix, “turn it back on itself, and poke holes in order to expose the inseparability of those terms that it separates.”³ For Derrida the enactment of a division or separation is always suspect because it is through such divisions that truth claims are grounded.

In the case of German/Jewish we find the two terms consistently “contaminated” by one another. They overlap; they become blurred; they switch places. One of the terms cannot be adequately articulated without the other. In fact, one of my contentions in this book will be that “the Jewish”—that which is supposedly differentiated from, outside of, or somehow opposed to “the German”—is actually within, if not constitutive of, that which is German. What this means is that the Jewish is entangled with and already “too close” to the German, despite the long and violent history, laced with anti-Semitism, of attempts to definitively separate the two. Hegel’s attempt, for example, to confine the Jews to the first stage of world history is just one instance in which the two terms are given a structuring relationship in the form of an ontological separation imposed by a strict historical-developmental hierarchy. For Hegel the German is valorized as the pinnacle of world history while the Jewish is dismissed as outside its movements. But it is here, particularly for certain German thinkers, that the Jewish is actually constitutive—in a strange, sometimes even obsessive way—of the German. And it is the project of a thinker like Heinrich Heine to take the Hegelian logic of the progress of world history, repeat it with a Jewish difference and thereby betray both the limits of the Hegelian system and the inseparability of German/Jewish.

Much like Heine, Kafka also performed a kind of deconstruction of the separatrix between German/Jewish. He did this in a little speech on the Yiddish language that he gave in 1912 to an audience of German speakers at the Jewish Town Hall in Prague.⁴ In his brief reflection on the history of the Yiddish language, Kafka suggests that Yiddish deterritorializes the German language through both its untranslatable closeness to and difference from the latter. He begins the short speech by assuring his German-speaking audience that they “understand much more Yiddish [Jargon] than they may believe” and that the “anxiety” they have toward Yiddish is actually unjustified (Y 421–22). He proceeds by enumerating some facts about the Yiddish language: that it is “the youngest European language,” that it is unique because it has “no grammatical structure,” and that it “consists entirely of foreign words” (Y 422).⁵ He then points out that mobility is a critical part of the language: “The migration of peoples runs through Yiddish from one end to the other. German, Hebrew, French, English, Slavic, Dutch, Romanian, and even Latin are contained within Yiddish with ease and curiosity” (Y 422–23). But it is the German language, Kafka indicates, that historically has had the closest affinities to Yiddish. In fact, German is so close to Yiddish that not only can speakers of German understand Yiddish but “Yiddish cannot be translated into German” (Y 425). Kafka insists, “the connections between Yiddish and German are so gentle and significant” that to translate Yiddish into German or even “trace it back” to German would be to “destroy it” (Y 425). Kafka gives some examples: “toit [Yiddish for “dead”] for instance, is very close to but not tot [German for “dead”] and blüt [Yiddish for “blood”] is very close to but not Blut [German for “blood”]” (Y 425).

What is significant about Kafka’s characterization of Yiddish vis-à-vis German is his recognition that the two languages are too close to be translated into one another. Translation presupposes a fundamental difference, a space or a gap between which something can be mediated. German and Yiddish are already contaminated by one another: German speakers can understand spoken Yiddish, and Yiddish speakers can understand spoken German. The fear of Yiddish is not simply that it can (almost) pass for German but that German can (almost) pass for Yiddish.⁶ In effect, what we might interpret Kafka as saying is that Yiddish is the “dangerous supplement” of German, that which is rigorously excluded—because it is a bastard language, because it is not standardized, because it is the language of “crooks” and “thieves,” because it is “uncultured,” because it is a mere “dialect” of a “backward” people—but is actually already within German.⁷ Yiddish essentially deterritorializes German by turning it eastward and making it Jewish. As Deleuze and Guattari astutely remark about Kafka’s relationship to Yiddish: “He sees it [Yiddish] less as a sort of linguistic territory for the Jews than as a nomadic movement of deterritorialization that reworks German language.”⁸ After all, Kafka’s examples—toit and tot, blüt and Blut—are differences uttered by the subaltern, which take the place of and enrich the plenitude of German. Through the operations of différance, barely recognizable in spoken language, Yiddish adds itself to, enriches, and replaces German. Yiddish is feared and perhaps dangerous because it undermines the authority, geography, and plenitude of the German language.⁹

As Kafka indicated by his attempt to valorize the oft-besmirched Yiddish language, a structuring hierarchy seems to govern the relationship between German and Jewish. German is supposedly the language of authority and nationality, grounded in the stability of geography and enduring cultural forms. Yiddish, on the other hand, is the language of Jewish “wanderers,” a language composed of foreign words because it has no geographic or cultural home. While this may be true at many times, I do not want to reduce the complex interactions of German/Jewish history to a strict, hierarchical relationship of such valuations and enforced normativity. Although “Jewish” may emerge as the devalued or non-normative underside of this relationship, there is—I contend—no pure “German” or timeless geography of “Germany.” The significance of this is that German modernity is always “contaminated” and, hence, means something else: namely, “German/Jewish” modernity.

To demonstrate this claim, my book is structured geographically around a group of dialectical encounters between German and Jewish thinkers: Heidegger/Celan, Goethe/Kafka, Hegel/Heine, List/Herzl, Heidegger/Arendt, and Freud/Sebald. An encounter does not necessarily refer to an actual meeting or a “dialogue,” especially if the term is limited to a conversation between two people who, in the critical words of Gershom Scholem, “listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him.”¹⁰ The encounters that I am tracking here did not occur on even ground, nor were they dialogical in the sense that one learns from and comes to terms with the other. My primary concern, however, is not with the debate about whether the German-Jewish dialogue actually took place.¹¹ Indeed, dialogue is actually too narrow a description for the German/Jewish relationships that I am analyzing here, and a real, physical encounter or meeting of the minds is not a prerequisite for my argument. Sometimes the thinkers in question did actually meet or correspond, sometimes one thinker “reads”—and in so doing reworks—the other, and sometimes there are discursive conditions of possibility or intellectual commonalities that enable certain chiasmic, transhistorical, conceptual affinities.¹² In each case the separatrix between German and Jewish marks the relationship as dialectical and entangles them within one another.

In the introduction to The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered, Klaus Berghahn argues that despite “the contradictions, illusions, and failures of Jewish emancipation and/or assimilation in Germany, there is still the possibility of historicizing the German-Jewish experience and restoring the German Jews as key figures in German culture.”¹³ While I agree with this assessment and its implicit negation of the model of failed dialogue, I go much further than simply “historicizing” the Jews in German modernity and “restoring” their place, something that essentially amounts to a retrospective project of historicization and commemoration. My argument is more fundamental: German modernity, I argue, is always already German/ Jewish modernity. The two are inextricably and fundamentally linked. To reinsert the Jews into “German culture” would be to imply that they can be truly removed.

In terms of methodology, I position my thinking about German/Jewish modernity closer to the work of Michael Brenner and Peter Eli Gordon, the latter of whom explored what he calls “the intimacy of the relationship between Germans and German Jews” through the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig.¹⁴ Both Brenner and Gordon focus on the richness of German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history in Weimar Germany without foreshadowing (or ignoring) the catastrophe that ensued. Like Gordon, I do not believe that we can maintain that the “richness and reality of intellectual exchange between Germans and Jews” did not occur because of the Holocaust; and, at the same time, I do not believe we should restrict ourselves to a narrowly conceived notion of dialogue, as Scholem insists. In Gordon’s words: “For such [German/Jewish] dialogue one needn’t understand the interlocutors as engaged in actual conversation. While Rosenzweig and Heidegger remained strangers in life, much of what they wrote bespeaks an intimate commonality of ideas” (xxiii), so much so that Gordon not only places Rosenzweig and Heidegger in contact with the philosophical traditions of German Idealism but, more significantly, concludes by entertaining “the startling possibility that Heidegger’s philosophy itself might somehow derive from Judaism” (313).

While Gordon analyzed a snapshot of the German/Jewish dialectic through his pairing of Heidegger and Rosenzweig, Paul Mendes-Flohr has examined the ways in which certain German-speaking Jews struggled to articulate hybrid identities torn between “German” and “Jewish.”¹⁵ Indeed, the tensions between Jewish faith and German culture within the intellectual and spiritual composition of German-Jewish thinkers must not be underestimated since the conjunctions and disjunctions between Judentum (Jewishness) and Deutschtum (Germanness) were far from consistent and clear-cut. After Mendelssohn, most German Jews, Mendes-Flohr argues, found “their identities and cultural loyalties fractured” because they were forced to struggle with and often choose between a “plurality of identities and cultures” (GJ 3). Although Rosenzweig optimistically imagined Germany as a “land of two rivers” (Zweistromland), one German and one Jewish, both flowing together “within the soul of the German Jew” (GJ 23–24), most German Jews saw their souls, in Benjamin’s word, as “bifurcated” (GJ 59). Therefore, we must be cognizant of the operations of more than one dialectic: that of German and Jewish within the soul of the German Jew¹⁶ and that of German and German-speaking Jew within the broader intellectual and cultural sphere. Mendes-Flohr examined the former dialectic in his study of German Jews; I will attempt, not unlike Gordon, to map out signposts for the geography of the latter dialectic here.

This, then, is the seemingly straightforward claim of my book: there is no such thing as German modernity pure and simple; instead “German” is always mixed together, for better and for worse, in splendor and in horror, with “Jewish.” I propose the signifier German/Jewish as a way of characterizing the movements, slippages, and tensions of this modernity and arrange the chapters of my study as snapshots of moments when the German/Jewish dialectic comes to a standstill. Here I will apply Benjamin’s famous concept of “dialectics at a standstill” to characterize my antidevelopmental historiography, which is organized according to constellations of tension between past and present, near and far, German and Jewish. It is not simply that the figure of the Jew is important for German thinkers; the idea of German—in the cultural sense of “what is German?”—is also a Jewish project. This is not to say, as Moritz Goldstein would famously argue in his article of 1912, “The German-Jewish Parnassus,” that Jews do, in fact, “administer” the “spiritual property” of the German nation;¹⁷ however, it is to say that German modernity—in its intellectual, cultural, and social forms—cannot be studied apart from Jewish modernity. The modernity that I am studying here breaks down into German/Jewish dialectics, and it is these inseparable tensions, encounters, relationships, and movements between German and Jewish which, recursively, constitute what I will term the dialectic of modernity.

The concept of the dialectic of modernity, as I use it here, certainly accords with the seminal work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, although I offer a significantly different account of historical processes, which will need to explain. Written in exile during the final years of World War and published shortly thereafter, Dialectic of Enlightenment is an attempt to explain fascism by tracking down the regressive, totalitarian elements of the Enlightenment’s dream of the rationalization of the world, the dissolution of myth, and the spread of knowledge.¹⁸ The concept of enlightenment does not, despite its claims to the contrary, simply mean the progressive illumination of the world through demythologization, knowledge, and mastery; it also means the ruthless dominance of this world through the leveling power of universal concepts, abstraction, and totalization. “The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (DE 3) because progress is always bound up with sublimation and domination. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the absolutism of the Enlightenment consumes everything, like a totalitarian system, such that “nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear” (DE 16). In the final analysis, “none can feel safe” (DE 23).

With the triumph of reason over myth (a triumph that can only happen completely when ratio becomes mythological), the fate of mimesis plays a particularly important role in articulating the dialectic, especially in Horkheimer and Adorno’s explanation of anti-Semitism. Mimesis does not simply mean the imitation of an object, but it also means the appropriation of it and is, therefore, part and parcel of the domination of nature: “the capacity of representation is the vehicle of progress and regression at one and the same time” (DE 35). Civilization is characterized by the “organized control of mimesis,” “rational practice,” and “work” (DE 180); anything or anyone that does not need this “organized control” is, by definition, outside of civilization. Because of the Jewish taboo on mimesis—the so-called Bildverbot, the ban on making graven images of God—Jews carried forward the processes of Enlightenment by themselves and, hence, did not need to be “civilized.” Hatred of the Jews, they argue, originated here and has thus become “a deeply imprinted schema, a ritual of civilization” (DE 171).¹⁹

Like Horkheimer and Adorno, I see the dialectic of modernity as simultaneously engendering opposing possibilities: On the one side of the coin, construction, progress, and emancipation, and, on the other side of the coin, destruction, regression, and enslavement. This dialectic is betrayed at every moment in the cultural and material history of modernization: The railway—the central example in my book—not only unified nations, brought together people, and facilitated mass migration, but it also shored up national borders, isolated people, and facilitated mass deportations. Or, as Walter Benjamin famously maintained, with respect to the “cultural treasures” of a civilization: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”²⁰ Culture and barbarism are not simply opposed; rather, they comprise a contradictory unity. But, unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, my project is not to explain historical phenomena such as fascism and anti-Semitism by tracing out long-term genealogies. For them fascism is the telos of Enlightenment absolutism, while anti-Semitism is tantamount to the very foundation and history of civilization. This is because Jews embody a “negative principle” and thus “must be exterminated to secure happiness for the world” (DE 168). Although I find their argument for the explanation of the persistence of anti-Semitism ingenious, it problematically confines Jews to a pure negativity and thereby fails to recognize the ways in which Jews contributed to the extension of “civilization” from within.²¹

Equally significant, the dialectic of modernity, as I articulate the concept here, does not consider fascism and the Holocaust to be the telos of the Enlightenment; rather, it considers them both to be historically specific possibilities of German/Jewish modernity. That is to say, the Holocaust did not end German/Jewish modernity or prove that the so-called dialogue had failed; rather, I consider the Holocaust as the most extreme dialectical expression of this very modernity. In this regard the dialectic of modernity does not trace out a history of continuous regression, culminating in the brutal totality of the “fully enlightened world radiating disaster triumphant,” with the Holocaust representing the endpoint of a historical succession. Instead I consider modernity to break down into German/Jewish dialectics, blurred possibilities and overlapping tensions of the variegated movements between German and Jewish. These movements—both the literal movements of people and the conceptual-historical interactions between German thinkers and Jewish thinkers—are neither additive nor modal: They do not constitute a continuous history nor do they have a definitive direction or teleology. For this reason I am wary of explaining the Holocaust by modernity—what essentially amounts to using a metaphysical concept of history to endow the Holocaust with meaning. To apply the apposite critique of Derrida: “This is the concept of history as the history of meaning … developing itself, producing itself, fulfilling itself. And doing so linearly, as you recall, in a straight or circular line…. The metaphysical character of the concept of history is not only linked to linearity, but to an entire system of implications (teleology, eschatology, elevating and interiorizing accumulation of meaning, a certain type of traditionality, a certain concept of continuity, of truth, etc.).”²² This is a concept of history that this book explicitly disavows.

I can now pose the central methodological question under investigation in this book: how might one map the German/Jewish dialectic of modernity? Rather than writing a cultural history of German/Jewish relations, I have opted to call my study a cultural geography in order to emphasize the significance of space and mobility for the history that I examine. While the discipline of cultural geography lies primarily outside of literary and cultural studies, there are a number of significant points of contact with my own work, not the least of which is the idea that culture is spatially constituted, which I need to clarify briefly. To overly simplify a complex field, cultural geography deals with the cultural and linguistic expressions of people in a particular place as well as their movements, patterns of development, urban environments, and cultural and social landscapes using tools that pull from geography, geology, anthropology, cultural studies, and ethnology.²³ Carl O. Sauer, the legitimate founder of the field, explains that classic cultural geography is “concerned with those works of man [sic] that are inscribed into the earth’s surface and give to it characteristic expression…. The geographic cultural area is taken to consist only of the expressions of man’s tenure of the land, the cultural assemblage which records the full measure of man’s utilization of the surface.”²⁴ For Sauer the expression of human agency in spatial terms—whether through the building of roads and railways or the carving of new trade routes and frontiers for colonization—is what cultural geographers study.²⁵

As the introduction to the seminal anthology Readings in Cultural Geography succinctly states: “cultural geography is the application of the idea of culture to geographic problems.”²⁶ In other words, cultural geography attempts to solve geographic problems by examining, distinguishing, classifying, and evaluating certain cultural expressions vis-à-vis their spatial articulations. Since 1962, when this anthology was first published, new appraisals and theoretical models have emerged that have significantly opened up the field beyond solving specifically geographic problems. As Peter Jackson points out in Maps of Meaning, the new cultural geography attempts to articulate the “spatial constitution” of culture and its “territorial expression.”²⁷ Other geographers such as Dennis Cosgrove, Edward Soja, and David Harvey have examined the dialectical relationship between culture and geography by focusing on the ways in which space, human landscapes, and spatial relations are socially and culturally constituted.²⁸ While my study shares a number of conceptual and metholodological points of contact with the field of cultural geography, not least in my analysis of cultural expression in spatial terms, I am not interested in trying to solve any particular “geographic” problem. Instead I am using geography to solve, so to speak, a cultural problem. That is to say, I want to examine the spatial constitution of German/ Jewish modernity by mapping its intellectual and cultural history onto a decidedly cultural-geographic surface: the railway system.

For my purposes here, cultural geography is the pendant to cultural history. While my attention to cultural geography betrays many of the same interests as cultural geographers—including the theorization of spatial relations, the centrality of place and landscape to understand cultural production, the attempt to map mobility, and the attention to migration and transnationality—I am much more interested in how cultural geography can help me articulate a theory of modernity. To this end, cultural geography is essentially a practice of history, a kind of historiography, which, as we will see, owes a particular debt to Walter Benjamin by virtue of its antihistoricist, materialist approach to studying cultural artifacts. The cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity presented in this book flattens chronology in order to highlight the mobility, contamination, and exchange between German and Jewish. Both the German language and the places of encounter between German and Jewish thinkers become deterritorialized and remapped according to new constellations, figures, and sites of contact. This has several important theoretical consequences: First of all, in shifting attention away from chronology, it becomes impossible to trace lines of development or continuities. Connections are not made according to the necessity of succession but rather according to the contingency of geography and the possibility of mobility. This means that a cultural geography is radically fractured and discontinuous; it resembles a pile of snapshots of a dialectic. At the same time that succession is given up, it also becomes impossible to assign modality or direction to historical events. Geographies of simultaneity or constellations of possibility are the result.

Concretely speaking, I do not proceed “from” a certain period “to” a certain period because the argument that I am presenting is not linear.²⁹ At the same time, I do not restrict myself to Germany as a preexisting territorial unit of reference because the argument that I am presenting is not based on nationality. The deterritorialized Germany that I am examining begins in Berlin and Delos and moves to Sicily, New York City, the North Sea, Nuremberg-Fürth, Palestine, Auschwitz, Vienna, Prague, Antwerp, and Paris. What emerges—through the multiplicity of places of contact, mobility, and contention—is a complicated cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity, not a national literary history. By way of an attentiveness to the specificity of geography and mobility, each chapter treats a certain problem in the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity: memory, subjectivity, historicity, nationality, death, and representation. Unlike the Hegelian dialectic, the German/Jewish dialectic is never sublated into something else. Instead, through the logic of the supplement, the dialectic is brought to a standstill at moments of tension: Celan adds to, enriches, and replaces Heidegger; Kafka adds to, enriches, and replaces Goethe; Heine adds to, enriches, and replaces Hegel; Herzl adds to, enriches, and replaces List; and Arendt adds to, enriches, and replaces Heidegger. In the cultural geography that I present here, the hierarchy overturns itself one time, becoming Jewish/German, as Sebald adds to, enriches, and replaces Freud. In effect, I am positing that German modernity cannot be understood without its Jewish other and that Jewish modernity cannot be understood without its German other.

The methodological differences between cultural histories and cultural geographies underscore another important issue in German-Jewish studies, namely, the “place” of the Holocaust in such narratives. Nowadays, within the field of German-Jewish cultural history, there is general agreement that the Holocaust was not the inevitable telos of a long-term historical development, although there may still be certain continuities (for example, concerning the history of anti-Semitism) worth investigating. Like Amos Elon, for example, I believe that it makes little sense to see “German Jews doomed from the outset” by tracing out “an inexorable pattern in German history preordained from Luther’s day to culminate in the Nazi Holocaust.” Elon continues: “I have found only a series of ups and downs and a succession of unforeseeable contingencies, none of which seems to have been inevitable. Alongside the Germany of anti-Semitism, there was a Germany of enlightened liberalism, humane concern, civilized rule of law, good government, social security, and thriving social democracy.”³⁰ And, at the same time that it makes little sense to trace forward the “inevitability” of destruction, it makes just as little sense to “backshadow” the Holocaust by emplotting our retrospective knowledge into the past and judging historical agents “as though they too should have known what was to come.”³¹

Both of these problems, however, are particular to a mode of cultural study in which the successive logic of temporality is the structuring principle. In a cultural geography one cannot “foreshadow” or “backshadow” the Holocaust because temporality is flattened in favor of the dialectics of mobility and spaces of exchange. Traditional cultural histories allow us to productively investigate long-term cultural problems (such as the history of the “Jewish question” in German culture or the history of anti-Semitism) by giving us, more or less, synthetic histories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Depending on how far these cultural histories are taken, the Holocaust enters the horizon—and rightly so—as a definitive end. It conditions the possibility of asking urgent questions such as “What happened?” “What went wrong?” and “Could it have been prevented?” But within the framework of a cultural geography, such questions cannot be asked or answered. Any sort of long-term, explanatory questions that seek to elucidate the development of a certain “track” or the emergence of a “history of mentality” are disallowed as soon as one gives up chronology, lines of influence, teleologies, modalities, and origins. Far from a simple binary, the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity is analyzed within discontinuous spaces of possibility, mobility, contingency, and connectivity, thereby enabling a new topology of concepts and problems to surface.

Over the past few years, the field of German-Jewish studies has moved in such a direction through the work of scholars such as Barbara Hahn, Scott Spector, Jonathan Hess, and Peter Gordon, even if their individual methodological claims are not expressed under the rubric of cultural geography. In her book on Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bertha Badt-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Margarete Susman, and other Jewish intellectuals, Hahn, for example, patently refuses to sketch out a “survey” of the history of “the Jewess Pallas Athena”; instead she divides her book into “constellations in which similar figures and similar positions continually reappear,” resulting in “a network of references, sometimes difficult to decode, sometimes almost lost to sight.”³² It does not add up to something as comprehensive as a cultural history of German-Jewish modernity. In his Prague Territories, Spector explicitly grounds his analysis in a spatial matrix, mapping out cultural expression and problems of nationality through a multiplicity of “circles” around Prague and, more expansively, the “territories” of central Europe.³³ And while Hess and Gordon are not primarily concerned with questions of space and geography, both are concerned with the agency and even partnership of German and German-Jewish intellectuals in shaping the philosophical and cultural landscape of modernity in all its dialectical expressions.³⁴ For all of these critics a new set of terms, priorities, and methodological investments have emerged for tracking and mapping out the complexity of German-Jewish modernity, ones that differentiate these studies from the commemorative conventions of earlier cultural histories.

In my book the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity is analyzed by investigating the cultures in transit—in short, what might be called mobility studies. The railway—arguably the most iconic association of both the splendor and horror of German/Jewish relations—is not only an important part of the cultural history of German/Jewish modernity, something which I indicate by the dialectical images of the Anhalter Bahnhof preceding each chapter, but it also allows us to formulate a theory of cultural geography by drawing our attention to the spatial fundament of the dialectic of modernity. I study this dialectic by mapping out German/Jewish modernity—that is to say, by studying the cultural forms in which mobility was imagined, experienced, narrated, and variously expressed. The railway system represents the organizing principle, the material reality, and the cultural metaphor for understanding how German and German-Jewish thinkers construct modernity as a story of mobility. To put it in Benjamin’s terms, the (German/ Jewish) railway system is the “crystallization” of (German/Jewish) modernity, the distillation of its essential dialectics, “of the total event.”³⁵

The railway system thus provides the organizing principles of this cultural geography: Stations are infinitely connectable; the tracks are, by definition, bidirectional; the system is nonlinear, acentric, and open-ended; connections are based on the contingency of contiguity; and movement is synchronous. With the rejection of developmental models of history, connections cannot be made by chronology; instead, derived from the cultural geography of the railway system, they are made through new constellations of contiguity: Celan’s Berlin is connected to the island of Delos for Heidegger’s travels of memory; Sicily, New York City, and Baranovich Station provide the transnational itinerary for the creation of the German/Jewish subject in Goethe, Kafka, and Sholem Aleichem; the North Sea is the locale for mapping Hegel and Heine’s movements of Spirit; the first German railway line between Nuremberg and Fürth is connected to Palestine via the national fantasies of Friedrich List and Theodor Herzl; the singularity of Auschwitz represents the site of modernity’s transformation of death for Heidegger and Arendt; finally, the modern railway system connecting Vienna, Rome, Prague, Antwerp, and Paris is the basis of conceptualizing new practices of representation for Freud and Sebald. In every case the territorial unit of the German nation cannot be presupposed as a starting point. Nationality and national literary histories are replaced by transnational spaces of encounter, which have the effect of deterritorializing the authority of the German language. Rather than proceeding from the nation, one inquires into the conditions of possibility for nationality, and, in so doing, the German/Jewish dialectic is brought to a momentary standstill in order to articulate the nexus between modernity and mobility.

I would now like to clarify dialectics at a standstill, a concept derived from Walter Benjamin that I use to describe these snapshots of German/Jewish modernity. In the drafts he made for his uncompleted magnum opus, Das Passagen-Werk, known in English as The Arcades Project, Benjamin coined the term dialectics at a standstill to characterize the practice of historical materialism attentive to both the flow and the arrest of historical phenomena. Although it remained a notoriously murky and underdeveloped concept in Benjamin’s oeuvre, the concept is important for this study because it contributes, first, to the creation of a discontinuous, nondevelopmental practice of history derived from material culture and, second, to a reconsideration of German/Jewish modernity as a complex interplay rather than a simple opposition. Unlike conventional historiographic practices that aim at reproducing the fullness of the past and are motivated by the belief that the past is worthy in and of itself of being preserved, Benjamin sought to articulate the contingency of the relationship between a given present and a given past as a dialectical image that comes together in a flash: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (AP 462). He calls this constellation “dialectics at a standstill” (AP 462). By contrast, he reviled historicism—the idea that the past can be represented “as it really was” such that eventually, over time, with careful and methodical accumulation, the reality of the past could be written, reconstructed, and finally rehabilitated—to be “the strongest narcotic of the nineteenth century” (AP 463).³⁶ Rather than attempting to produce a “homogenous” or “continuous exposition of history” (AP 470), historical materialism, Benjamin suggested, aimed at a kind of thinking that “comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions” (AP 475). This thinking “blasts the epoch out of the reified ‘continuity of history’” (AP 474), thereby exposing the claims of the losers and the “refuse of history” (Abfall der Geschichte; AP 461). These claims and refuse represent what had to be left out, covered up, or forgotten in conventional accounts of history in order to evoke the semblance of progress, continuity, or homogeneity.

Rather than the necessity of chronology, the relationship between what is past and what is present is marked by contingency, “the now of a particular recognizability” (AP 463). This means that the past is not a timeless domain amenable to narrative rehabilitation but always subject to present legibility and recognizability. In the sixteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, Benjamin underscores the significance of the present for the historical materialist: “A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.”³⁷ Unlike the historicist who attempts to produce “the ‘eternal’ image of the past,” the task of the historical materialist is to “blast open the continuum of history” through a kind of thinking that “involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.”³⁸ The historical materialist “[brushes] history against the grain”³⁹ in order to interrupt the seemingly inexorable flow of “history” and salvage some of the refuse that has been subsumed, lost, or edited out. The cultural geography of this book is an attempt to brush the history of modernity against the grain.

Although Rolf Tiedemann considered the “dialectical image” and “dialectics at a standstill” to be “without a doubt, the central categories of the Passagen-Werk,” Benjamin, he notes, never completely fleshed out how these concepts would inform a philosophy of history nor did he ever use them with “any terminological consistency.”⁴⁰ According to Tiedemann, the concept “dialectics at a standstill” first surfaced in a 1935 exposé in which Benjamin “localized dialectical images as dream and wish images in the collective subconscious.”⁴¹ Here the collective dreams its successor while referring back to “Ur-history” and the utopian ideal of a classless society: “Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. The standstill is utopia, and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish.”⁴² After criticism from Adorno, Tiedemann notes that Benjamin dropped this line of thought in favor of an understanding of dialectics at a standstill that “seems to function almost as a heuristic principle, a procedure that enables the historical materialist to maneuver his objects.”⁴³

According to Max Pensky, Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, despite “all the permutations and variations [had] … a remarkable degree of consistency,” which revolved around a few key terms: “dream and waking, myth and critical insight, historical continuum and shocking interruption, phantasmagoria and image, fetish and historical object.”⁴⁴ At the intersection of these axes, as Susan Buck-Morss has demonstrated, is the dialectical image, the crystallization of ostensibly antithetical elements, in which “the ‘fundamental coordinates’ of the modern world” can be recognized.⁴⁵ For my purposes here, I am particularly interested in how Benjamin’s concept of dialectics at a standstill can be used, first, to generate a critical, materialist historiography and, second, to articulate some of the fundamental coordinates, so to speak, of German/Jewish modernity. But rather than attempting to clarify or further explicate the concept, I will attempt to perform or enact it in the chapters that follow.

In terms of a critical materialist historiography, Benjamin conceived of the dialectical image, as Michael Jennings has pointed out, “as a powerful antidote to the concept of progress, for him the most dangerous ideological weapon in the capitalist arsenal.”⁴⁶ The critic’s juxtaposition of images is invested with a revolutionary power to transform consciousness, something that results in a concept of history decidedly unlike the progressive logic of the Hegelian dialectic. Benjamin’s dialectics are at a standstill precisely to halt the forward-moving progress of history such that particularity is no longer inexorably subsumed into the universal. The result is an antidevelopmental practice of history in which what is past enters into and out of legibility according to the contingency of a given present. Unlike the “additive” method of any sort of universal history, which “musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time,”⁴⁷ a materialist historiography freezes the dialectic, if only for a moment, in order to blast the image “from the continuum of historical process” (AP 475). As such, “history breaks down into images, not into stories” (AP 476; translation slightly altered), and it is in these configurations of dialectics at standstill that the historical materialist finds “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”⁴⁸

The following six chapters of this book, each preceded by a dialectical image of the Anhalter Bahnhof, represent a moment in which the movements of the German/Jewish dialectic have come to a standstill. These chapters do not add up to produce a “history” but rather, through the ways in which mobility is variously mapped by the thinkers under consideration, blast apart any claims to continuous development or narrative rehabilitation. German/Jewish modernity does not lead anywhere; instead it opens up a radically deterritorialized cultural and linguistic geography. The task of this study is to map out and salvage some of the remains of this modernity.

I can now say something about the overall ambition of the project and the status of the German/Jewish pairings in each chapter. In terms of ambition, Benjamin’s concept of dialectics at a standstill provides the materialist grounding and historiographic impetus for my cultural geography, which attempts to track some of the movements, tensions, and expressions of German/Jewish modernity. In terms of the status of the pairings, the concept provides a way of reconceiving the relationship between German and Jewish beyond a simple binary opposition or a normative orientation of the “German” (which is “bad”) and a normative orientation of the “Jewish” (which is “good”). My argument is that the one cannot be understood without the other, and that both are in a productive tension, which takes many different forms, valuations, and expressions. It is not that the German simply stands for one thing and the Jewish for its opposite; rather, the separatrix between German and Jewish means that the relationship is ambiguous and coconstitutive, a dialectic marked by undecidability, movement, slippage, and contamination. Far from mere oppositions, then, List and Herzl, for example, are both concerned with nationality; Sebald and Freud are both concerned with how contingency became the defining attribute of modernist practices of representation. And even in cases where the German “side” of the dialectic comes to stand for something normative (such as Hegel’s conception of world history or Heidegger’s “groundedness” of memory), it can only be recognized as such by way of the Jewish “side” of the dialectic (Heine’s ghost stories or Celan’s layered topographies), adding to, enriching, and productively engaging with the German “side.” What emerges is not a simple opposition but a dialectic at a standstill, a moment in which a new image or constellation emerges that allows us to reassess and reinterpret the culture from which the thinkers, ideas, and objects came. This is only possible, to invoke Benjamin, because the historical materialist or cultural geographer makes choices from the perspective of the present about what texts and authors to bring together in a productive, potentially explosive tension.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Because the separatrix simultaneously separates two (or potentially more) concepts and brings them together in a dialectical unity, the fact of a separatrix is the starting point for any study of mobility. The undecidability of the relationship between the terms conditions their movement, slippage, and tension. As in German/Jewish, it is a relationship characterized by contamination, exchange, hybridity, connection, transnationality, and displacement. An attempt to definitively separate them only reveals the extent to which the one is constitutive of the other. And just as significantly, the terms cannot be sublated into something else, as if the particularity of German and Jewish could be synthesized into something like a universal modernity. The modernity that I am studying here breaks down into dialectical encounters between German and Jewish, images of enabling and checking, facilitating and arresting mobility. This book constructs a cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity by mapping snapshots of this dialectic at a standstill. In this respect, it shares something of Adorno’s assessment of Benjamin’s thought, namely, “the obligation to think at the same time dialectically and undialectically.”⁴⁹

In providing one of its first theoretical reflections, Stephen Greenblatt described mobility studies as the tracking of the “restless and often unpredictable movements” of language and literature.⁵⁰ According to Greenblatt, the primary concern of literary history and the study of literature and languages can no longer be the charting of progress, the analysis of organic development, or the security of origins; instead literary studies, conceived as the study of mobility, examines the contingent interactions and sometimes bloody encounters between people on the move. In his words, “We need to understand colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected consequences, along with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, for it is these disruptive forces, not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy, that principally shape the history and diffusion of languages.”⁵¹ At the core of mobility studies is a recognition of contingency, that things could have been otherwise. Any sort of historicist assumptions about inevitable teleologies, transcendental units of analysis, or the unbleached recovery of “how it really was” are rejected out of hand. This does not mean that everything goes, that every story is as good as every other story, or that history is reduced to randomly chosen events.⁵² Rather, it means that we must create modes of writing cultural criticism in which the contingency of location, language, and transmission—all things that make the borders of any language and national literature, not to mention what constitutes the literary, far from clear—comes to the forefront of our analyses.

Although the purpose of this book is not to propose something as comprehensive, grandiose, or as highly structured as a new literary history, it might be useful to mention some of the conventional organizational premises of historical emplotment. If temporality is taken to be the raw material, so to speak, of literary history, questions of chronology (designations of before and after or not yet and no longer), origins, end points, modalities (history as direction), teleologies (history as an inevitability), and periodization are generally the privileged terms of analysis.⁵³ If, however, mobility is taken to be the raw material of historical analysis, a new emphasis on the relationship between space and time informs the investigation, allowing us to focus on the complexities of intercultural transmission, contamination, exchange, translation, migration, and transgression. An account of the relationship between space—both the space in literature and of literature in space, to use Franco Moretti’s distinction⁵⁴—and temporality—both diachronic changes and synchronic events—becomes a central part of the study of culture. Indeed, these are the kinds of premises that have informed the fragmentary geographies of the “new histories” of French and German literature.⁵⁵

In addition to the work of Moretti, a significant body of work on literary geography and mobility studies has emerged in recent years, particularly within the fields of cultural studies of transnationality and globalization.⁵⁶ It is here that the limitations of national literatures have been critically assessed with a view toward reexamining the complexity of cultural production by exposing structures of hegemony and discourses of exclusivity. Somewhat less attention, however, has been given to the problem of how to write such a cultural geography—that is to say, to what it might look like in practice. In her afterword to The Literary Channel, an anthology of essays examining the international cultural production and transmission of the novel between France and England, Emily Apter indicates three studies that begin to imagine what such models might look like. Here, she cites Rey Chow’s “diaspora studies,” Moretti’s “distant reading,” and Perry Anderson’s “new cartography” as being “representative of a new kind of literary history that circumvents nation-based criticism even as it recognizes that no general theory of literature can dispense with the nation as a crucible of historical and aesthetic comparison.”⁵⁷ My own work builds on and shares certain conceptual affinities with these new geographical approaches to studying cultures in transit.

Given the importance of mobility—whether diaspora or exile, emigration or dislocation, travel or deportation—within Jewish history, it may be surprising to learn that the vast majority of work in the fields of cultural geography and mobility studies has been done by scholars far removed from Jewish studies.⁵⁸ Within the field of geographically oriented cultural studies, the attention to mobility and space goes back to James Clifford’s seminal essay “Traveling Cultures,” in which he attempted to shift the field of cultural anthropology away from privileging relations of “dwelling” to investigating the complexities of movement, encounter, and cultural exchange.⁵⁹ For Clifford, the study of mobility allows us to recognize new types of agency that constitute “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” across cultural, social, national, and linguistic borders. These movements, encounters, and exchanges always take place in space and are mediated by certain temporal and spatial practices,⁶⁰ which, according to Clifford, require us “to rethink cultures as sites of dwelling and travel.”⁶¹

Not unlike Clifford, Homi Bhabha situates the “location of culture” within a postcolonial framework in which geography and mobility also come to the foreground. Bhabha argues that culture must be understood as both transnational and translational

because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the “middle passage” of slavery and indenture, the “voyage out” of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodations of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World … [and] because such spatial histories of displacement—now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of “global” media technologies—make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.⁶²

This question of signification is complex precisely because of “the transnational dimension of cultural transformation”—that is to say, because of mobility and its consequences of cultural hybridity, plurality, and contingency, particularly in an age of globalized media.⁶³ For Bhabha the analysis of culture from a postcolonial perspective requires a resistance to any sort of “unifying discourse” or “holistic forms of social explanation” and the embrace of “forms of dialectical thinking that do not disavow or sublate the otherness (alterity) that constitutes the symbolic domain of psychic and social identifications.”⁶⁴ The snapshots of the fractured, discontinuous dialectic of German/Jewish modernity offered here are an attempt to produce an analysis of culture attentive to both the transnational and translational effects of mobility.

Within the field of cultural studies perhaps the most important work to examine the problems of modernity within a transnational, intercultural framework explicitly against “nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches” is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic.⁶⁵ Gilroy takes “the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture” as his starting point for addressing “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering … the black Atlantic world” (BA 2, 3). Breaking from the conventions of English and American cultural studies, which, at the time his book appeared, were still ensconced in rigidly eurocentric models of nationality, Gilroy’s study of modernity derives from the transcultural, international formation he calls the black Atlantic. As a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” (BA 4) for representing the complexity of both cultural and human transport, the black Atlantic, “continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship—provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory” (BA 16). In effect, Gilroy introduces a new cultural geography, derived from the dialectics of mobility, to articulate the counterculture of modernity.

For Gilroy the organizing image for the black Atlantic is the ship—with its various kinds of cargo—moving across the water separating Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean. As Gilroy indicates and as I will discuss in more detail in the chapters that follow, ship travel is a central paradigm of Western cultural existence. It calls upon a wide range of experiences such as voyages of discovery, conquest, and enslavement as well as a wealth of metaphors, including journeys of progress, enlightenment, and education. And, materially, ships “were the living means by which the points within [the] Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they encountered. Accordingly they need to be thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade” (BA 16–17). As Gilroy underscores through the image of the ship on the black Atlantic, mobility must always be considered dialectically, as moving simultaneously in two directions: emancipation and enslavement, discovery and destruction. In this regard, building off the work of Bakhtin and Clifford, he sees the ship as a new “chronotope” for rethinking the cultural study of modernity beyond the boundaries of both conventional historiographies and traditional nation-states (BA 17).

Analogous to travel by ship, travel by train cannot be circumscribed to preexisting national borders. With the construction of an interconnected, international railway system at the end of the nineteenth century, travel by train was, by definition, transnational and translational, in the sense described by Bhabha; but, perhaps paradoxically, it was precisely the railway that played a significant part in German national unification by literally connecting together the fragmented space of the “dormant nation.” This paradox will be examined in detail in chapter 5 under the rubric of “some assembly required” when I discuss List and Herzl. In this respect, my study of mobility, following Apter’s admonition, cannot dispense with the nation “as a crucible of historical and aesthetic comparison.” At the same time, I will argue that these geographies of mobility—whether the black Atlantic or the transcontinental railway—deterritorialize the nation by opening up new social and political spaces for cultural exchange and encounter. Like the black Atlantic, such spaces emerge beyond the binaries of nationality and diaspora and, therefore, require new approaches to cultural and literary studies that are not strictly nation based or chronologically driven.⁶⁶

In much the same way that Benjamin looked to the arcade to examine how the hopes, desires, dreams, and fears of an epoch lay buried in its architectural and cultural forms, I look to the materiality of the railway system to investigate the deterritorialized cultural geography of German/ Jewish modernity. As Benjamin suggested in The Arcades Project, a historical materialist must turn to the leftover remains—from architectural achievements to cultural ephemera, from railway stations to works of literature—to offer up the “physiognomy” of an epoch from the perspective of the contingency of the present. The trove of cultural sources under investigation here ranges from travel literature, poetry, philosophy, and photography to railway maps, train schedules, decrepit railway tracks, bombed out stations, and abandoned machinery. As both material witnesses to a bygone epoch and as figures for the finitude of any practice of cultural criticism, they all testify to the dialectics of mobility and thereby represent a starting and ending point for my reflections on the cultural geographies of German/Jewish modernity.

Ultimately, of course, the cultural forms do not add up to something whole. The cultural geography presented here is fractured and partial, representing just one possibility for mapping German/Jewish modernity. Other possibilities might focus on different thinkers or other relationships and produce a very different map of the “stations” where the dialectic comes to a standstill. Nevertheless, I think that my choice of examples allows me to construct a compelling account of this modernity by mapping the multiple and complex ways in which the separatrix between German and Jewish renders the two terms inseparably connected and indefinitely mobile. Furthermore, by focusing on the ways in which these thinkers variously map mobility, the problems of memory, subjectivity, historicity, nationality, death, and representation—all critical terms for understanding any modernity—are given a new cultural genealogy. The payoff is not only a new cultural genealogy of German/Jewish modernity but also an interdisciplinary methodology—cultural geography—for writing about cultures in transit.

Let me now say something about the chapters that follow. All of the chapters begin with the assumption that there is something irreducibly anthropological about the study of modernity. How else can the plans, hopes, anxieties, and answers built into its material objects and written into its texts and discourses be studied, if not by examining modernity’s remains, by finding and piecing together some of its fragments? As the art historian T. J. Clark has recently indicated in his episodic history of modernism, the visual forms that modernity gave rise to—that is to say, its answers—are no longer readily comprehensible to us today because we have arrived on the scene too late, after both its realization and self-destruction, what Clark sees as the complementary horrors of modernization.⁶⁷ We know what happened, and no amount of philosophical bracketing will deliver—at least not in good faith—the pure forms of modernity in and on their own terms. The “pure form” is but a pretext for horror. And no amount of historical reconstruction will patch together the pieces into a former whole. In that sense, studying the objects, discourses, and documents of modernity is an exercise in futility because, paradoxically, the pieces do not add up yet cry out for unity.

I begin and end my study with the remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the wasteland of scattered industrial debris and architectural ruins that bear witness to a former whole. As a culturally stratified site, the dialectics of German/Jewish modernity can be traced in the material remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof. The task, however, is not to reconstruct the station or its history; instead, as I suggest in chapter 2, it is to construct a philosophy of history, an approach to cultural criticism, out of its materiality. As Adorno wrote in Negative Dialectics, “We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things.”⁶⁸ The wastelands of the Anhalter Bahnhof—its concrete, material remains—disrupt the homogenizing processes of “historicization” because they are “out of joint” with respect to both historical time and the time of the present. They are ruins that have not yet been decided, not yet subsumed into a discourse of historical intelligibility. In a word, they represent the unmastered remains of German/Jewish modernity.

As I show in the second chapter, it is precisely this undecidability that Celan preserves in his poetry but that Heidegger seeks to overcome in his philosophy. Both turn to material remains—for Celan it is the ruins of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof, whereas for Heidegger it is the ruins of ancient Greece—in order to articulate the urgency of the concept of memory after the destruction of World War II. I bring Heidegger and Celan together as a snapshot of the German/Jewish dialectic of modernity by examining two autobiographical travel narratives composed in 1962: Heidegger’s account of his voyage to the Greek island of Delos, Aufenthalte (Stopovers), and Celan’s train travels through Europe in the poem “La Contrescarpe.” Whereas Heidegger pursues the rootedness of place to ground the concept of memory, Celan envisions a kind of topographical memory in which the stratified remains of the past are encountered, however briefly, in the contingency of the present.

This chapter also serves to introduce the two paradigms of mobility under consideration in this study: travel by ship and travel by train. For Heidegger the sea voyage to Delos is a voyage of confirmation, in which he attempts to locate, in the most literal sense of the word, the groundedness of Greco-German being. As we will see in my subsequent discussion of Goethe, Hegel, and Herzl, the “meta-epistemology of the ship” (something exemplified by Heidegger’s travel narrative) is a long-standing ideological configuration, which is consistently linked with the production of a strong, nationally grounded subject with a safe, transcendental perspective on the world “out there.” By contrast, the railway system—as a horizontally differentiated, third-order network—is a structure of mobility that fundamentally prevents such a perspective and thereby gives rise to a less aggregated form of subjectivity as well as different possibilities of representation. Taking Heine’s famous observation that railways have killed space and time as my entry point, I analyze the “meta-epistemology of the railway” in Kafka, List, Freud, and Sebald as a dialectical configuration of contingency specific to modernity.

In chapter 3 I consider the question of the German/Jewish subject by looking at the meta-epistemology of mobility in Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian journey), Kafka’s Der Verschollene (The man who went missing), and Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories. The subject of German/Jewish modernity, I argue, emerges in the deterritorialized, non-national spaces of encounter—between Sicily, New York City, and the Baranovich Station—in which mobility is variously experienced and mapped in these travel narratives. Whereas Goethe’s Italienische Reise and his novel of education, Wilhelm Meister, narrate the formation of a German subject without a nation by mapping the spaces of geographic, linguistic, and political privilege, the travels of Kafka’s fictional figure, Karl Rossmann, map the desubjectification of the immigrant as a dislocated mass object of modernization. As a figure of abjection, he is severed from all geographies of nationality, citizenship, religion, and language. I place Kafka’s novel within the context of Jewish travel writing in Yiddish, particularly Sholem Aleichem’s contemporaneous Railroad Stories, in order to show how the modernist Jewish subject emerges in the dialectical and disaggregated network of the railway. The formation of the German/Jewish subject is illustrated in the conceptual, cultural, and material spaces of encounter between German and Jewish mobility.

Chapter 4, “The North Sea,” examines the concept of historicity by articulating a nautical space of encounter between Hegel and Heine. I show how Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history can be read as a travel narrative of World Spirit and that Heine’s Reisebilder (Pictures of travel), although ostensibly “images” from his travels through Germany and Italy, deconstruct Hegel’s all-consuming philosophy by repeating it with a Jewish difference. Heine transforms the travel narrative into a critique of history by taking the grand historical narrative, with its investment in the “Greek” trope of seafaring, and deconstructing its systematic claims of national belonging and teleological development. Through an analysis of the “North Sea” poems, I show how Heine reworks both the genre of travel literature as self-discovery and Hegel’s geographically determined movement of “World Spirit.” The result is a nonsystematic Jewish conception of historicity, which, in its embrace of particularity, subverts the absolutism of Hegel’s philosophy of history by exposing the very metaphors upon which its progressive development relies.

Not without irony, Hegel’s philosophy of world history as a sea voyage of World Spirit had a significant afterlife in the early Zionist imaginary. Jewish thinkers such as Max Grunwald and Theodor Herzl elevated the seafaring Jew into a historical paradigm of national and colonial rejuvenation. The result, as I show in chapter 5, is that Jews—far from being a landlocked people condemned to wander from nation to nation—actually set sail and thus have a claim, in Hegel’s sense of the word, to be world-historical people. In fact, the Zionist idea of nationality was consistently articulated as a politics of mobility: Seafaring and train travel not only provided the practical means of transporting the Jews of Europe to Palestine, but it also helped solidify a Jewish national consciousness, something that Herzl underscored in his own travels and writings about Zionism in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state) and his Jewish bildungsroman, Altneuland (Old-new land).

By looking to the relatively recent model of German unification, Herzl argued that the age-old Jewish question needed an analogous solution, which he considered to be the establishment of a modern Jewish nation. In chapter 5 I focus on two discursive periods in which the future-directed fantasies of German and Jewish nationality, respectively, conditioned one another dialectically: The period around 1835, emblematically represented by the ideas of German railway pioneer Friedrich List, and the period around 1900, emblematically represented by the ideas of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Here the German/Jewish dialectic of modernity paralleled another dialectic, namely, that of nationality and globalization. By examining a range of cultural expressions—including Fichte’s speeches to the German nation, List’s railway plans, the Young Germany controversy, and the development of national literary histories—I show how inwardly directed fantasies of German nationality were dependent upon encoding the Jew as global. Then, in the second part of this chapter, I show how the outwardly directed fantasies of Jewish nationality were dependent upon the inward history of German national unification. In both cases the fantasy of German/Jewish nationality needs its other for self-legitimation. My cultural geography thereby links the first German railway line between Nuremberg and Fürth—historically and conceptually—to Palestine.

Chapter 6 turns to the destruction of the other and the modernity of mass death. Significantly, both this chapter on Heidegger and Arendt and the next on Freud and Sebald do not “follow” from the previous chapters in the developmental sense that one might expect from a linear cultural history. It is here that one recognizes the fractured possibilities of a cultural geography: there is no attempt to anticipate, explain, or historicize the Holocaust because it is not situated chronologically as a kind of end point or telos of a history of meaning; instead it is broached as a dialectical possibility of German/Jewish modernity. I begin this chapter by grounding the deportation of German Jews in the specificity of the Anhalter Bahnhof and the transports of elderly Jews from Berlin who were sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt from this station. But, rather than analyzing the deportations as an instance of mobile modernity, I focus on the immobilization of the German/Jewish dialectic itself—that is, the Nazi attempt to absolutely destroy the Jewish other. The modernity of mass death, I suggest, represents the core of this immobilization.

Although both Heidegger and Arendt use the same phrase—“the fabrication of corpses”—to describe this destruction, the concept of death and, hence, the concept of life are far from congruous in the two thinkers. To explicate the essential differences, I compare Arendt’s reflections on totalitarianism, particularly her discussion of mass death in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1949 /51), with Heidegger’s reflections on authenticity and mass death in his Bremen lectures of 1949. Although Arendt adopted Heidegger’s critique of modernity into her political theory, I show the divergence of their thought with regard to the Holocaust and the significance of mass death to philosophy. While Arendt traces the transformation of human nature with the historical achievement of state-sponsored mass death, Heidegger never gives up the paradigm of authenticity for understanding death as one’s most individualizing possibility and will, therefore, insist that the victims of mass death never “died.” In the final analysis, I suggest, Heidegger’s thinking—not just about death but also about memory—fundamentally precludes the thought of mass death, something that not only prevents him from thinking the Holocaust but even redeems the Nazi’s failure to absolutely immobilize the German/Jewish dialectic.

In chapter 7 I turn to the construction of the railway system across Europe and use Freud and Sebald to reflect on the problem of representation in German/Jewish modernism. As my final stop of the German/Jewish dialectic, Sebald, I argue, shares an important conceptual and epistemological connection with the early thought of Freud: The railway system is the condition of possibility for modernist modes of representation. After abandoning the logocentrism of the so-called seduction theory in late 1897, Freud, particularly in The Interpretation of Dreams and his essay on “Screen Memories,” opens up the possibility that memory is not set down once and for all but rather subject to various movements through the open-ended processes of rearrangement, retranscription, connection, displacement, and contingency. Memory, like history, does not correspond to the replication of the past but rather calls upon the mobile interpretation of what remains in the space of the present. For Freud it is the modernity of the railway system that offers—through its seemingly infinite connectivity, contingency, and open-endedness—not only a model for the mobility of memory but also the conceptual basis of modernist practices of representation and the interpretative work of psychoanalysis itself. By mapping his most famous “Jewish” dream of Rome, “My Son, the Myops,” I show how his interpretation of the dream follows the logic of an acentric railway system in which the free play of associative links expands indefinitely into a complex, open-ended, horizontally differentiated network of mobility.

While the mobility of the railway system offers the conditions of conceptuality for both Freud and Sebald’s theories of representation, I argue that Sebald also sees the railway as the material embodiment of the dialectic of modernity. The stratified remains of the railway figure significantly in both his critique of the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity and his practice of historical representation. By divorcing the representation of the past from a literalist replication of what happened, Sebald, following Freud, introduces a new possibility to historical emplotment, namely, a cultural geography of the present. Here the remains of German/Jewish modernity are shown—once again—to be inextricably entangled in one another. His novels, particularly Austerlitz, are extended meditations on the present possibilities of representing the modernity of the German/Jewish catastrophe, and I illustrate this through the layered cultural geographies connecting Sebald and Freud via Vienna, Rome, Prague, Antwerp, and Paris. Through their artificial closures, ruptures, periscopic narration, and simultaneous histories, Sebald’s works, with their modernist roots in Freudian theories of representation, offer a materialist history of the present as a dialectical site of uncertainty. In so doing, he transforms history into an investigation of cultural geography, in which the conceptual, material, and cultural remains of German/Jewish modernity are forever “contaminated” by one another.