3. SICILY, NEW YORK CITY, AND THE BARANOVICH STATION

German/Jewish Subject Without a Nation

On the Meta-epistemology of Mobility and Mass Migration

3.1 Front of Anhalter Bahnhof (ca. 1885), Berlin. Courtesy of the Landesarchiv, Berlin

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1840, the first part of the railway line that would connect Berlin to the German state of Anhalt was opened between Dessau and Köthen by the directors of the Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn Gesellschaft.¹ The construction of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof was quickly completed, and by September of the following year daily service began running to Köthen via Wittenberg, Coswig, and Dessau. The line, which connected the German states of Prussia and Anhalt together, was the longest railway line in any German state at the time, stretching more than 150 kilometers.² By 1848 service from the Anhalter extended to Dresden and Halle and, from there, into Thuringia. Before German unification the Anhalter played a critical role in helping to expand the reach of the Prussian railway network.

The original railway station, designed and built between 1838 and 1841, was erected on what would become Askanischer Platz, directly on the outer edge of the old city of Berlin. It was to be accessible through a new gate leading into and out of the city. The three-story neoclassical “receiving building” was reached through a main entryway and was designed to rival the greatest English railway stations—only the Anhalter was to be larger and “more beautiful.”³ The station was a Kopfbahnhof, a terminal railway station, and constructed to connect the city of Berlin to places outside of Prussia. Its two main platforms, one for people and one for the transportation of goods, ran south out of the city along the newly constructed Militär-Strasse.

Immediately after German unification in 1871, the city of Berlin and shareholders of the Anhalter decided to rebuild the station to better service the rapidly industrializing nation. Beginning in 1872 the old station was torn down because it was deemed too small to handle the rising passenger and goods traffic and the main receiving building lacked in any sort of distinguishing monumentality appropriate to the dominance of Prussia. Between the summer of 1871 and August of 1878 the chief architect of the new station, Franz Schwechten, proposed no fewer than nine different, monumental designs.⁴ Even though the final design would change several more times before the new station was completed, the orders for “one million well-browned building bricks” and “one and a half million red bricks” were placed in 1875, and construction officially began on September 7 of that year.⁵

The Anhalter was rebuilt on a colossal scale and reopened to the public in 1880. At the time, the new building was one of the largest “terminal railway stations” in the world, measuring 170 meters long, 60 meters wide, and nearly 35 meters high at its apex. The passenger station now had six main platforms, two ancillary platforms, and six additional platforms for baggage. The brightly illuminated building, complete with glass windows along the roof, was held together by the massive innovations of iron construction. All sorts of accolades were heaped upon the architectural innovation of the structure: Anhalter Bahnhof was now the largest, the fastest, and the most efficient railway station in Germany. But, more than that, it was also considered the most beautiful: more than eight hundred specially trained stone workers were employed to craft the extravagant ornamentation covering the entire structure, ranging from terra-cotta relief figures and sculpted arabesques to detailed friezes, ornate columns, and flowering capitals.⁶ The terra-cotta ornamentation alone cost more than 1,500,000 marks, and the total cost of rebuilding the entire station was unprecedented in railway history, totaling 14,100,000 marks.⁷ Indeed, all of its proportions were mythological. After all, the new nation needed to build new myths.

MODERNIST TRAVELS

Shortly after the opening of the Paris-Rouen and the Paris-Orleans railway lines in 1843, Heinrich Heine reflected on the “world-historical” significance of the railway from the perspective of his Parisian exile. Using some of the most hyperbolic rhetoric he could muster, Heine appealed to creation theology to describe the earthly impact of railway technology. He placed the railway in a historical lineage that included other key turning points in the history of human civilization: the invention of gunpowder, the discovery of America, and the spread of the printing press; the last had “sent the word of God into the world.”⁸ In quite the same way, the railway “is once again such a providential event,” fundamentally transforming the way we live in the world and record our experiences of it. Heine wrote: “While the great mass of people stares astounded and dumbstruck at the outward manifestation of these great forces of mobility, the intellectual is seized by an uncanny horror, the way we always feel when the most monstrous, the most unheard of thing happens, the consequences of which are unforeseeable and incalculable.”⁹ He likens the construction of these two railway lines—the one extending northwest from Paris, the other southwest from Paris—to a “tremor” and an “electric shock” that instantaneously travels in a chain reaction through the “entire population of Paris.”¹⁰ No one is left untouched; everyone and everything is irrevocably changed.

In Heine’s diagnosis the construction of railways monstrously broke with the order of pregiven experiences and expectations, inaugurating a new world and an unforeseeable future. Playing off the new metaphors generated by railway transportation, Heine, not one for understatement, underscored how the railways ruptured the world he knew by severing past expectations: “Let us simply say that our entire existence is being ripped up and hurled on new tracks [neue Gleise]; that new relationships, pleasures, and torments await us, and the unknown exerts its ghastly fascination, irresistible and, at the same time, fearful.”¹¹ Here Heine draws our attention to the inability of deducing or deriving the future from the past. A circular continuity, what the philosopher of history, Reinhart Koselleck, will term the eschatological determination of the premodern world, is broken apart when experience no longer lines up with expectation.¹² For Koselleck the rupture between “the space of experience” and “the horizon of expectation” is the hallmark of a “new time” (Neuzeit), modernity. Time is no longer eschatological—the future already determined—but imagined as a space of possibility, openness, and unfixedness. Central to this reconfiguration of temporality was the generation of a form of historical time characterized by future-oriented concepts such as progress, acceleration, and revolution, the last no longer considered in terms of revolutio or “return” but now “rupture.” Such a reorientation could only take place when Christian eschatological time, predicated on the definitive and determined arrival of the Second Coming and Judgment Day, was superseded by the unbinding of the future from the past such that something entirely new and unexpected could come about in this world. As Koselleck noted, progress could happen when “the expectations that reached out for the future became detached from all that previous experience had to offer.”¹³ For Heine the processes of modernization and industrialization, especially railway construction projects and the primacy placed on speed, offered the material proof of and justification for this radical temporal reorientation.¹⁴

Writing a number of years after the so-called Sattelzeit (saddle period) of 1780–1820, a span that Koselleck, among others, sees as the start of a modern experience of temporality,¹⁵ Heine’s mix of fear over and enthusiasm for the unknown bears witness to precisely this ongoing, structural reorientation of the modern world. Superlatives, in conjunction with a sense of inevitability—“the most monstrous,” “the most unheard of,” “irresistible”—are thus not only descriptors of the railway’s transformative technology but are also the diagnosis of a new historical time. This is an age in which the fundamental prerequisites of being-in-the-world and narrating experience, namely, the ways in which space and time are known, organized, and related to one another, are completely reconfigured. In short, it is the age of an unprecedented mobility and unpredictable modernity.

The railways brought forth such a seemingly or potentially unbounded mobility because formerly faraway distances were bridged and formerly extended durations were shortened. As Heine foresaw the basic epistemological implications, more than a decade before anything close to a railway system was built on the mainland European continent, the ways in which we both intuit the world and represent our experiences of the world are structured by temporal and spatial life-world concepts that have now been rendered remarkably unstable: “Even the elementary concepts of time and space have become shaky. The railways have killed space, and only time still remains for us. If only we had enough money to respectfully kill time, too.”¹⁶ Although Heine did not flesh out the epistemological consequences of this new mobility, which I intend to do in this chapter by examining the new relationships between the experience of mobility and the formation of subjectivity, he consistently reacted—sometimes in horror—to the eradication of traditionally secured spatial distinctions and temporal markers. For instance, as early as 1831, after meeting the German railway pioneer, Friedrich List, in Paris, Ludwig Börne reports that Heine found it “a terrible idea” that he might, one day, be able to take a train from Paris to Germany in a mere twelve hours.¹⁷ Although the first German railway line did not open until the end of 1835, Heine already feared the potential eradication of the geographic distinction between Germany and France, not to mention the relative safety that the distance of exile allowed. But by 1843, predicting that French railways would eventually connect Paris to any major city in Germany, Heine wrote on a more sanguine note: “I already smell the fragrance of the German Linden trees; the North Sea is knocking at my doors.”¹⁸ By 1856, the year Heine died, railway travel between Paris and Frankfurt was indeed possible.

In his jocular wish for “enough money” to properly kill time alongside space, Heine was undoubtedly raising a subtle critique of the dominance of certain railway magnates, particularly the Rothschild and Pereire families in France, for creating financially and politically driven railway monopolies. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 5, the role of industrial capitalism and the opening up of national economies to international finance is an important part of the modernization of Germany and the modernity of the German/Jewish dialectic. The (re)invention of German nationality in the early nineteenth century and the rise of German nationalism were, at least in part, internally directed reactions to the “global” expansion of capitalism and the development of technologies for both penetrating and securing national boundaries.

Since Heine did not look to England in the early 1840s, what he failed to see was that time had already been “killed” across the channel, in the first country in the world to have constructed a national railway system.¹⁹ In November 1840 the directors of England’s Great Western Railway ordered that standard London time be kept at all of its stations and used in all of its timetables. As early as 1842, articles began to appear in the English press calling for the end of the multiplicity of local times and the implementation of a nationwide uniform time.²⁰ The fact that every locality maintained its own time first presented a problem in the late eighteenth century for scheduling postal deliveries and, several decades later, presented an analogous, although decidedly more dangerous, problem for coordinating trains. The idea of reliably reconnecting experience and expectation, past departures and future arrivals, was made public in the May 14, 1842, edition of the Illustrated London News in an article entitled “Important to Railway Travelers. Uniformity of Clocks Throughout Great Britain.”²¹ Although a nationally standardized time (Greenwich time) was not formally adopted by the English railway industry until 1847, the need for a uniform time was recognized as early as 1840 when local times were first abolished by railway schedules. By “killing” local times, the English invented, by the forces of necessity, a standardized, “new time.”

One need only compare the relative development of railways in England, France, and Germany in the early 1840s to recognize that, when Heine was writing, the experiences of both distance and duration were fundamentally different in England than in France or Germany. By 1840, with more than eleven primary railway lines connecting every major English city to one another and with scores of subsidiary lines extending from London, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, and other nodal cities, English railway lines formed a complex, structurally differentiated system.²² I use the term railway system to describe a third-order network comprised of multiple, interconnected railway nodes and segments. Second-order complexity refers to railway nodes, defined as cities with at least two railway segments, and first-order complexity refers to simple segments connecting only two cities together. If we compare the contemporaneous railway development in Germany or France, we quickly see that neither country had yet achieved anything close to a system and, hence, did not yet have to address the epistemological, let alone the practical, communicational problems that a railway system presented. In the 1840s, with the exception of Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden, virtually no major German cities were connected by rail. The level of complexity was either first-order segments (for instance, segments between Nuremberg-Fürth, Augsburg-Munich, Wiesbaden-Frankfurt am Main) or second-order nodes around Berlin and Leipzig. Analogously in France, a few second-order nodes existed around Paris, but nothing like a nationwide railway system emerges until the late 1850s, about the same time as Germany developed a railway system.²³

3.2 Railway development in England. Author’s drawing. Adapted from John Langton and R.J. Morris, eds., Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780–1914 (London: Methuen, 1986), 89

3.3 Railway development in France. Author’s drawing. Adapted from François Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France, 1740–1883, part 1 (Paris: Fayard, 1997), figure 11 (between 337–38)

3.4 Railway development in Germany. Author’s drawing. Adapted from Hans-Henning Gerlach, Atlas zur Eisenbahngeschichte: Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz (Zurich: Orell Füssli), xxi

In this regard, to follow David Landes, we might say that the “making of the modern world”²⁴ brought about two complementary (and not irreconcilable) impulses. First, as Heine indicated by his diagnosis of the monstrous shock of the advent of the railway age, one of the consequences of modernity is the radical unbinding of experience from expectation; and, second, as indicated by the English institution of a national standard time, the new time of modernity necessitated the reconnection of experience and expectation through the strategic linking of past and future, the progressive coordination of tradition and anticipation. With regard to the latter, one might think of the history of the coordination of train schedules, analyzed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch as “temporal shrinkage,”²⁵ as due to what will become, several decades later, Greenwich mean time or uniform world time.²⁶ Or one might think of the organization of the “working day” or “factory time” whereby the determinate and precise linkage between experience and expectation yields surplus value.²⁷ Or one might think of Husserl’s life-world (Lebenswelt), a structure he conceives as the reliable ground for all our activities precisely because expectations can be, more or less, derived from and based upon experiences.²⁸ Of course, with the making of the modern world, multiple “modern” possibilities for breaking out of these flowing and homogeneously connected temporal rhythms also emerged: Railway strikes, Marx’s proletariat revolution, Bergson’s individually experienced time (durée), Proust’s memoire involuntaire, Sorel’s general strike, Benjamin’s Jetztzeit or now time, and, perhaps most ominously, the numerous messianisms that, all too often, look like and bring about the disaster.

The construction and regulation of the railway system as a third-order network of interconnected nodes and segments is thus a paradigmatic illustration of how this decidedly modern process of delinking and relinking experience and expectation looks in practice. On the one hand, the invention of the railway broke with the horizon of expectation because the political, social, and economic consequences could not be derived from the prior stock of experiences. And, on the other hand, the coordination of arrival and departure times for an international network of moving trains required a strictly predictable and derivable relationship between experience and expectation to regulate and prevent railway disasters as best as possible. Of course, contingency—most dramatically, the possibility of a crash—could never be entirely eliminated from the operation of the system, only turned into a manageable risk. This is partly because the system as a whole could not be surveyed all at once: there is no transcendental perspective on the railway system such that an observer could know, at any given time, precisely where all the trains were, in what direction they were heading, and at what speed. Despite the invention of elaborate tracking and telegraphic devices for communicating between stations and trains, railway accidents, strikes, and disasters still happened.²⁹ But contingency also exists because there are simply too many variables to relate to one another: a system of organized complexity means, according to Niklas Luhmann, that “it is no longer possible at any moment to connect every element with every other element,”³⁰ even though, within the railway system, every linked city may be eventually reached by way of a series of interchanges and connections. In other words, the railway system—as the material structure of modernity—is an interconnected, nonlinear whole in which experience and expectation are more or less coordinated, but no perspective exists to observe, encompass, or map its entire operation at any one time. Moreover, it is not possible to banish or master every contingency that might break apart the delicate balance; instead contingency is a defining attribute of mobile modernity.³¹

When Kafka was traveling with Max Brod through parts of southern Europe in the early 1910s and writing his first novel, Der Verschollene (The man who went missing, 1912), all the major cities in mainland Europe were completely connected together by a coordinated, transcontinental railway system running on a newly adopted world standard time.³² Heine’s enthusiasm for and fear over time and space being “killed” had thus in some sense come true, certainly in comparison with the prerailway life-world or in comparison with the second-order railway nodes that Heine himself experienced. While traveling by train, Kafka noted in a diary entry from September 29, 1911, that there was a fundamental difference between the modern experience of mobility on the railway and what he understood to be the experience of mobility in Goethe’s prerailway life-world. Of course, Kafka did not (and could not) directly experience travel in Goethe’s world; he did, however, read Goethe’s accounts of his travels in the Italienische Reise (Italian journey) and in his novel of education, Wilhelm Meister. Goethe’s stories are narrative renditions of his phenomenal experiences of mobility, structured by certain meta-epistemological and metaphorical structures specific to his mode of travel. More important, they document the creation of a particular kind of individualized subject whose spectatorship, subjectivity, sociality, and national identity are shored up through the narration of mobility.

Kafka lucidly recognized that different, historically specific technologies of transportation not only structure what travelers can see and know but also reveal the spatial and temporal limits, terms, and conditions of conceptualization for both narrative description and subject formation. Carriage and ship transportation supports a fundamentally different kind of spectatorship on and experience of the external world than railway travel does. In the most important consideration that he ever gave to this difference, he wrote in his diaries:

Goethe’s observations on his travels [Reisebeobachtungen] different from today’s because made from a mail-coach, and with the slow changes of the region, develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by one who does not know those parts of the country. A calm, so-to-speak pastoral form of thinking sets in. Since the country offers itself untouched in its innate character to the passengers in a wagon, and since highways also divide a country much more naturally than railway lines (to which the former perhaps stand in the same relationship as do rivers to canals), so too the observer need not do violence to the landscape, and he can see systematically [systematisch sehn] without great effort.³³

Because of its closeness to both the landscape and the apparent rhythms of nature, carriage travel facilitates a different kind of observation on the world than that made possible by railways. Although Kafka does not show how travel by ship also contributes to the configuration of “systematic” spectatorship that he identifies with respect to Goethe’s travels in a mail coach, he does draw our attention to the relationship between the natural stability of the realist landscape and the security of Goethe’s masterful observations and transcendental views on the world. And, even more important, Kafka’s diary entry also distills a crucial component of the meta-epistemology of the railway system, namely, that systematic seeing, or, in my words, spectatorship from an inviolable subject position on terra firma, is no longer possible when all frames of reference are contingent and in relative motion.

The narration of travel in Goethe’s life-world, according to Kafka, proceeds according to a “calm,” “pastoral” logic, which is “easy to follow,” because the narrative, like the carriage itself, follows the “natural” rhythms and undisturbed topography of the landscape. Goethe’s observations are thus linked with the “natural flow” of space whereby spectatorship emerges from the landscape’s contours in a “slow” and “systematic” way. As we will see, Goethe’s travels through Italy are not only systematic by virtue of the author’s subject position and visual mastery over objects in the landscape, but the narrative is also systematically organized as both circular and telos driven. Precise times and exact locations provide reliable markers for the historical and geographic mapping of the narrative. Days and places follow in slow succession, while the narrative as a whole is always already connected together by a cycle of temporal continuity and return. Calling upon a well-established dichotomy between technology and nature, railways, according to Kafka, violently destroyed the natural environment and, following the logic of his reflections, not only produced new possibilities for mobility but also contributed to a new kind of narration of experience. But Kafka’s reflections end here, and thus it is up to us to specify the nature of the transformation as well as the epistemological and narrative consequences for subject formation.

Although they bear witness to two very different experiences of mobility and two very different processes of subject formation, the narratives that Goethe and Kafka produced about their experiences of travel were both conceived and written from a perspective outside the German nation. In bringing Goethe and Kafka together in this chapter as a kind of conceptual-historical encounter, I am proposing that the subject of German/Jewish modernity emerges in a deterritorialized, non-national space in which mobility is variously mapped in the German language through narratives of travel.³⁴ Through an analysis of Goethe’s Italienische Reise³⁵ and novel of education, Wilhelm Meister, I will argue that Goethe, in his desire to secure a transcendental or systematic perspective on safe ground for observing national differences, allows us to map the formation of a strong, individualized “German” subjectivity. The narration of mobility by carriage and ship contributes to the formation of a rationalized subject of the Enlightenment, who, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the nonexistence of the German nation, desires the political privilege and geographic mooring of a nationally grounded subject. Building on Kafka’s remark on the “systematic” nature of Goethe’s observations, I show that Goethe’s travel narratives and the genre of the bildungsroman itself are organized by what I call “the meta-epistemology of the ship,” an episteme in which experience and expectation are never broken apart and world spectatorship is made possible by the absolute distinction between the knowing subject and the object known.

Whereas Goethe’s travel narratives map the geographic, linguistic, and political privilege of a (future) national subject, Kafka’s narratives of his own travels by railway as well as those of his fictional figure, Karl Rossmann, map the formation of an immigrant subject who is torn from the geography of the nation, severed from its linguistic expressions, and expelled from its political privilege. Through the figure of Karl Rossmann in the novel Der Verschollene, Kafka creates a “desubjectified” mass object who is ultimately disassociated from all geographies of nationality, citizenship, religion, and language. Far from an autonomous individual, Kafka’s Rossmann is an abject figure of dislocation and anonymity, a byproduct of modernization, mass migration, and ineluctable systems of mobility. By examining the travels of Karl Rossmann and by placing Kafka’s novel within the context of “Jewish” travel writing in Yiddish, particularly Sholem Aleichem’s contemporaneous Railroad Stories, I show how the modern Jewish subject emerges within the deterritorialized and mediated spaces of encounter between German and Jewish mobility. Here, I suggest, the history of both the modern German subject and the modern Jewish subject—emblematically illustrated by Goethe, Kafka, and Sholem Aleichem—come together as a dialectic at a standstill in the conceptual, cultural, and material spaces of transnational mobility.

GOETHE STEERING TO PORT ON A TEMPESTUOUS SEA

On September 3, 1786, Goethe penned the first line on what was to become a nearly twenty-month long journey through Italy: “I stole out of Carlsbad at three in the morning, for otherwise I would never have gotten away.”³⁶ Since July 27 of that year, he had been vacationing in Carlsbad with Charlotte von Stein, Duke Carl August, the Herders, and a number of other unnamed acquaintances. After most of his friends had left and after having secured an “indefinite leave” from the duke, Goethe escaped Germany in the middle of the night and began traveling incognito in a mail coach. He wanted to reach the Italian border as quickly and as quietly as possible. For years Goethe had been planning to take an extended trip to Italy, just as his father had done in 1740, but for one reason or another his plans had never materialized. In his haste to get to Italy, Goethe headed first to Innsbruck through the Bavarian cities of Regensburg, Munich, and Mittenwald, making it to the Tyrol in less than six days. Rushing through the Brenner Pass, Bolzano, and Trent, Goethe reached the town of Roveredo, “the language border,” in the evening of September 11 (28). On September twelfth, “[writing] at the latitude of forty-five degrees and fifty minutes,” he finds himself “truly … in a new land, in a completely foreign environment” (29). He remarks that doors have no locks, windows have no glass panes, and certain facilities for relieving oneself are entirely absent. This foreign land, “rather close to a state of nature” (29), is Italy. Goethe had finally arrived.

In both the retrospectively penned accounts of 1816–1817, Reise I-II, and to an even greater extent in the diary he kept during the journey itself and would periodically send to Charlotte von Stein, Goethe is always careful to inscribe a time and a place to his narration of the journey.³⁷ When he writes about leaving Roveredo for Torbole, for example, not only does he give a precise time (September 12 in the evening after five), he also gives a precise latitude (forty-five degrees and fifty minutes). As will we see, the ways in which Goethe experiences, describes, and specifies both temporality and geography are highly significant for his determination of national differences. Moreover, the emplotment of time and place in the narration of the journey is also revealing of the production of a particular kind of subject position, one that emerges through Goethe’s ambitious spectatorship and political privilege as well as the larger epistemological structure of the travel narrative itself. I will discuss this below with respect to both the specific modes of mobility utilized by Goethe (carriage, foot, and ship) and the specific kinds of observations and patterns of knowledge these perspectives disclose about the places he visits.

But first let me be clear about the kinds of claims I want to make about Goethe’s Italienische Reise and why I feel that I am justified in making certain claims about the text as a whole. As I already indicated, the text that Goethe composed about the actual journey that he undertook in Italy between 1786–1787 was only written and published retrospectively, with the distance of nearly thirty years for the first two parts (Reise I-II) and a distance of more than forty years for the final part (Zweyter Aufenthalt in Rom). Not only did an older, neoclassical Goethe intervene in the conceptualization and representation of Italy, Goethe revised, edited, and even altered the existing documents, primarily letters and diaries, that he had about the original journey. As Erich Schmidt first demonstrated, particularly for the third and final part of the Italienische Reise, Goethe added, crossed out, and omitted whole passages from the perspective of 1829.³⁸ For this reason Goethe scholars have consistently emphasized the cautionary grain of salt with which the entire “literary-historical text” should be taken. Gerhard Schultz perhaps put the admonition best:

Whereas the author of the diaries and letters from Italy was in his thirties, that of the Italienische Reise was in his mid-sixties when he began the task of revision and just on eighty when he finally finished it. In other words, the traveler or “hero” of the Italienische Reise should not be equated with the actual traveler in Italy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe of the years 1786 to 1788; he is, rather, a fictitious character created by the author, a historicized version of himself.³⁹

Clearly, the text of the Italienische Reise can be understood as more of an autobiographical-literary testament to the development of Goethe’s career than it can be seen as an exact historical account of his actual trip to Italy.

These historical admonitions and critical interventions are unquestionably important if one wants to investigate the origins of the text and prevent simplistic biographical equations. My concern here, however, is not with comparing the Italienische Reise to Goethe’s actual journey, nor is it with documenting Goethe’s various deviations from the “raw” historical sources that he had before him. Additionally, I am not interested in developing an argument, which rests upon the diachronic changes in Goethe’s intellectual biography or the chronology of his life. This has all been done before in order to specify, for example, definitive fault lines between the development of the “historical” and the “artistic” Goethe. Instead I am interested in looking at the ways in which the texts comprising Reise I-II and the diaries of the first two months (September-October 1786) bear witness to a common and largely constant, internal epistemological structure and how this structure bears on the relationship between mobility, transnationality, and subjectivity.

In both this chapter and the following chapter on Hegel and Heine, I will show how the travel narrative, by virtue of its narration of space and time—or, more precisely, by virtue of the way the effect of space and time is produced—discloses concepts of subjectivity, nationality, and history, which are, in their epistemological and metaphorical structures, specific to, derived from, and justified by seafaring. I will call this structure the meta-epistemology of the ship in order to differentiate it from the meta-epistemology of the train and characterize the subject of German/Jewish modernity. Briefly, the meta-epistemology of the ship consists of the following: clear and stable distinctions are maintained between observer and observed, subject and object; the experiences of spectatorship are structured by the possibility of an ideal or transcendental perspective on the world “out there”; the space of the landscape can be mapped, translated, and reliably known in accord with a fixed topographical logic; and, finally, temporality, as experienced in both a given locality and conveyed over the course of the whole narrative, is structured in a continuous cycle, where experience and expectation are never broken apart and the ultimate potentiality of return, although not a mere repetition of the same, always determines the procession of the narration and the desire for nationality.

As Caren Kaplan has argued, building on the work of Michael Curry and E. H. Gombrich, the concept of the voyage is predicated on “the idea that travel produces the self, makes the subject through spectatorship and comparison with otherness. Thus, in this ideology of subjectivity, distance is the best perspective on and route toward knowledge of the self and others. Self-knowledge, standpoint, then requires a point of origin, a location that constitutes the subject as viewer and a world of objects that can be viewed or surveyed.”⁴⁰ The voyage is linked with the production of knowledge, arrayed such that a knowing subject is simultaneously constituted as the objects being surveyed. It is thus not insignificant that the beginnings of German modernity and its various figurations of subjectivity, nationality, and history are invested in ship travel as both the material embodiment of mobility and a conceptual field for German/Jewish encounters.

As James Clifford and others have pointed out, the writing of a travel narrative and the genre of travel literature itself are always ideological not only because mobility and knowledge are historical and technological possibilities (or impossibilities) for some people but also because movement gains a valuation depending on who undertakes it and what its direction, goals, and reasons are. In developing a comparative methodology for studying cultural transit—what he terms “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling”⁴¹—Clifford argues for the need to think comparatively about travel as both transnational and translational: such a project of comparative cultural studies as mobility studies “would have to grapple with the evident fact that travelers move about under strong cultural, political, and economic compulsions and that certain travelers are materially privileged, others oppressed. These specific circumstances are crucial determinations of the travel at issue—movements in specific colonial, neocolonial, postcolonial circuits, different diasporas, borderlands, exiles, detours, and returns.”⁴² Travel literature, then, is a particular kind of expression, whose material, social, linguistic, political, and economic conditions of possibility must be precisely articulated within the contours of comparative cultural criticism.

As we will see, travel narratives are fundamentally connected to the production of certain ideas of historicity, nationality, and subjectivity. The Italienische Reise is a particularly good text for showing how embodied mobility, namely ship travel, stages specific forms of spectatorship and facilitates certain forms of subjectivity because the composition of Reise I–II occurred precisely during the so-called Sattelzeit of 1780–1820 This means that we can use the emplotment of time and space in Goethe’s text as a kind of possible witness to the oft-remarked epistemic shift of modernity: That is, we can ask, does the Italienische Reise evidence a shift away from an eschatological predetermination of temporality to an “open future” and “acceleration of time,” as Reinhart Koselleck has argued?⁴³ Or, to use the terms of Friedrich Kittler, does the Italienische Reise bear witness to the creation of a new “discourse network,” or Aufschreibesystem (system of writing down), which marks a whole set of practices of subjectivization that are unique to this epistemic moment?⁴⁴

Thus the first task before us is to articulate, in the most precise terms possible, what these spatial and temporal structures are, how they inform Goethe’s Italienische Reise, and how the narration of a form of mobility stemming from seafaring contributes to a specific form of subjectivity, knowledge, and spectatorship. After detailing Goethe’s “meta-epistemology of the ship” and its ideological consequences for both subject formation and Goethe’s unique practice of “translating” nationality, I will turn to an analysis of what I call Kafka’s “meta-epistemology of the railway system.” Taking Kafka’s own observations about Goethe’s travel writings as my starting point, I will argue that the emergence of a modernist Jewish subject in Kafka must be historicized with respect to Goethe’s German subject and that both projects can be productively evaluated within a deterritorialized, transnational conceptual space in which German and Jewish come together to form a constellated image, a dialectic at a standstill.

The sea voyage or travel by ship is not only a classical mode of transportation, it is also one of the greatest, most persistent and specific metaphors of existence in the Western cultural tradition.⁴⁵ Among the countless examples, one need only bring to mind Odysseus and Aeneas, Columbus and Magellan, or Robinson Crusoe and Ahab, to begin to recognize its scope. Indeed, the ship journey, as both an actuality and an image, calls up a long history stretching back to antiquity and, in various permutations and valuations, stretching up through the present.⁴⁶ To see the dialectical complexity of the seafaring topos, one need only think of historical events such as colonial “voyages of discovery” and the horror of the middle passage, side by side with stock metaphors of self-discovery, progress, enlightenment, education, and shipwreck.⁴⁷ In its sheer cultural redundancy, the voyage, particularly the journey by sea, is vitally connected to Western culture’s greatest and most horrific enterprises, institutions, and concepts.⁴⁸

As Hans Blumenberg has argued in his brilliant overview of the seafaring paradigm, Shipwreck with Spectator, in antiquity seafaring was conceived as a transgression of natural boundaries but was considered by the Enlightenment to be the price and necessary risk of progress.⁴⁹ As historical events and as literary representations, sea voyages yield a wealth of metaphors for human potentialities, discoveries, and growth. In addition to tracing the metaphors generated by the sea voyage (a repertory that includes a vast array of nautical metaphors ranging from high seas to safe coasts, navigation to storms), Blumenberg also draws our attention to a persistent epistemological configuration stemming from ship travel: the ability to be a spectator.⁵⁰ Originating in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and spanning the literature from Quintilian’s ship of state (navem pro republica) to Goethe’s own account of his near shipwreck in the Italienische Reise, and including even Heine’s vitriolic, imaginary encounter with Ludwig Börne on a sinking ship, Blumenberg demonstrates what he calls the “emphatic configuration in which shipwreck at sea is set beside the uninvolved spectator on dry land.”⁵¹ This configuration of shipwreck (object) with spectator (subject) characterizes a fundamental epistemological stance, one that originates with and is specific to ship travel: the desire to observe movement from solid ground. In other words, Blumenberg shows how the valuation and cultural understanding of the seafaring metaphor changes, while its epistemological structure of spectatorship remains almost entirely constant.

Blumenberg argues that the shipwreck with spectator configuration has less to do with a distinction between those who suffer and those who do not and much more “to do with the relationship between philosophers and reality, [namely,] … the possession of an inviolable, solid ground for one’s view of the world.”⁵² The observation of a shipwreck or even the very fact of setting sail into the unknown is thus important because the certainty of solid land is set across from the uncertainty of seafaring. The clear distinction between terra firma and the sea (a distinction that is never sublated) is temporarily mediated but ultimately secured by the very fact that dry land is left behind and then returned to after the tumult of a (successful) sea voyage. In both the return to dry land and the possibility of a shipwreck at sea, the essential point is that solid ground is linked with subjectivity or spectatorship and that the ship or shipwreck is linked with objecthood. With this we have arrived at our first meta-epistemological point: Travel by ship, especially the uncertainty of the sea and the chance of a shipwreck, underscores the solid ground from which the belief in world spectatorship became possible. Expanding on the pattern of spectatorship derived from the ship’s mediation, but ultimate guarantee, of the distinction between land and sea, the shipwreck with spectator configuration can be broadened to include the production of a reliable distinction between subject and object, observer and observed. The pattern of viewing the world “out there” as an object and securing a stable subject position to do so is thus fundamental to the epistemology of the ship-spectator configuration. This is, of course, also another way of approaching the Cartesian dichotomy between res cognitans and res extensa, mind and object, respectively. We can now turn to Goethe in order to see how both the seafaring metaphor and this meta-epistemology operate within the Italienische Reise.

As is evident from Goethe’s writings on his trip to Italy and as numerous scholars have argued regarding the significance of the trip for his own development, Goethe’s journey was essentially a voyage of self-discovery. It is no coincidence that Goethe’s fact-in-fiction Italienische Reise approaches, and sometimes even intersects with, the educational journey undertaken by Wilhelm Meister.⁵³ As he says in the October 2, 1787, entry (written from the perspective of 1829, after having already written Wilhelm Meister in 1795–1796), “I have had the opportunity to reflect a great deal about myself and others, about the world and history, and, in my fashion, I shall tell you many good things, even though they are not new. Eventually, everything will be contained and included in Wilhelm” (330). Whether actually imagined as such in 1786/87 or conceived this way retrospectively is, however, of no consequence for us. What matters is that Goethe represented his own journey as a voyage of self discovery and, as we will now see, employed an extended seafaring metaphor to describe its critical progress.

In responding to a letter probably received from Charlotte von Stein, Goethe writes, just before heading to Naples, that contradictions in his letters and prose are inherent to his educational journey, which is nevertheless still goal directed. To illustrate this, Goethe tells the story of a boatman overtaken by a storm at sea. The boatman’s son asks why the lighthouse is sometimes above the boat and at other times below the boat. The father explains that the sea rocked the boat up and down but the lighthouse still illuminated the way home. In the same vein, Goethe reflects on his own journey: “I too am steering to port on a tempestuous sea, and I just keep a close watch on the glow of the lighthouse; even if it seems to change its position, nevertheless I shall at last arrive safely on shore” (143–44). In this passage Goethe encapsulates both the metaphor of seafaring and the epistemology of the shipwreck-spectator configuration. The implied ship, Goethe’s mode of transportation, is always already heading back to port, having survived the capricious sea.⁵⁴ His tumultuous journey will conclude safely, and, like all educational journeys of struggle and triumph, he will be better off for it. Moreover, the basic structural distinctions between sea and shore, alien and home furnish the basis for the production of a stable subject position: Goethe, as an observing subject having already arrived on terra firma, can retrospectively and safely perceive himself as an object thrashing about on a ship at sea. Here the epistemology of the ship-spectator configuration provides precisely the ground for the historical subject to observe himself as an object.

This narration of spectatorship on the world “out there” from the perspective of safe ground is the first component of the meta-epistemology of the ship. In more general terms, I would submit that the perceptual clarity of the subject/object division structures virtually all of Goethe’s observations here, not only those that reflect back upon the constitution of his own transnational subjectivity but also those that enable him to characterize the national distinctiveness of Italy. Although the latter is foremost a geographic distinction (an experience of what is Italian versus an experience of what is German), Goethe is also concerned with showing how this spatial difference is confirmed by a temporality that is unique to Italy. In this respect, the sea voyage not only contributes to the formation of a subject position, but it also represents the conceptualization and evaluation of nationality.

Indeed, the single most important component of the subject/object division for Goethe’s observations is the irreducible fact of the division itself: the distance separating subject and object, observer and observed, German and Italian, native and foreign, land and sea is never forsaken, and it is precisely the epistemological configuration of the ship-spectator that secures the integrity of these distinctions. The subject’s observations are never confused, and Goethe accumulates knowledge and gains a perspective of world spectatorship through the experience of mobility. Upon the return voyage from Sicily, even as his ship nearly drifts onto the rocks and founders west of the bay of Naples, Goethe’s totalizing, transcendental view of the world is never compromised:

At sunset we enjoyed the most superb view given us on the whole voyage. Capo Minerva and the mountains adjacent to it lay before our eyes, enhanced by the most glowing colors, while the rocks extending down toward the south had already taken on a bluish tone. The whole illuminated coast stretched from the cape to Sorrento. We could see Vesuvius, over it a towering cloud of smoke, from which a long strip drew far eastwards, so that we could assume there had been a very strong eruption. Capri lay to the left, rising steeply; we could distinguish the outlines of its rocky walls perfectly through the transparent bluish haze. Beneath a completely clear, cloudless sky sparkled the quiet, scarcely stirring sea.

(251)

Goethe’s spectatorship, made from the perspective of a returning ship at sea, is carefully organized in its bird’s eye description and precise geography. As an object to be surveyed, the landscape is an orderly and encompassable panorama able to be observed, structured, and known as a totality. Even when the landscape is moving, for example, when his boat back to Naples nearly founders or when he watches the eruptions of Vesuvius, his embodied subject position is never compromised because his observations are always systematically oriented in a mappable space and emplotted, as we will see, in a cyclical time.

These ideal, transcendental perspectives on the world at large are not only specific to the instances of seafaring in Goethe’s Italienische Reise, but they also contribute to the meta-epistemology of his project as a whole. In fact, Goethe consistently observes objects in the world from only the safest and most secure subject positions that afford him such views. His observations, replete with detail and descriptive charm, are often made from either the highest perspective he can find (atop a tower, a mountain, or an edifice) or from the slow and methodical accumulation of details on the ground. In both cases, his synthesizing vision allows a mastery of objects in the world. I would like to give a few salient examples of his techniques for such mastery. In Venice, after studying a map of the city, Goethe reports that he “climbed the tower of St. Mark’s, where a unique spectacle meets the eye. It was noon and the sunshine was bright, so that I could clearly recognize places near and far without a telescope” (60–61). The high perspective over the city allowed Goethe’s unaided eye to make the clear spatial distinctions necessary for an informed orientation.⁵⁵ This is even more apparent in Bologna, where he climbed the Torre degli Asinelli, a tower built between 1109 and 1119:

The view is splendid! In the north I saw the Paduan mountains, then the Swiss, Tyrolean, and Friulian Alps, in short, the whole northern chain, now covered by mist. Toward the west a limitless horizon, broken only by the towers of Modena. Toward the east a similar plain, up to the Adriatic sea, which can be glimpsed at sunrise. Toward the south the foothills of the Apennines, cultivated up to their summits and covered with growth, studded with churches, palaces, garden houses, like the Vicenzian hills.

(87)

The geographic totality is organized by the visual clarity of the cardinal directions, mapped according to geography, and oriented according to his body in the center of the space. A couple of months later in Rome, Goethe likens his educational journey to that of an architect learning how to lay solid foundations for building towers (123).

Both times that he is in Naples, the first time after coming from Rome and the second time after returning from Sicily, Goethe is enchanted by the danger of Vesuvius. On at least three separate occasions he climbs the mountain and walks around near the precarious crater, observing the smoke-filled atmosphere and the gushing lava. But far from undermining his subject position, his close encounters with the volcano actually contribute to and even guarantee its strength. The might of the volcano certainly brings to mind both Kant and Burke’s description of the sublime, and both of them illustrate the sublime by examples that will also figure prominently in Goethe’s journey to Italy. Kant tells us, for example, to “consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power … the boundless ocean heaved up” as examples of the sublime in nature.⁵⁶ Although Kant at first suggests that the sublime appears to betray the limits of subjectivity and reason because it cannot be readily thought or taken in (fassen), in the section “On the Dynamically Sublime in Nature” he proposes that the properly enlightened subject’s relationship to the sublime is not based on passive respect or the inadequacy of intellect but rather on the subject’s fortitude and superiority over nature. Kant writes, “we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid … we [find] in our mind a superiority over nature itself in its immensity” and, hence, must find an appropriately “safe” spot from which to take in and dominate nature (Kant 120–21).

Throughout the “Analytic of the Sublime” Kant underscores the importance of the body’s physical relationship to that which is sublime or exhibits qualities of the sublime. Like Goethe, the body must assume the correct viewing distance “to get the full emotional effect” (108) of objects, such as the pyramids or St. Peter’s Basilica; and the spectator’s body must be careful not to “get too close” when encountering massive natural phenomena such as ravines, volcanoes, and raging streams (“General Comment”). More than once, Kant insists upon the importance of the spectator’s “safety” in encountering the sublime: Any spectator on the edge of nature “is seized by amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred thrill; … [but] since he knows he is safe, this is not actual fear…. We may feel that very power’s might and connect the mental agitation with the mind’s state of rest. In this way we feel our superiority to nature” (129; my emphasis). In a passage that strikes of Kant’s safe sublime, Burke, too, writes: “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.”⁵⁷ Again, the physical encounter with the sublime, whether the Kantian nature or the Burkean titillation, is always predicated upon a zone of corporeal safety, a critical distance allowing a safe space for self-preservation.

For Goethe, just as with Kant and Burke, the encounter with Vesuvius and survival on the tempestuous sea do not undermine his subject position but rather strengthen it. Although close to danger, the spectator’s body is preserved in the face of the sublime because the crucial distance between subject and object is never overcome. In arguably one of the most overdetermined statements he ever made about the relationship between the safe spectator and the sublime shipwreck, Goethe, reflecting on his distant spectatorship of the Battle of Jena with historian Heinrich Luden, said that he was “like a man who looks down from a solid cliff onto the raging sea and cannot help the shipwrecked men below but also cannot be reached by the breakers, and, according to some ancient [Lucretius, Luden interpolates], this is even supposed to be a comfortable feeling…. Thus I stood there, safe and sound, and let the furious tumult pass by me.”⁵⁸ In other words, not only does Goethe’s privileged subject position afford him a view of the battle, he remains inviolable because of his transcendental safety. And, once again, the metaphor of the ship and its attendant epistemology of solid ground for observation structure Goethe’s remarks. His subject position is thus consolidated by sublime objects—whether historically decisive battles, erupting volcanoes, or tumultuous shipwrecks—that are observed at a safe distance from terra firma.

The last time that Goethe observes Vesuvius, the volcano is at its most dangerous, but Goethe’s privileged distance is also at its greatest. He is invited to visit the palace of Giuliana, belonging to a certain Duchess of Giovane di Girasole. Standing at the window in the upper story of her palace, he observes an erupting Vesuvius:

The sun had set long ago, and so the flames from the descending lava glowed distinctly and were beginning to gild the attendant smoke. The mountain roared violently, above it was an enormous stationary cloud of smoke whose various masses, at every eruption, were illuminated in separate sections as though by lightning…. To survey all this at one glance, and to see this most wonderful picture completed by the full moon, as it rose behind the mountain ridge, could hardly fail to cause astonishment. From this vantage point my eye could take in everything at once, and although it could not scrutinize individual objects, it never lost the impression of the whole great scene.

(272; my emphasis).

Goethe’s encounter with the sublime volcano is framed by a window (indeed, one of the oldest metaphors of picture making), which allows him a transcendental view of the whole object before his eyes. He surveys the volcano in a single glance, taking in the entire scene in one spectacular moment of visual mastery. Goethe’s optical “voyage” of discovery thus culminates in the creation of a subject of the Enlightenment, pushed up to the edge of danger but never overcome by it. His knowing eye simply takes it in all at once.

Goethe’s narrative of spectatorship is thus indebted to a subject/object configuration, which, in its articulation of the stability of solid ground for observation, owes its very formulation to what I have termed the meta-epistemology of ship travel. I have also indicated the ways in which Goethe’s synthesizing perception of the world “out there” is structured by the maintenance of a strong subject who is positioned above or outside the world he observes. Again, this transcendental perspective on the world is predicated on the ability to both depart from and return to the security of terra firma. So far, however, I have spoken primarily about the epistemological stakes of Goethe’s narrative of mobility. I now want to examine the specific ways in which Goethe determines nationality and national differences through the marking of space and the measurement of time. Although Goethe travels as a German subject without a nation, he introduces a specific concept of “transnational translation,” to use Homi Bhabha’s words, to determine and explain national differences.

In addition to the clear linguistic and geographic differences that Italy presents, Goethe is also convinced that national differences can be specified according to temporality. He believes that there exists both a “German” and an “Italian” way of marking the passage of time. That is to say, not only are German words able to be translated into their “equivalents” in Italian (and vice versa), Goethe also believes that German time can be translated into Italian time (and vice versa). Through the travel narrative, the recording of mobility becomes Goethe’s own record of nationalizing subjectivity through language, space, and time. He does not seek to overcome nationality or render nationality hybrid through his journeys between two languages, two places, and two times; rather, through the realism of the travel narrative, he attempts to solidify the specificity of national differences and thereby endow the German subject without a nation with a form of nationality.

Let me begin with Goethe’s articulation of the distinctiveness of marking national time. In Verona, just two weeks into his trip, Goethe observes that Italians, unlike Germans, orient their lives around “the time of day” (such as morning or evening), not the hour indicated by the clock. In characterizing the uniqueness of the Italian relationship to time, Goethe writes:

In a land where people enjoy the day, but especially delight in the evening, nightfall is most significant…. When night falls here the day, which consisted of evening and morning, is definitely past, twenty-four hours have been lived, a new account begins, the bells ring, the rosary is said, the maid enters one’s room with a burning lamp and says: ‘Felicissima notte!’ The cycle changes with every season, and the person who lives a lively life here cannot become confused because every joy of his existence is related not to the hour, but to the time of day. If a German clock were forced on this people they would become confused, for their clock is most intimately connected with their nature.

(42)

Goethe even wonders whether the German fixation on “clock time” has to do with the “eternal fog and gloom” that “we Cimmerians” (42) have to endure.⁵⁹ In a somewhat stereotypical fashion, Goethe writes that Germans have scarcely any time “to stroll and divert [themselves] beneath an open sky” (42), unlike Italians who apparently do so all day long.

3.5 Goethe’s comparison chart for the Italian and German clocks. Author’s drawing. Adapted from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 44

As a matter of convenience for himself, Goethe invents a “device” for translating between German and Italian time. According to Goethe, the inner circle represents the German twenty-four hours, in two cycles of twelve hours. The middle circle represents Italian time, indicated by “how the bells chime here” (43). And the outer circle represents “how in daily life one counts to twenty-four” (43). While the first hour of the day in Verona is simply indicated by one bell chime, the German clock would indicate “eight o’clock in the morning.” Similarly, the last hour of the Italian day is indicated by twelve bell chimes or, translating to German time, seven o’clock in the evening. The whole cycle begins again with one bell chime (at eight o’clock German time), indicating that night has arrived. In essence, Italian time consists of two structuring blocks of time, day and night, each twelve hours long, with time beginning for both at one and ending at twelve. Although, Goethe observes, Germans and Italians tell and value time differently according to their national characteristics and patterns of life, these national temporalities can nevertheless be “translated” through the narration of mobility. In this way, as Bhabha mentions in his brief analysis of the Italienische Reise in his study of the time and space of the nation, Goethe’s “realist narrative produces a national-historical time that makes visible a specifically Italian day in the detail of its passing time.”⁶⁰

But what Goethe seems to have really discovered in his translation of national time is the simultaneity of multiple, incommensurate, local times. Even though a “German clock” ostensibly still measured the passage of time in the same manner regardless of locale, virtually every (German or Italian) city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century maintained its own time, according to seasonal cycles and agricultural rhythms. The push for a uniform, nationwide and later worldwide standard time did not come about until the development of the railway system and the need to coordinate the arrival and departure times of trains as precisely as possible. This is probably attributable to the fact that, before the railway, transportation speeds were finitely fixed by horse-drawn carriages or largely uncontrollable because of their determination by the winds at sea. With the national and international spread of railways, the unprecedented acceleration of movement necessitated the abolition of locally determined and maintained times in favor of synchronized schedules and coordinated time zones.⁶¹ However, in the life-world before railways, local times could still be “translated” since they exhibited local, if not national, particularities. In other words, despite his belief otherwise, Goethe’s transnational translation of time is less specific to articulating nationality and more a consequence of locality: He was not translating the German clock into the Italian day, but simply the locality of time in one place into the locality of time in another. By the end of the nineteenth century, Weimar and Verona would be placed in the same time zone, and, hence, his translation of temporality would be superfluous (although national differences, seemingly paradoxically, would become all the more rigid).

Goethe, however, never gave up the belief that the way in which time is measured and experienced is an indication of national particularity. After all, one of the goals of writing a realist travel narrative is to convey the uniqueness of “Italian” measurements of time, or at least the impression or effect of this time, while consolidating his own—German—subjectivity through difference. This is especially the case in his characterization of the “Italian day,” and, as Bakhtin has elegantly shown, it also figures prominently in his representation of The Roman Carnival, a short, illustrated picture book published by Goethe in 1789/90.⁶² The description of the Roman carnival is shown to be specific to the locality of the Italians, evoked in all its unique color and dynamic presence, ranging from the promenade in the Corso to the spectacles of horse racing. Here, the realist travel narrative also reveals a certain anthropological practice of history: Goethe seeks to endow a space with its temporality or, in other words, link the specific geography of a place with the complexity of its patterns for marking time. In this respect, the Italian day has both a unique temporality and a specific space.

It is here that the realist organization of the travel narrative is most clearly betrayed as an ideological form of subject formation. While in Rome, for the first time on November 1, 1786, Goethe attempts to convey the impression of the uniqueness of the city’s layered topography and its nonsimultaneous history. But since “the capital of the world,” as he calls it, is essentially the telos of his voyage, he can think of nothing more to wish for after having arrived in Rome than simply to return home:

What shall I ever wish for afterwards? Nothing more that I can think of, except to land safely at home in my pleasant boat.…Now … [that I have arrived] my friends and fatherland truly become dear to me again. Now I look forward to my return, indeed all the more so because I feel very certain that I shall not be bringing all these treasures back just for my own possession and private use, but so that they may serve both me and others as guidance and encouragement for an entire lifetime.      (102–3)

Goethe considers his arrival in Rome as a “second natal day, a true rebirth” (121), one that serves both his own voyage of self-discovery and fosters new directions and relationships with his friends and homeland. He has not only accumulated objects of knowledge throughout the voyage but has also become a knowing subject; however, the journey can only be completed upon his return home. After all, these newfound treasures of knowledge and a strong, nationally distinctive subjectivity can finally only be articulated upon his return to Weimar. Otherness secures the self—but only upon returning home.

For this reason the realist travel narrative is not simply a chronology of transnational mobility but, just as important, a cycle of return. As he delves more deeply into the city, Goethe realizes that it is harder and harder to write about it. Using another seafaring metaphor, he says: “For just as the sea is found to be ever deeper, the farther one goes into it, so it is with me in my inspection of this city. The present cannot be understood without the past, and comparison of the two requires more time and leisure” (135). For him, as Bakhtin has also pointed out, past, present, and future are all bound together in “a ring of necessity.”⁶³ He encounters the ruins of Roman history, in the specificity of the local present, for the sake of his own future. There is no rupture between past experience and future expectations, only a cyclical continuity uniting them together, as if “the whole world is just a simple wheel” (172) or, as Goethe says in another context, as if “you are enclosed in a magic circle.”⁶⁴

Indeed, Goethe’s narrative of his journey is suffused with cycles of return. First of all, although he believes that Italian and German modes of measuring local time differ according to national characteristics, time runs in a reliable, seasonal cycle in both places. That is to say, even though Goethe argues that Italian time differs from the “German clock,” a cyclical temporality, whereby experience and expectation are linked together in the present, is nevertheless still fundamental to both the north and the south. Second, Goethe’s experiences of Roman antiquity are always closely linked with his present and the realization of his already fulfilled future. And finally, the voyage itself, derived from both an extended metaphor of ship travel and the actuality of two voyages by sea, is structured by and predicated on the desire to ultimately return home. It is no coincidence that one of the first things Goethe does upon landing on the island of Sicily is to rush out and buy a copy of Homer’s Odyssey (195). He dutifully reads his daily portion while using “this living environment [as] … the best possible commentary” he could have for his readings and, eventually, for the production of the idea for his own Odyssey (238). With its newly resonant, descriptive detail of the sea voyage—particularly, Odysseus’s encounters with foreignness, his ultimately safe return home, and, most of all, the retelling of the tale—Goethe reflects on his own journey. “Only now,” he writes to Herder on May 17, 1787, does “the Odyssey become a living word for me” (256). With its structuring encounters with and observations of foreignness, coupled with its cycle of return and formation of a national subject without a nation, the Italienische Reise is essentially Goethe’s Odyssey. In sum, then, the travel narrative—as both the realization of a form of subjectivity and the articulation of an idea of nationality and national difference—is an ideological form narrated according to cycles of foreignness, discovery, individuality, and return.

We can elaborate on the formation of the German subject without a nation by briefly comparing the structures discussed above with his paradigmatic novel of education, Wilhelm Meister, a novel largely written after Goethe returned from his trip to Italy. Although the protagonist, Wilhelm, never takes a trip on a ship, his education is certainly a temporal voyage of discovery, both metaphorically and literally, wherein the narration of the tale follows the logic of the meta-epistemology of the ship in terms of its telos of producing a socialized, autonomous, and nationally grounded subject. As Benedict Anderson astutely observed with regard to the temporal organization of the European novel, something that certainly applies to the bildungsroman: “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”⁶⁵ Goethe and Wilhelm Meister develop socially as they move though the empty, homogeneous time of the calendar in which experience and expectation are reliably connected to one another. Their movements and growth are not only analogues for the nation but, through their repetition, are precisely how the nation emerges as a desired or imagined community.

Both the Italienische Reise and Wilhelm Meister are travel narratives that are structured by a linear temporal development (a series of formative educational encounters that build upon one another) and a cyclical return to the beginning: Like Goethe, Wilhelm returns home at the end of the novel to rediscover his past, accept his inheritance, and recognize the guiding hand of the perennial authority of the so-called Tower Society. Wilhelm’s journey begins with him leaving home in order to join and later direct the “migratory empire” of a traveling theater.⁶⁶ Over the course of his journey, he meets many people, some of whom offer advice and guidance, others of whom seem to distract from his education. After completing his “apprenticeship” years and finally announcing his intention to renounce the theater, Wilhelm is initiated into the Tower Society, a secret society, which, it turns out, has been covertly guiding his educational journey from the very start. At the end, Wilhelm not only receives an ideal body (“deep-set” eyes, a “delicate” nose and mouth), but also gains “the feeling of fatherhood” and “all the virtues of a citizen” (Gefühl des Vaters… alle Tugenden eines Bürgers) who participates in civil society.⁶⁷ Having mastered the necessary skills and completed the educational journey, Wilhelm is integrated into the authority of the Tower Society and its architecture of timeless power. The novel of education concludes by coming full circle: In the end, Wilhelm is reunited with both his son Felix and the objects of art from his family’s inheritance. He then gets married to a woman, Natalie, whom he has known all along. The end not only connects back to the beginning but was preprogrammed from the start. In this sense, at the end of the journey, Wilhelm goes home as a father and a productive German citizen precisely because he is fortunate enough to have always already been a father and a productive German citizen. The circularity is mutually reinforcing.

In Wilhelm Meister as well as Goethe’s fictionalization of his travels in the Italienische Reise both characters leave home, explore foreign lands, learn about different customs, and, finally, get to return home having accumulated knowledge and social experience. On their respective journeys they both receive guidance and direction by virtue of their political privilege and prior familial positions: Goethe, knowing that his all-access freedom rests entirely on his political status in Germany, repeatedly mentions how fortunate he is that he can travel “incognito” and still benefit from elite social and political contacts. Similarly, Wilhelm can leave home and be guided “by some kindly hand” out of middle-class life⁶⁸ precisely because the noble authority of the Tower Society quietly directs his social and intellectual formation. Despite near misses, potential failures, and possible shipwrecks, neither character is undermined, weakened, or rendered impotent on his respective journey because a zone of corporeal and specular safety governs his observations and encounters with the external world. And, finally, although both Goethe and Wilhelm journey far from their homes, they never surrender their familial, cultural, linguistic, and social ties. The circularity of the bildungsroman ensures these bonds and always returns the protagonists home as better, stronger, and more socialized subjects than when they left. In this respect, the bildungsroman is a “voyage” of self-discovery, individualization, subject formation, and national mooring. In both its metaphorical capacity and its epistemological configuration travel by ship provides the basis for the generic integrity and narrative structure of the bildungsroman and its structures of subject formation.

Moreover, because the voyage by sea is, more or less, reliable and re-peatable—that is, future expectations derive from and match up with past experiences—the novel of education can be, more or less, universalized and held together by structures of power that thrive on such reliability and repeatability. These structures of power, in play throughout both Goethe’s texts, include the rules of inheritance and patriarchal authority, sexual and familial norms, the class-based stratification of society, the world of commodities and exchange, and, finally, the legitimacy of the weight of the past, represented primarily by museum objects, art and book collections, and relics from antiquity.⁶⁹ Both Wilhelm and Goethe benefit personally by them and even become socially integrated, educated, and responsible subjects precisely because their bodies and histories fit comfortably within these structures of power. When taken together, these structures also form the basis of an enlightened, civil society. The seafaring topos, with its characteristic journey of education, growth, and self-discovery, thus functions and gains legitimacy by repeatedly linking Bildung with Besitz (property) such that the individual subject, formed within such structures of power, also participates in the repetition, extension, and conservation of society.⁷⁰

The goal then is not just the Bildung of the individual but also the production and enforcement of a broader, power-laden social ideal. As Jarno, one of the highest-ranking members of the Tower Society enthusiastically declares at the end of Wilhelm Meister, the pedagogy of the Tower Society should be “[extended] into every corner of the globe, and people from all over the world will be allowed to join it.” His reason, however, is not worldwide altruism but rather strategic self-preservation: “We will cooperate in safeguarding our means of existence, in case some political revolution should displace one of our members from the land he owns.”⁷¹ The Tower Society’s theory of education, with Wilhelm as its model student, not only desires to maintain its architecture of power (“the hall of the past”) and its panoptic system of control in German-speaking regions, it also wants worldwide influence. In effect, the Tower Society—in its institutional, economic, patriarchal, and architectural authority—is both the product of the systematic connection between experience and expectation and also an ideological power realized and exerted through the cyclical organization of the travel narrative itself. Only Friedrich, the society’s sole critic, disparages its self-serving pedagogy and Enlightenment-colonial goals, calling them nothing but a bunch of “young colonists.”⁷² The Tower Society, however, is already preparing to send its missionaries off “to Russia and the United States” to secure its future and spread the gospel of Enlightenment and Bildung. Indeed, this colonization by sea is crucial not only to spread the Enlightenment idea of subject formation and the attendant concept of nationality but, as we will see in chapter 4 on Hegel and Heine, also critical to the way in which the progress of world history was conceived. It is not until Adorno that this achievement would be most trenchantly assessed: the “fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”⁷³

With this we can sum up the meta-epistemology of the ship and the life-world that it discloses. First of all, ship travel and the possibility of shipwreck initiates a long-standing epistemological configuration in which subjectivity and nationality are secured precisely by the insoluble difference between the sea and solid ground. This difference, as we have seen, is the basis of the desire for and the possibility of a transcendental perspective on the world as well as the production of the desire for a nationally grounded subject. Moreover, it is also the basis for the maintenance of a Cartesian subject/object dichotomy for observation and the steady accumulation of knowledge. Through this process of collecting knowledge and characterizing nationality through linguistic, spatial, and temporal difference, Goethe’s realist travel narrative betrays its ideological edge. “Voyages of discovery” and cycles of return not only shore up individuality but also solidify the Enlightenment ideal of Bildung achieved through the exclusivity of structures of power in preserving and expanding the missionary reach of civil society. This is the narrative enactment of the “dialectic of Enlightenment.”

We can now provide some answers to the questions I posed at the start of this chapter about the “acceleration of time” and the possible break with an eschatological predetermination of temporality. What we do not see in Goethe’s Italienische Reise, contrary to Koselleck’s determination of “new time,” is the rupture between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. Even David Wellbery’s recent detection of “an acceleration of time” in Goethe’s early work, particularly in Goethe’s poem “An Schwager Kronos” (October 10, 1774), indicates only the desire for the acceleration of time.⁷⁴ After all, a passenger riding in a mail coach tells Cronos to go ever faster, despite the obvious physical limitations of the horses pulling the carriage. Wellbery argues that the figure of the absolute in Goethe—the moment (Augenblick) of excitement, death, or crash—is a harbinger of the acceleration, even annihilation, of time. But, what is yet to happen is the paradigmatic rupture between past and future, or the phenomenological experience of an acceleration of time. The latter does not occur until the birth of the railway.

In fact, the first two parts, Reise I–II (conceived in 1786 but written and published in final form in 1816–17), testify to the exact opposite: Temporality is experienced as a cycle of continuity, with the expectation of safe return structuring the procession of the journey.⁷⁵ In this respect, the narrative form of the Italienische Reise is essentially a nostos, one of the most antique of storytelling structures.⁷⁶ The narrative proceeds linearly insofar as days come and go in succession, but the end is always already determined from the start. Experience and expectation are linked together in a reliable framework whereby knowledge accumulates in an organized and repeatable fashion. Finally, although not a simplistic repetition of the same, the end returns to the beginning, completing the circle of development with a kind of inheritance of the past. Once again, the journey—a literal, metaphorical, and epistemological voyage—is always back home to the nation that does not yet exist. The “modernity” of both these travel narratives (the Italienische Reise and Wilhelm Meister) comes less from the narration and experience of time and space and more from the subject’s obsessive desire to secure terra firma for his totalizing, systematic, and transcendental perspective on the world “out there.” In much the same way that Cronos desires to go ever faster but cannot exceed the period’s technological limitations on mobility, Goethe desires to return home to the nation, even though that possibility, too, does not yet exist, save the desire. As Goethe predicted in the last years of his life, not ships and seafaring would unify the German nation but the construction of the railway system and the narration of mobility in accordance with a phenomenologically new experience of space and time: “I have no fear about the unity of Germany: Our good roads and future railways will do their part,”⁷⁷ he remarked in 1828. But Goethe did not live long enough to ride a German train: He died three years before the first segment of the future German railway system opened between Nuremberg and Fürth. Space and time would soon be “killed,” but national differences, as Goethe predicted, would be far from overcome.

KAFKA, SHOLEM ALEICHEM, AND THE (JEWISH) IMMIGRANT MASS OBJECT

In 1835 two ostensibly unrelated events occurred: the first German railway line, a six-kilometer track between Nuremberg and Fürth, began operation and, in Russia, Nicholas I established the Pale of Settlement, restricting Jews to a zone in Western Russia bordering Germany and Austria-Hungary. Jews from Fürth, a predominantly Jewish town, could take the train to work in Nuremberg during the day but were not allowed to stay overnight. As in many other German cities and provinces, mobility was permitted, but settlement was not. And, within the Pale, Jews could move between designated provinces; however, if they left the Pale, reentry could be denied and Russian citizenship revoked. Settlement was granted, but mobility was strictly regulated. “German modernity” might be seen as the story in which these two historically distinct events became ever more intensely connected through the creation of transnational spaces of encounter between Germans and Jews. At the same time, “Jewish modernity” might be seen as a story of settlement and mobility wherein the construction and spread of the railway became the means of both facilitating mass migration and checking emancipation. Because they conditioned one another, it only makes sense to speak of them as inseparably linked, as German/Jewish modernity.

The industrialization of Germany and most of Western and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century was largely achieved by building new and efficient means for mobility and exchange. In the span of a few decades, isolated railway segments formed industrial railway nodes, and, by the 1870s, turned into a supranational railway system. Within Germanic regions railways were invested with a kind of salvific power since they quickly became regarded as the means and the symbol of unity for a modern, industrialized nation. As Goethe and Friedrich List had predicted before the first railway even began running in Germany, the scattered Germanic people and isolated Germanic states would be brought together and unified by the construction of a railway network. Indeed, they were not wrong. Railways advanced both national unification and massive economic changes for a modernizing Germany: railway growth and the accompanying industrial expansion (coal and iron production, exportation, the formation of infrastructure and capital) formed a greater part of Germany’s total domestic production during the nineteenth century than that of any other country.⁷⁸ As Friedrich Harkort enthusiastically declared about the modernization achieved by way of the railway: “The locomotive is the hearse on which absolutism and feudalism will be carried to the graveyard.”⁷⁹ And, as Wilhelm Raabe declared with regard to the German nation: “The German Empire was founded with the first railway line.”

But both Harkort and Raabe forgot the Jews in German modernity. After all, as we will see in more detail in chapter 5, Jews played an important role in German industrialization and railway financing as well as comprised not a small part of the passenger list on the first German railway between Nuremberg and Fürth.⁸⁰ Moreover, during the last decades of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, Jews were ubiquitous on trains, with hundreds of thousands of migrating Eastern Jews traveling through Germany to escape economic and political hardships in the Pale of Settlement. We might say more correctly that “the locomotive of traveling Jews is the hearse on which absolutism and feudalism will be carried to the graveyard” and that “the German Empire was founded with Jews traveling on the first railway line.”

The construction of a network of trains connecting Germany to Eastern Europe and Russia thus wrought tremendous demographic and socioeconomic changes in the ways that national spaces were configured and monitored as well as in the ways that Germans encountered Jews and dealt with transmigration. National borders became simultaneously more porous and more stringently regulated. And, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Jews began to emigrate from the Pale of Settlement in historically unprecedented numbers. Not only did Jews play disproportionate roles in railway financing, but largely poor, Hasidic Eastern Jews also began to migrate west in disproportionate numbers through the major railway hubs in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in order to find economic opportunity and escape pogroms. Nearly half a million Jews migrated from Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Romania through Austria-Hungary and/ or Germany between 1870 and the end of the First World War, and over three million Jews from Russia and the Polish sectors passed through Germany—the vast majority through Berlin—during the same period.⁸¹ In his study of the perception of Eastern-European Jews in Germany, Steven Aschheim likens this sudden surge in Jewish migration to “the floodgates [being] unleashed.”⁸²

Because of Germany’s unique geographic position between the West, the Pale of Settlement, the czarist Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German states formulated extensive and often contradictory administrative policies for regulating the immigration and transmigration of Jews. Unlike other European countries or the United States, Germany never enacted a national policy regarding Jewish immigration; instead individual states evaluated Jews based on economic utility, often facilitating transmigration to England or the “New World” from German ports but generally refusing citizenship to Eastern Jews and deporting tens of thousands who wanted to settle in the Reich.⁸³

It is in this regard that the railway began to manifest a dialectical history: trains facilitated an unprecedented mobility and mass migration, but, at the same time, they also enabled people to be denied citizenship and deported en masse. This historical precedent was already established in its most basic form in 1835 when Jews began traveling by train to Nuremberg but were forced to dwell in Fürth. As Walter Benjamin remarked about the significance of the railway in his material history of the nineteenth century, trains contributed to the formation of mobile masses of people: “The historical signature of the railroad may be found in the fact that it represents the first means of transport—and, until the big ocean liners, no doubt also the last—to form masses. The stagecoach, the automobile, the airplane carry passengers in small groups only.”⁸⁴ The dialectical complexity of the railway emerges precisely from the bidirectional movement of the Jewish masses: First, from East to West and, later, from West to East. In both cases, Jews are figured as mobile masses: Mass migration and mass deportation.

Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories: Tales of a Commercial Traveler address the dialectics of mobility against the historical background of the waves of mass migrations of Jews out of the Russian Empire.⁸⁵ For Sholem Aleichem the modernity of the railway system not only facilitated mass mobility but also prevented it because trains both enabled emancipation and unleashed terror. Jews who were previously isolated in small towns could now travel with comparatively greater freedom; but, at the same time, Cossacks could also travel to Jewish settlements, and Jews could be more efficaciously expelled from their land.⁸⁶ As we will see, Sholem Aleichem’s trains are populated with gregarious, Yiddish-speaking Jews who are moving within a massive, transnational network embodying both the hopes and catastrophes of the dialectic of modernity. Not unlike Kafka’s protagonist Karl Rossmann in his immigration story, Der Verschollene, the Jews in Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories comprise part of a mobile mass dissociated from the individualized privilege granted to “national subjects” who have a geographic, political, and linguistic mooring. Whereas Kafka’s Karl is a figure of disposability who has either lost or is denied everything that might contribute to the creation of an identity or subject position, including any religious or cultural ties to Judaism, the Jews in Sholem Aleichem’s stories create a vibrant “diasporic consciousness” through their cultural and linguistic mobility as well as their chance encounters with others—Jews and non-Jews—on the train.⁸⁷ Karl, on the other hand, is never allowed the space to develop such a diasporic consciousness; instead he is buffeted about as the unfortunate byproduct of the forces of modernity, becoming nothing more than an anonymous, mass object of modernization.

Kafka’s 1912 novel of transmigration, Der Verschollene, clumsily translated as “the man who went missing” but better known by the title Max Brod gave the text, Amerika, is the story of the first few months of Karl Ross-mann’s new life in America.⁸⁸ At the novel’s start, Karl, a seventeen-year-old boy from Prague, arrives on the Hamburg-America line in the port of New York. The novel ends with Karl joining a traveling theater troupe supposedly based in Oklahoma and traveling with his new colleagues for days and nights by train over great bridges and through treacherous mountains into the unknown. From his arrival by ship to his departure by train, Karl is a figure of disposability, trapped in a world of unmasterable mobility wherein everything is connected together, but the linkages and networks betray precious little logic, openness, or necessity. In trying to navigate these linkages and networks, Karl is unrelentingly bombarded by nonstop movement, while his body is constantly cramped into tiny places where he has virtually no control over his own mobility: He is shipped off to America on a giant ocean liner by his family in Prague but becomes stuck in a steerage cabin too small for two people; he is given a penthouse room in his American uncle’s six-story home but becomes trapped and disoriented on the forbidden balcony; he is driven by car through New York to a family friend’s country home but has no idea how he got there nor how much time expired since he left, and, upon entering the house, he becomes lost in its endless corridors; he lands a job as a lift boy in a gargantuan hotel but is forced to work twelve-hour shifts; he tries to escape the hotel by foot but becomes ensnared by an unbroken, unending stream of cars; finally, he decides to join the Theater of Oklahoma but is abruptly forced into a train compartment without any luggage and driven off to an uncertain destination.

Unlike Goethe who moves deliberately through the Italian landscape, accumulating knowledge by the methodical inspection of topography and the comparative measurement of temporality, Karl neither masters the American landscape nor gains an iota of knowledge about its geography or history. Whereas the Italienische Reise is carefully organized by Goethe’s arrivals at and departures from precise places on specific dates—so much so that he even learns to “translate” between Italian time and German time—Karl never learns what it might mean to be an “American” and never even knows where he is, apart from the very first line of the novel, which places him in New York City.⁸⁹ Like so many of Kafka’s other protagonists—Josef K., Gregor Samsa, K., Josephine—Karl Rossmann is a radically ahistorical character, severed by the force of circumstance from his past, with no constitutive hopes or expectations for the future. He is plucked down into an unplaceable geography of the present and buffeted about by constantly shifting, bewildering, and inexplicable contingencies.

Far from offering liberty and justice, Karl’s America is a modernist nightmare presided over by the Statue of Liberty carrying a sword in her outstretched arm. Unlike the landscapes that Goethe so relaxingly surveys on his journey of education, every place that Karl perceives is not only unwelcoming but also lacks topographical stability, history, and meaning. For this reason he cannot orient himself according to geography, temporality, or language. In fact, the possibility of finding terra firma is foreclosed the very first time that Karl gets a broad view of the American harbor from the window of the stoker’s tiny room:

Great ships crossed each other’s courses in either direction, yielding to the assault of the waves only as far as their weight permitted them. If one squinted one’s eyes, these ships seemed to be swaying under their own weight…. Probably from some battleship there could be heard salvoes, fired in salute; the gun-barrels of one ship that passed at no great distance gleamed with the reflection of the sunlight on steel, as it seemed to be nursed along by the sure, smooth motion, although not on an even keel. Only a distant view of the smaller ships and boats could be had, at least from the door, as they darted about in swarms through the gaps between the great ships. And behind them all rose New York, and its skyscrapers stared at Karl with their hundred thousand windows.                (G 19–20/E 11–12; translation altered)

Not only does the view out the window preclude a systematic spectatorship on the external world, but the cacophony of mobility prevents Karl from finding any stable ground or any encompassing view to organize the entirety of the scene.⁹⁰ Unlike Goethe’s specular mastery of Vesuvius from the window of the duchess’s palace, Karl finds the undomesticated objects under visual inspection looking back at him. The windows of the skyscrapers function like undomesticated eyes, returning his gaze one hundred thousand times over.⁹¹ Observer and observed have switched places. Kafka’s America, in its adamant refusal and constant mocking of the possibility of securing a reliable subject position for any view on the world, is a very different landscape than Goethe’s Roman Campagna.

As we have seen, Goethe’s travel narratives are structured by what I termed the meta-epistemology of the ship, an epistemological configuration in which the subject/object division is never destabilized and Goethe’s individualistic, systematic, and transcendental view of the world “out there” is made possible by the security of terra firma. The generic basis for the bildungsroman is encompassed by the realism of the spectator’s persistent search for and successful voyage towards solid ground from which to observe and know the world. It is marked by a temporal structure of preordained development and cyclical return. As a counterconcept, then, the structure of Kafka’s Der Verschollene might be productively termed the meta-epistemology of the railway system, a configuration characterized by the dissolution of the very possibility of solid ground, the utter destruction of a knowing subject with a transcendental perspective on the world, the relativity and contingency of all temporal and spatial frames of reference, and, finally, the articulation of an interconnected world of mass mobility. Far from an autonomous, knowing subject, the kind of subjectivity that emerges is a “desubjectified” mass object of migration.

Of course, the range and nature of the metaphors generated by railway travel are also quite different from those generated by the sea voyage. For one, although the train is often considered metaphorically as well as literally to “stitch together” the body politic of the nation (as we will see in chapter 5), the train is never a metaphor for the nation, unlike the Staatsschiff, the “ship of state.” When it is given metaphorical form, the train is often linked with theology, as Heine perceptively noted in 1843: the invention of the railway is a “providential event.” On the one hand, the train is the devil or the destroyer of nature and, on the other hand, the symbol for the faith in progress.⁹² At no point, however, are metaphors of train travel likened to voyages of discovery, education, or growth, and, hence, as I argued earlier, the technological conditions of possibility for the genre of the bildungsroman were to be found in the prerailway life-world of carriages and ships.

From the moment he arrives in New York’s harbor through the last time he looks out the train window on his way to Oklahoma, Karl is a figure of loss and rejection—“the one who went missing”—who is funneled through and finally ejected from inscrutable systems of power and unknowable topographies of displacement. Besides a single suitcase, umbrella, and photograph of his parents (all of which he will lose as he wanders through America), Karl has no possessions, no citizenship, no religion, and no home. According to his uncle, who rejects him and kicks him out of his house, Karl lacks a proper socialization, has an inadequate formal education, and can barely speak English. In other words, Karl has neither Besitz nor Bildung, the two constitutive components of subject formation in the traditional bildungsroman. He never becomes a subject because he never knows or produces anything. As Karl is moved through the novel, he becomes ever more ahistorical, losing all connections he once had to the past, learning nothing from his experiences in the present, and hoping for nothing particular in the future. He is always confined to the dislocation of a given moment, without direction, orientation, history, or expectation.

Whereas Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister begins with the “uselessness” of the theater and ends with four marriages and the legitimacy of sexual reproduction, Kafka’s Der Verschollene begins with the illegitimacy of sexual reproduction and ends with Karl joining a traveling theater. This reversal is not insignificant, for Kafka is quite deliberately subverting the genre of the bildungsroman, not only in its inevitable teleology of socialization and recitable subject formation but also in the latter’s meta-epistemological structure of voyage, self-discovery, and return. In contrast to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, seventeen-year-old Karl, after being seduced by his family’s thirty-five-year-old maid and fathering a child, is expelled from his home and country. He never gains the social status of “father” or the political privilege of “citizen,” and, over the course of his wanderings, is always an outsider who is in no way assimilated into American society.⁹³ Even in the few seemingly propitious moments in which Karl might gain status, he is promptly ejected from participation in or benefit from any system of power. He has no access to sexual, economic, social, political, or material privilege, and the associated structures of power consistently forbid him entry. On the contrary, Goethe’s Wilhelm is always already admitted into the Tower Society’s structure of power. He is named Meister (master) from the very start, and his travels record his development into a virtuous, productive, and autonomous citizen.

While Goethe’s systematic and transcendental observations on the world “out there” were made from solid ground (both the narrative representation of a stable position for viewing and the historical stability accorded to his retrospective writing of the Italienische Reise), Karl’s observations are consistently confused because neither his position for observation nor the objects in his world is ever stable. Not only do observer and observed unpredictably switch places in Kafka’s narrative, the seemingly safe perspective from above offers none of the security or mastery that Goethe was accustomed to experiencing. Objects “escaped his eyes” (G 144/E 112); new vantage points do not contribute to knowledge or facilitate mastery (G 154/E 119); the highest or broadest views, for example, those from atop his uncle’s sixth floor balcony, are instead the most disconcerting:

But what would have been the highest vantage point in his hometown allowed him here little more than a view of one street, which ran perfectly straight between two rows of squarely chopped buildings and therefore seemed to be fleeing into the distance, where the outlines of a cathedral loomed in the dense haze. And in morning as well as evening and far into the dreaming night that street was the channel for a constant stream of traffic which, seen from above, looked like an inexplicable confusion, for ever newly improvised, of foreshortened human figures and of roofs of all kinds of vehicles, sending into the upper air another confusion, more riotous and complicated, of noises, dust, and smells, all of it enveloped and penetrated by a flood of light which the multitudinous objects in the street scattered, carried off and again busily brought back, with an effect as palpable to the beguiled eye as if a glass roof stretched over the street were being violently smashed into fragments at every moment.

(G 55/E 38-39, translation slightly modified)

In this extraordinary passage, the possibility of a transcendental perspective on “America” is foreclosed to Karl. The objects before him are in a constant, inexplicable motion, and “the beguiled eye” can do nothing more than surrender to the simultaneous violence. Karl can neither orient his body in the space observed, nor discern any organizing logic inherent to the geography. He is neither the master nor the center of the coordinate system. Moreover, the view has no history and cannot be placed in a narrative of before and after, “no longer” and “not yet,” because it has no temporal extension: it is pure event. Everything occurs simultaneously, from morning to evening, and repeats itself indefinitely, like a “glass roof … violently smashed into fragments at every moment.”⁹⁴

This description stands in marked contrast to Goethe’s narration of travel in which chronological time, national spaces, and transcendental spectatorship are distinct, reliable, predictable, and absolutely determinable domains. In the Italienische Reise dates and places are strung together by the definitive connection between experience and expectation, whereby comings and goings by carriage and ship are always already contained in a continuous cycle of narrative return. Linear, historical time runs forward from day to day and repeats itself in seasonal cycles of return; the Cartesian spaces of national differences, filled with objects of beauty for contemplation, are amenable to the regularity of a coordinate system with clear borders and a mappable topography; and, finally, Goethe, as a mobile subject, can systematically observe the world “out there” from the most privileged positions and stable points of view that transcendental spectatorship will permit. However, in Kafka’s travel narrative, time, space, and observation fold together, even unpredictably warping as a function of one another.⁹⁵ As Albert Einstein first demonstrated, an objective or transcendental perspective on the world from a stable subject position on terra firma does not exist; the experience and measurement of time is rather a function of the mobility, speed, and the relative position of an observer to what he or she is observing.⁹⁶ In Kafka’s description of travel, characters and events do not develop against the procession of linear time or within an evenly coordinated, national landscape. Space and time are no longer absolute categories from which to demarcate events, actions, or plots—let alone secure the space of the “nation” or the time of “history”—but are rather a relative function of an observer’s mobility from within an ever more densely linked and, at least for Karl, oppressive system of power.

One of the most salient examples of such a system of power comes early in the novel, soon after Karl meets his long-lost uncle Edward Jacob, a wealthy businessman and senator from New York who proudly tells Karl, “I am an American citizen from my very heart” (G 38/E 25).⁹⁷ Uncle Jacob, we are told, came over from Europe more than thirty years ago to start a successful business in New York and is now the living realization of the American dream. The business, “a sort of commission and dispatch agency,” handles all the transfer of goods and raw materials between manufacturers and hence relies on an immense amount of coordination and transportation, maintained by “the most exact, uninterrupted telephone and telegraph connection” (G 65–66/E 47). By way of an “inhuman regularity and speed,” diligent workers move goods all over the country from a building so large that “it took many days to traverse in its entirety” (G 66–67/E 47–48). In other words, his uncle’s business is essentially a highly structured transportation and communication system, not unlike a third-order railway system in its linked complexity, temporal coordination, and relative simultaneity. Its unencompassable largeness and precise coordination between experience and expectation overwhelm Karl, who stands in awe but can hardly master a single part:

Through the hall there was a perpetual traffic [Verkehr] of people rushing hither and thither. Nobody said good day, greetings were omitted, each man fell into step behind anyone who was going the same way, keeping his eyes on the floor, over which he was set on advancing as quickly as he could, or giving a hurried glance at a word or figure here and there on the papers he held in his hand, which fluttered with the wind of his forward movement.                          (G 67/E 48)

The workers are nothing but perfectly coordinated parts in an elaborately linked, perpetual motion machine, which might be called industrial modernity.

Karl cannot “systematically” observe the operation of the business, although he discerns the existence of a complex, horizontally differentiated system in which every activity is somehow linked together. Once he is denied a position of informed spectatorship, the massive structures of power disallow his participation and, finally, expel him from their very operation. When Karl decides, against his uncle’s wishes, to spend an evening in the New York countryside with a family friend, Uncle Jacob angrily writes Karl a letter, instructing him never to visit or be in touch with him again (G 122–23/E 94–95). Karl is forbidden from the one possibility he has of gaining social, political, and economic status. In fact, as Karl wanders through the American landscape, never again will he be this close to gaining admission to the structures of economic power and social legitimacy. He won’t even be able to recall where his uncle’s agency is geographically located.

Throughout the novel, Karl is repeatedly set up against inscrutable systems of power, which consistently disenfranchise him by forcing him to remain outside as their object or refuse. It is in precisely this way, for example, that we can read the operation of the law enforcement system, whose suburban police hound Karl for his identification papers, or the operation of the Hotel Occidental, whose diffuse job responsibilities and power structures Karl never learns, or the decision-making body of the Theater of Oklahoma, with its disarmingly panoptic control of its employees. For Karl, although he resides in “America,” the national space is experienced as a network of intricately and inexplicably linked systems of power, which function ever more intensely to prevent his “citizenship.” Even when Karl seemingly gains admission to the American geography, he never gains admission to the ideals of nationality, the formalities of the English language, or the virtues of citizenship.⁹⁸ Not only is Karl’s identity completely divorced from nationality, language, and citizenship, he can never become a subject since his “voyage” yields no progress, knowledge, or concept of belonging. Instead he is turned into an object, the byproduct of modernity’s mass mobility.

Kafka’s travel narrative is, therefore, not organized according to the procession of time (such as a realist, progressive chronology) or the marking of geography covered (such as Goethe’s “translation” of nationality). Instead Kafka has created a narrative effect of contingency and terra infirma in which subjecthood is forever displaced and dissolved. Precise temporal indicators, for example, are rare in Kafka’s novel because Karl is not a character who develops over time. Such indicators show up either unpredictably as asides, or, just as unpredictably, as structures of power that Karl cannot penetrate. In the first two chapters of the novel time is intimated by vague, unmeasurable phrases (“one day” or “a relatively long time”), and we only find out retrospectively how much time Karl spent at his uncle’s home when Karl befriends Delamarche and Robinson on the way to Butterford: “They could not understand how Karl could stay for more than two months in New York and yet had hardly seen anything of the city but one street” (G 145/E 112). Not only is a temporal quantity disclosed after the fact and in passing, but Karl’s enormously feeble spectatorship on the space of the external world (one street in two months) is also underscored.

In the one instance that a precise time does enter into the narrative, it is arbitrarily handed down from above: Uncle Jacob’s rejection letter is to be delivered to Karl at exactly midnight, no earlier and no later, in accordance with the unalterable strictures of world standard time. There is no under-girding reason why the letter is to be delivered only at midnight; nevertheless Karl must wait patiently until the proper time has arrived so that he can be told formally that he cannot go “home.” He is both disoriented by and willfully subjected to the enforcement of time, but at no point does Karl become a temporal character. Only those in positions of privilege and power have the ability to master time. Quite unlike Goethe’s Italienische Reise, time does not run in an inevitable direction or at a constant rate; it cannot be “translated,” because it is not an objective quality that flows evenly over the course of the story. There are no small, equally long, repeatable units, such as sequentially ordered days succeeding one another in a regular, harmonious, and expected fashion. In the modernist narrative, Kafka produces an effect in which time appears to speed up and slow down as an unpredictable function of where Karl is, what circumstances he finds himself in, and which systems of power he runs up against.

Kafka’s travelogue is thus neither “pastoral” nor “easy to follow.” Perhaps partly owing to Kafka’s unfamiliarity with American geography and partly appropriate to Karl’s radical dislocation, space is profoundly difficult to map and impossible to predict. Similarly, time is profoundly difficult to anticipate and impossible to quantify, unless we are told outright how much time “went by.” As Karl walks to Butterford with his newfound acquaintances, for example, he observes a decidedly strange panorama of New York geography: “The bridge connecting New York with Boston hung delicately over the Hudson, and if one squinted one’s eyes it seemed to tremble” (G 144/E 111; translation corrected).⁹⁹ Of course, no such bridge exists. Several pages after, New York City and Boston are long gone, and Karl has arrived later that day, by foot, in a giant, unplaceable city called Ramses. We have no inkling why it takes less time to get from the outskirts of New York City to Ramses (a day by foot) than it takes to cross the length of the single building housing Uncle Jacob’s business. Just like Karl, we have no knowledge about the geographic location of Ramses, nor do we know how close or how far New York City lies from it. The space through which Karl moves, just like the space of the narrative itself, does not obey the rules of Cartesian geography because it cannot be plotted on a systematic coordinate system. Instead both space and time are experienced as if parts of a warped, acentric, and nonlinear system. The spatial and temporal relationship between one place and another, just like the narrative relationship between one chapter and another, is not determined by an external necessity, such as geographic mimesis or cumulative development, as in generic form of the bildungsroman. Rather, both the description of travel and the narrative structure of the text itself are suffused with an unmasterable contingency.¹⁰⁰

To elucidate this point, let’s look briefly at how Kafka narrates the order of Karl’s journey. The story begins on the Hamburg-America ocean liner with Karl’s arrival in New York’s harbor; Karl is rowed to shore from the liner and the next chapter takes place at his Uncle Jacob’s house; after a period of about two months, Karl leaves his house in a car for Pollunder’s country home; Karl stays in the home for a few hours, desires to leave by train, and, after being rejected by his uncle, finally sets off after midnight in a chance direction by foot; Karl arrives at an inn and leaves the next day with two strangers, Robinson and Delamarche, bound for the town of Butterford; they pass close to New York City and end up at a hotel in the town of Ramses; Karl stays in the hotel and works in an elevator for one and a half months; after being fired from his job, he flees in a taxi to the “suburbs” with his drunken acquaintance, Robinson; there, he stays briefly at Brunelda’s house and quickly leaves by train to Clayton to apply for a job in Oklahoma’s traveling theater; finally, bound for Oklahoma, he leaves Clayton by train and travels for two days and nights before the story breaks off.

Unlike the reliable and repeatable processes of subject formation in the travel journeys of the bildungsroman, Karl is never “formed” into a subject; instead, through the narration of mobility, he is radically denied subjectivity, agency, citizenship, and nationality. Events, places, and people come together by an inexplicable contingency of connection: After receiving the rejection letter from his uncle, Karl leaves the country house where he had been visiting but “could not tell with certainty in which direction New York lay…. Finally he told himself that he need not of necessity go to New York, where nobody expected him and one man certainly did not expect him. So he chose a chance direction and set on his way” (G 127/E 98). Karl discovers a small inn, finds two travel companions, tries to get back to New York City, but ends up at giant hotel in the unplaceable city of Ramses. Nothing necessary or external strings these random events and places together; they are placed side by side by the sheer and irreducible fact that they are placed side by side. Karl encounters systems of power in which everything is linked together for the sake of the system’s preservation and for the sake of keeping him out, but nothing in this world is linked together to form him into a subject and nothing about the story can be elucidated by the logic of realism. Kafka has essentially given narrative form to what Luhmann, at the end of the twentieth century, would argue is “modern society’s defining attribute,” namely, contingency¹⁰¹: Without a controlling order, necessity, or teleology, Kafka’s modernist travel narrative, like the social systems out of which it takes form and of which it is a symptom, disallows any kind of rational growth, evolutionary development, and social education by desubjectifying its subject into an object.

In this regard, the modernist space—whether Kafka’s text or the geography of the railway system—is predicated on the idea that everything is not only linked together in a complex system but that it could also be otherwise. Unlike the Italienische Reise or even Wilhelm Meister, Kafka could have organized the narrative differently: Karl could have wound up first at the hotel in Ramses, later met Robinson and Delamarche, and perhaps later come back to New York to stay with his uncle. The order does not matter. Karl is not a character who develops over time, and, similarly, the narrative structure itself is not a linear or determinate development through history. In Karl Rossmann Kafka has produced a character who is not “in” space or time but rather subjected to systems of power that organize and effectively manipulate space and time. He is nothing but a mass object of modernity. The story has direction only insofar as Karl sets off in a given direction at a certain moment, and the novel has direction only insofar as Kafka contiguously links one action, event, sentence, or chapter with the next.¹⁰²

The railway system and Der Verschollene thus share overlapping epistemological conditions of possibility and partake in the same structural logic of modernity. That is to say, they are both products of horizontally differentiated systems in which linked complexity and contingency—with all their social consequences—are modernity’s defining attributes. In the same way that Kafka himself could essentially go from train to train and railway line to railway line within an always moving system, the modernist narrative is also a relative system of possibilities, impossibilities, and contingencies. The point is that once Karl is dropped down in New York City, virtually anything could happen, and the story we have is just one possibility. As Robert Musil would later reflect, this is because the direction of the modernist narrative does not follow the singularity of a thread but rather proceeds according to the contingency of a space.¹⁰³ Without a definitive teleology, a continuous cycle of return, or a ground for systematic observations, the meta-epistemology of the railway system results in the desubjectification of the protagonist who is merely buffeted about by the contingent logic of an indefinite and infinitely mobile system of connectivity.

In the final fragments of the novel, Karl, perhaps recognizing for the first time that he will never be assimilated into American society, decides to join a traveling theater after reading a sign, which purports that “everyone is welcome!” (G 388/E 273). He renames himself Negro (G 402/E 286) and is introduced to the troupe as doubly foreign: “Negro, a European intermediate pupil” (G 405/E 288). In calling himself Negro, he assumes the function of the slave and recognizes the incontestable power of the ubiquitous but unspecified master in preventing his formation into an autonomous, free subject.¹⁰⁴ Karl can never become the “citizen” and “father” that Wilhelm becomes upon his induction into the Tower Society because no external authorities or structures of power guide Karl’s journey. He undergoes no sort of cumulative growth or education and never arrives at a destination because the novel, like the processes of desubjectification, is not guided by the strictures of teleology or voyages of return.¹⁰⁵

The last sentence that Kafka penned for the novel underscores this modernist process of desubjectification by bringing it together with the metaepistemology of the railway system. Karl sits in a moving train, bound for an uncertain Oklahoma, and observes the landscape from the framed window, not unlike the way in which one might experience the continuous discontinuities of a film sequence:

Masses of blue-black rock rose in sharp wedges up to the railway line, even if one bent down to look out the window, one searched in vain for their summits; dark, gloomy, jagged valleys opened up, one tried to follow with a pointing finger the direction in which they lost themselves; broad mountain streams appeared, rolling in great waves down onto the foothills and drawing with them a thousand foaming wavelets, plunging underneath the bridges over which the train rushed, and they were so near that the breath of coldness rising from them chilled the skin of one’s face.                (G 418–19/E 297–298; translation slightly modified)

Not only does Karl fail to observe the entirety of the pulsating landscape, he cannot find an orientation or point of stability in this world of the sublime. Quite unlike Kant or Goethe, this vision of the natural sublime is unencompassable, unsafe, and in no way contributes to the founding or strengthening of subjectivity. Even the syntax of Kafka’s final sentence captures the geographic instability, historical dislocation, and relativity of any frame of reference. Here the narrative breaks off, but not for any reason or necessity. It just ends, because endings, like middles and beginnings, no longer matter or provide direction when realist narration is replaced by the relativity of observation and narrative contiguity is replaced by the contingency of experience. Exactly unlike the bildungsroman, then, no external structure of necessity, no historical order of continuity, and no spatial configuration of understandability characterize Kafka’s modernism. The novel offers a bleak vision of modernity as the connected contingency of systems of power from start to finish, from decision to decision, from chapter to chapter, from arrival to departure. Karl Rossmann is its refuse.

In the last years of his life, Kafka had a number of conversations about his stories with an aspiring Czech poet by the name of Gustav Janouch. In one Janouch proposes, perhaps naively, that Kafka must have been “very young and happy” when he wrote “The Stoker”¹⁰⁶ because “there is so much sunshine and high spirits” in the youthful figure of Karl Rossmann.¹⁰⁷ Kafka then responds rather opaquely: “One speaks best about what is strange to one. One sees it more clearly. ‘The Stoker’ is the remembrance of a dream, of something that perhaps never really existed. Karl Rossmann is not a Jew. But we Jews are born old.”¹⁰⁸ If we work backward through this curious passage, Kafka seems to be saying that if Karl was “old,” he might be a Jew; however, in the story as it stands, Karl is the non-Jewish, youthful subject of a dream. Kafka then implies that he speaks best about what is foreign to him (namely, youthful non-Jews). In this respect, Karl, not hampered by Judaism precisely because he is not old and Jewish, might be interpreted as a figure for a kind of utopian freedom within a new American space of seemingly infinite and liberating possibilities.

Depending on one’s inclination to believe what Kafka supposedly said about his “lost” subject, Karl Rossmann may or may not be Jewish. In the novel there are, indeed, no overt references to Judaism, although it is tempting to interpret Karl’s Uncle Jacob as a supremely successful Jewish businessman, with a decidedly Jewish name. It is also tempting to interpret Karl Rossmann as an “allegorical” Jew, given his exile from his homeland, his non-national wanderings, and his perpetual outsider status.¹⁰⁹ In what follows, I will proceed from the assumption that Karl—as a mass object—has “lost” his Jewishness, just like he lost every other fixture that might have furnished him with an identity or might have ground the possibility of his development into an autonomous subject. Perhaps, then, Kafka declared Karl not to be Jewish precisely in order to offer a Jewish critique of the social consequences of modernity: Desubjectification also means de-Jewification. In other words, the new world in which Karl Rossmann finds himself precludes the establishment of any form of subjectivity or identity, whether national, linguistic, cultural, or religious. Rossmann is not a Jew precisely because he is reduced to an object of modernity’s mass mobility.

From his letters and writings, we know that Kafka had Goethe’s travel narratives and their particular form of subject formation in mind when he imagined the desubjectification and de-Jewification of Karl Rossmann.¹¹⁰ But he also knew the broad tradition of Jewish mobility and travel writing, particularly the long-standing association of Jews in the diaspora with the history of wandering, movement, and exile.¹¹¹ To more fully appreciate the formation of the modernist German/Jewish subject, Kafka’s Karl Rossmann must not only be set against Goethe and Wilhelm Meister but also placed within a context that includes the burgeoning of the modern, Jewish travel narrative in Yiddish. Here Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories are perhaps the most important contemporary literary expressions of the meta-epistemology of the railway system vis-à-vis the formation of modern Jewish subjectivity.

Although it is unclear whether Kafka encountered Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories, he did hear humorous sketches by Sholem Aleichem read aloud by members of the traveling Yiddish theater in 1911 and even included a small bibliographic blurb on Sholem Aleichem in his overview of Yiddish literature outlined in his diaries in 1912.¹¹² And numerous reasons have been given by critics for comparing and contrasting Kafka and Sholem Aleicheim, ranging from their interest in Yiddish and Yiddish literature to their stark representations of images of an “old Europe” and the New World.¹¹³ My interest here is motivated by what I have termed the dialectic of German/Jewish modernity, a dialectic that assumed a new level of intensity in Germanic regions with the construction of the first railway line connecting Nuremberg and Fürth. At the end of the nineteenth century, it is Yiddish-speaking, Eastern Jews who, in trying to escape political, religious, and economic oppression in the Pale of Settlement, began to migrate westward en masse through Germany on trains. Just like Kafka’s novel, Sholem Aleichem’s stories bear witness to the historical condensation of these two forces of cultural transformation: the construction of the railway system and Jewish mass migration out of the Pale of Settlement. I will focus on the organizational structure of Sholem Aleichem’s modernist travel narrative—its meta-epistemology of the railway system—and the formation of the modern German/Jewish subject within the deterritorialized geography of Germany.

Let me begin with a brief overview of the Railroad Stories: Tales of a Commericial Traveler. The twenty train stories, prefaced by a short note to the reader by Sholem Aleichem’s fictional narrator of the same name, were composed between 1902 and 1910 and first published in Yiddish in 1911. Although not continuous in either composition or in thematic development, the stories take place, for the most part, inside a third-class railway compartment populated primarily by Jews of all walks of life. They are essentially vignettes about Jewish life in the Pale, the politics of settlement and migration, and the forces of modernization, represented paradigmatically by the moving train itself. Thematically speaking, the stories cover a wide range of contemporary subjects: Jewish poverty, the 1905 Russian Revolution, white slavery, military service, suicide, police raids, draft exemptions, the vestiges of shtetl life, religious practices, and many other subjects, big and small, that might arise in conversations among strangers on a train.

Although my discussion will only touch upon a few of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, what is particular about them all is that they are narrated on a train. The railway compartment frames the narratives, and the stories themselves are written as if told in the time between the train’s departure and its arrival at a given destination. Jews on a moving train in an enclosed railway compartment provide the conditions of possibility for what Walter Benjamin, in another context, would call “the ability to exchange experiences.”¹¹⁴ For Benjamin, modernization put a rapid end to storytelling, and, in this respect, Sholem Aleichem’s stories might be seen as a testament to the passing of an oral tradition. In this turn-of-the-century world, Jews (and some non-Jews) board and sit together in a third-class train compartment; when the train begins to move, the Jews begin to talk. The Railroad Stories are the written records of this transient but decidedly modern form of communication. Because of the oppressive social conditions under which most of these Jews lived and traveled—ranging from extreme poverty and institutional anti-Semitism to pogroms, expulsions, and massacres—David Roskies has even suggested that “storytelling on board a train became for Sholem Aleichem the last frontier of hope because this vehicle made a mockery of everything salvific. The chunk of moving metal was as far removed from Kasrilveke, from the community of the faithful, as a Jew could go.”¹¹⁵ In themselves trains, of course, were not “salvific,” let alone “Jewish.” But because the moving refuge gave rise to the possibility of storytelling and the creation, if only for few fleeting moments, of a community, there was still an irreducible element of hope.

As the material products of modernization and the figurative embodiments of modernity, trains had occurred earlier in modern Yiddish fiction, since Yiddish travel literature has, in one way or another, always been concerned with the political and social articulation of Jewish mobility. In 1906, for example, I. M Weissenberg published a novella entitled “A Shtetl” in which Proletariat-Jewish revolutionaries arrived in the formerly secluded shtetl by way of the railway. In effect, the isolation of the Jewish religious community and the traditional authority of the rabbis were displaced by the revolutionary, “new time” forces of modernity. In 1909 David Bergelson published “At the Depot,” a somber story about unfulfilled dreams and human yearning in which Jews wait for obscenely long times at the railway station for the arrival of a kind of salvation that never comes in any certain terms.¹¹⁶

It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that Yiddish literature and Yiddish stories, at least since S. Y. Abramovitsh (1836–1917), were written down precisely to give a comparatively secure cultural expression to the instability, mobility, and transformations of what Wisse has called the modern “Jewish experience.”¹¹⁷ In what its often considered to be the first modern Yiddish novel, Abramovitsh, who wrote under the pen name Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler), published The Travels of Benjamin the Third in 1878, a novel that is both a parodic and nostalgic tale roughly based on Don Quixote and the expansionist triumphs of Alexander the Great.¹¹⁸ In Abramovitsh’s parody of the “travel novel,” his Jewish protagonists explore backwater Jewish shtetls in the unplaceable geography of the Russian Pale of Settlement but return home—quite unlike the characters in the bildungsroman or the imperialist conquests of great leaders—having learning nothing and, not only that, having forgotten where they were, why they went, and what they discovered. The Jewish travel novel is also a record of not being able to travel, of not being a citizen, of not being a nationally grounded subject, and, as in the case of Karl Rossmann, of not (or no longer) being Jewish. This is the basis of its critical, political edge.

But quite unlike any of his Yiddish literary predecessors, Sholem Aleichem produced a kind of travel narrative in which trains are not simply “represented” as antithetical forces disrupting the traditions of Jewish shtetl life. Instead the Railroad Stories are a description of travel informed by the modernity of the railway system as the basis for both his political criticism and the conditions of possibility of modernist narrative. That is to say, the stories conveyed, the narrative itself, and, hence, the very conditions of storytelling are all structured by the modernist logic shared by the meta-epistemology of the railway system. This is particularly evident in the ways in which the impression of time and space is conveyed in the Railroad Stories through the practice of storytelling.

“Baranovich Station” (1909), for example, is a vignette about storytelling on the train. In it a Jew from Kaminka claims that he has a story about Jewish bribery to tell that is far more exciting than the stories of other passengers. He recounts the story of a Jew named Kivke, whose death was faked by the leader of the local Jewish community, Nissl Shapiro, the grandfather of the storyteller, in order to protect Kivke from running the gauntlet. As the storyteller speaks, he interrupts the narrative by asking the stationmaster how much time is left before the train arrives at his transfer destination. After receiving a satisfactory answer, he resumes the story and tells how Kivke was forced to relocate to a German-speaking land. Because Kivke could not make ends meet there, he decides to bribe the Jewish community in Kaminka by threatening to “miraculously” return and tell the Russian authorities about their little secret. At that point, the traveling storyteller arrives at the Baranovich station and the story breaks off. The story ends with the fictitious narrator interjecting, “I wouldn’t mind if Baranovich station burned to the ground!”¹¹⁹ evidently a wish that the storyteller might be able to finish the story had the train not arrived at the station.

Although “Baranovich Station” shares many of the broad thematic concerns (particularly the struggles for Jewish political recognition) with the nineteen other stories in Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories, this story, just like each of the others, is remarkably discontinuous—in terms of the specific content, plot, and characters—with the stories that came before and the ones that come after it. The only continuity is the fictional persona of Sholem Aleichem, the commercial traveler, who supposedly hears, writes down, and conveys these “transient forms” called stories. Just like Karl Rossmann, Sholem Aleichem, the traveling narrator, does not move from place to place, chapter to chapter, story to story according to any kind of external logic or threads of necessity. The content of the stories, like the structure of the modernist narrative and the meta-epistemology of the railway system, is determined by the contingency of connectivity. That is to say, not only are the specific stories written as if determined by the comings and goings, arrivals and departures of the train, but the entire collection of Railroad Stories is also organized by the possibility of linkages within an always moving system. In the same way that Karl proceeds from place to place and chapter to chapter, the commercial traveler, too, moves from station to station, story to story within an open system of possibilities. At no point, however, is the entire system visible, knowable, or masterable because it can never be observed from a transcendental position of external spectatorship. Instead observers, narrators, storytellers, and listeners are all implicated within a relative, moving, and contingent system. The modernist narrative is the textual instantiation of the “new time” and acentric space of the railway system.

The Railroad Stories and Der Verschollene thus share overlapping epistemological conditions of possibility: They both describe and are structured by the conditions of modernity, that is to say, horizontally differentiated systems of geography and power defined by linked complexity and contingency. This can be seen in both the frame of a specific story, such as “Baranovich Station” or “The Man from Buenos Aires,” in which Sholem Aleichem created a story both determined and cut off by the departure and arrival of the train. And it can be seen in the contingent structure of the text as a whole, in which chapters and stories are in no way necessarily connected together as demanded by the “developmental” structure of the traditional travel narrative as a variation of the bildungsroman. In fact, with the exception of “The Slowpoke Express” and “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah,” none of the chapters is thematically connected; instead Sholem Aleichem produces the effect of a contingent railway linkage between the places encountered and the stories described.

Calling up the economic history of railway expansion into even the most distant regions of the Pale of Settlement, Sholem Aleichem relays the story of a train, the so-called Slowpoke Express, as a kind of neutralization of both the myth of modernity’s “acceleration of time” and the myth of modernization’s economic progress for everyone. In this story rural Jews are ecstatic that a railway line is going to be built through their little towns, Teplik, Golte, and Heysen. Not only do the poor Jews believe they will finally become “modern,” but they also believe they will become rich through savvy railway investments. Of course, neither really happens, at least not as anticipated. Once the railway line finally does open, the train running on it is so slow that Sholem Aleichem’s narrator tells us, in jest, that one resident apparently left on it “for his grandson’s circumcision in Khashchevate and arrived just in time for the bar mitzvah.”¹²⁰ Far from modernity’s supposed primacy placed on speed and new accessibility to distant cities, the “slowpoke express” runs nowhere quickly. The slowpoke express can be seen as a critical instantiation of the dialectic of modernity: its neutralization of both speed and the expectations of modernization.¹²¹

Another story, “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah,” relays the story of a runaway, slowpoke locomotive with a Jew from Sobolivke and a Russian priest from Golovonyevsk on board. After fighting about how to stop the runaway train, the Jew resigns himself to the fact that the day is Hoshana Rabbah, “the day in which the fate of every one of us is sealed in the Book of Life for the year—and not only who lives and who dies, but who dies what sort of death.”¹²² According to the Jew, God’s decision about whether he will live or die is set on that day, and there is nothing he can do about it. Miraculously, the train runs out of coal, and thus both the Jew and the priest get to live. Once again the short story offers a description of the paradoxical forces and demands of modernity: In this case the train’s time, which normally runs according to a predetermined railway schedule based on the strictures of world standard time, is described in accordance with a Jewish holiday and the cycles of the Jewish calendar. As Roskies writes, “Train time is linear time, historical time. Jewish time is cyclical, and mythic.”¹²³ But here they switch places in Sholem Aleichem’s critical take on the forces of modernization. Jewish storytelling and religious ritual intersect, in unpredictable ways, with the modernity of the railway system. It is these sorts of tensions—between Jew and Christian, religious and secular, shtetl and city, home and exile, particular and world-historical, Jewish time and train time—that Sholem Aleichem’s stories bring to the foreground. In both their thematic and narrative tensions they are descriptions of modernity as a dialectical process of both celebrating and lamenting, enabling and preventing mobility.

Sholem Aleichem thus extends and transforms the generic tradition of travel literature by turning the Jewish travel narrative, in both its narrative structure and political criticism, into a record of the dialectic of modernity. Indeed, both Kafka and Sholem Aleichem offer complementary critiques of this dialectic, which bear directly upon the formation of Jewish subjectivity: Kafka’s migratory fantasy of the New World is characterized by the proliferation of interconnected and inscrutable systems of power in which Karl is batted around as a desubjectified object and then expelled as its trash; Sholem Aleichem’s cultural history of the Old World is characterized by the transformation—but also the uncanny persistence—of places for telling stories and exchanging experiences within the systems of modernization. In both an observer cannot “get outside” the system, occupy a position of terra firma, or safely observe and narrate the passage of time and space. There is no geographic or national mooring from which subject formation can be reliably derived or to which it can be affixed. The train, like the travel narrative itself, is always moving in both directions at once: emancipation and destruction.

Like Kafka, Sholem Aleichem examines this dialectic against the background of the historical reality of mass migrations; however, unlike the desubjectified, de-Jewified figure of Karl Rossmann, Sholem Aleichem’s traveling Jews, through their encounters with others on the train, create a kind of subjectivity, which might be called a “diasporized consciousness.”¹²⁴ Reflecting on how to describe a Jewish political subject dissociated from land and independent of national space, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin proposed the notion of a disaggregated identity or “diasporic consciousness.” In their words, it represents “a Jewish subject-position founded on generational connection and its attendant anamnestic responsibilities and pleasures [in order to afford] the possibility of a flexible and nonhermetic critical Jewish identity.”¹²⁵ To articulate this subject, they sought to describe Jewish identity outside the strict and highly aggregated dualities of belonging inherent to nationality and claims of autochthony. Inside and outside, subject and object, self and other, and, we might add, German and Jewish, are shown to overlap and mix together—not only as a possibility for a future identity but also in the past as a (nearly lost) conceptualization of Jewishness. “Jewishness,” they write, “disrupts the very categories of identity because it is not national, not genealogical, not religious, but all of these in dialectical tension with one another.”¹²⁶ In other words, the Jewish subject is a dialectical and disaggregated—“diasporized”—form of identity that maintains both difference and connection without appeals to territoriality or nationality.

The Jews in Sholem Aleichem’s railroad stories are diasporized in this sense: Jewish identity is the product of mobility, displacement, connection, and contingent encounters with others, and, in this regard, is dialectically related to the German tradition of travel, subject formation, and movement. In the hybrid space of the railway car, the migratory Jews develop, to use James Clifford’s words, a kind of “positive transnationalism,”¹²⁷ one that stretches from the Pale of Settlement to Germany and beyond. The Railroad Stories forge, in this respect, transient cultural geographies of the mobile, modern subject without a nation.

The subject of German/Jewish modernity thus emerges through the constellation of transhistorical, transnational encounters between Goethe, Kafka, and Sholem Aleichem. The space of “Germany” stretches between Sicily, the Pale of Settlement, and America, and this space is connected together, however briefly and contingently, by experiences and narratives of mobility. The German language, like the national referent itself, is deterritorialized through the mobility of German-speaking Germans without a nation (such as Goethe), Yiddish-speaking Eastern Jews (such as Sholem Aleichem), and non-national German-speaking Jews (such as Kafka). In this transnational, conceptual-historical triangulation of Goethe, Kafka, and Sholem Aleichem, a new dialectical space of encounter becomes visible. This space came into existence and was radically transformed over the course of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century with the physical construction of the transcontinental railway system, rendering nationality, subjectivity, and language a function of the possibilities and pitfalls of mobility. The cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity begins to emerge through the mapping of these deterritorialized, dialectical spaces of connection, encounter, and exchange.