“Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency.”1
AT THE END of their last conversation the narrator recounts that Austerlitz decided to set off from Paris to find the remains of a camp in the Pyrenean foothills where his father may have been interned: “I don’t know, said Austerlitz, what all this means, and so I am going to continue looking for my father” (292). Before departing, he invites the narrator to stay at his home in England for as long as he wishes as well as visit a small Ashkenazi cemetery he had just discovered behind a wall of the adjoining house. They take leave of each other at the Glacière Métro station. The story of their relationship ends at this moment, or, more precisely, starts at this moment since it is at this point that the narrator first begins to compose the story of Austerlitz telling the narrator the story of his life. Over the course of the years that go by, he is entrusted with Austerlitz’s photographs, which, he thinks, “one day, would be all that was left of his life” (293). The narrator visits the Ashkenazi cemetery and sets off on his own journey to search for more traces of the violently vanished past. Once again the German narrator becomes geographically bound—in the contingent space of the present—to the remains of the Jewish past.
Sebald’s novel takes the simultaneously progressive hopes and destructive nightmares of modernity, ingrained in the physiognomy of its railway ruins, as the starting and ending point for articulating the German/Jewish dialectic. In the same way that the material ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof reveal a crystallization of modernity, the photographs of the empty railway station, the decomposing gravestones in the Ashkenazi cemetery, and the blurred image of the narrator’s reflection in the shop window at Terezín represent a crystallization of the German/Jewish dialectic. Benjamin underscores the historiographic insight: “Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (AP 461).
While navigating through and attempting to find an orientation in these ruins of modernity, the Jewish protagonist and the German narrator become inextricably bound to one another. After all, Austerlitz’s story would not exist without the German narrator listening to it and writing it down; without Austerlitz the German narrator would have no living connection to the remains of the past. But, rather than yielding a definitive history, a final resolution, or an ultimate symbiosis, the novel ends with both the fracture and the binding together of past and present, near and far, German and Jewish. And while their identities remain deeply connected to one another, even overlapping in certain places in the story, the narrator and Austerlitz are never simply combined together or elevated into a third, higher term; instead their relationship is left radically unresolved, in tension, at a kind of standstill. Celan once remarked in the notes he composed for his Meridian speech that Gegenüber ist unaufhebbar (that which stands across cannot be sublated),2 a dictum that appositely describes the German/Jewish dialectic in Sebald’s Austerlitz.
Sebald’s novel can thus be considered part of a much longer and complicated problematic, in which German and Jewish are entangled with and fundamentally bound to one another. It is a problematic, I would suggest, that has only become visible (and viable) after a significant amount of time has elapsed to allow us to reject Scholem’s famous encapsulation of German-Jewish history as an unrequited love affair and a dialogue that never took place. Now, instead of a failed dialogue and strict opposition, we can begin to recognize the complex constellations and dialectical images that comprise German/Jewish modernity. This is not a project of simply “reinserting” Jews into German history or demonstrating the significance of their various “contributions.” Nor is it a revisionist history, which seeks to highlight the “good” Germans and downplay the “bad” Germans. Instead it is the articulation of a persistent problematic specific to the intellectual history of modernity: the encounter of German and Jewish in constructive, critical, and violent tension. The history of this tension betrays, emblematically, the possibilities and pitfalls of the dialectic of modernity.
To be sure, Sebald’s novel is unique in the historiography that I lay out in this book insofar as it is constructed as the explicit rejection of Scholem’s model of failed dialogue: Austerlitz is entirely a German/Jewish dialogue in which the German narrator listens to the Jewish protagonist, perceives him for what he is and what he represents, and responds to him.3 The cultural geography that I mapped here was scarcely such a dialogue. However, the point, as I insisted earlier, is not “dialogue”—a criterion that is simply too narrow—but rather the multiplicity of expressions, encounters, and relationships, both constructive and destructive, between German and Jewish. In other words, the point is the possibility of reconceiving and reimagining the dialectical unity between German and Jewish, the complex ways in which the one adds to, enriches, and replaces the other.
In this regard, Hannah Arendt’s formulation of “the Jew as Pariah”—written in 1944—is a much more helpful way of imagining the relationship between German and Jewish than Scholem’s model of failed dialogue.4 Although unabashedly essentializing in treating Jews as “a pariah people,” she draws our attention to the creative and critical possibilities of being an outcast and thereby conceives of Jewishness as an attack on any sort of social and political hegemony. To be Jewish, for Arendt, has less to do with a particular religious or linguistic identity and more to do with a critical perspective, position, and point of view. As she explains, this perspective results in a “shifting of the accent, from this vehement protest on the part of the pariahs, from this attitude of denying the reality of the social order and of confronting it, instead, with a higher reality.”5 Her examples of Jewish pariahs include Heine, Kafka, Bernard Lazare, and Charlie Chaplin, the last of whom was not a Jew but “epitomized in an artistic form a character born of the Jewish pariah mentality.”6 We might even say that critical theory—a tradition that would include thinkers such as Benjamin, Adorno, and Arendt as well as Kafka and Heine—is not only Jewish in Arendt’s sense but also—and perhaps more precisely—German/Jewish in the entangled sense that I argue for in this book. This is because the Jewish and the German, the German and the Jewish form, if only for a moment, a constellated image, a dialectic at a standstill, that allows us to reassess and reinterpret the culture from which they came.
This attention to entanglement demands a new approach to writing the intellectual history of German/Jewish modernity, an approach that recognizes the multiplicity of expressions and relationships between the two terms, particularly the ways in which they condition and move with respect to one another. To articulate this entanglement, I chose several moments in which the two terms come together to form a dialectic saturated with tension. Indeed there are many more such moments—one may think of Goethe/Varnhagen, Dohm/Mendelssohn, Bauer/Marx, Wagner/Schönberg, Rosenzweig/Heidegger, and others—and that is precisely the point: the German/Jewish dialectic has just recently begun to be mapped.7 It is still a project of the future.
With the rejection of developmental or teleological models of history, the encounters between each of the thinkers are motivated by constellations of simultaneity or contiguity that were mapped onto the cultural geography of the railway system. One of the key consequences of this is that a new Germany and a new German emerges, one that is not bound to the geographic borders of the nation or even the linguistic territory of the Kulturnation. It finds its borders between Berlin and Delos, Sicily and New York City, the North Sea, Nuremberg-Fürth-Palestine, Auschwitz, and, finally, Vienna-Rome-Prague-Antwerp-Paris. And it finds its representation in the thought of those travelers, wanderers, exiles, insiders and outsiders such as Heidegger, Celan, Goethe, Kafka, Hegel, Heine, List, Herzl, Arendt, Sebald, Freud, and Benjamin. Chronology, necessity, and nationality have been replaced by spatiality, contingency, and mobility to yield a new cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity.
Not unlike the argument that Scott Spector produced in Prague Territories, a “deterritorialized” modernity comes into existence, one that is not slavishly derived from nationality but rather from spatiality, mobility, exchange, and encounter.8 Spector’s cultural history of fin-de-siècle Prague, indebted to the recent attention by social theorists to the production of space as a powerful discursive system and complex matrix of socially mediated and mediating relations, examines the ways in which culture is bound—materially and metaphorically—to the articulation of territory and space. As spatial counterpoints to Benjamin’s temporal or historical terms, Spector’s spatial constellations (“territorialization and flight, self and other, here and there”) coincide to reveal a “middle Europe” as dialectics at a standstill.9
It is here that we may see another set of priorities, models, and questions emerging in German-Jewish studies, one that moves the field beyond the paradigms of trauma and memory studies that have positively defined its contours for the past two decades. Building on the work on Hess, Gordon, Hahn, Spector, and others, new research questions have begun to emerge that do not take the Holocaust as the Urtext for understanding and commemorating German-Jewish modernism. The goal of this book was to demonstrate the fundamental entanglement of German modernity and Jewish modernity without reducing the relationship to one of failed dialogue or negative symbiosis. To do so, I introduced the emerging field of mobility studies—the analysis of cultures in transit—to German-Jewish studies. Drawing on the insights of transnational literary studies and cultural geography, I sought to develop a model for writing cultural criticism in which the contingency of location, language, and transmission comes to the forefront of the analyses.10 Rather than writing a traditional cultural history organized by the linearity of chronology and culminating in the negativity of the Holocaust, I have produced a broader account of modernity that focuses on the complex dialectics of mobility and the material spaces of exchange between German and Jewish. Complementing the recent work in transnational cultural studies and inspired by a Benjaminian approach to historiography, the result is a constellated cultural geography derived from the figure par excellence of German/Jewish modernity: the Jew on a train.