NOTES

1. Dialectics at a Standstill

1. Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 94. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

2. Among other places, Derrida tracks the operations of the separatrix (le trait) in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). For a good overview of the operations of the separatrix, see Jeffrey Kipnis, “Twisting the Separatrix,” Assemblage 14 (1991), 31–61.

3. Kipnis, “Twisting the Separatrix,” 32.

4. A transcription of the talk, “Rede über die jiddische Sprache” (Speech on the Yiddish language), is reprinted in Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1953), 421–26. All quotations will be documented parenthetically as Y followed by the page number. With regard to the genesis of the speech, Kafka writes in his diaries that he received a card from Oskar Baum asking him to give a “talk at the evening for the Eastern Jews” on February 18, 1912. In his diaries he notes that he “was overpowered by uncontrollable twitchings, the pulsing of my arteries sprang along my body like flames,” but he reassures himself: “I shall, of course, give a good lecture, that is certain, besides, the restlessness itself, heightened to an extreme on that evening, will pull me together in such a way that there will not be room for restlessness and the talk will come straight out of me as though out of a gun barrel.” Diaries, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1976), 179–80. For a discussion of Kafka “talking on Yiddish,” see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1999), 42–50.

5. Four years earlier, in 1908, the first international conference on the Yiddish language took place in Czernowitz. In addition to resolving Yiddish to be “a national language of the Jews,” the conference sought to address the standardization of Yiddish, including grammar, spelling, the entry of foreign words and new words into the language, and the establishment of a Yiddish dictionary. Although Kafka may have been right when he declared that Yiddish had no grammatical structure and that it consisted entirely of foreign words, the movement to standardize the language had already begun.

6. With regard to the fear of Yiddish by German speakers, Giuliano Baioni argues that the arbitrariness of Yiddish represents an affront to the bourgeois, rational work ethic of the West. See his essay, “Zionism, Literature, and the Yiddish Theater,” in Mark Anderson, ed., Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin-de-Siècle (New York: Schocken, 1989), 95–115.

7. Derrida describes the double logic of the supplement as follows: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place.” Of Grammatology, 144-45.

8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 25. Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of deterritorialization to describe the revolutionary displacements of a major language by a minority. These displacements not only occur when new modes of expression are introduced in a major language but also when the “place” of expression shifts, such as Jews speaking Prague German. Following Kafka’s own reflections on a minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari explain that “a minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.… [In a minor literature] language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). For an excellent discussion of Deleuze and Kafka, see Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 27ff.

9. In the conclusion to chapter 2, I suggest that Celan’s “Gespräch im Gebirg” functions in much the same way: He essentially writes Yiddish in German, thereby undermining the separatrix between the two.

10. Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 61–64; here 62.

11. There are many good studies addressing this problematic. See, for example, Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England, 1985). In his book, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), George L. Mosse famously countered Scholem’s argument by showing how German and German-Jewish intellectuals mutually embraced the ideal of Bildung. Mosse certainly extended the historical record of “dialogue” through his own work. For a reassessment of Scholem’s position, see the collection by Klaus Berghahn, ed., The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse (New York: Lang, 1996).

12. Michael Löwy prefers the term elective affinities in his study of Jewish libertarian thought. Very much in accord with the relationship of German/Jewish that I am describing, he defines an elective affinity as “a very special kind of dialectical relationship that develops between two social or cultural configurations, one that cannot be reduced to direct casuality [sic] or to ‘influences’ in the traditional sense. Starting from a certain structural analogy, the relationship consists of a convergence, a mutual attraction, and active confluence, a combination that can go as far as fusion.” Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (London: Athlone, 1992), 6.

13. Berghahn, “Introduction,” The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered, 2.

14. Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xxii. Further citations are documented parenthetically. Also Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

15. Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). All citations will be documented parenthetically as GJ followed by the page number.

16. This is something also treated in Paul Reitter’s forthcoming book, “The Soul of Form: Karl Kraus and the Dialectics of German-Jewish Identity.”

17. Moritz Goldstein’s article was originally published in the literary magazine, Der Kunstwart, as “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” 25 (1912): 281–94. The quotation comes from Steven Aschheim’s entry, “The publication of Moritz Goldstein’s ‘The German-Jewish Parnassus’ sparks a debate over assimilation, German culture, and the ‘Jewish spirit,’” in Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 299–305; here 299.

18. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 3. All citations will be documented parenthetically as DE followed by the page number.

19. For an excellent discussion of the dialectic of Enlightenment vis-à-vis anti-Semitism, see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

20. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

21. Breaking with the paradigm of modernity as a hegemonic monolith in which Jews were essentially “silent victims of the modern state’s quest to produce a homogenous citizenry,” Jonathan Hess has cogently demonstrated how Jews and Germans actively contested Enlightenment universalism and challenged the terms of emancipation and progress. In his important book, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), he investigates “the discourse of Jewish emancipation from 1781 to 1806” in order to shed light on “a dynamic tradition of debate within modernity about the promise, contradictions, and the limits of universalism” (8–9). Citing a trend in German-Jewish studies including the work of Paul Mendes-Flohr, David Sorkin, and Shulamit Volkov, Hess seeks to recover—contra Adorno and Horkheimer—the agency of Jewish intellectuals in fashioning both their own identities and, more broadly, the terms and limits of modernity. Cf. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Volkov, Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne: Zehn Essays (Munich: Beck, 2001). By arguing that German modernity must be understood as German/Jewish modernity, I see my own work contributing to this reevaluation of modernity.

22. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Continuum, 2002), 56–7.

23. In its traditional sense, cultural geography tries to answer the questions of “how the world looks,” “how the world works,” and “what the world means.” Cf. Kenneth E. Foote, Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan Smith, eds., Re-reading Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). See the introductory essay by Hugill and Foote, “Re-reading Cultural Geography,” 9–23.

24. Carl O. Sauer, “Cultural Geography,” in Philip L. Wagner and Marvin W. Mikell, eds., Readings in Cultural Geography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 30–34; here 32–3.

25. Cf. Carl O. Sauer, “The Agency of Man on the Earth,” ibid., 539–57.

26. “General Introduction,” ibid., 1.

27. Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

28. Without implying their agreement with one another, see Dennis Cosgrove, “Towards a Radical Cultural Geography: Problems of Theory,” Antipodes 15 (1983): 1–11; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

29. In this regard my work differs methodologically from what we might call standard cultural and literary histories such as those of Ritchie Robertson, The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of German Jews, 1743–1933 (London: Lane, 2002); and Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (New York: Free, 2000).

30. Elon, The Pity of It All, 11.

31. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16. As a way of avoiding the fallacies of “foreshadowing” and “backshadowing” in historical writing, Bernstein develops the concept of “sideshadowing” to show how the future is rife with possibilities in any given present. My attention to cultural geography seeks to augment this approach.

32. Barbara Hahn, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, trans. James McFarland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 13.

33. Spector, Prague Territories. While quite different from Spector, Till van Rahden’s social history of Jewish Breslau is also grounded in a concrete spatial matrix: Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Grossstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000).

34. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity; Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger.

35. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). I will quote from the English translation, with references to the German as necessary: The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 461. Further citations will be documented as AP followed by the page number.

36. Perhaps unfairly, the name Leopold von Ranke is traditionally associated with the historicist dictum of representing the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it really was). He proclaimed these famous words in the preface to his Histories of the Romantic and Germanic Peoples (1824). Benjamin’s strongest critiques of historicism can be found in Convolute N of The Arcades Project and in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

37. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262.

38. Ibid., 262.

39. Ibid., 257.

40. Rolf Tiedemann, “Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere, AP 929–45; here 942.

41. Ibid., 943.

42. Benjamin, “Exposé of 1935, section V,” quoted ibid., 943.

43. Ibid., 943.

44. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 213–14.

45. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 210.

46. Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 37.

47. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262.

48. Ibid., 263.

49. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1999), 152.

50. Stephen Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History,” PMLA 16, no. 1 (January 2001): 48–63; here 60.

51. Ibid., 62.

52. For the best studies of contingency as a defining attribute of cultural production and historical analysis, cf. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

53. For a thorough discussion of historical narrative and the emplotment of time, see the seminal work of Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathlene Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), vol. 3. Also see the intriguing discussions of the changing concept of historical time by Reinhart Koselleck in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). In his most recent work Koselleck employs the term Zeitschichten (layers of time) to indicate how time is always spatially layered. For more on this, see my discussion in chapter 7 on Freud and Sebald. Also, see Koselleck, “The Unknown Future and the Art of Prognosis” (chapter 8) in The Practice of Conceptual History.

54. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 3.

55. See, for example, Dennis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), and David E. Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrechtt, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, Dorothea E. von Mückech, eds., New History of German Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

56. Some of the essential works include Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Poetics of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). For a fascinating study of British modernism and technologies of mobility, see Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Two recent special issues of PMLA have addressed the relationships between mobility and globalization within literary studies: “Globalizing Literary Studies” (coordinated by Giles Gunn), 116, no. 1 (January 2001) and “Mobile Citizens, Media States” (coordinated by Emily Apter, Anton Kaes, and D. N. Rodowick), 117, no. 1 (January 2002).

57. Emily Apter, “Afterword: From Literary Channel to Literary Chunnel” in Cohen and Dever, The Literary Channel, 286–293; here 288.

58. Paul Gilroy, for example, recognizes this and even tries to bring Jewish scholars back into the discussion of transnationality and culture in the conclusion to his book, The Black Atlantic. He notes that the concept of diaspora comes from Jewish thought and that “the themes of escape and suffering, tradition, temporality, and the social organization of memory have a special significance in the history of Jewish responses to modernity” (205). Although there have been a handful of excellent studies of Jewish literature and culture over the past few years that draw attention to the significance of mobility vis-à-vis the concepts of exile and diaspora, they have yet to significantly impact the fields of transnational cultural and literary studies. See, for example, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Howard Wettstein, ed., Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

59. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–112. The arguments in this article are developed at more length in his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

60. As Clifford notes, the term spatial practice is derived from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Arguably the most influential theorist to examine culture in spatial terms is Fredric Jameson. See, for example, the idea of cognitive mapping developed, among other places, in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

61. Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 105. He argues that studies limited to localization and dwelling fail to account for “the wider global world of intercultural import-export in which the ethnographic encounter is always already enmeshed” (100). Cultural anthropologists need to focus on the ways in which people leave home and variously return by considering travel in its widest possible sense: Not simply the bourgeois, heroic traveler but also the coerced traveler, the servants, helpers, merchants, tourists, translators, and laborers, among others. This attention to travel in all its expressions and possibilities demonstrates, he argues, how hybridity and cosmopolitanism produce new types of cultural agency that resist the leveling power of both “localism” and global capitalism: “Cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political and cultural interaction, histories that generate … discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (108). In this respect the study of mobility and the forms of agency produced are also the study of how ideologies become displaced and political resistance is leveraged.

62. Homi Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” in The Location of Culture, 172.

63. For more on this, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

64. Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” 172–73.

65. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 15. All further citations will be documented parenthetically as BA followed by the page number.

66. In the wake of Gilroy, a new trend has begun to emerge within literary studies in which spaces, such as the sea or the railway system, are examined for their contribution to both cultural production and new models for literary criticism. See, for example, the work of Margaret Cohen on the novel and the sea, Andrew Thacker’s studies of British modernism, and Cesare Casarino’s Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Also, the collection Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005). This trend can also be seen in the attention to language and linguistic dispersion by cultural geographers such as Jackson, Maps of Meaning, especially chapters 6–7.

67. In Clark’s words: “It is just because the ‘modernity’ that modernism prophesied has finally arrived that the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are now unreadable … The intervening (and interminable) holocaust was modernization.” T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2–3.

68. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 33.

2. Berlin and Delos

1. Quoted in Christine Roik-Bogner, “Der Anhalter Bahnhof: Askanischer Platz 6–7,” in Helmut Engel, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Wilhelm Treue, eds., Geschichtslandschaft Berlin—Orte und Ereignisse, vol. 5: Kreuzberg (Berlin: Nicolai, 1994), 52–69; here 59.

2. Summary from Alan Cowell, “Suspect in Nazi Massacre Arrested in Germany,” New York Times, March 5, 1998.

3. Josef Joffe, quoted from an interview given on National Public Radio, March 4, 1998.

4. The archival collection, Ein Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas: Dokumentation 1988–1995 (Berlin: Bürgerinitiative Perspektive Berlin, 1995), provides many newspaper and magazine articles on the debate over the “form” of the memorial and the motivations for remembering in Berlin. It also contains the winners of the original competition for the memorial, both rejected by Helmut Kohl in 1995. A new competition commenced in 1996 and the winners of this competition, a joint submission by Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra, were announced in early 1998. After contentious political debates, Eisenman’s redesigned memorial (without Serra) was finally given the green light in 1999, when construction began on the site. An extensive documentation is to be found in Ute Heimrod, Günter Schlusche, Horst Seferens, eds., Der Denkmalstreit – Das Denkmal? Die Debatte um das ‘Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas’ – Eine Dokumentation (Bodenheim: Philo, 1999). One of the best critical essays on the Holocaust memorial debate is James Young, “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem—and Mine,” in At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 184–223.

5. “Wo das Holocaust-Mahnmal geplant ist,” Berliner Morgenpost, March 9, 1998.

6. The terms for this analysis resonate with Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

7. Cf. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).

8. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 239.

9. Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Neuzeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 231–66.

10. Of the immense literature on the so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Charles S. Maier’s The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), remains one of the best.

11. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 55. She points out that “philosophical history” or “philosophy of history” rather inadequately translates the term Geschichtsphilosophie since Benjamin’s point was not to construct “a philosophy of history but philosophy out of history.” She suggests that “philosophical history” might be a less misleading translation of the term.

12. The full quote is from Hamlet, “time is out of joint.” The quote serves as the exergue to Derrida’s Specters of Marx.

13. Perhaps an exception might be the concentration camps, of which all the major camp ruins are still extant, many with extensive museums documenting the horror. However, they are hardly forever immune to “disposal”—for the argument runs: “fifty years have past, is this not enough time to ‘reclaim’ this land for ‘normal’ activities again?” In Fürstenburg, for example, residents decided to have a supermarket built on a portion of the acreage belonging to the former concentration camp Ravensbrück. The “Supermarkt-Skandal” (as reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 9 and 18, 1993) indicates one element of a larger Schlußstrich-Mentalität (“drawing a line to demarcate the past”), that the residents no longer want to “live with” a concentration camp in “their backyards.” As one sympathetic commentator put it, “Fifty years after the liberation, the city of Fürstenburg had to work to establish a new beginning.… Finally something happened that looked like a normal life.” Jürgen Dittberner, “Ravensbrück 50 Jahre nach der Befreiung: Ein Neuer Anfang,” in Jürgen Dittberner and Antje von Meer, eds., Gedenkstätten im Vereinten Deutschland (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), 41–45; here 42–43.

14. Reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996), 261–68.

15. Jürgen Habermas, “1989 im Schatten von 1945: Zur Normalität einer künftigen Berliner Republik,” in Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 167–88. In 1999 the city of Weimar sponsored an “International Essay Prize Question” on the topic “Liberating the Past from the Future? Liberating the Future from the Past?” One can understand the formulation of this question precisely along the lines analyzed by Habermas.

16. Walser used this phrase in his 1998 Friedenspreisrede with respect to what he saw to be the overemphasis of the Holocaust in Germany. For a discussion of the ensuing debate between Walser and Bubis, see Amir Eshel, “Vom eigenen Gewissen: Die Walser-Bubis Debatte und der Ort des Nationalsozialismus im Selbstbild der Bundesrepublik,” in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 2 (June 2000): 333–60.

17. Although a more extensive discussion of the very complex processes of musealization is beyond the scope of this chapter, some important questions would surely need to engage the possibility that museums are hardly hegemonic institutions of reification (whether of historical events or art objects despite Adorno’s famous criticism “Valéry Proust Museum”), particularly along the lines of fractured, nonlinear representations of space and history. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin as well as Peter Zumthor’s design for the museum building on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters are both innovative and striking examples of the latter. The anthology edited by Wolfgang Zacharias, Zeitphänomen Musealisierung: Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung (Essen: Klartext, 1990), contains a number of apropos articles on this issue. See also Zumthor’s published writings on his design in Stabwerk: Internationales Besucher- und Dokumentationszentrum ‘Topographie des Terrors’ (Berlin: Aedes, 1995).

18. The 1946 film Irgendwo in Berlin depicts both the shock and fascination of ruins in a devastated Berlin. The film was shot in Berlin during the months after the end of World War II. Young children are shown cavorting on the rubble, fascinated by the tattered landscape. They supposedly represent innocence and liberation since they have no haunting memories of Nazism.

19. I am referring to Bataille’s influential essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1919 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985). “Productive expenditure” refers to instrumental rationality, capitalist exchange, and commodification whereas “excess” refers to the possibility of transgression, the fact of waste, remains, leftovers, and loss. Benjamin’s critiques of historicism can be found most pointedly in Convolute N of The Arcades Project and in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The brand of historicism most heavily critiqued by Benjamin is that in which the past is pursued as worthy in itself such that continual development and progress is enabled by its amenability to narrative rehabilitation.

20. Derrida articulates the famous notion of différance in an essay by the same name in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–27.

21. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.

22. Ibid., 257.

23. The literature on the Heidegger-Celan relationship is immense. Some of the key texts include Otto Pöggeler’s Spur des Wortes: Zur Lyrik Paul Celans (Freiburg: Alber, 1986) and his Heidegger in seiner Zeit (Munich: Fink, 1999); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Poésie comme experience (Paris: Bourgeois, 1986); Véronique M. Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1992), chapters 6 and 7; Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation … That There Is Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), chapter 4. For recent accounts, see Amir Eshel’s thought-provoking essay, “Paul Celan’s Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics,” in New German Critique 91 (Winter 2004): 57–77; and James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). The latter appeared after this book went into production.

24. The full poem appears in Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 2:255.

25. Martin Heidegger, Aufenthalte (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), 3. Pagination is in accordance with Heidegger’s hand-numbered pages. All further citations will be documented parenthetically as H followed by the page number.

26. Celan’s poem was first published in the collection Die Niemandsrose (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 80–81. The poem is dated September 19, 1962. For biographical details I am particularly indebted to Jean-Marie Winkler’s interpretation of the poem in Jürgen Lehmann, ed., Kommentar zu Paul Celans ‘Die Niemandsrose’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997), 331–39.

27. Translation of “Bread and Wine” from Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, ed. Jeremy Adler, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 153.

28. German original and translation of “Bread and Wine,” ibid., 152–53.

29. Heidegger is calling on a distinction that he articulated in his Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). The original is Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959). “Calculative thinking” (rechnendes Denken) is technological in nature because it seeks to quantify thought into stable units or objects. “Meditative thinking” (besinnliches Denken), on the other hand, is characterized as “the releasement toward things” (Gelassenheit) and associated with opening the world up to mystery and memory (Andenken).

30. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), 313–64. The translation appears as “Letter on Humanism” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 189–242.

31. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 43 (translator’s note).

32. Cf. Amir Eshel, Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Dichter im Angesicht der Shoah (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999).

33. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: Endfassung, Entwürfe, Materialen, eds. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 102.

34. Celan’s “Der Meridian” (October 22, 1960) is the most pointed rejection of poetry as a kind of “art” or practice of “representation.” The poem is not an attempt to “mimic” a reality “out there” but is “reality” by virtue of its sedimented time and space as well as by virtue of its relational or ethical dimension. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, 3:187–202. All references to the Meridian speech will be documented parenthetically as M followed by the page number. For an excellent discussion of the speech, see Fynsk, Language and Relation, chapter 4.

35. Martin Heidegger, “Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung,” in Gesamtausgabe, 102 vols. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), 4:28.

36. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” (1946), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row), 142.

37. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4 (“Andenken”) and vol. 53 (“Der Ister”). Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets, 47. Also see Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger (Zurich: Atlantis, 1954).

38. Quoted in Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets, 47–48.

39. Celan, Der Meridian, 158.

40. Ibid., 125.

41. Ibid., 93, 132.

42. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 1:577–578. The English translation reads: “bound to a nucleus of time” (AP 463)

43. Paul Celan, “Ansprache anlässlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der freien Hansestadt Bremen” (1958), in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, 3:185–86.

44. Paul Celan, “Gespräch im Gebirg” (1959), Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden, 3:169–173.

45. Ibid., 173. Translation by John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 143–44.

46. Celan, Der Meridian, 145. Although she does not deal with the Meridian notes, Barbara Hahn introduces “the Jewess Pallas Athena” with a late Celan poem which begins “If I know not, know not / without you, without you, without a You, / they all come, / the / freebeheaded, who / lifelong brainlessly sang / of the tribe / of the You-less / Aschrej.” Hahn explains that “the tribe of the You-less injects its words, rather than giving them to a You, rather than making room with its calling for a You.” The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, trans. James McFarland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4–5.

47. Celan, Der Meridian, 96.

48. In writing it is known that Heidegger mentioned the Nazi concentration camps twice. The first mention comes in a 1948 response Heidegger sent to Herbert Marcuse on the charge that his philosophy identified with “a regime that has killed millions of Jews.” Heidegger’s simple response is that if Marcuse had written “East Germans” instead of Jews, “the same [would hold] true.” Cited in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 160–64; here 163. The second time comes in his Bremen lectures of 1949: “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry: in essence, the same thing as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and death camps, the same thing as blockades and the starvation of countries, the same thing the fabrication of hydrogen bombs.” The lectures are entitled “Einblick in das was ist” and reproduced in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, 79:27. I will discuss these lectures and Heidegger’s thoughts on mass death in chapter 6.

49. There has emerged a sort of cottage industry around Heidegger scholarship dedicated to precisely this task. Spurred by Victor Farías’s Heidegger and Nazism (1987), two of the earliest and critical engagements with Heidegger’s work were undertaken by Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard: See, respectively, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990). Derrida believes Heidegger realized the error of his ways in his post-1945 work and tries to show through an elegant—but, in my opinion, ultimately unsatisfying and sometimes forced—argument that Heidegger himself performed the necessary “deconstruction.” For discussions of Heidegger and Nazism, see Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

50. Martin Heidegger, “Die Bodenständigkeit des heutigen Menschen ist im Innersten bedroht,” Gelassenheit, 18. I will quote from the English translation, “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, 49.

51. Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” 48. A little later in the memorial speech Heidegger even laments how “farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorized food industry” (54). In the memorial speech of 1955 he has already forgotten “the manufacture of corpses in gas chambers.”

52. In the “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger writes that young Germans who knew Hölderlin’s poetry (such as “Heimkunft”) died for something much greater than the war itself; they died for the sake of overcoming the “loss of being” (Seinsverlassenheit), 218–19. Heidegger mentions the destruction of the atomic bomb numerous times in his writings about poetry and the possibility of dwelling after 1945: cf. “Das Ding” (1950), translated as “The Thing” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 166, 170. Here the atomic bomb is considered “the final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened [namely, the loss of being]” (166); “The Discourse on Thinking,” 49, 52. Among other places, his disgust with the “Americanization” of the world is mentioned in Aufenthalte, 8, “What Are Poets For?” 113, and in an essay on Hölderlin’s “Der Ister”: “Americanism is determined to annihilate Europe, which is to say, its homeland.… The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history, but is already the final American act of American ahistory and self-devastation.” Gesamtausgabe, 53:68.

53. Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” 57.

54. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 219, 242.

55. Celan, Der Meridian, 53.

56. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1995), 2 and 75.

3. Sicily, New York City, and the Baranovich Station

1. This history of the Anhalter Bahnhof draws on the following studies: Peter Bley, 150 Jahre Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn (Düsseldorf: Alba, 1990); Helmut Maier, Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, n.d.); Rainer Knothe, Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1987); Christine Roik-Bogner, “Der Anhalter Bahnhof: Askanischer Platz 6–7,” in Helmut Engel, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Wilhelm Treue, eds., Geschichtslandschaft Berlin—Orte und Ereignisse, vol. 5: Kreuzberg (Berlin: Nicolai, 1994), 52–69; and Alfred Gottwaldt, Berlin: Anhalter Bahnhof (Düsseldorf: Alba, 1994).

2. Handbuch der deutschen Eisenbahnstrecken: Eröffnungsdaten 1835–1935. Streckenlängen, Konzessionen, Eigentumsverhältnisse, introduction by Horst-Werner Dumjahn (Mainz: Dumjahn, 1984).

3. Bley, 150 Jahre Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn, 33.

4. Maier, Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, 123.

5. Ibid., 135–36.

6. Ibid., 154–66.

7. Bley, 150 Jahre Berlin-Anhaltische Eisenbahn, 52.

8. Heinrich Heine, Lutezia. Zweiter Teil, in Werke: Schriften Über Frankreich, ed. Eberhard Galley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1968), 3:509–10.

9. Ibid., 3:509.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), especially the essay “‘Neuzeit’ Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” 231–66; also “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154–69.

13. Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past, 267–88; here 279.

14. In his essay “Crash (Speed as the Engine of Individuation),” Jeffrey Schnapp has explored the ways in which speed contributed to the formation of a modern form of subjectivity and individuation. Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 (January 1999): 1–49.

15. Besides Koselleck, Michel Foucault, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Friedrich A. Kittler have also argued that a new conception of historicity and temporality emerged in this period: Catalyzed by the French Revolution, an eschatological notion of time became replaced by a “modern” notion of temporality in which the future was imagined as a space of indeterminacy, possibility, and openness. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1975); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), vol. 4, 93–131;and Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

16. Heine, Lutezia, 510.

17. Carriage travel from Paris to Germany normally took several days. Ludwig Börne, “Die Bedeutung der ‘Idées sur les réformes,’” in Friedrich List, Werke, ed. Artur Sommer and Wilhelm V. Sonntag (Berlin: Hobbing, 1935), 9:190. For a detailed, comparative history of carriage travel vis-à-vis the primacy placed on speed, cf. Schnapp, “Crash.”

18. Heine, Lutezia, 510.

19. Heine did make a short trip to England in 1827, and he published some of his observations in 1828. These were republished in 1831 under the title “Englische Fragmente” and included in the fourth volume of the Reisebilder. See Chapter 4.

20. Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 87.

21. Ibid., 86–88.

22. John Langton and R. J. Morris, eds., Atlas of Industrializing Britain: 1780–1914 (London: Methuen, 1986), 89.

23. François Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France, vol. 1: 1740–1883 (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Hans-Henning Gerlach, Atlas zur Eisenbahngeschichte: Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 1986), xxi.

24. David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

25. In his classic cultural and social history of the railway, Wolfgang Schivelbusch briefly discusses Heine and his comments about the annihilation of space and time. The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 33–44.

26. In 1884 members from twenty-five countries convened in Washington, D.C. to establish Greenwich as the zero meridian, to determine the exact length of the day, and to divide the earth into twenty-four time zones. However, as a result of political resistances and national differences, Greenwich mean time was not immediately adopted everywhere. Germany adopted it in 1892, but France, for instance, continued to use “Paris time” until just prior to World War I. For this history, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 10–15; Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Geschichte der Stunde: Uhren und moderne Zeitordnung (Munich: Hanser, 1992), 315–21.

27. According to Marx, the emphasis on regularity, expectation, rationalization, and timing—all part and parcel of the quantification of units of work and the invention of the workday—necessitated a spatialization of time into infinitely divisible and repeatable segments. Cf. Karl Marx, “The Working Day,” Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, 2 vols. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 1:340–416.

28. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

29. For a discussion of the trauma of the railway accident and the inability to control all contingencies, cf. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 129–49.

30. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 24.

31. Niklas Luhmann, “Contingency as Modern Society’s Defining Attribute,” in Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 44–62.

32. Kafka and Brod were themselves intensively occupied with travel literature between 1909 and 1912, from Fontane and Hebbel to Flaubert and Goethe, and, during this time, traveled by train to Northern Italy, Paris, Weimar, and Zurich (where Kafka spent time nearby in a sanatorium)—but Kafka never left Europe. The accounts of America and his knowledge of American geography in Der Verschollene come entirely from secondary sources, not first-hand experiences. Franz Kafka, Reisetagebücher (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994). The best book to date on Kafka and travel literature is John Zilcosky’s Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave, 2003). I also draw on Malcolm Pasley’s important article, “Kafka als Reisender,” in Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, ed., Was Bleibt von Kafka? Positionsbestimmung Kafka-Symposium, Wien 1983 (Vienna: Braumüller, 1985), 1–15; here 3.

33. Franz Kafka, The Diaries, 1810–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, 1976), 56 (translation modified).

34. In terms of its attention to space and travel in the work of Kafka, this chapter draws on the insightful discussions in Scott Spector’s Prague Territories and John Zilcosky’s Kafka’s Travels.

35. Italienische Reise is the general title given to the body of writings that Goethe wrote and collected about his trip to Italy. Goethe wrote some of these documents in the form of letters and diary entries during the trip itself, which he regularly sent back to Charlotte von Stein. From the onset of the trip he planned to use these to write about the journey upon returning to Weimar. Although a couple of travel sketches on Italy were published in 1789 and 1790, most notably an illustrated book called The Roman Carnival, Goethe did not begin working on the composition of the Italienische Reise until 1813, and the first two volumes were not published until 1816 and 1817. Following Stuart Atkins, in order to avoid confusion, when referring to the first two volumes individually, I will use Reise I and Reise II, respectively, and refer to the 1786/87 trip itself as the Italian journey (without italics). In the Ausgabe letzter Hand, these writings are designated as Italiänische Reise. I, II. The third volume, composed and published in 1829, differs markedly in form and content from the first two, and is given a separate title by Goethe, Zweyter Aufenthalt in Rom, which is also how I will refer to it. In general, I will use the broader title Italienische Reise to refer to the collected corpus of writings on the trip. For more on the history of this work, see Stuart Atkins, “Italienische Reise and Goethean Classicism,” in Jane K. Brown and Thomas P. Saine, eds., Essays on Goethe (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), 182–97.

36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Tagebücher, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. 1775–1787, ed. Wolfgang Albrecht and Andreas Döhler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 1.1:164. This is also the same line Goethe would use in the published version of his Italienische Reise I (1816): Italienische Reise, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Christoph Michel and Hans-Georg Dewitz, 40 vols. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 1993), 14:9. Unless otherwise noted, I will quote from the standard English translation of the latter: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, in Goethe’s Collected Works, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, introduction and notes, Thomas P. Saine, trans. Robert R. Heitner, 12 vols. (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), 6:13. All further citations will be documented parenthetically. My historical background is indebted to Saine’s thorough introduction.

37. Goethe’s diary (Tagebücher) covers the first two months of his Italian journey, from leaving Germany on September 3, 1786, through his departure for Rome at the end of October 1786. Much of the 1816 reworking of the first two months of his journey simply replicates and expands upon the diary entries. The later parts of his journey, however, are significantly more indebted to letters and retrospective memories than contemporaneously recorded data. For this reason, I do not think it is necessary to overly insist upon the distance of conceptualization for the early parts of the Italian journey. There are certainly important historical and biographical reasons to acknowledge the fact that Goethe’s Italienische Reise was composed and published retrospectively, and this is particularly important for the third part, Zweyter Aufenthalt in Rom, since it was produced at the end of Goethe’s life and differs markedly, in content and structure, from the other two parts.

38. Erich Schmidt, ed. Tagebücher und Briefe Goethes aus Italien an Frau von Stein und Herder, 2 vols. (Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1886), vol. 2.

39. Gerhard Schulz, “Goethe’s Italienische Reise,” in Gerhart Hoffmeister, ed., Goethe in Italy, 1786–1986 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 5–19; here 6.

40. Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and Location in an Era of Globalization,” in PMLA (special topic, “Mobile Citizens, Media States,” coordinated by Emily Apter, Anton Kaes, and D. N. Rodowick) 117.1 (January 2002): 32–42; here 36.

41. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 36.

42. Ibid., 35.

43. Cf. Koselleck’s The Practice of Conceptual History and his Futures Past.

44. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900.

45. We might recall the spatial and mobile terms in which Cicero classically defines metaphor in De Oratore: Metaphorical words are “those that are transferred and placed, as it were, in an alien place [eis quae transferuntur et quasi alieno in loco collocantur].”

46. In Plato’s Statesman, for example, the stranger relates a creation story to Socrates with God as the pilot of the metaphorical ship of the universe. In order to avoid cosmic chaos, God must rescue his creation from shipwreck: “Beholding its troubles, and anxious for it lest it sink racked by storms and confusion, and be dissolved again in the bottomless abyss of unlikeness, he takes control of the helm once more” (273 e). Less grandly, but more persistently, the ship and the ship journey are also metaphors for the state or a civic leader, as Goethe remarks in his visit to the “ship of Venice” on October 5, 1786: Goethe writes that the state barge, Bucentaur (destroyed in 1797 by Napoleon), is “a true monstrance for displaying the nation’s leaders to it in great magnificence.… The ornate ship is a real bit of stage property, which tells us what the Venetians were and considered themselves to be” (Italian Journey, 68). The history of the ship as state (Staatsschiff) metaphor has been traced in detail by Eckart Schäfer, “Das Staatsschiff: Zur Präzision eines Topos,” in Peter Jehn, ed., Toposforschung: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972), 259–93.

47. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) shows how the ship, as both a historical reality and literary metaphor, structures the dialectical underside of modernity. He argues that “the ship is the first of the novel chronotopes … to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the Western hemisphere” (17).

48. As Georges Van Den Abbeele has argued, the “voyage,” while certainly counting as one of the most banal motifs in Western letters, is also the basis of many of Western culture’s “dearest notions,” ranging from progress, the quest for knowledge, freedom as freedom to move, self-awareness, and salvation. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv.

49. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

50. Ibid., 17.

51. Ibid., 10.

52. Ibid., 26.

53. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr (1795–1796) was a revision of an earlier work, the Theatralische Sendung, conceived between 1777 and 1786. He put the latter work on hold during his trip to Italy and returned to it after coming back to Weimar.

54. One is reminded of Novalis’s famous characterization of the circularity of the bildungsroman: “Where is the journey of maturation and discovery leading? ‘Immer nach Hause’ [always heading home].” Quoted in Michael Minden, The German Bildungsroman: Incest and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.

55. Zilcosky briefly discusses Goethe’s impulse to “find oneself” by staging such a “view from above” in his Kafka’s Travels, 54–55.

56. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 [1790]), 120. Quotations will be cited parenthetically.

57. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Routledge, 1958 [1757]), 46.

58. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke: Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler, 24vols. (Zurich: Artemis, 1948–1971), 22:454; quoted in Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, 48 (my emphasis).

59. In book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey the Cimmerians refer to a distant people who live in fog and clouds. This is the first of several important references that Goethe will make to the Odyssey, in this case linking Germans to Cimmerians.

60. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 143.

61. Dohrn-van Rossum, Geschichte der Stunde, 315–17.

62. The Roman Carnival was inserted verbatim by Goethe in the third part of the Italienische Reise in 1829. The essay by M. M. Bakhtin is “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59.

63. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman,” 39.

64. Goethe, Annals; quoted in Bahktin, “The Bildungsroman,” 48.

65. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 26.

66. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). I will quote from the standard English translation, in Goethe’s Collected Works, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall, 12 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9:27.

67. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 306 and 307; translation slightly altered. The German is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 526.

68. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 165.

69. See the excellent discussion by Minden, The German Bildungsroman.

70. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in The Practice of Conceptual History, 170–207.

71. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 345.

72. Ibid., 346.

73. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 3.

74. See, particularly, Koselleck’s essays “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity” and “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories” in Futures Past. Even where Koselleck gives evidence for the definitive “rupture in continuity” (281), as he calls it, mitigating evidence also exists: At the century’s turn, for instance, Goethe wrote to Schiller, “I sincerely enjoyed closing out the year and also the century with you yesterday evening, as we were once ninety-niners. Let the end be like the beginning, and the future like the past.” Brief an Friedrich Schiller, January 1, 1800, Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen: IV. Abtheilung: Goethes Briefe, 1800–1801, vol. 15, ed. Hermann Böhlau (Weimar, 1894). Once again, Goethe underscores a circular continuity precisely where one might expect to see a rupture in experience. This, of course, is not meant to negate the force of “new time,” but it does indicate the coexistence of more than one experience of temporality during the critical Sattelzeit period. I thank Hinrich Seeba for this kind reference. Wellbery’s argument was delivered as a talk at Stanford University on January 22, 2001: “Temporal Semantics and Poetological Conception: On the Unity of Goethe’s Thought.”

75. The argument could be made, however, that the third part of the Italienische Reise, composed and published by Goethe in 1829, does evidence the ruptures of modernity in its montage format. In the Zweyter Aufenthalt in Rom, Goethe organizes the return journey back through Rome not by place, as in Reise I–II, but roughly by month, beginning in June 1787 and ending in April 1788. Goethe breaks up the narrative continuity by inserting actual letters, reports, and short essayistic prose pieces into the description of his journey. The dates are not always sequential, and Goethe deliberately ruptures the narrative with intrusions such as his “Intruding Meditations on Nature” (300–1) or even lengthy excerpts from essays that were published after the journey took place (for example, an excerpt from the German Mercury of 1791).

76. As Irad Malkin has written, “The word nostos, possibly expressing at once a spatial dimension and the human undertakings, occurs already in the Odyssey itself, where it signifies both the action of returning and the hero who returns … and the story or song about him.” The Returns of Odysseus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 2–3. Goethe is quite self-consciously fashioning himself into precisely this tradition: He returns to Weimar as a hero and writes the very story of his voyage of discovery.

77. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 1823–1832, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 227.

78. Rainer Fremdling, Eisenbahnen und deutsches Wirtschaftswachstum, 1840–1879. This is also confirmed by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, two of the most suspicious critics of the German Sonderweg theories: David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

79. Quoted ibid., 189, note 45.

80. After the urging of Rabbi Isaac Löwi, the rabbi of Fürth, Jews bought 31 percent of the railway stock purchased by the citizens of Fürth. Later, in 1866, Jewish factories in Fürth manufactured exactly half of the fourteen steam engines in use. This information comes from Gerd Walther, “Die Juden im Fürther Wirtschaftleben,” and Werner J. Heymann, “Die erste Deutsche Eisenbahn und die Fürther Juden,” in Werner J. Heymann, ed., Kleeblatt und Davidstern: Aus 400 Jahre jüdischer Vergangenheit in Fürth (Emskirchen: Mümmler, 1990), 133, 162, respectively.

81. Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11–15; Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), especially chapter 2; Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration Since 1800 (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), chapters 3–4; David Berger, The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

82. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 34.

83. The best book to detail this complex history is Jack Wertheimer’s Unwelcome Strangers, and my historical summary is indebted to his invaluable study.

84. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 602.

85. Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish for “hello there” (traditionally, “peace be onto you”), is the pen name of Sholem Y. Rabinovich (1859–1916). The Railroad Stories were written in Yiddish in two cycles, one between 1902–1903 and the other between 1909–1910, and first published in 1911 as Ayznban geshikhtes: Ksovim fun a komivoyazher (Railroad stories: Tales of a commerical traveler). I will refer to the standard English translation by Hillel Halkin in Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (New York: Schocken, 1987).

86. Since the 1880s, government-backed pogroms and anti-Semitic decrees in the Pale of Settlement had increased dramatically. For this reason, between 1881 and 1914, as many as three million Jews left the Russian Empire, many for Western Europe and the United States. The modernization of Russia not only meant railway construction and economic growth but also forced expulsions, more pogroms, and Cossacks who traveled by train to terrorize Jews. Cf. Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881–1917 (London: Longman, 1983); and Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety.

87. The term diasporic consciousness comes from Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 693–725; here 713.

88. Kafka worked on and completed the second draft of the novel in September, October, and November of 1912. Der Verschollene, ed. Jost Schillemeit, in Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit (New York: Schocken, 1983). For translations I used the following version and made corrections or clarifications as noted: Franz Kafka, Amerika, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1996). All quotations will give references to the German edition followed by the page of the English translation.

89. Both Goethe and Kafka were indebted to “actual” guidebooks for their accounts of travel, the former primarily to J. J. Volkmann’s three-volume Historical and Critical News of Italy (first published in Leipzig in 1770–1771) and the latter to a number of descriptions of America, most notably, Arthur Holitscher’s Amerika: Heute und Morgen (1911–1912) and Frantisek Soukup’s lecture and travel book on the disenfranchisement of American immigrant workers. Goethe, Italian Journey, 450, note 26. Unlike Goethe, who did, of course, travel through Italy, Kafka never made it to America. As Mark Anderson and others have noted, Holitscher’s influential text first appeared in installments in the Neue Rundschau. Anderson, “Kafka and New York: Notes on a Traveling Narrative” in Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick, eds., Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 142–61;here 147. Kafka attended Soukup’s lecture on June 1, 1912, from which, according to his diary he learned about “the Czechs in Nebraska, [that] all officials in America are elected … Roosevelt … threatened a farmer who had made an objection, [and that] street speakers … carry a small box with them to serve as a platform” (June 2, 1912). The Diaries, 1910–1923, 203.

90. This passage parallels a dream, which Kafka wrote about in his diaries (September 11, 1912), of landing in New York’s harbor: “In the direction of New York my glance slanted downwards a little, in the direction of the sea it slanted upwards. I now noticed the water rise up near us in high waves on which was borne great cosmopolitan traffic.” The Diaries, 1910–1923, 209.

91. Interestingly, the Muirs literalize this in their translation of the last sentence, “And behind them all rose New York, and its skyscrapers stared at Karl with their hundred thousand eyes” (12). But Kafka uses the word Fenstern here, not Augen. Indeed, the metaphor of the window as a supposed portal of clarity onto the world has a long tradition in both literature and art history. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822), for example, depicts an invalid, confined to his bed, who teaches the “art of seeing” from his bedroom window. He considers the window a “framed canvas” from which he can see the whole panorama of Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt “in a single glance.” In both Goethe and Hoffmann the window is a metaphor for seeing, and, more important, a world that can be visually mastered exists beyond the window. Kafka, however, breaks with this tradition: Even when Karl sees beyond or outside of the window frame, the world is just as impenetrable and recalcitrant as before. In Kafka’s world the window offers no clarity and the gazing subject gains no mastery.

92. For example, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s short drama, Das Incognito, depicts the runaway train as the devil. Walter Benjamin analyzed the theological dimensions of the faith in progress and the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for building railways in Convolute U of the Arcades Project, “Saint-Simon, Railroads.”

93. While Kafka is giving literary form to what Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi calls “the transformative power of the ethos of immigration,” I think this ethos is subsumed within a critical assessment of the relationship between modernity and mobility. See her brief discussion of Der Verschollene in Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 116.

94. Some critics such as Mark Anderson and Wolfgang Jahn have identified a correlation between this epistemological confusion and Kafka’s linguistic complexity, paradigmatically illustrated by the confusing syntactical structure of this sentence. Anderson, in his article “Kafka and New York: Notes on a Traveling Narrative,” has termed Kafka’s linguistic technique “the traveling narrative.” His argument, certainly in consonance with parts of mine, is that Kafka’s text can best be understood by examining the multiple valences of the term Verkehr (traffic). These include the representation of complex traffic patterns in the narrative, the layered linguistic structure of the sentences, and the sexual connotations of intercourse contained in the term Verkehr. He considers the montagelike narrative to have cinematic qualities, as Wolfgang Jahn first argued in his seminal study Kafkas Roman ‘Der Verschollene’ (‘Amerika’) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), especially 52–67.

95. In a short essay published in 1906 called “On Apperception,” Kafka first noted the epistemological consequences of mobility for perception. His essay, “Über Apperzeption,” is available in Max Brod’s Der Prager Kreis (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 94–95. Kafka posits that perceptions are always new, even of ostensibly the same objects: “[Since] all objects are located in a constantly changing time and light, and since we spectators no less so, we always encounter these objects in a different place.… Hence, apperception is not a state but a movement” (94–95). I am indebted to Mark Anderson for this reference (I modified his translation).

96. Albert Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and “Special Theory of Relativity” were first published in 1905. In her astute comparative study of modernist literature and modern science, N. Katherine Hayles argues that Einstein’s theory of relativity “contains two fundamental and related implications …: first, that the world is an interconnected whole …; and second, that there is no such thing as observing this interactive whole from a frame of reference removed from it. Relativity implies that we cannot observe the universe from an Olympian perspective.” N. Katharine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 49.

97. Rendered literally, “I am an American citizen with my entire soul.”

98. This is, of course, taken to an extreme in Kafka’s description of the legal system in The Trial. Along quite the same lines as I have argued with respect to Der Verschollene, we might interpret the operation of the legal system in The Trial: It is a complex, horizontally differentiated system of power that is linked together by utterly contingent, inscrutable, and incomprehensible connections. In fact, everything and everyone in this system is linked in one way or another to Josef K.’s case; however, he himself can never penetrate or discern the nature of the connections or the logic of the system’s totalitarian operation. As the famous parable attests, he is always “before the law,” waiting to be granted an admission that will never come.

99. The Muirs correct Kafka’s supposed misunderstanding of American geography by changing “Boston” to “Brooklyn” and the “Hudson” to the “East River.” Stanley Corngold discusses the significance of these “translation mistakes” in his Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapter 10, “On Translation Mistakes, with Special Attention to Kafka in Amerika.”

100. In this respect, I disagree with the attempts by certain critics to read Der Verschollene as a kind of bildungsroman, even if in a “special” or “unique” way. As I tried to make clear, I do not think that Kakfa is in any way extending this tradition. See, for example, Jürgen Pütz, Kafkas ‘Verschollener’: Ein Bildungsroman? Die Sonderstellung von Kafkas Romanfragment ‘Der Verschollene’ in der Tradition des Bildungsromans (Frankfurt: Lang, 1983). In a suggestive (but, in my opinion, unconvincing) article, Gerhard Neumann tries to show how Der Verschollene can be “read as a late form of the German Bildungsroman” because it fits within the tradition of the “Adventure-, migration-, and exile-novel.” But what he fails to account for is the complete lack of subject formation, guidance, growth, or even change in Karl Rossmann. Moreover, he gives inadequate attention to the real issues of “modernity” in the novel, namely, the structures and systems of power, which Karl consistently runs up against. “Ritual und Theater: Franz Kafkas Bildungsroman ‘Der Verschollene,’” in Franz Kafka: Der Verschollene. Le Disparu/L’Amérique—Écritures d’un nouveau monde? (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997), 51–78; here 77.

101. Derived from Aristotle, Luhmann’s definition of contingency is that which is “neither necessary nor impossible.” Observations on Modernity, 45; also Social Systems, 106.

102. If anything, Der Verschollene can be read as a negation of the bildungsroman tradition. Although he dose not discuss the novel, this is also the argument in Minden’s conclusion to his The German Bildungsroman, 245–48.

103. “Alles … nicht einem ‘Faden’ mehr folgt, sondern sich in einer unendlich verwobenen Fläche ausbreitet [Everything … no longer follows a ‘thread’ but rather spreads out into an infinitely interwoven space].” Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), 1044. For a thorough discussion of Musil vis-à-vis the question of narrative strategy and nationality, see Stefan Jonsson, Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

104. In this particularly overdetermined moment, Karl confesses his disenfranchisement by allying himself with black Americans. Rather than calling himself “Jewish,” he calls himself “Negro.” As Paul Gilroy indicates in his discussion of Jews and blacks in the final chapter of The Black Atlantic, certain black intellectuals, such as Edward Blyden, developed “a sense of the affinity between Jews and blacks based around the axes provided by suffering and servitude” (210). Through the figure of Karl, Kafka is extending this affinity.

105. As is well known, Kafka’s Der Verschollene, like both his other novels, was left uncompleted. Thus any definitive arguments about the novel’s end must be avoided. Nevertheless, given the structure of the novel as it is, there is no indication that Karl was to return “home” or, for that matter, that anything more than perpetual wandering would come to fruition. That Kafka intended “The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma” to be the final, inclusive chapter, a chapter that Kafka apparently quite enjoyed, is confirmed by Max Brod: “Afterword,” Amerika. What is more uncertain, however, is that Brod also says: “In enigmatic language Kafka used to hint smilingly, that within this ‘almost limitless’ theatre his young hero was going to find again a profession, a standby, his freedom, even his old home and his parents, as if by some celestial witchery” (299–300). Even if this last statement is true, the sheer outrageousness of Karl being reunited with his home and parents while traveling through Oklahoma seems to still underscore my claim about the radical contingency of the narrative structure. As the novel stands, however, no hints whatsoever are given that anything like Brod reports will take place.

106. In his lifetime Kafka published only the first chapter of Der Verschollene, “Der Heizer” (The stoker) in May 1913. Janouch’s assessment of Karl Rossmann comes from this piece.

107. Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: Quartet, 1985), 30. Although Kafka does indicate in his letters a number of conversations that he had with Janouch in the early 1920s, the reliability of this source is still somewhat questionable.

108. Ibid., 30.

109. This has been done, for example, by Gershon Shaked, The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987); Gerhard Neumann, “Der Wanderer und der Verschollene: Zum Problem der Identität in Goethes ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and in Kafkas ‘Amerika-Roman,’” in P. Stern and J. J White, eds., Paths and Labyrinths (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1985), 43–65. For a highly suggestive and insightful discussion of the influence of Yiddish theater on the development of Der Verschollene in general, see Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 122–35.

110. While Zilcosky discusses the influence of Goethe and his travel writings on Kafka, he does not mention the influence of Jewish travel writing, such as that of Sholem Aleichem; cf. Kafka’s Travels, 44ff.

111. See, for example, Arnold Eisen’s Galut: Modern Jewish Reflections on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Ezrahi’s Booking Passage.

112. Kafka, The Diaries, 1910–1923, 81 and 175. Kafka was preparing to give his “Little Introductory Speech on the Yiddish Language” in late January and early February of 1912, when he produced this outline of Yiddish literature. For more on Kafka’s encounters with Yiddish, cf. Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater.

113. For examples of these different types of comparisons, cf. Ezrahi’s Booking Passage. Also Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: Free, 2000). In her decision to bring Sholem Aleichem and Kafka together, Wisse writes: “Kafka follows so naturally after Sholem Aleichem that one might think his comic vision had derived from the older kin’s. The moral and cognitive breakdown that always threatens Sholem Aleichem’s characters overtakes Kafka’s fiction from the very first” (20).

114. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 83–109; here 83.

115. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 178.

116. Both novellas are translated in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth R. Wisse (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986).

117. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon.

118. “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” appears in English in Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third, ed. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1996). The best critical work on Mendele and the emergence of Yiddish literature is Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken, 1973).

119. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, 163.

120. Ibid., 186.

121. As the flipside to the equation of modernity with speed and transcendence, Sholem Aleichem taps into the slowly destructive capacities of a mundane modernity. For the former, see Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).

122. Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, 193.

123. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, 181–82.

124. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora.”

125. Ibid., 701.

126. Ibid., 721.

127. James Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–38; here 321.

4. The North Sea

1. Walter Benjamin analyzed railway construction side by side with the religious zeal of Saint Simon in Convolute U, “Saint-Simon, Railroads,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 571–602.

2. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 91.

3. Michel Chevalier, “Chemins de fer,” quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Saint Simon, Railroads,” 598.

4. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979, 81–82.

5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255–56; here 255.

6. Ibid., 255.

7. Ibid., 255.

8. G. W. F. Hegel, “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), 1:297.

9. Reisebilder (Pictures of travel) is the term given by Heine to his four collections of travel writings. The first, Reisebilder I: Die Heimkehr, Die Harzreise, Die Nordsee. Erste Abteilung (Pictures of travel I: The homecoming, The Harz journey, The North Sea, part one), was published in 1826; the second, Reisebilder II: Die Nordsee. Zweite Abteilung, Die Nordsee. Dritte Abteilung, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, Briefe aus Berlin (Pictures of travel II: The North Sea, part two, The North Sea, part three, Ideas: The book Le Grand, Letters from Berlin), was published in 1827; the third, Reisebilder III: Reise von München nach Genua, Die Bäder von Lucca (Pictures of travel III: The journey from Munich to Genoa, The baths of Lucca), was published in 1830; the last, Reisebilder IV: Die Stadt Lucca, Englische Fragmente (Pictures of travel IV: The town of Lucca, English fragments), was published in 1831. All four books are published together as volume 2 of Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 6 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1968–1975).

10. Although Heine did not, of course, use the term deconstruction to describe his Reisebilder, I am arguing that the Reisebilder effectively do just that, namely, deconstruct Hegel’s universality of world history by mimicking the travel narrative as “history with a Jewish difference.” Because the Reisebilder present a history of particularity and betray a specifically Jewish consciousness of history, they can be productively read next to and against Hegel’s systematic idea of world history. I will use the term deconstruction to mean this kind of doubled reading of Hegel, both next to and against his system from within. Derrida’s most important engagement with Hegelian ideas comes in his own “doubled reading” of Hegel and Genet, the universal and the particular, respectively. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

11. Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 78; Jost Hermand, Der frühe Heine: Eine Kommentar zu den ‘Reisebildern’ (Munich: Winkler, 1976), 108.

12. For an overview of the Science of Judaism in the context of the German-Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), see Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), chapter 4; also Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), chapter 6.

13. The three lectures delivered by Gans between 1821 and 1823 are reprinted in Norbert Waszek, Eduard Gans (1797–1839): Hegelianer-Jude-Europäer. Texte und Dokumente (Frankfurt: Lang, 1991), 55–85. Gans also wrote the forward to both Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts in 1833 and Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte in 1837. For an excellent discussion of Gans and Hegel, see Norbert Waszek, “‘Wissenschaft und Liebe zu den Seinen’—Eduard Gans and die hegelianischen Ursprünge der ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums,’” in Eduard Gans (1797–1839): Politischer Professor zwischen Restauration und Vormärz, ed. Reinhard Blänkner, Gerhard Göhler, and Norbert Waszek (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002), 71–103.

14. Georg Lukács, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Francke, 1952).

15. “On the History of Religion and Philosophy and Germany” and “The Romantic School” were intended to be published together as a singe work, as they appeared in French under the title De l’Allemagne, a clear reference to Germaine de Staël’s 1810 work of the same title. Heine’s Geständisse (Confessions) were written in the winter of 1854 and contain numerous references to Hegel, mostly concerning his personal attempts to come to terms with Hegel. For instance, Heine writes: “How difficult it is to understand Hegel’s writings and how easy it is for one to be led astray and believe oneself to understand him having only learned to construct dialectical formulas.” Sämtliche Schriften, 6.1:473.

16. Harold Mah, “The French Revolution and the Problem of German Modernity: Hegel, Heine, and Marx,” New German Critique 50 (1990): 3–20; here 10. As Mah and others have indicated, Heine wrote a new preface to this work in 1852, essentially repudiating his earlier claims and rejecting Hegelianism. Moreover, it is worth noting that Mah’s argument is also inflected by Lukács’s periodization and focuses exclusively on the post-1831 Heine.

17. Eduard Krüger, Heine und Hegel: Dichtung, Philosophie und Politik bei Heinrich Heine (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1977).

18. Ibid., 111–39. Space does not permit for an evaluation of the details of Krüger’s argument; however, it should be noted that he does not simply replicate Lukács’s argument without spelling out the changing ideological and philosophical commitments of Marx and Heine during this period. It should also be noted that Marx also penned his notorious essay “On the Jewish Question” in 1844. Anita Bunyan has even suggested that the negative portrayal of Jews as money hungry may have come from Marx’s readings of Heine’s The Baths of Lucca. See “Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx Meet” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 171–77; here 177.

19. Between December 1843 and early 1845, Heine and Marx had several meetings and exchanges. Krüger does briefly mention Heine’s 1822–23 text “Über Polen” (On Poland), which was published around the time Heine heard Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history. Krüger detects a “dialectical treatment of history” in Heine’s articulation of the “political destiny of the Poles,” but he does not provide any further details. Krüger, Heine und Hegel, 49.

20. Klaus Briegleb has productively posed the question of history in Heine’s poetry and his reception of Hegel in his article “Abgesang auf die Geschichte? Heines jüdisch-poetische Hegelrezeption,” in Gerhard Höhn, ed., Heinrich Heine: Ästhetischpolitische Profile (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 17–37. More recently, in his Bei den Wassern Babels: Heinrich Heine, jüdische Schriftsteller in der Moderne (Munich: DTV, 1997), Briegleb has shown how Heine’s reception of Hegel informed a range of critical responses over the course of Heine’s career.

21. Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels, 140, 139.

22. Ibid.,138.

23. Multiple versions of these lectures exist: the earliest, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, was edited by Eduard Gans in 1837. The version by Karl Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (1840), is the standard edition, volume 12 of Hegel’s Werke. Recently, another reconstruction of the lectures was published, based on three sets of lecture notes from the same winter semester 1822–23: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Karl Heinz Ilting, Karl Brehmer, and Hoo Nam Seelmann, vol. 12 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996). I will refer to both the standard edition and this reconstruction since the latter is probably closest to what Heine heard.

24. These lectures formed the basis of his 1821 double publication, G. W. F. Hegel, Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse and Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werke, vol. 7.

25. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts, eds. Emil Angehrn, Martin Bondeli, and Hoo Nam Seelmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), 14:198. This book represents the reconstructed lectures given in Berlin during 1819–20.

26. Hegel, Werke, 7:503. The original formula, “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” came from a 1784 poem by Schiller called “Resignation,” and it makes its first Hegelian appearance in the Heidelberger Enzyklopädie (1817). The Hegelian formulation was the topic of the Hegel Congress in 1999 and the proceedings are available in Die Weltgeschichte – das Weltgericht? ed. Rüdiger Bubner and Walter Mesch (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001).

27. For an attempt to articulate Hegel’s relationship to colonialism and views on Africa, cf. Robert Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of Ashanti,” in Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998), 41–63.

28. According to Charles Taylor, the “Germanic world” does not refer to Germany, per se, but rather to the “barbarians who swarmed over the Roman empire at its end and founded the new nations of Western Europe. There is no particular chauvinism in this use of the word German.” Hegel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 398.

29. Jews have no freedom—the hallmark of Christianity and crucial to the progress of world history—because they are dogmatically bound to their own laws. Hegel’s argument is remarkably similar to Horkheimer and Adorno’s explanation of the origins of anti-Semitism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Because Jews have their own laws, particularly the Bildverbot, they do not need the laws of civilization in order to “control mimesis.” Jews are hated precisely because they have their own laws, and are, hence, condemned to be always already “outside” civilization. In the same way, Hegel disparages the Jews because of their laws, which he sees as antithetical to the formation of civil society. Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 180–81.

30. Kierkegaard reads Abraham in precisely this way, but not in order to deprecate his willingness to transcend the law but rather to praise his radically individual commitment to faith. For Hegel, Jews represent a kind of slave mentality because their laws are enforced by a rigidly abstract code of morality, with no connection to the formation of civil society, family, or state. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1985).

31. Cf. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew, 165–67.

32. Eduard Gans, “Erste Rede vor dem ‘Kulturverein,” in Waszek, Eduard Gans, 55–62; here 57.

33. Ibid., 57.

34. Ibid., 57–58.

35. Eduard Gans, “Halbjähriger Bericht im Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,” in Waszek, Eduard Gans, 62–75; here 65.

36. Ibid., 66.

37. Ibid., 66–67.

38. Eduard Gans, “Dritter Bericht im Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,” in Waszek, Eduard Gans, 75–85; here 80–81.

39. After the dissolution of the Verein in 1824, the strong Hegelianism of the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums was replaced by an effort to resist assimilation. As Susannah Heschel has argued using postcolonial theory, Abraham Geiger’s study of Judaism, for example, was motivated by the attempt “to subvert Christian hegemony and establish a new position for Judaism within European history and thought.” Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (1999): 61–85; here 64. I thank Leslie Adelson for drawing my attention to this reference.

40. Although Heine was a member of the Verein from August 4, 1822, until he left Berlin in May of 1823, his understanding of “Judaism” and its place in Europe was never inflected by such a resolutely Hegelian philosophy of history, nor did he ever pursue a “scientific” study of Judaism. Moreover, the members of the Verein cannot even be said to have espoused a consistent philosophy on the “scientific” study of Judaism. Isaac Marcus Jost, for instance, contended that Jews were not even a people and, hence, could not be studied as if they were, despite the protestations of Zunz or Gans. For more on Heine’s relationship to the members of the Verein, cf. Edith Lutz, Der ‘Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden’ und sein Mitglied H. Heine (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997).

41. S. S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A Study of his Portraits of Jews and Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10–40.

42. Part of the reason for Heine’s and Gans’s baptism is that Heine was hoping to find and Gans already had an academic teaching position in a Prussian institution of higher education. However, in the late 1810s and early 1820s, a growing institutional anti-Semitism largely prevented Jews from acquiring such teaching positions in public colleges, and this sentiment was codified into law in 1822.

43. The twenty-four poems are published in Heine’s Sämtliche Schriften as part 1 of the Reisebilder.

44. Prawer remarks that Heine’s depiction of Christ here is “the irenic Christ” whose sure sign of his Judaism, as Heine relates elsewhere, is his circumcision; cf. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 114–15. In the third part of his writings on the North Sea, Heine’s narrator discusses his ironic rapprochement with Christianity: “The Lord knows I am a good Christian, and am often even prepared to visit his house, but by some mishap, I am always hindered in my good intentions. Generally, this is done by some chatty gentleman who holds me up on the way there, and even if I get to the gate of the temple, some jocular, irreverent thought comes to mind, and then I regard it as sinful to enter. Last Sunday … an extract from Goethe’s Faust came into my head.” Sämtliche Schriften 2:217–18.

45. Sammons, Heinrich Heine, 117.

46. Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1957), 69.

47. See also Pierre Grappin’s commentary on the poem in Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, 16 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffmann, 1986), 1.2:1054–57.

48. This image of world history appearing in a glass also comes up in Die Harzreise, when Heine describes an evening spent drinking with patriotic Germans. He relentlessly ridicules their patriotism and even advises one to write bad poetry, full of “ragged verse,” in order to better represent the morasses and crooked paths of the Teutonic forest where the mythical Hermann battle took place. Sämtliche Schriften 2:149–50.

49. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 153.

50. “An Jules Michelet in Paris,” January 20, 1834, Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse: Säkularausgabe (Berlin: Akademie; Paris: Cars, 1970), 21:74.

51. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater (New York: McGraw, 1984), 234–35.

52. Leopold von Ranke proclaimed these famous words in the preface to his Histories of the Romantic and Germanic Peoples (1824). Quoted in Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 67. To be sure, the complexity of Ranke’s ideas cannot be reduced to this single dictum. Nevertheless, the scientific treatment of the past as a recoverable object is certainly crucial to his critical project. In Walter Benjamin’s trenchant analysis of his pervasive methodological influence, he assessed Ranke’s historicism to be “the strongest narcotic of the [nineteenth] century.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463.

53. In Derrida’s analysis of Marx, he analyzes the ways in which ghosts disjoin or disrupt the progression of time using the famous declaration of Hamlet, “Time is out of joint.” Heine is doing something quite similar. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

54. Cf. Sammons, Heinrich Heine; Hermand, Der Frühe Heine.

55. Precisely by avoiding any kind of “systematic” writing, Hinrich C. Seeba has cogently argued analogously that Heine’s Briefe aus Berlin (1822) present the seemingly innocent urban stroll as “a political venture in disguise.” What is more important than what Heine says is what he does not say, and, hence, “seeing what is not written and what must not be questioned [is] an oppositional act that defies censure.” “‘Keine Systematie’: Heine in Berlin and the Origin of the Urban Gaze,” in Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub, eds., Heinrich Heine’s Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Lang, 1999), 89–108; here 100.

56. As Amir Eshel has recently argued in “Cosmopolitanism and Searching for the Sacred Space in Jewish Literature,” many of Heine’s works, ranging from the Reisebilder to Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen and his famous poem “Jehuda ben Halevy,” “can be read as a constant attempt to inhabit places poetically in the European cosmos” by a poet who “does not have and will not have a home to which he can return.” Jewish Social Studies 9.3 (2003): 121–38; here 126–27.

57. Letter to Moses Moser, October 14, 1826, Werke 20:265.

58. Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Heine: The Wound” is the classic—and not unproblematic—attempt to understand Heine’s German-Jewish identity as a “homelessness” or “wound” vis-à-vis the German tradition after Goethe. The essay appears in his Notes on Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:80–90. For a thoughtful reflection on Heine’s Zerrissenheit, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s chapter “Language, Poetry, and Race: The Example of Heinrich Heine,” in his Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), chapter 5.

59. Derrida attempts to enact a similar deconstruction in Glas by performing a double reading of Hegel against Genet. Hegel’s idea of the universal development of Weltgeist is shown to be a Christian ghost story, which grounds its legitimacy in the rejection the “Abrahamic cut.” Glas, 41.

60. Quoted in Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 100–1.

61. Cf. Seeba, “‘Keine Systematie.’”

62. Jost Hermand has also pointed out the way that these dialectical tensions offer a pointed alternative to an all-consuming Hegelian philosophy of history. As he writes, Heine’s “dialectical view of history … stretches back to the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Middle Ages, indeed to all cultural circles and the reception of these traditions … [such that] everything is inserted in, over, and through antitheses and enumerations.” Hermand sees these “antitheses” and multiple contradictions as “the poetic expression of a consciousness of history which synthetically blends together.” Although I do not think that Heine’s consciousness of history can be said to be “synthetic,” he does mix together and reassemble the “raw material” of the past in a volatile, dialectical constellation with his present. Der Frühe Heine, 110–11

63. See Jost Hermand’s commentary in Heinrich Heine, 6:836–37.

64. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 22.

65. Ibid., 142.

66. Ibid., 144.

67. As Derrida wrote in Specters of Marx: “[The] deconstructive procedure … consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history—in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger. Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity … another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design” (74–75).

68. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254.

5. Nuremberg-Fürth-Palestine

1. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Aussprachen mit Juden,” Der Kunstwart, 25, no. 22 (2 August 1912): 226. Qtd. in Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan,” in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Jewish Museum, 1999), 20. I thank Juliet Koss for the kind reference.

2. Waltraud Schade, “Hotel Excelsior: Stresemannstrasse 78,” in Helmut Engel, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Wilhelm Treue, eds., Geschichtslandschaft Berlin—Orte und Ereignisse, vol. 5: Kreuzberg (Berlin: Nicolai, 1994), 70–83; Helmut Maier, Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, n.d.), 255–58; Rainer Knothe, Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1987), 59–60. The stores included a winery, flower shop, bakery, and stationary store.

3. Max Grunwald, “Juden als Rheder und Seefahrer,” Ost und West 7 (July 1902): 479–86. The article was also published as a small pamphlet under the same title in 1902. Further citations will be documented parenthetically as JR followed by the page number.

4. Johann Gottfried Herder, “The Hebrews,” in On World History: An Anthology, eds. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze, trans. Ernest A. Menze, with Michael Palma (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997), 263.

5. For an assessment of the significance of Herder’s coinage of the Jew as parasite metaphor, see Alex Bein’s Die Judenfrage. Biographie eines Weltproblems, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 2:93–95; and Bein’s essay “The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with special Reference to Germany,” Leo Baeck Year Book 19 (1964): 3–40.

6. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 5th ed., 2 vols. (1899; Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1904) 1:454 (my emphasis). Further references are documented parenthetically.

7. For a fascinating account of the vibrancy of Jewish seafaring in antiquity, see Raphael Patai’s The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For a discussion of the tradition of the wandering Jew in its many cross-cultural variants, see Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds., The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press, 1986); in particular, the essay by R. Edelman, “Ahasuerus, The Wandering Jew: Origin and Background,” 1–10.

8. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv.

9. As Susanne Zantop has shown, German colonial fantasies existed long before Germany actually became a colonial nation under Bismarck. While it was more limited in terms of both time span and global reach than that of other Western European countries, German colonialism perpetrated some of the worst atrocities, including the Herero genocide of 1904, in its brief existence. An extensive literature on German colonialism has developed in recent years. In addition to Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), some of the key studies include Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998); Russell Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Alexander Honold und Oliver Simons, eds., Kolonialismus als Kultur: Literatur, Medien, Wissenschaft in der deutschen Gründerzeit des Fremden (Tübingen: Francke, 2002); John K. Noyes, Colonial Space. Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Reading: Harwood, 1992). For an argument showing the long-term development of German colonial discourse, see George Steinmetz, “Precoloniality and Colonial Subjectivity: Ethnographic Discourse and Native Policy in German Overseas Imperialism, 1780s–1914,” Political Power and Social Theory 15 (2001): 135–228.

10. J. G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Leipzig: Meiner, 1944 [1808]); Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Westport: Greenwood, 1979); all references will be documented parenthetically as Addresses followed by the page number.

11. Zantop, Colonial Fantasies.

12. J. G. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Gliwitzky, 10 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1988), vol. 7. For more on Fichte’s ideas, see “Fichte’s Blueprint for Autarky,” in Michael A. Heilperin, Studies in Economic Nationalism (Geneva: Droz, 1960), 82–96.

13. J. G. Fichte, Der geschloßne Handelsstaat, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7. 139.

14. Friedrich List, Le Système Naturel d’Économie Politique/Das Natürliche System der Politischen Ökonomie (1837), in Werke, ed. Artur Sommer and Wilhelm V. Sonntag, 10 vols. (Berlin: Hobbing, 1935), 4:519–27.

15. Ibid., 4:397. Further citations to List’s Werke will be documented parenthetically as List followed by the volume and page number.

16. Barrie Axford, The Global System: Economics, Politics and Culture (New York: St. Martins, 1995), 27.

17. This goes for a wide range of studies on globalization, from the most sophisticated cultural analyses, such as Frederick Buell’s National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), to popular celebrations such as Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1995) or Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). One of the most comprehensive books to buck the trend and embed the concept of globalization within historical networks of change, ranging from the scientific to the financial, environmental to the social, is David Held, Anthony G. McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, eds., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). For critically skeptical assessments, cf. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); or Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” in Critical Inquiry 19.4 (Summer 1993): 726–51.

18. Cairncross, The Death of Distance; Stanley D. Brunn and Thomas R. Leinbach, eds., Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communication and Information (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991).

19. Cf. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

20. Negroponte, Being Digital, 230, 238.

21. Cairncross, The Death of Distance, 279.

22. Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State and the Pressures of Globalization,” trans. G. M. Goshgarian, New Left Review 235 (May/June 1999): 40–59. Although an advocate of a so-called postconventional identity (that is, an identity not grounded in nationality), Habermas does not suggest that globalization is the panacea for overcoming nationalism and identities derived from national heritages and histories.

23. Friedrich List, “Eisenbahnen und Canäle, Dampfboote und Dampfwagen-transport,” in Staats-Lexikon oder Encyclopädie der Staatswissenschaften, ed. Carl von Rotteck and Carl Welcker, 15 vols. (Altona: Hammerich, 1837), 4:650–778; here 659–60.

24. Ibid., 4:660.

25. Bernhard Siegert gives a short discussion of Klüber in his book Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 57–59.

26. Ludwig Klüber, Das Postwesen in Teutschland, Wie es war, ist, und seyn könnte (Erlangen, 18n). Further citations will be documented parenthetically as PT followed by the page number.

27. Siegert, Relays, 57.

28. In a second book on the relationship between the world postage system and German nationality, Klüber further argued that “global” communication, far from incompatible with patriotism and national feelings, would actually help to promote both of the latter: Ludwig Klüber, Patriotische Wünsche: Das Postwesen in Teutschland betreffend (Weimar, 1814).

29. Heinrich von Kleist, “Useful Inventions: Project for a Cannonball Postal System,” in An Abyss Deep Enough, ed. and trans. Philip B. Miller (New York: Dutton, 1982), 245–48.

30. Ibid., 245.

31. Ibid., 246.

32. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” in The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

33. Michael S. Batts, A History of Histories of German Literature, 1835–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). My history of German literary histories produced during this period also draws on the following studies: Jürgen Fohrmann, Das Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte: Entstehung und Scheitern einer nationalen Poesiegeschichtsschreibung zwischen Humanismus und Deutschem Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989); Sibylle Ohly, Literaturgeschichte und politische Reaktion im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert: A. F. C. Vilmars ‘Geschichte der deutschen National-Literature’ (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1982).

34. Ludwig Wachler, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der teutschen Nationalliteratur, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1818–1819).

35. Johann Wilhelm Schaefer, Grundriß der Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (1836), quoted in Batts, A History of Histories of German Literature, 6.

36. Ibid.

37. Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Neuere Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1843–48); Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1836).

38. For critical overviews of Young Germany, cf. Jeffrey L. Sammons, Six Essays on the Young German Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1972); Gert Mattenklott and Klaus R. Scherpe, eds., Demokratisch-revolutionäre Literatur in Deutschland: Vormärz (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1974); Joseph A. Kruse and Bernd Kortländer, eds., Das Junge Deutschland: Kolloquium zum 150. Jahrestag des Verbots von 10. Dezember 1815 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1987).

39. One could certainly see the decision of “die deutsche Bundesversammlung” to outlaw particular works by Heine, Gutzkow, Mundt, Wienbarg, and Laube as one of the first steps in securing a unified German cultural tradition. According to the joint ruling, all these authors stand accused of defiling social relations, destroying morality, and, most of all, regarding Christianity with disdain. Heine is even accused of propagating a Weltreligion in his salon writings through his expression of enthusiasm for Saint Simonism. “Der Beschluß des Bundestages” is reproduced in Jost Hermand, ed., Das Junge Deutschland: Texte und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 331–34.

40. Wolfgang Menzel, “Unmoralische Literatur” (1835), reprinted in Politische Avantgarde, 1830–1840. Eine Dokumentation zum Jungen Deutschland,’ ed. Alfred Estermann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972), 1:56–64; here 62.

41. Sammons, Six Essays on the Young German Novel, 51.

42. Friedrich List, Über ein sächsisches Eisenbahn-System als Grundlage eines allgemeinen Deutschen Eisenbahn-Systems und insbesondere über die Anlegung einer Eisenbahn von Leipzig nach Dresden (Leipzig, 1833). The pamphlet is also reproduced in List, Werke 3.1:155–95.

43. As early as 1819, List had publicly advocated, against Metternich’s wishes, for the formation of a German customs union in order to foster free trade between the German states and, in his analysis, economically strengthen Germany. Understandably, Metternich viewed a unified Germany as a potential threat to the economic and political clout of Austria-Hungary. Cf. Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 105; W. O. Henderson, Friedrich List: Economist and Visionary, 1789–1846 (London: Cass, 1983), 46–48.

44. Despite the clear economic and national benefits of railways, List spent the last decade of his life—largely in vain—trying to convince politicians to construct railway lines connecting together the various German cities and states. Although he met with countless politicians and financiers as well as published scores of articles and pamphlets on the beneficial effects of railway, List only succeeded in convincing two states to build railways: Saxony in 1837 and Thuringia in 1841. Unrecognized and largely scorned, he took his own life in 1846. For more biographical details, see Henderson, Friedrich List.

45. Ibid., 79.

46. The state as body metaphor has a long prehistory that goes back to Aristotle and plays a significant role in modern discourses on state formation, such as in Hobbes and Kant. In taking up this metaphor, Fichte and List are building on its valences of regeneration. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the concept of regeneration had broken away from its strict uses in medicine and theology and came to designate rebirth in all its respects—physical, moral, and political. It was explicitly linked with its antonym, degeneration, and gained explanatory power as part of the Enlightenment belief in progress and the perfectibility of the human race. Not only could individual bodies be regenerated, but the larger social or political body could also be reborn, renewed, and perfected. Regeneration had gained a revolutionary corporeal meaning. See the discussions by Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999); and Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

47. Here Fichte is reworking the biblical story of cutting up and distributing the parts of the body to the twelve tribes of Israel, a reference that his contemporary, Heinrich von Kleist, also used in his drama of nationalism, Hermannsschlacht.

48. Hinrich C. Seeba, “Auferstehung des Geistes: Zur religiösen Rhetorik nationaler Einheit,” in Thomas Müller, Johannes G. Pankau, Gert Ueding, eds., “Nicht allein mit den Worten.” Festschrift für Joachim Dyck zum 60. Geburtstag (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995), 266–82; here 278.

49. Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, 1835ff. All references will be documented parenthetically as G followed by the volume and page number; here 4:6–7.

50. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 616.

51. Quoted ibid.

52. Goethe, Conversation (July 15, 1827), in Conversations with Eckermann, 1823–1832, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point, 1984), 175; also in Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1957), 369.

53. Goethe, quoted in Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur, 371.

54. Ibid., 372.

55. Karl Gutzkow, Ueber Göthe: Im Wendepunkte zweier Jahrhunderte (1836) (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1973), 230.

56. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 227 (translation modified). For a discussion of the concept of world literature, see David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

57. Sheehan, German History, 502.

58. List, quoted in Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism, 103–4.

59. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 1823–1832, 227–28.

60. Menzel, Die Deutsche Literatur. All references will be cited parenthetically as M followed by the volume and page number. Translations were adapted from Wolfgang Menzel, German Literature, trans. C. C. Felton, 3 vols. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1840).

61. Many of the German states, owing to their small size and desire to retain autonomy, refused to let any private entrepreneurs finance the first railways. It was feared that foreign capitalists, particularly the Rothschilds, would exert an “undue economic influence” over their state. This was, for example, precisely the reasoning of the Baden parliament in 1838. Cf. Henderson, Friedrich List: Economist and Visionary, 138.

62. List, quoted in Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 273, 439–40. After the first decade of railway construction in Germany, private Jewish bankers and Jewish entrepreneurs played an ever increasing role in investing the needed capital for the expansive railway development during the 1850s and 1860s. Outside of the Rothschild family, Bethel Henry Strousberg and Joseph Mendelssohn (of the Berlin banking family) played prominent roles. Cf. W. E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite, 1820–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 100–18; Joachim Borchart, Der europäische Eisenbahnkönig Bethel Henry Strousberg (Munich: Beck, 1991).

63. Ferguson, The World’s Banker, 451. To be sure, France was hardly immune to a vitriolic anti-Semitic backlash during this time. As Ferguson shows, a growing number of books, pamphlets, and newspapers emerged during the 1840s to denounce the private, Jewish railway monopolies in France. Of these, Alphonse Toussenel’s The Jew-Kings of the Epoch: A History of Financial Feudalism codified the image of the Jewish railway baron as an exploitive capitalist; cf. Ferguson, 453–54. But, unlike in Germany, railways were hardly coded in France as the means of attaining “national unity.”

64. No imperial governing authority existed to grant concessions for the construction of railways, and, hence, as Anselm Rothschild explained his lack of involvement in 1838, “here in Germany, railways get off the ground only with a great deal of effort.” Quoted in Ferguson, The World’s Banker, 439.

65. Ludwig Börne, Briefe aus Paris, in Sämtliche Schriften, 5 vols. (Düsseldorf: Melzer, 1964), 3:758.

66. Wolfgang Menzel, “Die jeune allemagne in Deutschland,” Literaturblatt, no. 1 (January 1, 1836), 4.

67. Ibid.

68. Wolfgang Menzel, “Die jeune allemagne in Deutschland,” Literaturblatt, no. 2 (January 4, 1836), 8.

69. List, “Idées sur les réformes économiques, commerciales et financières applicables à la France” in Revue Encyclopédique (March, April, November 1831), in Werke 5:59–91. List argued that a national “railway system” would help strengthen France by fostering internal commerce and the centralization of political authority.

70. Edward Whiting Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York: Norton, 1972), 131.

71. M. Charié-Marsaines, “Mémoire sur les chemins de fer considérés au point de vue militaire” (Paris, 1862).

72. Ibid., 4.

73. Ibid., 14, 23.

74. Although beyond the scope of my project here, it would be interesting to comparatively examine the emergence and transformation of the concept of nationality in the nineteenth century by paying attention to the role of railways in national unification, particularly in countries such as Russia, Italy, and the United States, where “traditional” unification cannot be presupposed. The essays by Alexander Gerschenkron, collected in Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), offer the classic (economic) interpretative framework for doing this. In the United States the debate over railways and economic development has raged since Robert Fogel, in his seminal book Railroads and American Economic Growth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), argued that railways were not nearly as pivotal for American development as had been previously thought. In his analysis of the economics of German railways in the nineteenth century, Rainer Fremdling has demonstrated that Fogel’s thesis cannot be accurately applied to Germany, where, in fact, “a single innovation” (namely, railways) was “vital for economic growth in the nineteenth century.” See Rainer Fremdling, “Railroads and German Economic Growth: A Leading Sector Analysis with a Comparison to the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 3 (September 1977): 583–604; here 601. Another, more recent, nation-specific account is Albert Schram’s Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

75. The primary works to initiate the Sonderweg theory are A. J. P. Taylor’s The Course of Germany History (1945) and Helmuth Plessner’s Die verspätete Nation (1959) both of which explain German history by pointing to its unique failures (the failure of a proper bourgeois revolution, Germany’s supposed hostility to modernization). The best critical account of the history of the Sonderweg argument is still David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley’s The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). As Blackbourn rightly argues, we must “question assumptions about German peculiarity, while at the same time indicating what was actually distinctive about the German nineteenth-century experience” (165). I share this view.

76. Otto von Bismarck, Werke in Auswahl, ed. Gustav Adolf Rein et al., 8 vols. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965), 3:3.

77. Cf. John Westwood, Railways at War (San Diego: Howell North, 1980), 7; Wolfgang Klee, Preussische Eisenbahngeschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), 97–113.

78. Handbuch der deutschen Eisenbahnstrecken: Eröffnungsdaten, 1835–1935. Streckenlängen, Konzessionen, Eigentumsverhältnisse, introduction by Horst-Werner Dumjahn (Mainz: Dumjahn, 1984), 28.

79. Klee, Preussische Eisenbahngeschichte, 224.

80. James M. Brophy, Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1867–1890 (Columbus: Ohio State University Pres, 1998), 169.

81. Although the particulars of the so-called Eisenbahnpolitik are beyond the scope of my concerns here, it is worth pointing out, as Fritz Stern has done, that Bismarck’s enthusiasm for nationalizing the railroads was also sustained by his own personal financial investments in the railroads. Cf. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977), 210–17; for more on the Reich’s railway law and the mandatory sale of privately held railway lines, cf. Rudolf Morsey, Die oberste Reichsverwaltung unter Bismarck, 1867–1890 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1957), 139–60.

82. Michel Chevalier, “Chemins de fer,” quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 598.

83. Helmuth von Moltke, “On the Bill Relating to the Acquisition of Several Private Railways for the State,” in Essays, Speeches, and Memoirs, trans. Charles Flint McCumpha (New York: Harper, 1893), 2:37 (translation modified).

84. Stern, Gold and Iron, 217.

85. Bismarck, quoted in Stern, Gold and Iron, 203.

86. For an insightful conceptual history of the ship of state metaphor, cf. Eckart Schäfer, “Das Staatsschiff: Zur Präzision eines Topos,” in Peter Jehn, ed., Toposforsc-hung: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972).

87. Although Bismarck famously rejected the need for Germany to have colonies, he changed his mind in 1884–85, outlining the economic and political necessity of establishing Schutzgebiete (protectorates) in a series of speeches given at the Reichstag between June 26, 1884, and March 16, 1885. These speeches are reprinted in Bismarck, Werke in Auswahl, vol. 7. Otto Pflanze argues that Bismarck’s support of German colonies reflects a kind of “Torschlusspanik,” namely a fear that Germany would be shut out of the global market as new geographies of world politics took shape. For a thorough discussion of Bismarck and the colonial question, see Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), vol. 3.

88. Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebücher: Zionistisches Tagebuch, 1895–1899, ed. Alex Bein, et al., 7 vols. (Berlin: Propyläen, 1983), vols. 2–3; here 2:142. All further references to Herzl’s letters and diaries will be documented parenthetically as T, followed by the volume and page number.

89. For more on the historical and political context of the development of Herzl’s ideas, cf. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), chapter 3.

90. Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

91. Hinrich C. Seeba, “‘Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit’: The German Quest for National Identity in the Nineteenth Century,” in Concepts of National Identity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue/Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen zur Frage der nationalen Identität, ed. Peter Boerner (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1986), 153–66; here 164–65.

92. About a half of year later, Herzl uses almost the same explanation in the preface to Der Judenstaat: “I say that this force, when correctly used, is strong enough to run a great machine and transport human beings and goods. The machine may look however one wants.” Herzl is certainly drawing a parallel between the “machine” of Zionism and railways, something that will emerge in his ideas as the necessary prerequisite for the practical realization of Zionism. Der Judenstaat is reproduced in Theodor Herzl, Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv: Ivrith, 1934), 1:19–105; here 20. All further references to Der Judenstaat will be documented parenthetically as J followed by the page number to this edition.

93. In a feuilleton he wrote for the Neue Freie Presse on May 31, 1896, “Das lenkbare Luftschiff” (The guidable airship), Herzl presented an allegory of Zionism using the metaphor of the zeppelin. The article is reprinted in Philosophische Erzählungen (Berlin: Harz, 1919), 25–39.

94. Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Zionism, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York, Atheneum, 1970), 179.

95. Ibid., 184.

96. Herzl’s leadership of the masses was, however, far from undisputed. In trying to secure a location for the First Congress, growing protests, largely from the assimilated Jewish communities in Western Europe, forced Herzl to move the conference from Munich to Basel. The Executive Committee of the Association of Rabbis in Germany, consisting of five rabbis from Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, Halberstadt, and Munich, published a protest article in the Berliner Tageblatt rejecting Zionism because “Judaism obligates its adherents to serve the fatherland to which they belong with full devotion and to further its national interests with all their hearts and all their strength.” Quoted in Bein, Theodor Herzl, 221. Building on his airship allegory, Herzl’s response was that “Zionism is not a party. One can come to Zionism from any party; in the same way, Zionism embraces all the factions in the life of the people. Zionism is the Jewish people in movement [unterwegs]” (my emphasis). Herzl, “Protestrabbiner,” in Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, 1:169–74; here 170.

97. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 167.

98. For more on the French political context of LeBon’s work, cf. Robert A. Nye, “Introduction,” to Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995 [1895]), 1–26. Also, for the growth of mass politics and anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus affair, see Nancy Fitch, “Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern Anti-Semitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France,” American Historical Review 97 (February 1992): 55–95.

99. LeBon, The Crowd, 34.

100. Quoted in Bein, Theodor Herzl, 231–32.

101. Michael Berkowitz has also intimated a link between Herzl and LeBon in his astute analysis of the cultural creation of Zionism in his Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30.

102. In Der Judenstaat, he rhetorically asks, “Who among us knows enough Hebrew to buy a railway ticket in that language?” (J 94).

103. Herzl, “Mauschel,” in Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, 1:209–15; here 209.

104. Ibid., 211.

105. Ibid., 214.

106. Ibid., 212.

107. Ibid., 215.

108. Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (1804), quoted in Seeba, “Auferstehung des Geistes,” 267.

109. Herzl, “The Family Affliction” (originally published in The American Hebrew), in Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses, trans. Harry Zohn, 2 vols. (New York: Herzl, 1975), 2:43–47; here 45.

110. Ibid.

111. Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1892–1893). For translations I used the following English edition: Degeneration, 7th ed. (New York: Appleton, 1895), 560.

112. Nordau, Degeneration, 38–39 (translation modified).

113. Ibid., 557. The violence of Nordau’s imagery of crushing the degenerate “vermin” to death had, of course, a disturbing afterlife in the fervid adoption of race science and eugenics in the service of state formation and state purification. Moreover, throughout the twentieth century, the concept of the Ungeziefer has consistently indicated the abject of society, the absolutely vile deviation from the norm. Franz Kafka famously thematized this in his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into an Ungeziefer and is ultimately killed by his family for the sake of preserving bourgeois society. More ominously, the association of Jews with parasites and vermin was a persistent topos of Nazi propaganda, something that was given a direct visual association in the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi film, The Eternal Jew (1940). For a more extensive discussion of Nordau, see my “‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’: Max Nordau and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration,” Modernism/Modernity 10.2 (2003): 269–96.

114. Nordau, Degeneration, 550.

115. Nordau’s original call for a “muscular Judaism” was given at the second annual Zionist Congress in 1898. His article “Muskeljudentum” was first published in the Jüdische Turnzeitung of June 1900. The article is reprinted in Max Nordau, Zionistische Schriften, ed. Zionistischen Aktionskomittee (Cologne/Leipzig: Jüdischer, 1909), 379–81; here 380.

116. For a thorough discussion of the figure of the muscle Jew, see my “‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’” and my book, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge, 2007).

117. Although Germany never carried out a full-fledged colonial program in the Middle East analogous to its efforts in Southwest Africa, German colonies were established in Palestine as outposts of European civilization and Bildung. Unlike the ethnographic and genealogical studies on race mixing that the Germans undertook in Africa, something that, as Russell Berman points out, informed key aspects of Nazi racial thought, the colonies in Palestine were founded primarily with cultural-imperial, missionary goals in mind. This was also the rationale given for the kaiser’s visit to Palestine in 1898. After German unification in 1871, he writes, “the mission to the Jews played a not insignificant role in the reconstruction of national representations. The image of Prussian liberalism would finally give way to a religious Prussia with a benevolent, if unctuous, orientation toward Palestine. Such was the ideological background of the pilgrimage of Wilhelm II, the imperialist kaiser, at the end of the century.” Enlightenment or Empire, 109.

118. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, in Gesammelte Zionistische Werke, 5: 125–420. All citations will be documented parenthetically as A followed by the page number to this edition.

119. The Zionist Jew arriving from the sea or even being born from the sea is a critical part of Israeli self-fashioning: First the pioneer arrives from the sea and, then, proceeds to regenerate the desolate land. In so doing, he is turned into a new “Sabra” Jew. This recursivity of building and being rebuilt is captured in the opening line of S. Y. Agnon’s novel, Only Yesterday (1945): “Like all our brethren of the Second Aliya, the bearers of our Salvation, Isaac Kumer left his country and his homeland and his city and ascended to the Land of Israel to build it from its destruction and to be rebuilt by it.” trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. The trope of the pioneer arriving from the sea appears in countless works of literature and film, perhaps most emblematically articulated by Moshe Shamir who declares that his hero, Elik, “was born from the sea.” For a discussion of the seafaring Zionist Jew in Israeli cinema, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). For a timely reassessment of this trope, see Hannan Hever, “We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography,” Social Identities 10.1 (2004). 31–51.

120. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 303. Boyarin continues by arguing that Zionism “is almost, but not quite, colonialism,” instead favoring an analysis of its “mimicry” of European colonialism (307–8).

121. Moritz Goldstein, Begriff und Programm einer jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, n.d.), 20. All quotations will be documented parenthetically. The pamphlet was most likely published in 1912, the same year he published his classic (and notorious) essay “The German-Jewish Parnassus.”

6. Auschwitz

1. I draw on the following sources for this historical material: Alfred Gottwaldt, Berlin: Anhalter Bahnhof (Düsseldorf: Alba, 1994), 97; Christine Roik-Bogner, “Der Anhalter Bahnhof: Askanischer Platz 6–7,” in Helmut Engel, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Wilhelm Treue, eds., Geschichtslandschaft Berlin—Orte und Ereignisse, vol. 5: Kreuzberg (Berlin: Nicolai, 1994), 63–65.

2. Norbert Wollheim quoted in Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 99.

3. Heinz Knobloch, Meine liebste Mathilde: Die beste Freundin der Rosa Luxemburg (Berlin: Morgenbuch, 1994), 305–12.

4. Ibid.

5. For the former, see Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); for the latter, see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Moreover, the correspondence between Heidegger and Arendt was recently published: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger: Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere Zeugnisse, ed. Ursula Ludz (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002).

6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979 [1951]). Further citations will be documented parenthetically as OT followed by the page number.

7. Martin Heidegger, “Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge” in Gesamtausgabe, 102 vols. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), 79:27. All further citations will be documented parenthetically as BV followed by the page number.

8. Ludz, ed., Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, 94. Barbara Hahn briefly discusses this quote in her book, The Jewess Pallas Athena: This Too a Theory of Modernity, trans. James McFarland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 161–62.

9. For a discussion of this topic, see the collection by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (New Jersey: Humanities, 1997).

10. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1990), 82.

11. There is an immense body of literature on Heidegger and the Nazi question. Some of the key works include Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Berel Lang. Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question is probably the most widely cited of the extraordinary defenses of Heidegger.

12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1926), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). All citations will be documented parenthetically as BT followed by the page number.

13. Following Edith Wyschogrod, I use the term mass death to refer to anonymous death suffered in great numbers. It is a general concept that includes the Holocaust as well as embraces other instances of extermination and mass murder. See her book: Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). In order to unpack the conceptual trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking about death and dying, I chose the term mass death (rather than mass murder) since he is not concerned with acts of killing. Mass death, of course, obscures the agency involved in killing—and this is precisely my point and one of my central critiques of Heidegger. For an important argument underscoring the agency of genocide and mass murder, see Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

14. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999); Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes.

15. As we will see below, Heidegger accorded a very specific meaning to sterben (to die) and differentiated it from other seemingly synonymous terms such as ableben (to demise) and verenden (to perish). He writes: Dasein “can end without authentically dying, though on the other hand, qua Dasein, it does not simply perish…. Let the term ‘dying’ stand for the way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death” (BT 291).

16. In philosophy a thorough discussion of this tripartite temporality is found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); cf. part 2, “Being-for-Itself,” in which the “for-itself” (Sartre’s concept of an authentic human) is a temporal being who is simultaneously what it has been (past), what it is not (present nihilation), and what it projects to be (future). Sartre’s notions of temporality are largely adapted from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926), where an analogous argument informs his characterization of Dasein’s temporality.

17. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes. According to Wyschogrod and derived from Husserl, the “life-world” is a set of cultural and social meanings that render our lives and relationships to others intelligible, meaningful, and coherent. As a pregiven dimension of human experience, the life-world represents the spatial and temporal constitution and extension of our world. The “death-world”—the concentration camps, for example—is a new social form in which the meaninglessness of death is its supreme and singular purpose.

18. Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes, 57.

19. In addition to Wyschogrod, William Haver, Giorgio Agamben, and Wolfgang Sofsky have written astute analyses of mass death and modernity. Through a striking parallel analysis of the atomic bombings and the AIDS crisis, Haver articulates the challenges of narrating the disaster in his The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Agamben articulates the aporias of bearing witness to the “Muselmann” in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; and Sofsky articulates the space and time of the world of the concentration camp in his The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I draw on their conceptual and theoretical insights in this chapter.

20. Heidegger will argue in Being and Time that “the conceptions of ‘future,’ ‘past,’ and ‘present’ have first arisen in terms of the inauthentic way of understanding time” (BT 374). He prefers to characterize Dasein and the structure of care according to the “ecstases of temporality,” calling upon the literal sense of the term as a kind of standing out from time (BT 377). Dasein is “thrown” into a situation (hence, its historicity) as a project, which moves toward or anticipates what is not by present nihilation.

21. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 138. The German original is Gesammelte Werke, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), vol. 6.

22. Ibid.,144 (translation modified); ibid., 6:147.

23. Ibid., 142 (translation modified); ibid., 6:145.

24. Ariès, who calls himself a “historian of death,” has written extensively about Western conceptions of death, including how the death of the individual and its meaning changed from the Middle Ages to the present. Western Attitudes Toward Death, trans. P. M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). I draw on this history here.

25. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Death, trans. H. Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

26. Heidegger mentions Tolstoy’s story in footnote xii on page 495 of Being and Time.

27. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Zurich: Niehans and Rokitansky, 1948). I thank Andreas Huyssen for drawing my attention to the affinity between Heidegger’s and Rilke’s concepts of death. In the secondary literature on Heidegger, this connection has received surprisingly little attention. A key exception, which I discuss below, is an essay by Maurice Blanchot, “Rilke and Death’s Demand,” in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 120–70. Agamben also indicates, along the same lines, a connection between Rilke and Heidegger in his Remnants of Auschwitz, 72–73.

28. Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 12.

29. Ibid., 20.

30. Blanchot, “Rilke and Death’s Demand,” in The Space of Literature, 122–23.

31. Ibid., 128.

32. Ibid., 129.

33. Rilke, Letter to Fürsten Alexander von Thurn und Taxis (October 4, 1914), in Briefe aus den Jahren 1914 bis 1921, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel, 1938), 17.

34. The “tomb of the unknown soldier” originated in World War I because individuals could no longer be identified and buried as such. For more on this, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a comparative focus, cf. Ken Inglis, “Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London and Paris to Baghdad,” History and Memory 5 (1993): 7–31.

35. Reinhart Koselleck, “War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors,” trans. Todd Presner, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Quite in consonance with the argument I am making here about how death changed in modernity, Koselleck has traced how the transformation of death (from individuals dying as heroes or martyrs to anonymous, mass death) impacted possibilities for representation. War memorials, he argues, changed from figurative representations of single individuals to abstract monuments commemorating the magnitude and senselessness of mass death.

36. The term traumatic unconscious comes from Anton Kaes and his recent work on the heritage of World War I in the cultural and intellectual life of Weimar thinkers.

37. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1965), 352.

38. Ibid., 491 (translation modified). The original is Doktor Faustus, in Gesammelte Werke in Zwölf Bänden (Oldenburg: 1960), 6:651.

39. Mann, Doktor Faustus, 452.

40. Paul Valéry, “La Crise de l’esprit,” in Variety, trans. Malcolm Cowley (New York: 1927), 7.

41. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), 44.

42. Paul Valéry, “La Crise de l’esprit,” 3–4 (translation modified).

43. Ibid., 12–13.

44. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 75.

45. Sofsky, The Order of Terror, 73.

46. Ibid., 86.

47. Ibid., 81.

48. Reinhart Koselleck, “Terror and Dream: Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during the Third Reich,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 224.

49. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 83.

50. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 34.

51. Ibid.

52. Sofsky, The Order of Terror, 199. He continues: “In a final stage of emaciation, their skeletons were enveloped by flaccid, parchmentlike sheaths of skin, edema had formed on their feet and thighs, their posterior muscles had collapsed. Their skulls seemed elongated; their noses dripped constantly, mucus running down their chins. Their eyeballs had sunk deep into their sockets; their gaze was glazed. Their limbs moved slowly, hesitantly, almost mechanically. They exuded a penetrating, acrid odor; sweat, urine, liquid feces trickled down their legs.”

53. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1993), 90. Agamben discusses this passage on page 44 of his Remnants of Auschwitz.

54. The original essay, entitled “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” (1946), was published in the Partisan Review. In 1948 she published the essay in German, and it is reprinted in English translation as “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 163–87. All further citations will be documented parenthetically as WEP followed by the page number to this edition.

55. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Wakening, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

56. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: Endfassung, Entwürfe, Materialen, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 145.

57. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 152.

58. Arendt also used the phrase “the fabrication of corpses” in an interview that she gave in 1964 with Günther Gaus. She described learning about the Holocaust: “This ought not to have happened. And I don’t mean just the number of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on—I don’t need to go into that. This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.” “What Remains? The Language Remains: An Interview with Günther Gaus.” Reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 14.

59. In his discussion of Heidegger in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben also quotes a portion of this speech. I consulted his translation and his insightful discussion of the first part of this passage but offer my own translation and analysis here. Remnants of Auschwitz, 73–74.

60. Heidegger’s critique of modern technology was given further expression in the lectures he gave in the 1950s, which were later published in Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Günter Neske, 1962). Two of these essays were published in English in the volume The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

61. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 15. I discussed the memorial speech in chapter 2.

62. Ibid.

63. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 248.

64. Ibid., 250–51.

65. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 128. This essay was originally given as a lecture in 1938. His critique of the “world picture” also appears in the Rilke essay of 1946, “What Are Poets For?” In the latter, he writes: “Man places before himself the world as the whole of everything objective, and he places himself before the world. Man sets up the world toward himself, and delivers Nature over to himself” (110).

66. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 129.

67. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 73.

68. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90.

69. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 71–72.

70. Arendt, The Human Condition, 19.

7. Vienna-Rome-Prague-Antwerp-Paris

1. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 39–40.

2. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 1961.

3. The exhibition was entitled Mythos Berlin. Cf. the exhibition catalogue, Mythos Berlin: Eine szenische Ausstellung auf dem Anhalter Bahnhof (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1987).

4. Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (London: Virago, 1982), 335.

5. As Saul Friedlander argued in his introduction to a pathbreaking collection of essays, Probing the Limits of Representation, “postmodern thought’s rejection of the possibility of identifying some stable reality or truth beyond the constant polysemy and self-referentiality of linguistic constructs challenges the need to establish the realities and truth of the Holocaust.” “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–21; here 4–5.

6. Both Ginzburg’s paper, “Just One Witness” (82–96), and White’s paper, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth” (37–53), are reproduced in Probing the Limits of Representation. A revised version of White’s essay, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation,” is printed in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 27–42. I will quote White’s essay from this edition.

7. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, quoted in Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” 86 (my emphasis). Ginzburg continues his argument by accusing White of dissolving the distinction between fiction and history, of putting the reality of the Holocaust in question, and, through a reconstruction of White’s intellectual trajectory, partaking in some decidedly unsavory, almost fascist company. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to evaluate the merits of Ginzburg’s argument or his representation of Hayden White’s position. For a thorough discussion of the terms of the debate, I recommend the essays collected in Friedlander’s Probing the Limits of Representation, especially those by Friedlander, Christopher Browning, Perry Anderson, Amos Funkenstein, Martin Jay, and Berel Lang.

8. White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” 27.

9. Ibid., 39.

10. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism, 66–86; here 70.

11. Ibid., 81.

12. I discuss White’s position, together with Sebald, at more length in my article, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals’: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebald’s Realism,” Criticism, special issue, “Extreme and Sentimental History,” 46.3 (Summer 2004): 341–60.

13. W. G. Sebald, Die Ausgewanderten: Vier lange Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1992); Austerlitz (Munich: Hanser, 2001). Unless otherwise stated, I will quote from the English translations: The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1997); Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001). All references to Austerlitz will be documented parenthetically.

14. Interview with W. G. Sebald, “Ich fürchte das Melodramatische,” in Der Spiegel, March 12, 2001, 228–34.; here 228. In an article by Maya Jaggi, “Recovered Memories,” Sebald gives the name of the woman as Susie Bechhofer and adds that her life, “with child abuse in a Calvinist Welsh home, [was] far more horrific than anything in Austerlitz. But I didn’t want to make use of it because I haven’t the right. I try to keep at a distance and never invade.” Guardian, September 22, 2001. Andreas Huyssen speculates that the other half of Austerlitz is Sebald himself. Cf. his article “Austerlitz: Gray Zones of Remembrance,” in David Wellbery, Judith Ryan, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Anton Kaes, Joseph Leo Koerner, Dorothea E. von Mücke, eds., A New History of German Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 970–75.

15. Sebald, “Ich fürchte das Melodramatische,” 228.

16. The most important critique of the affinities between the claims of photography and the claims of historicist thought remains Siegfried Kracauer’s essay “Photography.” Kracauer writes that historicists “believe… that they can grasp historical reality by reconstructing the course of events in their temporal succession without any gaps. Photography presents a spatial continuum; historicism seeks to provide the temporal continuum.… Historicism is concerned with the photography of time.” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 49–50.

17. In the short period between December 1896 and the writing of the Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, Freud completely reconceptualized how memory functions. Memory is not the recollection of the reality of the past as such but rather something that is retrospectively produced within a given present. This shift in Freud’s thought has been often remarked upon, and hefty debates have focused on the significance of Freud’s rejection of the seduction theory for explaining hysteria and establishing the truth of childhood molestation. One of the most polemical attacks came from Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who argued that the early Freud was right in privileging the actual occurrence of the physical trauma, whereas the post-1897 Freud “is in covert collusion with what made [his patient] ill in the first place” because he seemed to characterize the patient’s memories as mere fantasies. See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 185. I do not think this assessment of Freud is fair: As I argue in this chapter, I think that Freud is giving up the logocentrism of his former theory in favor of a praxis of interpretation and meaning construction. This does not mean that the trauma is simply turned into a “mere fantasy,” but it does mean that the past is no longer recoverable and reproducible as he had earlier imagined it to be. For one account of the debate, see William McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). For a thorough discussion of its significance within Freud’s intellectual development and personal biography, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 87–102; and Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1: The Formative Years and the Great Discoveries, 1856–1900 (New York: Basic, 1953).

18. Unless otherwise stated, all citations to Freud’s work will come from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1966–73). Citations will be abbreviated as SE followed by the volume and page number. Freud’s most widely cited works on trauma are “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (SE 12), “Mourning and Melancholia” (SE 14), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE 18). Building off of Freudian (and Kleinian) theory, a vast body of literature on trauma theory has emerged over the past decade. Some of the important studies include Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and the collection edited by Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Caruth does not, however, discuss Sebald in either of these works. For a critique of “trauma studies” see Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

19. Within the field of psychoanalysis extensive work has been done on “recovered memories.” The theories behind this range from the attempt to resurrect the wholeness of the past or what “actually happened” to ones that take the lability of memory and all representations of the past as their starting point. In contrast, for example, to the literalism of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s claims about his recovered “Holocaust memories,” Austerlitz’s memories, as we will see, are tentative, contingent, and always a function of the layered spaces of the present. For an assessment of Wilkomirski and the patently false nature of his memories, see Daniel Ganzfried and Sebastian Hefti, eds., Alias Wilkomirski: Die Holocaust-Travestie: Enthüllung und Dokumentation eines literarischen Skandals (Berlin: Jüdische Verlagsanstalt, 2002). For an insightful discussion of the malleability of memories from a sociological and clinical perspective, see Jeffrey Prager’s Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Prager argues, in line with my thinking here, that memory is “as much a product of the present as of the past” (11).

20. As Andreas Huyssen notes, this modernist breakdown of language in Austerlitz is also a citation of Hugo von Hofmannthal’s Lord Chandos Brief (1902), a fictional letter recounting, paradoxically, the disintegration of language and the facility to use language. Huyssen, “Austerlitz: Gray Zones,” 971.

21. In this nascent formulation of the work of psychoanalysis, Freud is not concerned with articulating a theory of the difference between the origin and the reproduction: There exists an originary trauma and the cure to hysteria is to be found in its literal reproduction. Several years later, particularly in “Screen Memories” (1899), Freud gives up this single-minded search for origins and begins to articulate the thesis that there may only be reproductions with no recoverable origin. I will discuss this shift in more detail below.

22. Friedrich Kittler points out that these metaphors conform to the wider scientific practices of his day: “The Project provided the very model of contemporary models; the soul became a black box. One need only compare the hypothetical pathways, discharges, cathexes, and (of course discrete) neurons of Freud’s text with statements about the material of brain psychology, which, since Sigmund Exner, had described the brain as a ‘street system’ with more or less deeply engraved ‘driving tracks,’ or as a network of telegraphic ‘relay stations’ with more or less prompt connections. Freud’s mental apparatus, which has recently been interpreted as protostructuralist, merely conforms to the scientific standards of its day.” Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 278–79.

23. Derrida briefly discusses the concept Bahnung in his essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–231. He is interested in how Freud’s use of writing metaphors develops from the Project to the “Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” such that the “configuration of traces… can no longer be represented except by the structure and functioning of writing” (200). He does not, however, consider the shift in Freud’s thinking that I am discussing here.

24. Jones points out that Exner published his Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1894) the year before Freud wrote the Project for a Scientific Psychology and that “it was Exner who developed the conception of Bahnung (facilitation of the flow of excitation).” Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1:381.

25. Ibid., 1:385.

26. It is not until Freud famously discovers the “mystic writing-pad” (der Wunder-block) in 1924 that he finds an apparatus capable of representing or modeling memory, although the desire for finding such a model clearly goes back to 1895. The mystic writing-pad models the mnemic apparatus because it satisfies both of Freud’s demands: unlimited receptive capacity (that is, it can always receive fresh impressions) and retention of permanent traces (that is, nothing is lost). “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” in SE 19: 226–32. For a brilliant discussion of this essay and the conceptual context of the development of Freud’s concept of memory, see Mary Ann Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33–68. See also the discussion in Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 220–29.

27. The German version of the Project is published in Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse: Briefe an Wilhelm Flieβ, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887–1902 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1950), 297–384; here 331.

28. Letter of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, September 23, 1895, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 140.

29. Letter of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 8, 1895, ibid., 141. He repeats his discovery in the October 15, 1895, letter: “Have I revealed the great clinical secret to you, either orally or in writing? Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock. Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a presexual sexual pleasure, which is later transformed into [self-]reproach. ‘Presexual’ means actually before puberty, before the release of sexual substances; the relevant events become effective only as memories” (144).

30. Letter of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 20, 1895, ibid., 146.

31. This formulation of exorcising ghosts represents Freud in the position of the Aufklärer, a role that unequivocally describes his early scientific work but that also runs, in one way or another, throughout his entire career. However, as Derrida points out, Freud also learned to live with ghosts and never completely drove out the specters through his investment in science and rationalism. For this reason, it is possible to consider psychoanalysis as a kind of “hauntology,” rather than a meaning-determinate ontology. For an elaboration of this difference with respect to Marx, see Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). With respect to Freud, Derrida writes: “It is known that Freud did everything possible to not neglect the experience of haunting, spectrality, phantoms, ghosts. He tried to account for them. Courageously, in as scientific, critical, and positive a fashion as possible. But by doing that, he also tried to conjure them. Like Marx.” Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85. To my mind, the Studies of Hysteria represents Freud’s preeminent conjuring of ghosts.

32. Letter of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, December 6, 1896, in The Complete Letters of Freud to Fliess, 207. The German can be found in Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, 151.

33. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 206.

34. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 292.

35. Freud’s new understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the telling of “historical truth” has been astutely analyzed by Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1982).

36. The German version is Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Gesammelte Werke, 18 vols. (London: Imago, 1942), vols. 2–3; here 3:286.

37. The dream is first mentioned on page 269 of the standard edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (SE 4). Freud gives the dream content and his analysis on pages 441–44 (SE 5).

38. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 40.

39. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 3:444. In his essay, “Freud’s Passover Dream Responds to Herzl’s Zionist Dream,” Ken Frieden points out that James Strachey’s translation of freizügig as “can move across frontiers” captures the imbrication of mobility and Jewish emancipation but that the term also refers to a “liberal education” in the sense of being open-minded and cosmopolitan. The essay appears in Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 240–48.

40. The literature on Freud and Judaism is immense. In addition to Yerushalmi’s book cited above, some of the most important book-length studies include Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

41. Peter Loewenberg, “A Hidden Zionist Theme in Freud’s ‘My Son, the Myops …’ Dream,” Journal of History of Ideas 31 (1970): 129–32.

42. Ken Frieden, Freud’s Dream of Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 120–22.

43. Perhaps the most suggestive is Yerushalmi’s book, in which he concludes his “monologue with Freud” with the fateful question—posed to Freud’s specter—whether psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science.” See his Freud’s Moses, 99–100. Responding to this decisive question, Derrida offers a powerful, deconstructive reading of Yerushalmi’s monologue in his Archive Fever.

44. For one of the best accounts of this problematic in Freud, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

45. Frieden makes the compelling argument that Schriftgelehrten is better translated as “rabbinic scholars” than as “philologists.” See his “Freud’s Passover Dream,” 242.

46. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 69.

47. Frieden, “Freud’s Passover Dream,” 247.

48. This is articulated most clearly in Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), and Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

49. Luhmann, Social Systems, 24.

50. Interestingly, this rendition of the reach of the “greater” German Empire includes Poland, Denmark, Austro-Hungary, and eastern France.

51. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 3:535.

52. Archaeological metaphors can be found in Freud’s earliest work on hysteria, such as “On the Aetiology of Hysteria” (SE 3), through his case studies—for example, the fate of Pompeii as a metaphor for repression in “The Rat Man” (SE 10)—up through his anthropological works, such as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, to his “historical novel,” Moses and Monotheism (SE 23). In his early work the fantasy of uncovering and deciphering the ruins of the past illustrates the work of psychoanalysis; later the total preservation of the past functions as a conceptual analogue to the functioning of the “archaic” unconscious.

53. As Terdiman and others have pointed out, Freud never gave up this phylogenic conception of the unconscious, something for which he has been extensively criticized. See Terdiman, Present Past, 280–82. Although I find the biological investment in phylogeny dubious, Freud’s hypothesis of an “archaic memory” can be used, following Herbert Marcuse, “for its symbolic value” in elucidating the dialectics of domination and civilization. See his chapter, “The Origin of Repressive Civilization (Phylogenesis),” in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 55–77.

54. Terdiman, Present Past, 273.

55. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 95.

56. Derrida, Archive Fever, 74.

57. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, 100.

58. Derrida, Archive Fever, 51.

59. Derrida’s critique of Yerushalmi is layered in its complexity, and I cannot do it justice by responding to only one part. He essentially is arguing the following: “Yerushalmi undoubtedly thinks, and his book seems in any case to aim at demonstrating, that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. It seems to aim for it in an original sense. Proposing a rigorous and ‘scientific’ renewal of reading, he bases himself on an archive sometimes archaic (the oldest biblical or talmudic tradition), sometimes recently published.” Besides accusing Yerushalmi of a kind of “archive fever” in his revelation of a “private document” (the inscription in the Bible given by Jakob Freud to his son) to determine Freud’s Jewishness and the Jewishness of psychoanalysis in general, he wants to elicit a confession from Freud himself, “that he [Freud] avows and proclaims, in an irreducible performance, that psychoanalysis should honor itself for being a Jewish science. A performative by which he would as much determine science, psychoanalytic science, as the essence of Jewishness, if not Judaism.” Archive Fever, 46–47.

60. See, for example, Linda Woodbridge, “Afterword: Speaking with the Dead” in PMLA 118.3 (May 2003): 597–603.

61. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur. Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch (Munich: Hanser, 1999). The English translation includes two additional essays, one on Jean Améry and the other on Peter Weiss; On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003). The lectures were originally delivered in 1997 and reworked for publication. Although I find Bell’s translation of Austerlitz masterful, I had to often provide my own translations of Luftkrieg und Literatur in order to convey Sebald’s argument as precisely as possible. I will cite Bell’s translation parenthetically as Destruction followed by the page number and make emendations as necessary; here vii.

62. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 5 (my translation). The English translation reads somewhat pallidly: “this catastrophe had nonetheless left its mark on my mind,” viii.

63. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 83; I have altered this translation in several places.

64. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25.

65. J. J. Long, “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausge-wanderten,” Modern Language Review 98.1 (January 2003): 117–37.

66. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.

67. White, Figural Realism, 81.

68. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 34. The English translation is “rather unreal effect” (Destruction 24).

69. Ōta Yōko, “City of Corpses” in Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, trans. Richard H. Minear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 185.

70. Unlike the paucity of literature on the air war in Germany, an extensive body of Japanese literature has emerged on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For an excellent overview of this literature and its formal innovations, cf. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For a fascinating comparative discussion of catastrophe and representation, see William Haver, The Body of This Death (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

71. I make this argument more fully in my article, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals.’”

72. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 90 (English translation slightly emended).

73. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 10.

74. W. G. Sebald, “Katastrophe mit Zuschauer: Ein Gespräch mit dem Schriftsteller W. G. Sebald,” Neue Züricher Zeitung (November 22, 1997), 52.

75. Huyssen, “Austerlitz: Gray Zones,” 972.

76. Jean Améry’s experiences of torture at Fort Breendonk are conveyed in his memoir, At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

77. James Wood, “An Interview with W. G. Sebald,” in Brick: A Literary Journal 58 (Winter 1998): 23–29; here 26.

78. W. G. Sebald, “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Améry,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, 143–67. The original essay, “Mit den Augen des Nachtvogels: Über Jean Améry,” is reprinted in W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, ed. Sven Meyer (Munich: Hanser, 2004).

79. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 33.

80. AP 463; translation modified. In an earlier section Benjamin insists: “For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain legibility only at a particular time” (462).

81. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 93.

82. Wood, “An Interview with W. G. Sebald,” 27.

83. W. G. Sebald interview with Christian Scholz, “Aber das Geschriebene ist ja kein wahres Dokument,” in Neue Züricher Zeitung 48 (February 26, 2000): 51.

84. The first part of the English translation (although approved by Sebald) differs from the German original and conveys a somewhat different impression: “Wir versuchen, die Wirklichkeit wiederzugeben, aber je angestrengter wir es versuchen, desto mehr drängt sich uns das auf, was auf dem historischen Theater von jeher zu sehen war” (“We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find that what was seen in the historical theater always forces itself upon us”). Sebald, Austerlitz, 105. Here Sebald relates history not to reality but to theater, preserving the sense that it is something staged, enacted, and visualized.

85. For more on this distinction, see Reinhart Koselleck’s “Geschichte, Historie,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 2: 593–718.

86. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60–61.

87. We might read Benjamin’s famous dictum on history in much the same way: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255.

88. W. G. Sebald interview with Christian Scholz, 51.

89. Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71–96. I thank Eshel for graciously sharing his research on Sebald with me.

90. Cf. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 10–15.

91. Helmuth von Moltke’s speech, “Third Debate on the Imperial Budget—Imperial State Railways—Standard Time,” was given on March 16, 1891, in the Reichstag. Essays, Speeches, and Memoirs of Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke, trans. Charles Flint McClumpha, 2 vols. (New York: 1893), 2: 39–43.

92. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), and The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

93. Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1906) is the most famous literary rendition of the history of the Greenwich bombing.

94. Interview with W. G. Sebald, “Wie kriegen die Deutschen das auf die Reihe?” in Wochenpost, June 17, 1993, 1–2.

95. Koselleck uses the term futures past to describe the ways in which past epochs imagined the openness or closure of the future. As such, through the practice of conceptual history, he examines the ways in which a given past imagined what the future would look like and bring.

96. Michel Chevalier, “Chemins de fer,” quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Saint Simon, Railroads,” in AP 598; ellipses are Benjamin’s.

97. Wood, “An Interview with W. G. Sebald,” 28.

Concluding Remarks

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Geophilosophy,” in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 96.

2. Paul Celan, Der Meridian: Endfassung, Entwürfe, Materialen, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 104.

3. Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 61–64; here 61–62.

4. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978), 67–90.

5. Ibid., 72.

6. Ibid., 69.

7. See, for example, Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and the fascinating study by Michael Mack, which argues that the figure of the Jew and the history of anti-Semitism are central to the narratives and counternarratives of German philosophy: German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003).

8. Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

9. Spector explicitly invokes Benjamin’s concept of dialectics at a standstill in his conclusion, ibid., 239–40. Very much in line with my thinking here, Spector argues for the centrality of the Jew in German modernism in his article “Modernism Without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument,” forthcoming in Amir Eshel and Todd Presner, eds., Modernism/Modernity 13.4 (2006).

10. In addition to the seminal works by Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai, see the recent studies on cosmopolitanism, flexible citizenship, transnationality, and transmigration by Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Margaret Cohen, “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 481–99.