5. NUREMBERG-FÜRTH-PALESTINE

Some Assembly Required

Global Anxieties and Corporeal Fantasies of German/Jewish Nationality

5.1  Railway timetable of luxury trains leaving Berlin (1910).

AT THE START of the twentieth century, service from Anhalter Bahnhof fanned out all over Europe, with more than one hundred trains arriving and departing daily from Berlin. If we look at a timetable from January 1910, for example, we see that a number of luxury trains began their journeys from Berlin’s Anhalter station, including, among others, the North-South Express (connecting Berlin to Munich, Verona, Genoa, and Cannes), the Egyptian Express (connecting Berlin to Rome and Naples and, from there, to Alexandria and Cairo by ship), and the Riviera Express (connecting Berlin to Amsterdam, Lyon, and Marseille). Other lines connected Berlin to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Athens, and Budapest. In 1912 the editor of the prominent cultural review, Der Kunstwart, wrote, somewhat stereotypically, that he heard “the luxury cars of the train from Berlin to the Riviera are nigh-exclusively occupied by Jews.”¹

Adding to its mythological proportions, a gigantic underground passageway connecting the train station to the luxurious Hotel Excelsior across the street was opened in 1928. Guests arriving at the Anhalter station could walk to a doorway at the end of the platform, take an elevator downstairs, stroll through the “longest hotel tunnel in the world,” shop around the clock in the underground retail stores, and emerge 80 meters away in the lobby of the “largest hotel on the continent,” the Excelsior.² Perhaps only Kafka’s fantastic Hotel Occidental, with its thirty-one elevators, could compare.

5.2  Hotel Excelsior (ca. 1930). Courtesy of Landesarchiv, Berlin

The year before, Walter Ruttmann immortalized both the hotel and the train station in his film, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City: A roaring train speeds through the countryside before entering the city at daybreak with its arrival at the Anhalter Bahnhof. The camera then follows the luggage of a passenger as it makes its way up the elevator and into the Hotel Excelsior. At the film’s end, fireworks explode over the wildly illuminated, technically pulsing city in a celebration of Berlin’s modernity. It is the Anhalter Bahnhof that both embodies and gives us access to this modernity.

Analogous to the arcades of Paris in the nineteenth century, these twentieth century passageways—railway stations, underground tunnels, and gigantic hotels—became hubs of capitalist culture, dream places of modernity. The materiality of the arcade and the railway station were imbued with a type of myth that simultaneously valued innovation—speed, size, beauty, and efficiency—above all else yet, at the same time, were always vulnerable to what would supersede it. In this respect, the Parisian arcades and Berlin’s Anhalter station are also material witnesses to the finitude and passage of the very epoch that they inaugurated. What, after all, could be more transient than claims to permanence?

THE SEAFARING JEW AND THE MISSING GERMAN NATION

In 1902 Max Grunwald, a rabbi from Vienna sympathetic to the incipient Zionist cause, published an essay called “Jews as Anchormen and Seafarers” in the Jewish cultural periodical Ost und West in which he insisted that Jews, despite popular opinion and ostensible historical evidence to the contrary, are in fact a seafaring people.³ Far from being condemned to the first stage of world history, as Hegel would have it, Jews actually have a long and rich tradition of setting sail and, hence, can claim to be world-historical people in their own right. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was Hegel who established one of the most enduring arguments for Jewish impotence by implying that Jews were a people who constitutionally lack a great seafaring tradition. Citing the voyages of Columbus, the discovery of a sea route to India, and the spread of Christianity across the world, world-historical people are characterized by their power to master the expansiveness of the sea and their ability to undertake voyages of discovery and conquest. Jews, Hegel claims, know nothing of this history.

Several decades before Hegel delivered his lectures on the philosophy of world history, Johann Gottfried Herder published his magnum opus, a multivolume book called Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Reflections on a Philosophy of the History of Humankind, 1784–1791). In this book Herder set out to map the general direction of humankind by presenting the characteristics of various peoples in a manner that anticipates many of Hegel’s ideas for the organization of world history. As Hegel would later do, Herder starts his account of world history with the African peoples before moving from the Far East to the Western world, ending up in Europe with the Greek and Germanic peoples. Midway through this movement, he dedicates several chapters to the Near East, including one on the “Hebrew peoples.” In this chapter he argues that one of their most prominent features is that they are not a seafaring people:

Although they possessed for some time the ports of the Red Sea, and dwelt so near the shores of the Mediterranean, they never became a seafaring people.… Like the Egyptians, they dreaded the sea, and from times immemorial preferred to live among other nations, a feature of their national character against which Moses strenuously fought. In short, they are a people spoiled by their education, because they never attained political maturity on their own soil, and consequently never attained a genuine awareness of honor and freedom.… The people of God, whose country was once given to them by heaven itself, have been for thousands of years, yes, virtually from their inception, a parasitical plant upon the trunks of other nations; a tribe of cunning brokers throughout almost the whole world who, in spite of all oppression, nowhere long for their own honor and habitation, for a country of their own.⁴

In effect, the Jewish people are not a great seafaring people, and, more than that, they are merely a “parasitical” people who prefer to live stealthily among other peoples rather than seek “honor and freedom” on their own soil.⁵

Building off of Herder and Hegel’s account of Jews in world history, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), a race-based, anti-Semitic philosophy of history, argued that not only are present-day Jews racially unfit for nation building, but Jews have, according to his version of history, always been so. After describing the physical, religious, and cultural deficiencies of the Jews in his chapter “On the Entrance of the Jews into Western History,” Chamberlain looks back to the history of the Judeans to show how Jews, unlike Germans, have never been able to found a great nation:

They were so unwarlike, such unreliable soldiers that their king had to trust his protection and the protection of their land to foreign troops; that they were so unwilling to undertake any endeavors that just looking at the ocean … horrified them; that they were so slothful that for every task at hand one had to hire designers, production managers, and even handworkers for all the delicate work from neighboring countries; that they were so unfit for agriculture that (as it says in many places in the Bible and the Talmud) the Canaanites were not just their teachers but were the only ones up until the end who worked the land; yes, even in a purely political respect, they were such opponents of all stable, well-ordered conditions that no rational form of government could come about by them and they felt best from early on under the pressure of foreign rule, something that did not prevent them, however, from burrowing underneath of it.⁶

Through their scheming, their “materialistic worldview,” and their “demonic genius” (1:455), the Jews have, despite (or perhaps because of) their laziness and other deficiencies, nevertheless managed to survive as a race under the rule of other nations; however, they remain nothing more than “a foreign element,” as he quotes Herder with approbation (1:463). Because of these transhistorical racial qualities, Jews can never know the greatness of their own nation. By contrast, Germans, Chamberlain maintains as he expands on Hegel’s quadripartite structuring of history, represented the pinnacle of “world history” because their cultural and national strength was the outgrowth of the great colonial empires of Greece and Rome. After all, reckoning with the ocean, traveling by ship, and cultivating the new land were world-historical achievements that, according to Herder, Hegel, and Chamberlain, assured national greatness.

Given the importance of seafaring for the great theoreticians of world history, it is not surprising that Grunwald crafts his essay on Jewish seafaring as a historically pointed rejoinder to their claims. Citing sources from the Talmud, antiquity, and the Middle Ages, Grunwald shows that Jews—far from simply averse to traveling by sea or somehow incapable of undertaking sea journeys—have always engaged in seafaring, including voyages of discovery, trade, adventure, and even conquest. Moreover, he argues, in the age of exploration, Jewish adventurers traveled right alongside their non-Jewish counterparts, sailing with Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and the East India Company. He tells his presumably astonished readership that there were even Jewish pirates, Jewish skippers, and Jewish sea captains at this time. In other words, Jews are and have always been a seafaring, world-historical people.

In so arguing, Grunwald tries to debunk the prevalent idea that Jews—due to certain historical, social, and political circumstances—are restricted to traveling, or more precisely, wandering on land. Jews are not simply condemned to wander the earth, but they also set sail, like great explorers and pioneers.⁷ In Grunwald’s revision of this history of the landlocked, wandering Jew, he shows that Jews have always participated in seafaring, arguably the greatest—and most horrific—enterprise and institution of Western civilization. After all, travel by ship is not only a classically Greek mode of transportation, it is also, as we have already seen, one of the most persistent and specific metaphors of existence in the Western cultural tradition, something that Grunwald certainly knew. As Georges Van Den Abbeele astutely writes: “The dearest notions of the West nearly all appeal to the motif of the voyage: progress, the quest for knowledge, freedom as freedom to move, self-awareness as an Odyssean enterprise, salvation as a destination to be attained by following a prescribed pathway (typically straight and narrow).”⁸ In this respect, then, the history of Jewish seafaring is a testament to Jewish participation in and extension of both the noble and the dubious ideals of Western civilization: Discovery and conquest, knowledge and colonialism, progress and enslavement.

Indeed, he is anxious to write Jews back into colonial history. I quote Grunwald:

In the voyages of discovery and conquest undertaken by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English, Jews played a not unimportant role as seamen and pilots. The ship’s doctor on Christopher Columbus’s expedition was a Jew, and it is said to have been a Jew that first discovered land; a Jew was the first to found a settlement on the newly discovered land…. Vasco da Gama made use of Jewish seafarers, and his constant companion, Alfonsos d’Albuquerque, was a Jew. In 1334, Jayme IV, the last King of Mallorca, testified that the Jew, Juceff Faquin of Barcelona, had sailed around what was then the known world. There were many Jews on the Portuguese expedition of 1415 which accepted Mauritanians. A linguistically gifted Jew accompanied Captain James Lancaster on the first enterprise of the East-India Company in 1601 and was in charge of the negotiations with Sultan von Atschin of Sumatra.

(JR 482)

The list of examples cited by Grunwald goes on and on. His point is that Jews have always engaged in seafaring and, for better or for worse, thus have an incontestable, historically substantiated claim to be a world-historical, colonial people. But what makes his essay so important for our purposes here is that Grunwald sought to legitimize the incipient national-colonial fantasies of Zionism by grounding them in a revisionist history which emerged directly from the tensions of German/Jewish modernity. Jewish seafaring is important to the Zionist idea of nation building because Jews, like Germans, are a colonial, world-historical people.⁹ After all, it was the great theoreticians of history—Herder, Hegel, and, most recently, Chamberlain—who had claimed that Jews, by definition, are not a seafaring people and, hence, are nothing but inconsequential for the progress of world history. Grunwald was attempting to turn this claim on its head. Without any embarrassment, criticism, or irony, Grunwald argued that Jews not only engaged in seafaring but—like the great powers of Europe—also engaged in conquest and colonization. Zionists would simply be continuing this tradition by journeying to and resettling in Palestine. In so doing, Grunwald not only buys into this conception of world history but also creates an uncomfortably close alliance between the Zionist ideals and those of the great apologists for empire and expansion. Informed by the meta-epistemology of the ship, it is not coincidental that Herzl published his bildungsroman, Altneuland, in the same year. Inspired by the German tradition, the seafaring paradigm legitimized the Jewish state and created a strong, nationally grounded Jewish subject.

Nearly a century before Grunwald and Herzl articulated their ideas of Jewish nationality by calling upon the topos of seafaring, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, reflected on the insignificance of seafaring for the German nation in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German nation, 1807–1808).¹⁰ In these addresses, delivered the year after Napoleon’s victorious campaign against Prussia and the fall of Berlin in October of 1806, Fichte turned to German history to legitimize the future-directed project of national unification. Unlike Grunwald, however, Fichte did not seek to reclaim a mighty seafaring and colonial history, something that would have entailed an outward expansion of the German spirit. Rather, he maintained that German national unification would come by looking inward and cultivating an autocentric development of German originality and strength while combating all threats of foreignness and external corruption. A decade before Hegel declared that seafaring was critical to the spread of World Spirit and the touchstone of world-historical nations, Fichte—perhaps prematurely—repudiated its necessity for the German nation, which, for its part, needed only to concentrate on its inward self-sufficiency and strength:

Foreign to the German is the freedom of the seas, which is so frequently preached in our days…. Throughout the course of the centuries, while all other nations were in rivalry, the German showed little desire to participate in this freedom [of seafaring] to any great extent, and he will never do so. Moreover, he is not in need of it. The abundant supplies of his own land, together with his own diligence, afford him all that is needed in the life of a civilized man; nor does he lack skill in the art of making his resources serve that purpose. As for acquiring the only true advantage that world-trade brings, namely, the increase in scientific knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants, his own scientific spirit will not let him lack a means of exchange.

(Addresses 230; translation modified)

According to Fichte, Germans have never participated in seafaring “to any great extent,” and they do not need to in order to reap its advantages of exchange and knowledge. Remarkably, in rejecting seafaring, what Fichte is attempting to do is to provide a radically different framework for thinking about nationality: Rather than derive the idea of German nationality from outwardly directed fantasies of colonial expansionism, something that, as Susanne Zantop has shown, was actually quite common during this period,¹¹ Fichte sought to demarcate nationality through a rhetoric of inward originality, purity, and self-sufficiency. The problem, Fichte argued, was that German national purity had been corrupted by foreignness, something that had subsequently pitted the German states against one another. Therefore, Germans must turn inward, not outward, to unify the fragmented nation.

To do so, Fichte posited that the German people, despite their present fragmentation, were actually “a single body” (Addresses 96) and “a single nation” (Addresses 3)—that an underlying unity already existed. This is because Germans shared a common cultural tradition, a common language, a common history, and a common rootedness in place. But more than this, the Germans were an “original people … without admixture of, or corruption by, any alien element” (Addresses 135–36). The uncertainty that Germany is currently living through is not the fault of the Germans themselves, Fichte assures his audience, but rather the result of “foreign countries … artificially [destroying] German unity” (Addresses 227–28). Of course, Fichte, in barely veiled terms, is alluding to the fact that Prussia, as one of the last German states to fall to Napoleon, was now occupied by the French who had taken over Berlin. In effect, the French were responsible for Germany’s downfall and division.

Several years before delivering these addresses, Fichte had already spelled-out the fundamentals of his plan for German autarky in Der geschloßne Handelsstaat (The closed commercial state, 1800), a political-economic treatise in which he advocated for an internally directed, autocentric development for Germany: German borders were to be largely closed to foreign trade and disconnected from the rest of the world such that Germany could catch up.¹² His theory was that the German states should internally produce, process, and trade their own raw materials and goods between themselves by nationalizing the work force. This would free the German states from economic dependence on “stronger” nations like England and ultimately facilitate unification and the formation of a strong sense of national identity. As Fichte wrote, when “the members of a closed nation depend only on themselves and have as little contact as possible with foreigners … a higher degree of national pride and a sharply defined national character will emerge very quickly … an entirely new nation will come about.”¹³ He then rails against the “world” system of capital, what he calls Weltgeld (world gold), and its dominance over Germany. As he says in the Addresses: “Oh! That we might at last see that all those swindling theories about world-trade and manufacturing for the world market, though they suit the foreigner and form part of the weapons with which he has always made war on us, have no application to the Germans” (231). Seafaring, colonial expansion, and world trade would only exacerbate the “German” problem. For this reason Fichte called for Germans to turn inward and disconnect from the emerging world system.

Indeed, he was not alone in this regard. Germany’s foremost railway pioneer, Friedrich List, also argued passionately against what he termed the “cosmopolitan world system” of capitalism precisely because it would continue to be detrimental to “backward” or divided countries like Germany.¹⁴ Before Germans could seriously embrace “cosmopolitanism” and the global economy, they had to first create internal strategies for unifying the developing nation. As List wrote in 1837:

We regard ourselves as cosmopolitans [Kosmopoliten], but our cosmopolitanism rests on the solid ground of nationality [Nationalität]. We hope to be at a point where the system of free trade for a nation is preferable to a restrictive trading policy … but we are citizens of the state [Staatsbürger] before we are citizens of the world [Weltbürger]. We devote our energies and efforts to the culture, welfare, glory, and security of our nation … [this is because] we owe our culture, our language, our way of life, our spiritual values in general to the nation.¹⁵

Because the nations of the world have developed unevenly in terms of economic output, free trade and open borders will only hinder developing nations until they are able to elevate themselves to the level of developed nations. In so arguing, both List and Fichte suggest that global anxieties, particularly the emergence of a world system of capital, cosmopolitanism, and cultural hybridity, necessitate and—at least for Germany—even entail a heightened consciousness of nationality and resurgence of nationalism.

Using the ideas of Fichte and Grunwald as my two theoretical starting points, the purpose of this chapter is to articulate a peculiar aspect of the German/Jewish dialectic of modernity, namely, how German fantasies of nationality responded to “globality” by turning inward and, later, how Jewish fantasies of nationality, derived from the model of German nationality, reconfigured Jewish history as outwardly expansive. I focus on two discursive periods, which are paradigmatically represented by the ideas of Friedrich List and Theodor Herzl, respectively: the period around 1835 for German fantasies of nationality and the period around 1900 for Jewish fantasies of nationality. I am interested in how the development of inwardly directed fantasies of German nationality was dependent upon the encoding of the Jew as “global,” and how the subsequent development of outwardly directed fantasies of Jewish nationality was dependent upon the inward history of German unification. The German/Jewish dialectic comes to a standstill by way of the productive tension governing the discursive formation of these fantasies of nationality. In both cases, the national fantasy needs its “other” for self-legitimization.

While proponents of German nationality argued that unity would come by looking inward and connecting together the scattered Germanic people through railway technologies, proponents of Jewish nationality sought to reconfigure Jewish history to reflect the world-historical status of the Jewish people. They did this, first, by writing Jews into the expansive history of seafaring, nationality, and colonialism, with a particular focus on the model of German unity as achieved under Bismarck, and, second, by configuring Jewish national identity as the end of exile or as a kind of voyage home. In both cases, seafaring negated claims that Jews are constitutionally unfit for nation building. Not without irony, it was precisely this notion of seafaring that had been rejected by German nationalists such as Fichte, List, and, to a certain extent, Bismarck, even while it formed a staple of both philosophical and popular critiques of the emergence of Jewish national identity.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, I will argue, this dialectic of German/Jewish nationality is structured by an inverted relationship between the national and the global imaginary: Succinctly put, the hopes and anxieties of the global solidify the national. As I will show, these hopes and anxieties can be detected in a wide range of cultural forms. Beyond Fichte and List, for example, the hope that the German nation would emerge from the global is the central issue in Ludwig Klüber’s theoretical reflections on the expansion of the postal system in Germany; it is the raison d’être for the sudden eruption of a surfeit of “national literary histories” during the 1830s and 1840s; it is the basis of Wolfgang Menzel’s anti-Semitic anxieties over the spread of “unpatriotic” literature and the emergence of the “Young Germany” controversy in 1835; and it is the primary concern of List’s analysis of the political economy and his unbridled enthusiasm for the salvific power of railway technologies. The expansiveness of the global—especially as a threat—gives rise to the inwardness of the national.

Significantly, this anxiety of the global, far from fuzzy or abstract, was always localized on the body and, for this reason, a persistent figure emerges throughout the nineteenth century to imagine “Germany” and search for practical ways to unify the divided German states through various technological or cultural-historical means: the unification of the German nation becomes tantamount to the resurrection and redemption of a broken body. Yet at the same time that the nation is connected together as a body might be reassembled, the fear of too much connectivity—seen in the fears of foreignness, globality, and hybridity—increases in like measure. Jewish bodies, in particular, because of their cosmopolitan, non-national heritage and ties to international finance, provide both the justification for German nationalism and boundaries for delimiting the developing body politic of Germany. In other words, the global—world literature, world capital, world trade, and world religion—becomes coded as Jewish, and this threat is precisely what grounds, unifies, and strengthens the German national body.

In the second part of this chapter, I show how German fantasies about national unification and anxieties over globalization during the first half of the nineteenth century impacted the conceptualization of Jewish nationality in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here I focus on the ideas of Theodor Herzl, giving particular attention to the ways in which the concept of Jewish nationality emerges as a politics of mobility. As we will see, Herzl imagined Zionism as a kind of modern “movement” in which the Jewish people would not only be relocated out of Europe but would also be regenerated—very much like a body that has been resurrected. Drawing on the rhetoric of unity used by Bismarck and Fichte, Herzl’s conception of Jewish nationality sought to elevate Jews into world-historical people with a unique difference, namely, that they would travel by sea to Palestine. In his last major work, the travel novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902), Herzl does just this by creating an imaginative fantasy for the realization of the Jewish state. Using the basic form of the bildungsroman, a narrative structure that, as we have seen with Goethe, is intimately connected to the paradigm of the sea voyage in its quest for knowledge, maturity, and subjectivity, Herzl wrote Zionism’s first colonial novel. Told as a seafaring journey through space and time, the novel represents the rationale for and the fulfillment of the Zionist colonial dream: Exodus out of Europe—by ship—would mean arrival in Palestine. Jews—like Germans—could become modern, world-historical, national subjects.

GERMAN/JEWISH BODIES: HOW GLOBAL ANXIETIES CONDITIONED NATIONAL FANTASIES

Claims about the contemporary consequences of globalization for the nation-state are familiar: With the rapidity and volume of information and material exchange across national borders, with the interconnection of the world through telecommunication networks, with the dominance of transnational financial aggregates, the old, territorial concept of the nation has been superseded and even made irrelevant by global demands. Although there are simply too many such claims to enumerate, let me provide a few salient examples: in conceptualizing what he terms the “new global condition,” Barrie Axford, like so many others, argues that the “core of the idea is that the world is undergoing a process of ever-intensifying inter-connectedness and interdependence, so that it is becoming less relevant to speak of separate national economies, or separate national jurisdictions founded on principles like the sovereignty of the territorial nation-state.”¹⁶ Of course, he is not wrong: contemporary networks of communication and economic interdependence certainly characterize the globalization of production, finance, trade, and technology, rendering the borders of the geographically defined nation-state porous and seemingly obsolete. But there is no mention of the fact that the “sovereignty of the territorial nation-state” was threatened before the Internet, MTV, and Nike by the world postal institute, railway transportation, and world banking magnates; yet the nation-state somehow managed to survive, if not thrive. Does this historical fact not necessitate further investigation of the relationship between globalization and nationality?

Indeed, there are many contemporary studies on globalization that focus on the imminent demise of the nation-state.¹⁷ The argument is deceptively convincing: because globalization, by definition, exceeds the geographic or territorial borders of the nation, the nation as a unit of political and economic analysis is no longer (or very soon will no longer be) relevant. Cultural commentators point out that “never before” has the nation—with its outmoded Cartesian spatial and temporal coordinates—been so threatened by global structures that transcend its borders as it is today. As the inflated rhetoric of recent book titles like The Death of Distance or Collapsing Space and Time posit,¹⁸ the demise of the geographically defined nation-state is largely seen through the optimistic lenses of a postnational identity politic or welcomed as the positive product of a hybridized “global community.”¹⁹ In the wildly sanguine words of Nicholas Negroponte on the birth of the “digital age”:

The nation-state itself is subject to tremendous change and globalization…. The harmonizing effect of being digital is already apparent as previously partitioned disciplines and enterprises find themselves collaborating, not competing…. Like a mothball, which goes from solid to gas directly, I expect the nation-state to evaporate…. Without question, the role of the nation-state will change dramatically and there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox.²⁰

But why should humanity, “bonded together by the invisible strands of global communications” with the rise of the Internet and other telecommunication technologies, “find that peace and prosperity are fostered by the death of distance”?²¹ Indeed, the very same optimism and rhetoric—ultimately unredeemed—also came along with other ostensibly “global” developments. Among other things, railways were supposed to end world hunger, bind together humanity into one, and make war impossible. Of course, this is not quite what happened.

As Jürgen Habermas has rightly argued, there is no reason to see the rise and renewal of “world citizenship,” “cosmopolitanism,” or “global” technologies as somehow divorced from or opposed to the continuing historical reality of xenophobia, racism, nationalism, and forms of class-based social stratification.²² In other words, celebrating the transcendence or demise of the nation with the birth of new, “global” technologies and “cosmopolitan” ideals might actually neglect the very fundamental ways in which nationality contributes to, if not determines, our thinking about and responses to the history of globalization.

Although writing in a very different political and geographic context some 170 years ago, Friedrich List—Germany’s most indefatigable advocate of the beneficial effects of railways during the 1820s and 1830s—once echoed precisely Negroponte’s unbridled enthusiasm for the “digital age” in his conviction that new railway and steam technologies would eventually bring about global understanding and the unification of the countries of the world:

Through the new means of transportation, man will become an infinitely happy, wealthy, perfect being…. National prejudices, national hatred, and national self-interest [will disappear] when the individuals of different nations are bound to one another through the ties of science and art, trade and industry, friendship and family. How will it even be possible for cultivated nations to wage war with one another[?].²³

Unimpeded by borders, List stalwartly, if not naively, believed that worldwide communication networks—ranging from mail deliveries to railways and stream transportation—would bring the “effects and benefits of these gifts from God … to the interests of all of humankind.”²⁴ Although List did not believe the nation would “evaporate,” to use Negroponte’s term, he shared much of the same enthusiasm and expectations for new, global technologies, but with one noteworthy difference: He historicized the forces of globalization by placing them within the conceptual, political, and economic histories of nationality. As List recognized, the relationship between nationality and globalization is more complicated than the latter simply phasing out the former. In this regard, we might look to the nineteenth century not in order to “model” the world of today or derive facile analogies but rather to see why these same kinds of prognoses and expected consequences, saturated with both hopes and anxieties, failed to pan out.

Declarations about the death of distance and borders, the end of the nation-state, the rise of the interconnected world, the primacy of speed and material transport, the acceleration of time, the dominance of transnational financial aggregates, the celebration of cosmopolitanism (or, conversely, the horror of hybridity) all had historical, technological, and prognostic precedents at the beginning of the nineteenth century, precedents that were also the conditions of possibility for the very diagnoses of globalization made today. These precedents range from the technological to the economic, cultural, and social. They include the conceptualization of a worldwide postal system and a world postal institute (1811); the building and spread of passenger trains across the European continent (the first of which was in 1825); the development and refinement of the electric telegraph (1836); the first delivery of mail by train (1838); the conceptualization and the first stages of implementation of an international network of trains linking newly opened canals and ports in the Netherlands and along the Rhine to France, to the unified Germanic states, and eventually to Russia (beginning in 1835); the systematization of a world time (Weltzeit), first imagined and implemented in England between 1840–1842 to coordinate railways and postal deliveries; the realization of the idea of world literature (Weltliteratur), a term coined by Goethe in 1828 to describe the increasing speed of cultural exchange (by which he meant translations, journalism, and book trade); the increasing industrialization and spread of capitalism at the expense of the proletariat (in Marx’s analysis, both capital and the proletariat transcended national borders); the worldwide ascendancy of international bankers, such as the Rothschild family; and, finally, the simultaneous embrace and fear of hybridization, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism vis-à-vis identity, linguistic, religious, and cultural politics.

My contention is that, in order to understand how the specific concept of nationality emerged in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century, we have to, seemingly paradoxically, examine the idea of globalization. This focus on globalization will turn out to be far from paradoxical: The invention of German nationality in the historical, cultural, and technological imaginary was, I will argue, a function of the hopes and anxieties over this diffuse group of changes, which I will collectively term globalization. I think that the use of the concept globalization to describe these transformations in the early nineteenth century, far from being anachronistic, is both historically justified and conceptually necessary to elucidate the way in which the idea of nationality was imagined before “Germany” existed. Rather than opposing concepts or successive stages, then, nationalism and globalization were mutually reinforcing in Germany such that the emergence of a global system of dominance created the desire to delink from it by turning inward to a heightened awareness of national identity, nationality, and, ultimately, nationalism.

One of the earliest formulations of this seemingly paradoxical dialectic between nationality and globalization came not from railway rhetoric but rather from a German advocate for the founding of a “world postal institute” named Johann Ludwig Klüber. In 1811 Klüber, a cabinet and privy councilor to Karl Friedrich of Baden,²⁵ published a 225-page treatise entitled Das Postwesen in Teutschland, Wie es war, ist, und seyn könnte (The postal system in Germany: How it was, is, and could be), in which he argued that the creation of a “world institute” (Weltanstalt) for the delivery of mail, unimpeded by local, state, and national borders, would not only unify Germany but bring about universal happiness.²⁶ Because postal deliveries crossed borders and fostered communication on a worldwide scale, the postal system is inherently “universal in nature” and its “perfection rests on unity, commonality, expansion (universality to a large area), coherence, freedom, security, speed and affordability” (PT 225, 217). At the time Klüber formulated these ideas, there were “no less than forty-three different territorial postal systems” throughout the German states, and, hence, due to transit fees charged by each territorial ruler, postage had increased markedly since 1806.²⁷ For a package to go from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main, for example, it had to go through nine different territorial postal agencies, accruing taxes, tariffs, and other costs along the way (PT 121). The internal division of the German states not only impeded written communication (something Klüber believed would hinder German Bildung, cultural refinement, and modernization) but also militated against the potential unity, commonality, universality, freedom, security, and speed that a world postal institute could bring about.

What Klüber essentially argued was that a “global” communications system would benefit the nation by overcoming the internal divisions plaguing “Germany” and fostering a spirit of “unity.” As Klüber buoyantly wrote, “How infinitely redeeming [heilbringend] the postal system could be if it were treated universally as a world institute [Weltanstalt]…. Its nature and purpose do not tolerate competition, rivalry, or postal divisions; it offers unity and universality” (PT 129, 207). By eliminating the taxes and tariffs on and internal divisions around mail, Klüber believed that a world postal system could really “save” Germany: “If anyone doubts the hope that I have that the main ideas of this treatise can be put into practice in our fatherland, I ask them to consider the fact that it is already stopping things from getting worse” (PT iv).

Although he was probably a little overenthusiastic about its beneficial consequences, Klüber was convinced that the postal system would create the “practical linkages” (Verbindungen) between people necessary for the “cultivation of humanity” (PT 4, 5). In his most hyperbolic moments he even argued that “mail is indispensable for every kind of trade and exchange, for arts and sciences, for the study of countries and peoples, for the boundless field of the natural sciences, for the most sublime of all sciences, astronomy, the first, greatest, and most astonishingly important of all revelations from God!” (PT 4–5). In effect, the creation of a world postal institute would not only “redeem” Germany by creating a cultivated nation, but educated Germans could better know God when humanity was “connected” together by efficient and cheap mail.

Klüber imagined that Germany, newly unified by postal deliveries, would also play an important role in helping the world become “a cosmopolitan whole” (weltbürgerliche Ganze; PT 222). Because of its strategic geographic location in the middle of Europe, Germany could function like a thoroughfare for the transportation of letters: “All of northern Europe corresponds with southern Europe and vice versa through Germany…. Letters from England and Holland to Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, Russia, and the majority of Denmark and Sweden travel through Germany…. No other country has so many varied and important postal communication lines [PostCommunicationsLinien] to offer” (PT 221–22). The postal system would essentially create a spatial revolution: nation-states would become both unified and connected by a “global” communications system, while the German nation—not paradoxically—became stronger and, more important, poised to lead the way.²⁸

Although probably only matched in his optimism and zeal for new “global” technologies by List, Klüber was certainly not alone in his hope that new, global communication technologies could unify Germany and bring “universal” benefits to humankind. In fact, the year before he published his first treatise on the postal system, Heinrich von Kleist published a short, half-satirical, half-serious proposal for “a cannonball postal system.”²⁹ Kleist suggested that, to expedite worldwide communication, mail could literally be “shot” from place to place, like a projectile, from strategically located stations across the globe until it reached its final destination. Kleist considered his invention to be an “advancement in the art of long-distance communication … across the four corners of the globe” and placed the cannonball postal system within a historical context that included the electric telegraph.³⁰ He ended his short proposal by describing the immense benefits of the technology: compared with mail delivered by horse-drawn carriages, the cannonball method would be ten times faster, save money, accelerate commerce and communication, and unite distance places. “One could write or reply from Berlin to Stettin or Breslau within half a day’s time … [it has] the same effect as if a magic wand were to move that place ten times closer to the city of Berlin.”³¹ In effect, the cannonball postal system would potentially unify Germany by flinging letters through the air; it would also shrink space, or at least have the effect that space was smaller. Not only does the “collapse of time and space” or “the death of distance” thus predate contemporary diagnoses of globalization, it also predates Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s famous analysis of railway technologies causing “temporal and spatial shrinkage.”³² Both of these inventions—the world postal institute and the cannonball postal system—shared a common desire: Their inventors hoped that the creation of a global communication network would unify Germany and, at the same time, result in tangible benefits for all of humankind.

In order to explicate how globalization in the nineteenth century was the condition of possibility for imagining the German nation, I would like to turn to three synchronic developments—each articulated as fantasies—around the year 1835: first, the idea of the Kulturnation, a product of the shared cultural and literary achievements of the German people, paradigmatically represented by the birth of Germanistik and the publication of scores of literary histories during the mid 1830s; second, the emergence of the Young Germany controversy in 1835–36, galvanized by Wolfgang Menzel’s anxiety over “unpatriotic” literature produced by cosmopolitan thinkers, particularly Jews; last, List’s conception of a network of railway lines connecting all of the German states together, inspired by the English invention of the railway in 1825 and the opening of the first German—or, more precisely, German/Jewish—railway line between Nuremberg and Fürth on December 7, 1835.

I will start with the idea of the Kulturnation. Commentators such as Michael Batts have argued that Germanistik, as a discipline of study and historical research, first arrived around 1835/36.³³ After all, in comparison with the relative paucity of histories of German literature before 1835, no fewer than ten major histories of German literary production were written and published between 1834 and 1836—and, if we look forward to 1848, we are talking about more than a hundred largely redundant such histories. Ludwig Wachler’s seminal lectures and history of German national literature, although reissued and expanded in 1834, originated in 1818/19 and would have to be seen as a lone harbinger.³⁴ Most of these works published around 1835 came from a number of already well-established literary scholars, authors, and schoolteachers, ranging from Gotthard Marbach to Johann Wilhelm Schaefer, Karl Gutzkow to Wolfgang Menzel and Georg Gervinus. All of the authors attempted to write a history of the German people by diachronically organizing their written culture—the poetry and literature—into an accessible, coherent, and necessarily connected record.

Judging from the titles, most of these histories were meant to be accessible to a broader public interested in Germanics: Outline, Handbook, Overview, Introduction, Guide, Encyclopedia were the terms they used. Schaefer provides the reason for writing such a history in the introduction to his Grundriß der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur: “In the sequence of available intellectual works in the German language from the oldest time of national formation [nationale Bildung] to our own days, the history of German literature demonstrates the shape of the literary life of the German people, showing how national literature, under the right conditions and with the right interactions, quickly flourishes … and quickly shines forth with its particular national characteristics.”³⁵ The point of writing a history of German literature is to chart the growth and development of a national culture until the particularity of its people emerges. The story he tells, like the other literary histories of this period, emphasizes the continuity of “national formation,” with special attention to its internal unity and liberation from foreign influences. According to Schaefer, German literature has emerged by severing the “chains of imitation” and by combating the external corruption of German “morality” (Sittlichkeit).³⁶

Of these literary histories from around 1835, by far the most influential were those published by Gervinus, Neuere Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (the first volume came out in 1835, followed by four additional volumes by 1842, under the more general title, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung), and those published by Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur.³⁷ Parts of Menzel’s three-volume history were published in 1828; the revised and significantly expanded final version appeared in 1836. Later in this chapter I will give special attention to Menzel’s German Literature because I think it best represents the anxieties over cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and globalization that were rife during this period. Moreover, Menzel was arguably one of the best-known “public” intellectuals of the period thanks to his often acerbic reviews in his journal Literaturblatt, his single-handed instigation of the Young Germany controversy, and his love-hate relationship with Germany’s foremost railway pioneer, Friedrich List.

But 1835 was not only an extraordinary year for the sheer number of literary histories written and subsequently published, but also because of the politically charged controversy over suppressing “unmoral” and “unpatriotic” literature represented by the so-called Junges Deutschland (Young Germany). With the exception of Wolfgang Menzel’s influential and critical condemnations of Young Germany and the discourse around defining national literature, I will not discuss the individual works cited in the controversy here.³⁸ Suffice it to say that the controversy, sparked by an article Menzel published on October 26, 1835, in his Literaturblatt, “Unmoralische Literatur,” resulted in a Federal German ban, inspired by and laced with anti-Semitic justifications, on the works of Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Ludwig Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt, and Heinrich Laube beginning in December of that year.³⁹ With respect to Karl Gutzkow’s so-called Jewish novel, Wally, die Zweiflerin, which provided the fodder for Menzel’s charge of Unsittlichkeit and the absence of Vaterlandsliebe,⁴⁰ Jeffrey Sammons has written that, “as an outcry of pain and bewilderment at the alienation of the individual and the erosion of sustaining values in society, [the novel] is a symptomatic event of this turbulent year of 1835.”⁴¹ As I will argue here, much of this turbulence has to do with the way in which the nonexistent German nation was imagined as a unified body, purged of its foreign or cosmopolitan—especially, Jewish—parts.

And, finally, defining the imaginary German nation was not only the domain of critics like Menzel, it was also that of Friedrich List, by far the most important and tireless advocate of the beneficial industrial, cultural, economic, and political consequences of the railway. As early as the mid-1820s, List had already foreseen the practical ways in which railways could contribute to national unification by facilitating open communication and increased trade between the German states. In 1833, two years before the first railway began operation in Bavaria, he published the first of his imaginary “national” maps for a unified Germany, and called it the “German railway system.”⁴² List’s map was published in a pamphlet addressed to the people of Saxony and outlined the economic reasons why a railway should be constructed between Leipzig and Dresden, one segment of what was clearly intended to be a proposal for a national project of unity. As List imagined it, the completed railway system would connect together thirty-seven cities, with major nodes in Leipzig, Berlin, and Hanover. Railway connections would extend as far east as West Prussia, to Danzig and Thorn, as far west as Cologne, and as far south as Basel and Lindau. Tracks also extended slightly into Habsburg territory (represented by the Dresden-Prague line), but List quite obviously left two major Habsburg cities off the map entirely: Only a large blank space on the bottom right intimates where Vienna and Budapest are, and not even the Danube flows on this map.

5.3  Friedrich List, The German Railway System (1833).

List’s exclusion of Austria-Hungary from the German railway system was an overtly political decision, probably based on his desire to secure autonomy for Germany and his antagonism with Vienna’s Chancellor Clemens von Metternich.⁴³ Metternich famously regarded List as “one of the most active, shiftiest, and influential German revolutionaries” and persistently worked to block List from receiving any consular or political appointments in the German Confederation (List 9:73). Metternich considered List’s proposals for a unified Germany dangerous to Austria-Hungary’s dominance in central Europe, and, in response, List left Austria-Hungary entirely out of the “German railway system.”

Along the bottom of his 1833 map he placed a train running eastward, presumably from Leipzig to Dresden, carrying packages, coal, and passengers (in both open railway compartments and on stagecoaches, now securely tied to flat railway beds). As if to show how a single train can be multiplied into many for the sake of unification, the train that runs along the bottom of List’s map also runs the whole length of his representation of Germany itself. The train bears the name of three cities (Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin), not connected in that order, but as possible routes from Leipzig on the new “K Sachsen” line. The first part of the Leipzig-Dresden line actually opened in 1838, and by 1843 it was indeed possible to take a train from Leipzig to either Berlin or Dresden.⁴⁴ By connecting together each of the thirty-eight German states (represented by either a railway in a major city or by a railway segment that ran through the state) without indicating the names or borders of any of them individually, List presented the public with a plan for the unification of Germany by way of new railway technologies.

In the March 7, 1835, edition of List’s Pfennig-Magazin, a weekly journal that he founded alongside his Eisenbahnjournal (April 1835) to advocate for the development of the railway in Germany, List published a slightly revised version of the 1833 “railway system.” In the new version Danzig is gone, but three new cities are added: Perleberg, Saarbrück, and Fürth. In addition, a couple of new railway segments are also added and the Danube is penciled in along the right-hand, bottom region of the map. Again, there was no need to indicate much about the Habsburg Empire: both these journals would be banned in Austria by 1837.⁴⁵ Fürth would be important, as List knew, less because of its location as a significant economic node and more because of its symbolic significance as the terminus for the first German railway.

As List spelled out his intentions in a series of articles published a few years later under the same name, “The German Railway System”: The railway was a “means of connection” (Verbindungsmittel), a remedy for overcoming “the malady of small-statehood” (Kleinstädterei) (List 3.1:348). Moving seamlessly between the railway as a means of connection and the German nation as a fragmented body, List writes: “Stripped of almost all attributes of nationality because of early disunity [Zerrissenheit], no other nation requires the internal connection of its limbs [Glieder] as much [as Germany]” (List 3.1:348). According to List, the railway system even functions as “the nervous system of a shared spirit [das Nervensystem des Gemeingeistes]” (List 3.1:348). In this respect, we are well advised to see the imaginary nation not only connected together by way of the technology of railways—List’s hopes for unity, internal coherence, national strength, and border-free trade—but also to see the nation as a healthy body, rein-vigorated and newly stitched together. List’s maps, then, are both programs for unity and depictions of the already unified body politic. Just as Fichte believed Germany already to be a single, unified body, List essentially performed a vivisection of the dormant nation to reveal its guiding nerves; he takes these nerves and lays them down like tracks across the ground. Not unlike medical diagrams of the opened (but healthy) body, his maps both call upon and reveal the essence of a central German nervous system.

5.4  Friedrich List, The German Railway System (1835).

In so arguing, List introduces an important metaphor for thinking about the nation, namely, the newly reassembled body. As List probably knew, this metaphor had received one of its fullest articulations in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, wherein the philosopher posited that the German people needed to stop “weeping over [their] own corpse” and realize that the body of the nation is already being reassembled, resurrected, and given new life (Addresses 18).⁴⁶ Juxtaposing a telling passage from Ezekiel on corporeal regeneration with his own belief in the resurrection of the German nation, Fichte argued: in the same way that God breathed new life into dead bones, laying them with muscles, flesh, and skin such that they “stood upon their feet, [as] an exceeding great army,” the scattered “bones” of the German nation would soon have new life breathed into them, such that “the quickening breath of the spiritual world … will take hold, too, of the dead bones of our national body [Nationalkörper], and join them together, that they may stand glorious in new radiant life” (Addresses 51). In other words, the dead bones of the German people will be resurrected—muscles and all—such that the new Germany will be strong enough to exact revenge on France.⁴⁷ As Hinrich Seeba has cogently argued in his analysis of Fichte’s rhetoric, this linkage of “nation” and “body” is not only tied to Fichte’s belief in the Christian concept of resurrection, it also represents “the founding eschatological metaphor of German nationalism.”⁴⁸ This is because the German national body was analogous to a “real” body, able to be broken, die, and, ultimately, be resurrected. A couple of decades later, List would simply apply this metaphor in a new way: the body of the nation would now be reassembled and resurrected by railway tracks.

In the same way that List imagined the railway as a Verbindungsmittel for the body of the nation, one that would essentially rebuild or regenerate the latent nerves already binding the German people together as one, Gervinus saw the task of the historian of literature in much the same light: Rather than connect the nation together by resuscitating its shared cultural and linguistic geography (as List wanted to do), Gervinus sought to “regenerate” the German nation by way of connecting together its common cultural and linguistic history. In other words, List sought to unify the space of the body politic (its geography) and Gervinus, among other contemporary literary historians, sought to unify the time of the body politic (its history). In the methodological preambles to his Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (first published between 1835 and 1842), Gervinus clearly lays out both the need for and the goals of this history: In comparison with other countries in Europe, particularly France and England, “We have in Germany, up until now, no history, no state, no politic; but we do have literature, science, and art … [yet] still no literary history.”⁴⁹ Because “we only have the ruins of an actual and strongly native and national poetry” (G 1:11), Gervinus wants to write a history that allows “one to have a successful overview of the whole” (G 1:10). His method of writing this history is not to render “aesthetic judgments” but merely to present the entire history of German literature from its beginnings to the present day: “bloß eine Geschichte der Dichtung [zu schreiben]” (G 1:12, 14). As he further indicates, his book “is quite different from all those literary handbooks and histories [which make aesthetic judgments]”: his “is nothing but history [nichts als Geschichte]” (G 1:12). “I am not writing for the specialist and the scholar of literature, nor for a particular class of readers, but rather, if I am successful, for the nation [für die Nation]” (G 1:12–13).

Although Gervinus certainly appears to share some of the dubious goals of a historicism that desires to recuperate the past “as it really was,” his literary history is far from objective, written for the nation with a decidedly liberal political bent. Gervinus was among the “Göttingen Sieben” who lost his faculty post in 1833 for protesting against the English monarchy’s refusal to honor Hanover’s commitment to a constitutional government.⁵⁰ In this respect, his literary history is also a call for the formation of a state organized by, and historically grounded in, the rule of law and subject to the regulations of a nationally adopted constitution. He even dedicates the fourth volume of his history to his ousted Göttingen colleague, Friedrich Dahlmann, one of the most outspoken critics of the king: “I fight for the immortal king, the legal will of the government, when—with legal weapons—I resist what the mortal king does in violation of existing laws.”⁵¹ For Gervinus, writing such a literary history—binding together the “old” literature with the “new”—is “at the same time the ability to connect [verbinden] the state” in order to move it in the direction of a nationally secured constitutional government (G 4:vii). He intimates this link in his fourth volume by drawing on the familiar state as body metaphor: “Our beautiful literature has become a stagnant swamp, filled with poisonous little pieces; since up until now no German government wisdom has come to see that a body politic [Staatskörper] needs both physical and pedagogic movement, one would have to wish for a storm from the outside to come in … to cast a new spirit” (G 4:vii). It is no big surprise, then, that Gervinus, not unlike Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation, began the very next part of his literary history with the corporeal title: Regeneration der Poesie. In other words, he fashioned history writing into a storm for achieving both national unification and the historical legitimacy for his politics.

Both List and Gervinus shared a common faith in the future viability of the German nation and worked, in their respective ways, to bring about its regeneration. Both made the imaginary nation a conceptual category for their political criticism and had a common anxiety that their ideas, taken to an extreme, could potentially sublate the nation rather than resuscitate it. Although neither List nor Gervinus went so far as Fichte had several decades earlier in advocating for a “closed commercial state” with internal unity achieved by way of impermeable external borders, both feared what they perceived to be the logical progression of their ideas: the emergence of a global or cosmopolitan, not national, consciousness. List needed only to look to the ideology of Saint-Simon in France to see how industrialization fed an embrace of the supranational or the zeal of international financiers to fund German railway construction. After all, the technological achievements of globalization (a European or international railway system, the telegraph, the world postal institute, the worldwide expansion of capitalism) appeared to potentially eradicate the stability, and even relevance, of national borders. This, however, was never List’s goal, judging from his extensive writings on the concept of nationality as an economic and industrial imperative—and it’s also not what happened. And analogously, for Gervinus, it was Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur that appeared to “globalize” and threaten the relevance of the nation he was working to “regenerate.” Gervinus critiqued the idea of Weltliteratur, as he understood it, as “incomprehensible … [for its] chimerical hopes” and scorned the “unification of all literatures … and the prophecy of their elevation into a world-language [Weltsprache]” (G 5:579). Instead, he maintained, the identity and recognition of German literature abroad would only happen “when we preserve our national resolution [nationale Festigkeit] more and more … and hold firm to the ground of the fatherland” (G 5:579).

Although seemingly logical (German literature needs to be grounded in national particularity), Gervinus’s belief that “world literature” was the opposite (Gegenkonzept) of “national literature” was both a misunderstanding of Goethe’s idea and historically inaccurate. Goethe never prophesied or advocated for a “world language” or thought that the cultural specificity of the nation-state would dissolve into a single unity with “globalization.” Instead he imagined the emergence of a world literature, side by side with national literatures, precisely because technological developments on the global level fostered the accelerated interaction and translation of each nation’s culture. Goethe’s examples and reasons come from the world of commerce and exchange, namely, the increasing rate of global intercourse, the acceleration of everyday life, and the ease of worldwide communication due to steamship, postal, and railway services: World literature would continue to encourage “close … intercourse [Verkehr] among the French, English, and Germans”⁵² because of the “ever increasing acceleration of traffic [Verkehr]” between countries.⁵³ World literature is not the death knell of the nation-state but rather the means by which “nations will be able to become stronger, by more quickly benefiting by each other’s advantages.”⁵⁴ Interpreting Goethe’s concept in this way, Karl Gutzkow wrote in 1836: “World literature does not seek to suppress nationality … on the contrary, world literature is the guarantee of nationality.”⁵⁵

Not only did Goethe see the concept of “world literature” as compatible with, if not derivable from, nationality, he also sought the unity of Germany (not its sublation) in the same technology and for the same reasons as List, namely, railways for the health of the body politic. In an 1828 conversation with Eckermann, a full seven years before the first railway began running in Bavaria, Goethe said: “I have no fear about the unity of Germany: our good roads and future railways will do their part.” He then extols the benefits of unity: “May Germany be one, so that German dollars and groschen may be of equal value throughout the whole empire! One, so that my traveling chest may pass unopened through all thirty-six states! … May there be no more talk about inland and outland among German states! In fine, may Germany be one in weight and measure, in trade and commerce, and a hundred similar things.”⁵⁶

Indeed, the first steps toward the implementation of a German customs union were taken the same year, in 1828, when Bavaria and Württemberg signed a bilateral customs agreement, but it was not until 1834, two years after Goethe’s death, that eighteen German states merged together to form the Zollverein, significantly lowering taxes, tariffs, and other economic boundaries for intra-German trade.⁵⁷ As early as 1819 Friedrich List had petitioned the German Diet to “remove all customs duties and tolls in the interior of Germany … [because] thirty-eight customs boundaries cripple inland trade, and produce much the same effect as ligatures that prevent the free circulation of the blood.”⁵⁸ This body of state metaphor also returns in Goethe in the same conversation he had with Eckermann about railways, free movement, and unification: “A state has been justly compared to a living body with many limbs; and the capital may be compared to the heart, from which life and prosperity flow to the individual members, near and far. But if the members be very distant from the heart, the life that flows to them will become weaker and weaker.”⁵⁹ Railways—as internally realized technologies of national unification—stitch together the fragmented body politic.

Whether welcomed or feared, whether real or imagined, the effects and consequences of globalization—ranging from the conceptualization of a “world literature” and a “world postal institute” to the worldwide spread of capital and the financing and construction of railways—played a decisive role in the formation of a German national consciousness before a unified German nation existed. Even in cases where the benefits of “globalization” and “cosmopolitanism” are openly embraced, as in Goethe’s concept of world literature or Klüber’s advocacy of a world postal system, the primacy placed on securing nationality is never forsaken. But more often globalization is perceived to be a threat to nationality, and, hence, the necessity of turning inward or separating from the emerging world system is emphasized, in various degrees of extremity, from Gervinus and List to Fichte and Menzel.

I now want to look at how the greatest anxieties over globalization also spawned an inwardly directed nationalism, which, in its most virulently anti-Semitic forms, sought to “purify” the space and the populace of the imaginary German nation. This is because all these “global” hopes—the desire for unification, the reduction of distance, the freedom of exchange and mobility—shared a dialectical counterpart, namely, the anxiety over the potential sublation of nationality, the breakdown of the distinction between foreign and domestic, and the loss of German identity through a hybridization of people, languages, and customs. The locus of these anxieties was, once again, the body, but, this time, it was the body of the foreigner, often coded as the Jew, corrupting the German body politic.

Let me first be clear where this anti-Semitism did and did not come from. In the literary domain, it did not come from Goethe or Gervinus; in the domain of railway politics there is scarcely an anti-Semitic comment in List’s ten volumes of writings, letters, and strategies. But if we broaden our scope slightly, we encounter the anti-Semitic anxieties over Young Germany in 1835, ignited by, but hardly limited to, Wolfgang Menzel’s Literaturblatt and his three-volume history, German Literature. Jews, especially Jews in France such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, are to blame for creating a hybrid German-Jewish, German-French identity that is unfaithful to Germany’s geographically grounded cultural history.⁶⁰ We also encounter a persistent fear of foreign capital, manifested most obviously in the state-by-state refusal to allow the Rothschild family and other Jewish bankers to finance German railways during the first decade of their construction.⁶¹ Although List once proclaimed that “Rothschild was the pride of Israel, the mighty lender and master of all coined and uncoined silver and gold in the Old World, before whose money box kings and emperors humbly bow,” the Rothschild family, despite its Frankfurt origins, and Jewish banking families in general, played no significant role in German railway financing until after 1848.⁶² In Germany the first railways were almost all financed by local state governments and private regional funders. This is in striking contrast to France, for instance, where the Rothschild family invested 84.6 million francs between 1835 and 1846 in railway capital formation, or 38 percent of the total.⁶³

Two interrelated reasons explain this difference: first, local German states were wary of infusions of foreign, Jewish capital and, second, Jewish financiers, like the Rothschilds, had to seek cooperation from multiple governments for constructing railway lines that crossed state borders.⁶⁴ Both of these facts explain why international Jewish financiers played such a modest role in early German railway construction. During this period of initial railway projects, two German caricatures from around 1840 can be seen as illustrative of the fear of Jews financing the German railway system or, in other words, German national unity stemming from international Jewish investments. In both the body of the corpulent, crooked-nosed Jew holding moneybags and power is staged in the foreground. The first depicts the rush by potential Jewish investors to buy railway stocks (Aktien), knocking over their fellow citizens in their haste to buy thousands of shares. At the top, three Jews point the way: the first gives direction to the crowd, the second points to the people, and the third points to the Jewish justification, the Ten Commandments. On the right-hand side, we see a Star of David next to the exhaust shoot of a locomotive, what is certainly the critical message of the entire caricature. In the other caricature we see a grotesquely distorted Jew (probably a composite of the five Rothschild brothers) standing in a moneybag and labeled a “general pump” or “general lender.” This complicated caricature is particularly interesting for our argument here because the Jew’s body is literally depicted as the “global body” and, by virtue of international finance, has seized control of the body politic of the individual nation. On Rothschild’s bloated belly we see a globe, with the axis of the earth running straight through the Jew’s navel and marked by a gold coin, a Louis d’or. National boundaries are irrelevant because the Jew, as a “general lender,” knows no borders and wears his financial conquests as a diadem: loans to the Danish, the Neapolitans, the Russians, the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Portuguese. We are meant to see that the Jew’s financial empire has not only transcended the borders of these nations but, by virtue of his ever expanding tendrils, could soon invade any small German state too. The little town on the left-hand bottom struggles to keep the financial foot of the Jew out: the German sign reads “imports forbidden,” what we might interpret as a final attempt to keep foreign, Jewish capital at bay.

5.5  “Shareholder’s stampede” (ca. 1840).

5.6  “The General Lender”—caricature of the Rothschild family (ca. 1840).

Using many of the same rationales and arguments, Menzel took it upon himself in his journalism and literary histories to protect the future unity of the German nation from Jewish corruption. He believed that the German language and culture had lost much of its “purity” (M 1:39) because of an imitation of and mixture with foreign literatures and a shortsighted adoption of a “cosmopolitan” worldview (M 1:57). He critically laments that “our nationality consists in wishing to have none” (M 1:57), and blames Goethe—who he later calls the “new Messiah of the Jews” (M 3:267)—and the so-called Young Germans, particularly Heine and Ludwig Börne, for their cosmopolitan, unpatriotic writings. Menzel feared that the “fantastic mixtures” of literatures and languages would obstruct the possibility of a national unity by producing a weakened, “hybrid” culture with no national grounding. Goethe—as the champion of “world literature”—is condemned for his “Jewish” cosmopolitanism, having “mixed the most heterogeneous manners … antique and romantic, northern and southern, eastern and western, Christian and pagan, Greek and Indian, old German and French” (M 3:51). Germany must not continue to eradicate national differences and distances through such “monstrous mixtures” but rather must seek to secure its borders through a unified, internal coherence true to itself. With the growth of “global” cultures and “cosmopolitan” ideologies, Menzel feared these kinds of mixtures would become ever more prevalent, causing national specificity to become more porous and less pure.

For Menzel, even worse than a German-French mixture was a German-Jewish mixture, because for Jews “patriotism was only an animal impulse of the blood” (M 3:335). Jews looked to world literature, he thought, because it was not connected with a nation, instead coming from and espousing an ideology of the cosmopolitan and the hybrid. He writes: “The coterie called itself ‘Young Germany,’ but only as an emanation of ‘young Europe;’ for they expressly declared … that we must devote ourselves not to one nation but to the whole human race (which, however, is to be derived from France), and therefore the hitherto national literature must be annihilated and a literature of the world substituted for it” (M 3:335). As Menzel knew, sentiments not unlike these had, indeed, been expressed by Börne—second only to Heine as Germany’s most famous baptized Jew living in exile in France—in his political Letters from Paris of 1834: “The nationality of Jews has been in a beautiful and enviable way destroyed…. The Jews are the teachers of cosmopolitanism [Kosmopolitismus], and the whole world is their school. And because they are the teachers of cosmopolitanism, they are also the apostles of freedom. No freedom is possible as long as there are nations.”⁶⁵ Since Jews had no fatherland—no cultural or linguistic boundaries determined by nationality—their literature, Börne suggested, was always already inherently free, both hybrid and cosmopolitan, two things that Menzel believed would thwart German national unity. In his most anti-Semitic tirade against “Young Germany” in the Literaturblatt, Menzel argued that Jews both “disturb and poison … our inner nationality” because Jews, by their very definition, “revoke the nation [entnationalisiren].”⁶⁶ He even offers a reason: “Without [their own] fatherland, love of the fatherland must be a folly to them.”⁶⁷ Jews and the supporters of Young Germany espouse a “doctrine of humanity that universalizes and annihilates every nationality,” in turn “suppressing our national literature … [in the name of] a world literature.”⁶⁸

Menzel’s greatest fears thus concern the corruption and disappearance of national distinctiveness. He sees the permeability of borders, the mixing of traits, and the breakdown of distinctions and distances between peoples as dangerous to the future of German nationality. In order to unify the cultural traditions of Germany, the nation must preserve its original purity. In the final pages of his literary history, he calls for a “concentric” nationality, not unlike the “autocentric” doctrines of Fichte, where all the interests of the nation are pulled inward. And, not fortuitously, just like List and Goethe, he cites the “customs union” (Zollverein) and “the railways” as two possible ways to do just that (M 3:358).

Although List never gave up the category of the nation or the benefits of nationality, Börne did notice how “the significance of List’s ideas” potentially rendered the nation permeable and hybrid by collapsing the distance between foreign lands and Germany—precisely what Menzel feared. In fact, Menzel even wrote a scathing critique of List in his Literaturblatt of 1832 because the latter had written an encyclopedia article in French about how railways could economically and commercially help France.⁶⁹ List may have exploited the category of the nation, but he was, Menzel feared, not exclusively a German nationalist, and, more than that, railways were not exclusively a German domain. As Börne realized the implications of List’s ideas: he could take a train from Paris to Strasbourg, and from there to Frankfurt, all in just eighteen hours. “Heine thinks it’s a horrible thought to be in Germany in twelve hours. For me and List, these railways are our fantasy because of their unbelievable political consequences” (List 9:190). In other words, the cosmopolitan freedom of the Jew might become the built reality of the railway system once national distances and differences are overcome. Börne, swept up by List’s enthusiasm for new railway technologies, welcomed the eradication of the distance and the difference between France and Germany. But this is, of course, not what happened—and it is also what Menzel worked to prevent. The nation-state became ever more entrenched, not sublated, and new, “global” technologies of communication and transportation, far from simply “saving” humanity and bringing forth a happy cosmopolitanism, played a decisive role in securing nationality and making possible the rise of nationalism.

ZIONIST FANTASIES OF THE JEWISH NATIONAL BODY

If we shift our attention from the fantasies of German nationality that emerged during the discursive period around 1835 to the reality of railway construction projects and the unification of the German states, it becomes clear that the development of the railway system in Germany, compared to its development in France or England, betrays a striking feature about national unity: Especially in France, but also to a certain extent in England, the construction of primary railway lines fanned out from the nation’s capital because national unity preceded railway technologies. Such unity did not exist in Germany. During the 1840s in France, for example, legislation was passed for the construction of the five great railway lines radiating from Paris and extending to the nation’s main ports: the Nord was to extend to the Channel, the Ouest to Nantes, the Sud-ouest to Bordeaux, the P.L.M. to Marseille, and the Est to Strasbourg and the Rhine.⁷⁰ If we look at French railway construction in the 1850s and 1860s, the centralized star pattern extending from Paris (although strategically unsound for military reasons) is quite unlike the acentric network that developed in Germany during the same period. As is evident from an 1862 military map published by M. Charié-Marsaines, the inspector general of bridges and roads in France, in a pamphlet titled “Mémoire sur les chemins de fer considérés au point de vue militaire,” France was already a centralized nation, whose defense would fan out from Paris to its land borders and, from there, to its colonies by way of the expansiveness of the sea.⁷¹ As military leaders such as Charié-Marsaines argued, railways “fundamentally changed social relations” by shrinking distances and facilitating the deployment of military troops.⁷² He terms the “converging” and “concentric lines” critical “for the defense of France” and concludes by recognizing that railways have “profoundly changed the conditions of war.”⁷³

In contrast to the development of the French or English railway systems, regardless of when one examines the history of German railways, an analogous system of centralization characterized by “concentric” railway lines that extend to the sea is never discernable because a centralized, colonial nation with a single capital barely existed. Although this fact cannot be ignored in assessing the role of the railway in the history of German national unification,⁷⁴ my purpose is not to give another example of Germany’s so-called backwardness, belatedness, or special path to modernity, as the political, historical, and even technological limits of such lines of argumentation have been well established and well trodden.⁷⁵ Instead I am interested in how the conceptualization and construction of the German railway system modeled a process of nation formation (a process in which the scattered parts of the nation’s body were reassembled), which was, to a large extent, studied and imitated by Zionists at the end of the nineteenth century. Particularly for Theodor Herzl, it was Bismarck’s plan to unify the German states and nationalize the railways that gave form to Herzl’s fantasies for Jewish nationality. As we will see, the Zionist conception of the Jewish state derived both its model and legitimacy from the newly unified German nation.

In the most famous speech that he ever gave before the Budget Committee of the Diet on September 30, 1862, Bismarck brought together the rhetoric of national unity with the new technological capacities of modernization:

Germany does not pay attention to Prussian liberalism, but rather to its strength…. Prussia must bring together and hold together its power in an opportune moment, which it has already missed many times. Under the treaties of Vienna, Prussia’s borders are not favorable for the healthy existence of the state; the great questions of the day will not be decided through speeches and majority votes—that was the great mistake in 1848 and 1849—but rather through iron and blood.⁷⁶

As evidenced by the extensive use of railways for troop deployment in the three wars that immediately preceded German unification in 1871—the war with Denmark in 1864, the war with Austria in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71—Bismarck was not speaking metaphorically about iron and blood. It was quite clear that unification meant an aggressive Prussian expansionism abetted by modern means of communication and rail transportation throughout the German federation and beyond.

As early as the 1848 revolution, Prussia had recognized the military benefits of railways (as well as its own unpreparedness) when revolutionaries began moving through the German states on train. This became even clearer in 1850 when the Austrian army deployed more than seventy-five thousand men and eight thousand horses to the Silesian frontier—all moved by rail—in order to force Prussian submission at the “Punctuation of Olmütz.”⁷⁷ It was not until 1866 that Prussia had the internal rail capacity to effectively move the necessary troops to its contested borders: Nearly two hundred thousand troops and fifty-five thousand horses were moved by rail in the first three weeks of the Prussian campaign against Austria. Railway transportation would both create and defend national space.

But just as important as the clear military benefits that railways offered for troop mobility and deployment was the fact that Prussian strength—hence German nationality—depended on the control, use, and ownership of the railways. From the construction of the first lines in Prussia in 1838 up until the year after the 1848 revolution, every railway line built in Prussia was privately financed, owned, and operated. It was not until 1850 that the first state-owned railway lines even opened under Prussian direction, a 77.77 kilometer line licensed between Paderborn and Hamm.⁷⁸ By 1866, the Prussian state owned 2,803.27 kilometers of track, whereas private companies and regional shareholders owned 3,841.44 kilometers.⁷⁹ Bismarck realized the significant problems that private ownership of the railways potentially presented to both effective military mobilization and the consolidation of German nationality. In fact, after Prussia absorbed some 1,200 kilometers of state-owned rail from Hesse and Hanover with its 1866 expansion, Bismarck proposed the nationalization of all railways throughout the German federation.⁸⁰ His goal of nationalizing the railways, however, would not be finally realized until after German unification, in December 1879 with the passage of the Reichseisenbahngesetz.⁸¹

Although the “nationalization” of the privately owned railways was itself not a strict prerequisite of German unification, the mobility and communication afforded by rail transportation certainly was: Railways played a critical role in generating both the German concept of nationality and practically enabling the expansion, unity, and defense of the states in the German federation after 1850. The relationship between German unification and the railroads thus had less to do with specific ownership and more, as Friedrich List predicted decades earlier, to do with the future “stitching together” and defense of the German body politic. As Benjamin pointed out in his cultural study of the Saint-Simon imaginary in France, railways transmogrified the fantasies of modernity—nationality, progress, rationality, speed—into a religious zeal to “rally the scattered populations.”⁸²

Bismarck was quite prescient in realizing the great potential for unity and nationhood by turning the regional and privately held railways into a uniform, state-run, national railway system. Together with a plan to generate more taxes for the Reich through internally directed industry reforms and externally mandated tariffs, Bismarck’s dream was finally realized with the help of a speech given by General Helmuth von Moltke on December 17, 1879:

It cannot be doubted that the conversion of the most important railways of the country into State lines is, in a military sense, most desirable. Railways have in our time become one of the most important factors in war. The transportation of large masses of troops to given points constitutes a task of the most complicated and comprehensive kind, which must be continuously kept up to date. Each new connecting line necessitates new work…. It is clear that there would be a substantial simplification if, instead of having to deal with forty-nine authorities, we had practically to deal with only one. Gentlemen, I do not by any means wish to ignore the debt we owe to private railways for the work done by them at critical periods, but I am convinced that a still greater success is achievable.⁸³

The law requiring German railways to be sold to and operated by the state was passed shortly thereafter. At the beginning of 1879, the state owned a little more than six thousand kilometers of track; by 1890 it owned close to twenty thousand kilometers. As Fritz Stern wrote about “Bismarck’s scheme”: “There were hardly any private lines left [in 1890]; the state operated a model system, efficient, reliable, and economical. The power of the state was greatly enhanced by running what became the largest enterprise in Prussia.”⁸⁴ But, more than this, the nationalization of the railways helped to stabilize and “refound the Reich” by indirectly applying the protectionist theories of Fichte and List: the nation was now internally unified, connected together by uniformly running railways, and protected from foreign competition by newly enacted tariffs on virtually all imports. In effect, Bismarck had ensured that Germany was linked together for the nation to now, more or less, delink—or, in von Moltke’s words, to achieve “still greater success” through a new nationalism.

In what Stern calls a “bafflingly candid account of his plans” to create this protectionist state by nationalizing the railway system and enacting such tariffs, Bismarck laid out his plan in detail to the French ambassador St. Vallier in January of 1879. Knowing that he will have to weather storms in uncharted waters as the leader of the newly unified body politic, Bismarck describes his leadership by appealing to an extraordinary “seafaring” metaphor: “I shall act like a navigator who has set his course and encounters adverse winds; he more or less modifies his route; he uses more or less coal; he avails himself of the sails more or less, following the caprice of the storm, but as for the end of the voyage, he never changes. I shall act like him, and now you know my aim; as for the means of reaching it, I reserve my choice, depending on the game of the adversaries and the liveliness of the battle.”⁸⁵

Here Bismarck effectively employs a metaphorical language, which was virtually absent until the last quarter of the nineteenth century: The nation, physically unified by rail and decree, was now a ship—as in a Staatsschiff or “ship of state”—with a solitary captain responsible for its future direction. Indeed, only after railways and Prussian political expansionism “stitched together” the fragmented body of the German nation could ship of state metaphors return to describe nationality, hence explaining why such metaphors were entirely absent from previous German discourses about nationality.⁸⁶ And, beginning in the mid-i88os, under Bismarck’s newly adopted colonial policy, Germany secured a rapidly expanding colonial empire in Africa and the South Pacific.⁸⁷ German nationality had finally realized Hegel’s injunction that world-historical people have a colonial relationship to the sea. With this we can now turn to fantasies of Jewish nationality.

In June of 1895 Theodor Herzl confidently proclaimed that he had solved the recalcitrant, age-old “Jewish question.” Since this was no small announcement, he decided to present his solution to found a “Jewish state” to Vienna’s Rabbi Güdemann to gain support among the Jewish community and to the wealthy Jewish patron Baron Moritz von Hirsch to gain financial backing for the realization of his plan. But both Güdemann and Hirsch ignored him, believing Herzl to be “cracked”; his plan to “nationalize” the Jews in their own state is impossibly absurd. So Herzl decided to look elsewhere for support: “I’m turning to Bismarck. He is big enough to understand me, or cure me.”⁸⁸

Herzl crafted a long-winded letter to Bismarck in which he solicited the German leader’s support and remarks that only someone like Bismarck—who had himself united a scattered people—could judge the true viability of his plan: “Only the man who so wonderfully stitched together a torn Germany with his iron needle such that it does not even look patched together—only he is big enough to tell me once and for all whether my plan is really the solution or a perceptive fantasy” (T 2:144). Clearly alluding to Bismarck’s “iron and blood” policies stretching from the construction and later the nationalization of the railways to the so-called Wars of Unification, Herzl desired the support of “the greatest living empire builder [Staatskünstler]” (T 2:145) for his own plan to collect, transport, and nationalize Europe’s Jews outside of Europe. He waited several days for a response, but none was forthcoming. Herzl then began to wonder if perhaps Bismarck would not understand the solution and the relationship to its German antecedent. Already intimating a connection between Zionism and a modern mode of transportation, Herzl wrote: “Napoleon did not understand the steamboat—and he was younger [than Bismarck] and thus more accessible to new ideas” (T 2:152). Perhaps Bismarck would not understand Zionism. Just over a week later, Herzl became regrettably convinced that he would have to pursue his solution without the help of the German leader. In effect, Herzl would have to become the Jewish Bismarck.

Although Bismarck never responded to his letter, Herzl had, in fact, already learned more than enough from the German leader about nationhood. He had studied the policies, rhetoric, and especially the technologies of modern state formation side by side with the rabid anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe as the Paris correspondent for Vienna’s daily, the Neue Freie Presse. His solution emerged after having covered the Panama scandal, the start of the Dreyfus affair, and the victory of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party in municipal elections in Vienna.⁸⁹ Herzl insisted that his solution is a “plan,” which he likened to that other plan called the “Unification of Germany,” because it “represents the actual details of the future” (T 2:245). Herzl offers an elaborate description of how his “plan” for Jewish nationality will be implemented with a view back to the German precedent:

And out of what was [German] unification created? Out of ribbons, flags, songs, speeches, and, finally, out of singular struggles. Do not underestimate Bismarck! He saw that the people and the princes would not even make small sacrifices for the objects of those songs and speeches. So he exacted great sacrifices from them, forced them to wage wars…. A people drowsy in peacetime jubilantly hailed unification in wartime. It is not necessary to attempt a rational explanation. It is fact! (T 2:246)

Herzl essentially realized what Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha have argued about the formation of nationality and the rise of nationalism: Namely, that nations come into being through the ways in which communities imagine, narrate, and disseminate fantasies and projections for national identity.⁹⁰ As Hinrich Seeba argued in his analysis of the making of German national identity in the nineteenth century, cultural expressions such as patriotic poems about the German Rhine, the Lied der Deutschen, the myth of the Nibelungen, and the myth of Barbarossa all functioned as “aesthetic concepts for rather than historical reflections of national identity.”⁹¹ The ribbons, flags, songs, speeches, and struggles that Herzl observes in Germany are precisely these kinds of cultural expressions for nationality.

Herzl continues his reflections by presenting an analogy between Bismarck’s unification of Germany in a time of great apprehension and his own rise to leadership in a time of great Jewish suffering and need. His plan for the creation of a Jewish state does not need a rational grounding or explanation to legitimize it, he says, rather only a force to drive it forward and guide it: “My plan calls for the utilization of a driving force that already exists in nature. What is this force? The suffering of the Jews! … I say that this force is strong enough to run a great machine and transport human beings. The machine may look however one wants” (T 2:24z).⁹² Inspired by German unification and constructed out of modern technologies of transportation, the machine will be called Zionism, and Herzl will be its conductor. He had already begun to conceive of Zionism as a politics of transportation.

In his program for the creation of the Jewish state, Der Judenstaat, he begins by positioning his solution within an array of other “problems” modernity has solved: Electricity and lightbulbs remedied darkness; trains and steamships mastered distance; the telegraph facilitated rapid, worldwide communication; and the Jewish state, he maintained, could resolve both anti-Semitism and the “medieval” problem of Jewish nonbelonging (J 24–25). Herzl believed that the Jewish people—despite internal linguistic, monetary, educational, religious, and geographic differences—were indeed one people who needed one nation. Although he did not know where this national space would be, he argued that true emancipation, and, hence, the real solution to the Jewish question, would only come when the Jews were gathered up, transplanted, and “stitched together” in their own sovereign state. According to his assessment in 1896, possible places for wealthy Jews to buy enough land for the benefit of world Jewry included Palestine, Argentina, and Uganda; but Herzl would leave the decision to Jewish public opinion. What he was certain of was that Jews must be “carefully lifted up and transplanted to a better ground” such that the “homeless nation” could be geographically grounded and united (J 72). In this respect, the Zionist idea of nationality and colonization rested upon a modern politics of transportation.

Herzl even lays out the logistics of the travel plans: the relocation will be carried out by two Jewish agencies, called in English (a choice that was hardly fortuitous given Britain’s colonial history), “The Society of Jews” and the “Jewish Company.” The former would take care of scientific and political matters; the latter would deal with the practical and financial side of organizing the economy of the new state (J 42–25) He imagines that the poorest will go first “to construct streets, bridges, railways, and telegraph communications” (J 43). The Jewish Company would buy the necessary land, handle all the financing of the infrastructure, and help convert the assets of the departing Jews into funds to support the transmigration (J 48). He imagines the implementation of a standard seven-hour working day, the creation of large-scale housing projects, welfare agencies and systems of social support, and democratic governance by a constitution. The full-scale relocation of the Jews would take place over a period of several decades until Europe was finally left behind.

Shortly after Der Judenstaat was published, Herzl produced a series of further reflections on the relationship between mobility and the creation of the Jewish state. As he wrote in a tellingly philosophical diary entry on the rationale behind the Zionist politics of transportation:

Great things do not need a solid foundation. One has to put an apple on the table so that it does not fall down. The earth hovers in mid-air. In the same way, I can perhaps found and support the Jewish state without a sure foundation. The secret lies in the movement [Bewegung]. (In this, I believe that somewhere a guidable airship [das lenkbare Luftschiff] will be invented. Weight overcome by movement, and not the ship but rather its movement is to be steered.)

(T 2:341)

The secret of his movement was precisely the fact that it was a literal movement and, for this reason, not only differed from those fantastic utopias that Herzl dismissed but was also an undertaking of the masses and thus differed physically and structurally from the movement of a single individual.⁹³

Although not unanimously well received by every Jewish group, the publication of Der Judenstaat was immensely successful and secured Herzl as the leader of the burgeoning Zionist movement. It was immediately translated into multiple languages and, in the words of Herzl’s biographer, Alex Bein, the tract “broke like the effect of a thunderbolt.”⁹⁴ Even though Russian censorship kept the book out of much of the Pale of Settlement, his ideas and name were widely known and enthusiastic responses came from all over Western and Eastern Europe, many crowning Herzl “the genius like Moses to lead us” back to the Promised Land.⁹⁵ In the short span of a few months in 1896, he managed to secure the backing of the grand duke of Baden, various Turkish statesmen, and the Bulgarian minister, Natchevitch; he traveled to Paris, London, Sofia, and Constantinople, garnering support and adulation from both politicians and Jews who met him in cheering masses at the railway stations. He was likened to the Jewish messianic leader Sabbatai Zevi, Christopher Columbus, Moses, and, of course, Bismarck.⁹⁶

As Carl Schorske indicates in his analysis of Herzl’s meteoric rise to become the leader of the Jewish masses, Herzl tapped the latent energies and sufferings of the Jews by combining “archaic and futuristic elements in the same way as Schönerer and Lueger…. All three connected ‘forward’ and ‘backward,’ memory and hope in their ideologies.”⁹⁷ For his part, Herzl sought to reclaim the prediaspora kingdom of Israel by using the modern technologies of transportation to return the Jews, by way of an allegorized airship, to the Holy Land. On multiple occasions in his diaries, Herzl even notes that the founder of Zionism will have to become a kind of hypnotic leader, likened to that of Sabbatai Zevi (T 2:316). As early as June of 1896, Herzl writes about leading the Jewish masses: “People crowded into every corner. A stage served as the platform from which I spoke…. Succeeding speakers eulogized me. One of them, Ish-Kishor, compared me to Moses, Columbus, etc…. Great jubilation, hat waving, cries of hurrah that followed me out into the street. Now it really depends on me whether I shall become the leader of the masses” (T 2:403).

Although Herzl never produced a systematic theory or psychology of the masses like Gustav LeBon, he certainly called upon some of the same energies and experiences that both he and LeBon had observed in Paris during the early 1890s, namely, mob demonstrations and mass politics stemming from the Panama scandal and the Dreyfus affair.⁹⁸ Believing that he lived in the “era of crowds,” LeBon attempted to show how the unconscious activity of the crowd is a decidedly modern phenomenon.⁹⁹ The psychology of the crowd demanded a leader—as in a hero or God—above all else in order to arouse its passions and guide its activities. Herzl, in fashioning himself into a modern-day Sabbatai Zevi, certainly tapped precisely these energies as the leader of the Jewish masses. As one of the Zionist delegates described their modern leader at the First Zionist Congress in 1897:

Before us rose a marvelous and exalted figure, kingly in bearing and stature, with deep eyes in which could be read quiet majesty and unuttered sorrow. It is no longer the elegant Dr. Herzl of Vienna; it is a royal scion of the House of David, risen from among the dead, clothed in legend and fantasy and beauty. Everyone sat breathless, as if in the presence of a miracle. And in truth, was it not a miracle that we beheld? And then wild applause broke out; for fifteen minutes the delegates clapped, shouted, and waved their handkerchiefs. The dream of two thousand years was on the point of realization; it was as if the Messiah, son of David, confronted us.¹⁰⁰

Zionism’s modernity was clearly a politics of both moving and guiding the Jewish masses, not unlike the psychology of the crowd analyzed by LeBon.¹⁰¹

Even though the mother tongue of the Jewish masses was Yiddish, Herzl always maintained a profound attachment to the German language. This manifested itself most clearly in his deeply ambivalent relationship to Hebrew and his outright dismissal of Yiddish.¹⁰² In Der Judenstaat, for example, he imagines a “federation of tongues,” but not including the “stunted and crumpled jargons of those Ghetto languages” (J 94). Yiddish, always already a non-national language, would not be given any space in Herzl’s state, for it was nothing “but the stealthy tongue of prisoners” (J 94). The founding of the Jewish nation needed the linguistic authority of national languages like English, French, or German, which were geographically attached to the unified, territorial concept of the modern European nation. In this respect, the idea of the Jewish nation was, once again, to derive its sense of nationality from the German model.

Indeed, Herzl never hid his dislike and distrust of Yiddish. Elaborating on his ideas about linguistic nationality, Herzl wrote a scathing article, “Mauschel,” about a month and a half after the First Zionist Congress, in which he argued that Mauschel (speaking Yiddish or speaking German with a Yiddish accent) was “anti-Zionist.”¹⁰³ In this article he clearly equates the nationalistic goals of Zionism with national language traditions: “The Germans are a nation of poets and thinkers because they have produced Goethe, Schiller, and Kant. The French are brave and brilliant because they have brought forth Baynard, Duguesclin, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Rousseau. We are a nation of hagglers and crooks because Mauschel practices usury and speculates on the stock exchange Mauschel is the curse of the Jews!”¹⁰⁴ Here Herzl conflates the speech with the person speaking. Since national languages have great cultural traditions, Zionism was conceived—in Herzl’s German—as the origin of Jewish cultural and national greatness. It sought to transform the Jew speaking Mauschel in the Eastern European ghetto and living off the expanding world system of capital into the culturally refined Jew speaking German in a new and modern, sovereign nation-state. In Herzl’s words, “a national consciousness … is alien to Mauschel” because his identity is based upon the economic benefits of international commerce and transnationality: “Mauschel has his eye on distant places—not on Zion, but on some country where he might slip in with some other nation.”¹⁰⁵ The furtive non-nationality of Mauschel’s world of commerce and the stock exchange was to be replaced by the “German” dream of Jewish nationality.

Arguably co-opting some of the nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric prevalent in contemporary right-wing political ideologies of pan-Germanism, Herzl even suggests that Mauschel and “the Jew” are of two “different races.”¹⁰⁶ Zionism then became a task of trying to separate them, a separation enacted in terms of language and on bodies. If Mauschel could somehow be severed from Jews—through racial sophistry and assertion or linguistic, corporeal, and national regeneration—the Jewish state would be one step closer to realization. In perhaps the most violent, nationalist image he ever gave to the “movement,” he ends his article on Mauschel with an admonition that Zionism “could act like [Wilhelm] Tell”: “When Tell got ready to shoot the apple from the head of his son, he had a second arrow in waiting. If the first missed, the second was to serve as revenge. Friends, the second arrow of Zionism is meant for the chest of Mauschel.”¹⁰⁷ Schiller’s legendary play, Wilhelm Tell, to which Herzl was undoubtedly alluding, is a call for nation formation, motivated by the recurring mantra “Wir sind ein Volk, und einig wollen wir handeln [We are one people, and as one we will act].”¹⁰⁸ In Herzl’s modern incarnation, the Zionists, should they fail, would seek revenge by scapegoating the backward, Yiddish-speaking, ghetto Jews. In effect, Herzl’s Jewish nationality not only derived its technological inspiration from the German model but also—at least in part—an exclusionary, nationalist legitimacy.

By 1899 Herzl declared—somewhat more compassionately—that Zionism was “a kind of new Jewish care for the sick,” quoting its justification from a poem by Heine, “Das neue Israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg,” in which Jews suffer from “das tausendjährige Familienübel [that thousand-year-old family affliction].” ¹⁰⁹ As Herzl says, “We have stepped in as volunteer nurses, and we want to cure patients—the poor, sick Jewish people—by means of a healthful way of life on our own ancestral soil.” He even conceived of his work as a kind of mitzvah: “People should never forget that the cause which we have championed was once the most hopeless, the most lost, the most despised thing in the world.”¹¹⁰ In a word, Zionism was configured as both a preventive and a potential cure for Jewish national, racial, and linguistic sickness. Zionism was thus a nationalist movement of the healthy body in the German language.

The Zionist idea of the healthy Jewish body living in the modern nation-state, however, did not derive just from Herzl’s nationalist commitments but was also given a theoretical justification by Max Nordau’s conception of Jewish regeneration. Herzl first met Nordau in Paris in 1895, and both worked closely together in the formulation of the Zionist movement until Herzl’s death in 1904. Nordau’s claim to fame was a cultural diagnosis written and published in German in 1892–93: Entartung (Degeneration). In the unwieldy, five hundred pages of contemporary cultural criticism, Nordau argues that humans have become sick, pathological, weak, and degenerate because of their failure to adapt to the modern pace of society. The only way that degeneracy could be overcome, Nordau argues, was for the nervous and weak to perish and the healthy and strong to become “true moderns” in the face of modernity’s new challenges.¹¹¹

Of all the sources of degeneracy that Nordau identifies in modern society—and they range from tainted corn and alcohol consumption to sexually transmitted diseases and urban density—the most manifest and hence the most worrisome source of degeneration is the speed of modern life, represented paradigmatically by technologies of movement, particularly railways. Nordau writes:

In 1840 there were 3,000 kilometers of railway in Europe; in 1891, there were 218,000 kilometers. In Germany, France, and England, the number of travelers in 1840 amounted to 2.5 million; in 1891, it was 614 million. In Germany in 1840, every inhabitant received 85 letters; in 1888, 200 letters…. All these activities, however, even the simplest, involve an effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue. Every line we read or write, every human face we see, every conversation we carry on, every scene we perceive through the window of the flying express, sets our sensory nerves and our brain centers in motion. Even the little shocks of railway traveling that are not perceived by the consciousness, the perpetual noises, the various sights in the streets of a large town, our suspense before the progression of events, the constant expectation of the newspaper, of the postman, of visitors—all cost our brains wear and tear.¹¹²

When Nordau penned these words in 1892, railway lines not only connected together all of the major cities throughout Europe in an intricate network, but the connections themselves looked like a complex nervous system, as Friedrich List had imagined nearly fifty years earlier. Nordau’s solution to the degeneracy caused by the fast pace of modern life, however, was not a return to the slower rhythms of the prerailway life-world; rather he called for a Nietzschean-inflected, evolutionary adaptation to the pressures of modernity. He concludes by heralding the emergence of a race of “true moderns” who are best adapted to this society and, in the most violent image of his book, for the members of the new humanity to prosper, progress, and develop by “mercilessly [crushing] under [their] thumb the anti-social vermin [Ungeziefer].”¹¹³

In his 1892–93 version of the history of degeneracy, Jews hardly play a role at all, and his book is certainly not a critique of Eastern Jewish backwardness or Mauschel. Instead Nordau, a Western-schooled Enlightenment Jew like Herzl, who believed resolutely in the evolutionary progress of civilization and the survival of the fittest, saw modern culture as degenerate because it sanctioned, even desired, the biologistic, moral, and aesthetic achievements of the “pathological.” Only through the calm rationality of science and civil society would humanity be able to regain its vital energy and recover from this degeneracy. He intended his book to be a kind of therapeutic cultural exposé. It ends with an optimistic prognosis that the degeneracy of the present age would soon come to an end: “People will recover from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity…. Is it possible to accelerate the recovery of the cultivated classes from the present derangement of their nervous system? I seriously believe so, and for that reason alone I undertook this work.”¹¹⁴

In 1898, after Nordau became a Zionist, both he and Herzl urged Jews to reform their bodies, and thereby reform their whole race, by becoming physically stronger, energetic, and vital. He imagined the creation of a “new type” of Jew who is specially adapted to the colonial project of Zionism. Thus, in the same way that Herzl envisioned Zionism as a nationalistic movement for curing the “sickness” of Eastern Jews by transporting them out of Europe via modern technologies of transportation, Nordau imagined the creation of a “new type” of Jew who is specially adapted to the stresses and strains that modernity caused. The celebrated genus was, according to Nordau, the German-speaking “muscle Jew.” In his rally cry for a “muscular Judaism” (Muskeljudentum), Nordau argued that Zionists are rejoining “our oldest traditions by becoming strong-chested, tautely-jointed, bold-looking men” (tiefbrüstige, strammgliedrige, kühnblickende Männer).¹¹⁵ Nordau first provided the rationale for the muscle Jew at the Second Zionist Congress, and, a couple of years later, Herzl imagined the future Palestine to be populated with strong, regenerated muscle Jews in his colonial travel narrative, Altneuland. As I have argued elsewhere, while the concept of the muscle Jew represented a new paradigm of national regeneration for the Jewish people, Nordau’s idea was not only consistent with his 1892 call for “true moderns” but also partook in a long history of attempting to redeem the individual body in order to strengthen the broader body politic.¹¹⁶ In much the same way that Fichte imagined the resurrection of the German nation through regenerating and reassembling the bones and muscles of a fragmented body, Herzl and Nordau would now render this “German” conception of nationality into a Jewish corporeal politics of national regeneration.

The same year that Nordau called for the formation of a “muscle Jews” at the Second Zionist Congress, Herzl, alongside a small Zionist delegation from Germany, made a greatly publicized sea voyage to Palestine to meet the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, and enlist his support for establishing a Jewish state. He wanted to ask the kaiser to speak with the Turkish sultan about creating a “German protectorate” for world Jewry in Turkish-controlled Palestine. In a letter written to the kaiser on October 18, 1898, Herzl argues, “Even if his Majesty the Sultan does not immediately realize what aid the Zionists would bring to his impoverished, decaying state [verarmte, verfallende Staate], he will accept your Imperial Majesty’s advice in a personal discussion as to how his administration and finances could be regenerated [regeneriren]” (T 2:655). Drawing on the rhetoric of national regeneration as used by German nationalists in the early nineteenth century, Zionism, Herzl argued, was a European form of civilization that would cultivate the “decaying” country and, as a universally regenerative project, could even “regenerate” the insolvent Turkish Empire. Its colonialism was not that of “conquering” the land and its inhabitants but rather that of “cultivating” and “regenerating” them, something that the Zionist Jews, Herzl maintained, knew quite well. He concludes his letter with a vaguely Hegelian description of world history: “God’s secrets hover over us in these world-historical hours. There is nothing to fear, if he is with us” (T 2:655).

On the same day that he wrote his letter, Herzl was granted an audience with the kaiser, who, after their conversation, agreed to speak to the Turkish sultan about Herzl’s plan. They decided to meet in Palestine as part of the kaiser’s historic visit to the Holy Land. Accompanied by a small Zionist delegation, Herzl set sail aboard the steamship Nicholas II to Egypt and, from there, sailed aboard another ship, the Russian, to Palestine. He traveled via Smyrna, Piraeus, Alexandria, and Port Said before finally arriving in Jaffa seven days later. Not only was it Herzl’s first (and only) visit to Palestine during his lifetime, it was also the first time that a German emperor had set foot in the Holy Land in 670 years. Wilhelm II arrived in the port of Haifa on October 25, 1898, and Herzl arrived in the port of Jaffa shortly thereafter. They met one another in the kaiser’s imperial tent in Jerusalem on November 2, 1898. As Herzl justifiably wrote in his diary on that date: “This brief reception will be preserved forever in the history of the Jews” (T 2:688).

Although nothing concrete ultimately emerged from their negotiations, the overdetermined, symbolic significance of the German kaiser meeting with the Jewish founder of Zionism in Jerusalem is hard to overestimate. This historical convergence of German and Jewish nationality in 1898—the former already a reality, the latter still a fantasy—can perhaps best be seen in two photographs of seafaring, taken at roughly the same time: the first shows Herzl and the Zionist delegation aboard their ship Nicholas II and the second shows the German kaiser and top officers aboard their ship, the Hohenzollern. Both are on their way to Palestine. In the photograph of the Zionist delegation, Herzl (the third man from the left) wears a double-breasted jacket and a visor hat, maintaining a decidedly erect posture. He has the disposition of a leader embarking on a journey to lay claim to his people’s land. Much like the German kaiser, clad in a double-breasted hussar uniform and a military hat with the insignia of the German empire, Herzl is undertaking a sea voyage to corroborate the claim that Jews are, in fact, a world-historical people. He recounts in his diary the first impression that he had of the German leader: “When I entered, the kaiser looked at me with his great sea-blue eyes. He really has imperial eyes. I have never seen such eyes. A remarkable, bold, inquisitive soul shows in them” (T 2:664). Herzl, it seems, desired to see with the imperial eyes of the German kaiser.

When Herzl finally arrives in Jaffa, he is disappointed by the “poverty and misery” (T 2:675) that he sees throughout the backward land and in its Arab inhabitants. In a brief exchange with the kaiser, who “flashed his imperial eyes” at him in Jerusalem on October 29, Herzl relays in his diaries that the kaiser himself considered the country “to have a future.” Herzl responded: “At the moment it is still sick” (T 2:678). A couple of days later he describes the clean-up work that he envisions for Jerusalem:

5.7  Theodor Herzl and the Zionist delegation traveling to Palestine (1898).

5.8  Kaiser Wilhelm II traveling to Palestine (1898).

The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling streets…. If we ever get Jerusalem back and if I’m able to still do something, the first thing I would do is clean it up. I would get rid of everything that is not sacred, set up homes for workers outside the city, empty out and tear down the nests of filth, burn the secular ruins, and move the bazaars elsewhere. Then, retaining the old architecture as much as possible, I would build a comfortable, well-ventilated, well-organized, new city around the holy places. (T 2:680–81)

Echoing the thoughts of a speech that he composed for the kaiser several days earlier, he argued that the Jewish people have the right to return to their ancient homeland in order to colonize, improve, and cultivate it. Even though “many generations have come and gone since this earth was Jewish,” Herzl says:

This is the land of our fathers, a land suitable for colonization and cultivation [Colonisirung u. Cultivirung]. Your Majesty has seen the country. It cries out for people to build it up. And we have among our brothers a frightful proletariat. These people cry out for a land to cultivate…. We are honestly convinced that the implementation of the Zionist plan must mean welfare for Turkey as well. Energies and material resources will be brought to the country; a magnificent fructification of desolate areas may easily be foreseen and, from this, more happiness and civility will flourish for all human beings. We plan to establish a Jewish Land Society for Syria and Palestine, which is to undertake this great work and request the protection of the German kaiser for this company. Our idea threatens no one’s rights or religious feelings; it breathes a long-desired reconciliation. We understand and respect the devotion of all faiths on this soil, upon which the beliefs of our fathers also arose.

(T 2:657–68)

Although couched in terms that emphasize religious tolerance, Herzl’s plan clearly involves a marginalization and displacement of the current population. The Zionists would cleanse the foul-smelling streets, tear down the secular buildings, and get rid of the means of sustenance for the Arab people, while “cultivating” and bringing “fructification” to the impoverished land. In its essence, Herzl imagined Zionist colonization as a project of cleansing, resettling, and cultivating, which would take the German model of Bildung as its historical justification.¹¹⁷

When Herzl finally met the German kaiser in Jerusalem, the kaiser’s observations were essentially the same as Herzl’s: “The settlements that I have seen, both the German ones and those of your people, can serve as a model for what one can make out of this country. There is room for everyone. Only provide water and trees. The work of the colonists will serve as a stimulating model for the native population. Your movement, which I know quite well, contains a healthy idea” (T 2:689). Jews, like Germans, could cultivate the land and the people, in turn improving them both. However, the kaiser hesitated to commit to do anything more to further the Zionist cause. In Herzl’s words (written in French), which he relayed to the Zionist delegation, “Il n’a dit ni oui ni non [He did not say yes or no]” (T 2:690). The following day, the kaiser’s flotilla departed Jaffa, and Herzl’s Zionist delegation set sail back to Vienna via Egypt and Italy. The reality of German nationality and colonialism—from Bismarck to Wilhelm II—had already provided Herzl with a convincing model for realizing Zionist national fantasies.

These fantasies were no more explicit than in Herzl’s Altneuland, a novel conceived immediately after his meeting with the German kaiser in 1898 and published four years later.¹¹⁸ Generically, the novel is a work of travel literature depicting a journey through space and time: by way of a seafaring journey, the novel moves from the hopelessness of Herzl’s contemporary Europe to the regeneration of Palestine in the year 1923. Using the basic form of the bildungsroman—a structure intimately connected to ship travel, education, subject formation, and return—Herzl imagines the transformation of Palestine from a barren wasteland into a fantastic, colonial wonderland modeled on the cosmopolitanism of the German universal. For Herzl and many of his Zionist contemporaries, the idea of return meant reclaiming the Holy Land and populating it with strong, cultivated, German-speaking muscle Jews and polite, clean, well-behaved, German-speaking Arabs, as he depicted in his novel. Through the processes of Bildung, not only would the decaying land be regenerated but both Jew and Arab would be raised up into the ranks of Europeans and thereby, in Hegel’s formulation of world history, into the fourth—Germanic stage of world history.

I will briefly summarize a few of the salient features of the plot. The novel begins with a disillusioned Jewish man by the name of Friedrich Loewenberg in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a city deeply riven with anti-Semitism. Loewenberg meets a German-American misanthrope named Kingscourt who convinces him to permanently leave Europe and sail around the world to his personal island in the South Seas. Although Loewenberg (as a Jew) is “not familiar” with seafaring and “life on a yacht” (A 155), he nevertheless decides to accompany Kingscourt to his island and live in seclusion from the world with no one but their two servants, “a dumb Negro and a Tahitian” (A 156). Kingscourt explains to Loewenberg that he needs a “companion” so that he “does not unlearn human speech” (A 156) in this uncivilized, colonial territory. They depart from the Trieste harbor but, before heading to the South Seas, decide to make a stop in Palestine so that Loewenberg can see his “fatherland” (A 163). This is how the city looks:

Jaffa made a very unpleasant impression on them. Although situated by the wonderful blue sea, everything was in a state of extreme decay. Landing in the miserable harbor was difficult. The alleys were filled with the worst possible stenches; everything was unsanitary, dilapidated, and draped with colorful Oriental misery. Impoverished Turks, dirty Arabs, and timid Jews lounged around—indolent, beggarly, and hopeless…. The train to Jerusalem revealed pictures of the deepest degeneracy. The flat land is almost all sand and swamp; the meager fields looked burned. The Arab towns were black; the inhabitants looked like bandits. Naked children played in the dirty alleys … with few traces of a present or former culture.

(A 166)

After witnessing such degeneration, they sail away together and spend the next twenty years on their colonial enclave in the South Seas.

The second chapter of the novel skips ahead to the year 1923, with Loewenberg and Kingscourt returning to the Red Sea on their yacht. Upon meeting other sailors, they quickly find out that shipping traffic between Europe and Asia no longer moves through the Suez Canal but now via Palestine; its port cities of Jaffa and Haifa have in the intervening twenty years become the centers of world trade: “A marvelous city had been built on the deep blue Mediterranean. Magnificent stone dams rested on the water and, at the same time, revealed what the wide harbor really was to the foreign gaze: the most convenient and safest harbor on the Mediterranean Sea. Ships of all sizes, all kinds, and all nationalities docked in this sanctuary” (A 183). Noticing the inhabitants’ clean, cosmopolitan wardrobes, Loewenberg and Kingscourt remark that the people “look more civilized [zivilisierter] than we do” (A 183). Although the city “seemed entirely European,” it was actually “more modern and cleaner” (A 185–86). In the twenty years that they were away, Palestine had actually become more European than Europe.

On shore, Loewenberg is reunited with a young man named David Littwak whom he had known in Vienna as a poor, dirty, Yiddish-speaking beggar child from Galicia. He and his family immigrated to Palestine shortly after Loewenberg left on his voyage and, in the intervening twenty years, Littwak had become a well-respected, wealthy, German-speaking leader of the Zionist movement. He takes the two travelers on a tour of the new cities, showing them the impressive technology, culture, and social structures, which are all modeled on their European antecedents but are more refined, dignified, and, most of all, cosmopolitan. Loewenberg and Kingscourt are amazed by the immeasurable progress, diverse civilization, cleanliness, and efficiency of the new land: “The blue sky and the brilliantly colored sea was reminiscent of the Riviera. But the buildings were much more modern and cleaner, and the street traffic, although lively, caused little noise…. There were neither hoof beats from horses nor the crackling of whips nor the rumbling of tires. The pavement was as smooth as the sidewalks, and automobiles sped noiselessly by on rubber tires…. [Above them] hovered an electric train” (A 186). Now cleansed and cultivated, Palestine has become a testament to Jewish progress.

The Jews, Littwak says, have successfully migrated en masse to “civilize” Palestine and, in so doing, have built a modern nation based on the European model. They have thus become, in his words, both nationally strong and “physically fit,” something that Jews achieved through gymnastics associations and rifle clubs (A 203). Both Jews and Arabs have given up their formerly “Oriental” qualities, evolving—in a mere twenty years—from the first stage of world history to the final stage. After countless paeans to technology, universal freedom, and socialist economics, the novel concludes with Loewenberg and Kingscourt deciding to become citizens of the “new society.” Loewenberg marries Littwak’s sister and Kingscourt becomes the caretaker of Littwak’s son. As would be played out innumerable times over the course of the century, the Zionist seafaring voyage ends with the decision to dwell as citizens in the new state.¹¹⁹ A celebration of all the things that made Zionism possible follows, as Littwak, who was just elected the president of Palestine, joins with a diverse group of people—Jewish and Christian, European and Arabic, old and young—in celebrating the “new and happy form of human society” (A 419). The novel ends with a brief afterword by the “editor” directed at the readers: “If you don’t want it, all that I related to you is and will remain but a fairytale. I tried to write an instructive poem…. All the deeds of human beings were first dreams” (A 420).

As an “instructive poem” [Lehrdichtung], the novel is intended to give form to the possible, that is, to the imagined Jewish state of the future. Herzl insists that everything needed to realize the “dream” is already available and, for this reason, his answer to the Jewish question is a modern solution, derived from and making use of the technologies, social conditions, and politics of his present. In updating the conclusion of the Passover seder’s call for “next year in Jerusalem,” Herzl presents his readers with a modern seder, in Tiberias in 1923, that recounts how the mass movement of the Jews was based on the historical presuppositions of today:

First we shall finish our seder in the manner of our forefathers. Then we will let the new era tell how it was born. Once again, there was enslavement in “Egypt” and, once again, there was a happy exodus. This time, of course, it happened with respect to the cultural conditions and technological means available at the beginning of the twentieth century. It could not have been otherwise. It could not have been earlier either. The industrial age had to have first arrived. The nations had to have grown mature enough for colonial politics. Instead of sailing ships, there had to be great steamboats, which could speed by sailing ships at twenty-two knots or more. In short, the whole inventory of the year 1900! We had to become new men and yet not be disloyal to our ancient heritage. And we had to win the support of other nations and rulers, or else the whole thing would have been impossible.

(A 313)

The conditions of possibility for Zionism are to be found, ready at hand, in early twentieth-century Europe: from technological, political, and financial support to the suffering of Jews, the will to leave, and, of course, charismatic writers and leaders like Herzl. Emphasizing that the colonial ideas do not need to remain mere fantasies, Herzl writes: “With the ideas, knowledge, and means that exist today, the 31st of December, 1902, humankind possesses everything needed to help itself. One does not need an oracle or a dirigible [lenkbare Luftschiff]. Everything needed is already at hand to make the world a better place. And do you know who, man, can show the way? You! The Jews! Because your situation is so bad. You have nothing to lose” (A 174).

In so doing, Herzl presents Zionism as an optimistic, colonial bildungsroman that moves almost effortlessly through space and time: It relocates the Jews in Palestine in the near future and reveals a perfectly rationalized, perfectly open, and perfectly efficient society of freedom, tolerance, and wealth. There is no dialectical underside to Herzl’s society: War is nonexistent; degeneracy has been overcome; nations persist without nationalism; technology is salvational; imperialism has been squelched; colonialism is mutually profitable for both colonizer and colonized. As a smiling David Littwak tells Loewenberg from the post-Zionist perspective of 1923, “On the whole, it was a bloodless operation” (A 189). And, on the whole, what Herzl failed to see, or was unwilling to see, was that all the technological, social, political, and economic hopes that he harbored for Zionism’s nationality could—and did—run in exactly the opposite direction. The immense railway network, for example, that Herzl imagines to link Jerusalem to all the cities of Western and Eastern Europe, was also the precondition of military expansionism and the reinvigoration of nationalisms. The happily global technologies and progressive cosmopolitanisms did not simply subvert or attenuate nationalism but rather justified its reassertion.

This is because the colonial project—no matter how open, progressive, or utopian—must nevertheless domesticate and in some way subjugate its other. In the case of Herzl’s novel, this becomes evident in the ways in which he understands the processes of cultivation, both the cultivation of “Eastern” Jews and the “Oriental” population. As for the first, Herzl’s novel is driven forward by overcoming the “weakness” of homosexuality and the reinstitution of the strong, reproductive, heterosexual familial unit. And, as for the second, the “dirty,” uneducated Arabs Herzl first observed in Palestine when he visited the kaiser are precisely the people who most require cultivation and integration into the European ideal of civility. In Daniel Boyarin’s critical words: “Herzlian Zionism is thus itself the civilizing mission, first and foremost directed by Jews at other Jews and then at whatever natives happen to be there, if indeed, they are noticed at all.”¹²⁰

Before Loewenberg makes the decision to bid farewell to Vienna and essentially elope with Kingscourt to the island, Kingscourt checks whether he is ready to spend the rest of his life with a man: “I want to take a companion [Gesellschafter] back with me … so that there may be someone by me when I die. Do you want to be that someone? … I must remind you that you are undertaking a life-long obligation…. If you come with me now, there will be no going back,” Kingscourt warns him (A 156). But, after twenty years together, Loewenberg apparently begins to long for family, and so Kingscourt takes him on a trip to Palestine. Speaking to Friedrich Loewenberg in the diminutive, Kingscourt remarks, “You know Fritzchen that I can no longer live without you. Indeed, I arranged this whole trip for your sake, so that you would be patient with me a few years longer” (A 178). They then joke at the prospect that Loewenberg is being “dragged back to Europe” in order for Kingscourt “to marry him off” (A 178).

But, while in Palestine, Loewenberg develops feelings for David Littwak’s sister, Miriam. She has matured into a beautiful, German-speaking woman who works as an English and French schoolteacher, teaching her students the languages of Western-European nationality. Loewenberg sadly explains to her that he cannot marry: “I am tied to someone else for life” (A 278). But upon realizing that homosexual relationships don’t count (since they cannot populate colonial lands), Miriam’s “face lit up” (A 278). It was only Kingscourt: “What if he were to release you from your promise to him?” (A 278), she asks. Indeed, heterosexuality was just around the corner. Loewenberg falls in love with Miriam and eventually marries her at the novel’s conclusion. But Kingscourt is not left behind: He too is integrated into a family and willingly accepts child-rearing duties for David Littwak and his wife Sarah. Transferring his homosexual love of the older Fritzchen, Kingscourt develops a close bond with their infant son, who is, not fortuitously, also named Fritzchen. When the child becomes deathly ill at the end of the novel—something that threatens the reproduction of the family—Kingscourt steps in and miraculously saves the child. In the end, even homosexuals are integrated into the new society.

And in the same way that sexual fertility was linked to the fertility of the nation, Herzl always imagined the colonization of Palestine to be a process of “cultivating” the backward land and people. This becomes most disturbing in his portrayal of Reschid Bey, the single Arab character in the novel, who is unable to utter a critical word about Zionism. Bey, a chemist by training who received his doctorate in Berlin and speaks fluent German, can only express his unreserved gratitude to the Jews who regenerated and saved Palestine. While touring the Palestine of 1923, Kingscourt remarks that he must be in Europe, perhaps Italy, with all the lush foliage and modern means of agriculture. Not only did the Jews cultivate the soil, we are told, they also civilized this formerly backward land: “Jewish settlers who streamed into this country brought with them the experiences of the whole cultured world [i.e., Europe]” (A 251). Bey tells Loewenberg and Kingscourt what a sorry state Palestine was in before the Jews came to save the Arabs:

Nothing could have been more poor and wretched [jämmerlicher] than an Arab village at the end of the nineteenth century. The peasants’ clay hovels were unfit for animals. The children lay naked and neglected in the streets like dumb beasts. Now everything is different…. When the swamps were drained, the canals built, the eucalyptus trees planted … the ground became healthy…. The Jews have enriched us, why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them? (A 247–48)

Indeed, both Jew and Arab have been regenerated in the image of the European universal.

At the upshot of the Zionist bildungsroman, then, weak, Eastern, Yiddish-speaking Jews have become transformed into politically and physically strong, heterosexual, German-speaking Jews who reside in Palestine, the outpost of European civilization. And, at the same time, the unkempt, uncivilized “Orientals” have been transformed into polite, European-educated, German-speaking citizens of the “new society.” Herzl’s Zionism—as a colonial mission—touches everyone, forming them in the image of the European ideal of civilization.

With reference to Hegel, we might then organize Herzl’s concept of world history into four stages that mark the Zionist idea of progressive regeneration: condemned to the first stage, we find Kingscourt’s “dumb Negro” and Tahitian, neither of whom presumably have the capacity for human speech or culture; on the next stage we find the masses of “timid,” Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe and the hordes of “dirty Arabs” in Palestine before the arrival of the Zionist settlers; on the third stage we find Loewenberg and Kingscourt, who, by returning to Palestine, redeemed their original, Abrahamic Trennung by reconnecting with the “new” Europe; finally, in the Palestine of 1923, we find the highest development of the Jewish-European state, represented by the “new society” and the likes of David Littwak and Reschid Bey. As Herzl writes in the novel, this is because Jewish settlers who “brought the experiences of the whole cultured world [Kulturvölker]” (A 251). As a civilizing mission for all, Jews supposedly imported the universalizing education, culture, and political ideals of Europe without the divisive anti-Semitism, racism, classism, and colonialism associated with these ideals. In effect, Herzl’s Zionist imaginary is a radically nondialectical vision of the “Germanic” stage of world history.

In conclusion, Herzl created a heroic fantasy of nationality inspired by the reality of German national unification in which seafaring Jews, as world-historical people, return to Palestine to claim their “old-new land” and regenerate its soil and inhabitants. As Moritz Goldstein would later reflect in an extraordinary essay on the need for Jewish national literature, the “effect of Herzl’s ideas is to be found not with the technocrats but with the poets.”¹²¹ In other words, literature—like Herzl’s Altneuland—was important for cultivating a “feeling of nationality” (20) and, hence, creating the conditions of possibility for a future nation. In this respect, Jews, Goldstein argues, would be well-advised to look to the German model: “As the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation was split into pieces at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a passionate call to rebuild was unleashed…. But where was the unity of the Germans to be found after it was apparently lost? In its shared writings.… Bismarck could never have created political unity had our classic authors not already established intellectual unity [geistige Einheit] beforehand” (19–20). He then insists that the Jews should learn from this: “The new Judah must be completed as an idea before it can exist in reality” (20). This ideational process must be the work of poets who would cultivate “a Jewish national literature” with “ideal Jewish heroes” (18). In this respect, Grunwald’s history of Jewish seafaring and Herzl’s novel not only represent the first testaments to the birth of a heroic Jewish national literature; they also represent the extent to which Jewish conceptions of nationality were dependent upon German literary and cultural history, German national unity, and German nationalism. Triangulated between Nuremberg, Fürth, and Palestine, we find another snapshot of the German/Jewish dialectic of modernity.