for Jonathan

The following essay was presented as the keynote lecture at the “Moments of Enlightenment” symposium. It was written as a conversation with the audience, and also as a conversation I would have liked to have had with Jonathan Hess. Jonathan and I shared common research interests in the Enlightenment and in German Jewish Studies. We also shared, I think, a deep appreciation for children's books, and certainly a deep appreciation for Harry Potter and its innovation. For these reasons I felt that these comments about Maurice Sendak's tremendously creative illustrations for Wilhelm Grimm's tale Dear Mili would be a fitting tribute to Jonathan. Sendak once wrote that “My best friends in the profession are people I rarely see but whose natures and work I love.” Jonathan was precisely this type of best friend in the profession to me.

Sendak's illustrations for Dear Mili are stunning in their complexity and their artistry.In the course of my research for this project, I have come to understand that Sendak drew heavily on multiple sources in his work. His illustrations are often profoundly personal, and resonate on many different levels. The images in one illustration come together and cohere; they do not necessarily resolve in a single meaning or a clear message. They are visual poems that work as multiplicity, and they are, very simply, beautiful. The German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller famously said of Beauty, “its whole magic resides in its mystery, and in dissolving the essential amalgam of its elements we find we have dissolved its very Being.” In what follows, I present an analysis of but one aspect of Sendak's beautiful illustrations, and in so doing I hope not to have dissolved their magic or their mystery.

MAURICE SENDAK once described his book illustrations as “visual poems,” suggesting their inherent lyrical resonance, and in a seminal essay from 1964, “The Shape of Music,” he identifies a “quickening,” an animating, rhythmic, impulsive musical principle as a key source that inspires his artwork. “For me,” Sendak writes, “to conceive musically means to quicken the life of the illustrated book”; “To quicken means, for the illustrator, the task of first comprehending the nature of his text and then giving life to that comprehension in his own medium, the picture.”

A GERMAN LIFE (2016) is a feature-length documentary consisting primarily of an interview with Brunhilde Pomsel, who was hired at the Third Reich's Propaganda Ministry in 1942 and worked as a secretary in Joseph Goebbels's office until 1945. In May of that year, after the German surrender, Pomsel was taken prisoner by the Soviet Army and was interned for five years in camps, including Buchenwald, Hohenschönhausen, and Sachsenhausen. Following her release, she returned to work in broadcasting until her retirement in 1971.

The film's four directors, Christian Krönes, Olaf Müller, Roland Schrotthofer, and Florian Weigensamer, interviewed Pomsel. She is rendered in high-contrast black and white, and she frequently looks directly into the camera while recounting her memories. At the time the interview was conducted, she was 103 years old, and she lived three more years, which was long enough to attend a screening of A German Life at the Munich Film Festival in 2016. When she passed away on January 27, 2017, she was living in a rest home in Munich.

Although Pomsel appears extraordinarily alert and coherent during the film's interviews, the dense pattern of wrinkles crisscrossing her face reveals her advanced age. The directors chose to highlight this feature, zooming in closer rather than pulling away, possibly because they found themselves entranced by Pomsel as an image of living history. She knows that the decisions she made during the war were opportunistic, but does not act like someone who regrets her choices, and she makes few apologies. She is no revisionist, but she is not particularly concerned with working through the Nazi past. It is difficult to believe that she was as unaware as she claims to have been, and her account is sometimes undercut by its many contradictory positions, most notably that in her capacity as secretary she typed thousands of documents for Goebbels, but that she knew nothing about the fate of the Jews. The directors also include archival propaganda footage at regular intervals in the film, underscoring the unmistakably and relentlessly ideological atmosphere in which she worked.

NEXUS 4 ENCOMPASSES a rich variety of film, theater, and literature central to German Jewish Studies. We open the volume with two scholarly articles. The first, by Ritchie Robertson, revisits the topic of Kafka and childhood. The major contribution of this essay may, in our estimation, lie in the way in which Robertson contextualizes Kafka within competing discourses about childhood at the turn of the twentieth century. He places Kafka (both his fictional and nonfictional texts) within the conceptual framework dominated by Augustine and Rousseau on the one hand, and by Freud and Ellen Key, on the other. So rich is this aspect of the article that scholars concerned with childhood and literature more generally (memoir included)—even those with little interest in Kafka—will benefit from this contribution. While focusing ultimately on the story Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse (Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse- People), Robertson diagnoses divergent positions on childhood within Kafka's oeuvre, reflecting both the author's evolving perspective and his fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis childhood. Robertson conceives of the piece as a kind of scholarly gateway for future investigation.

With her contribution, Eva Revesz returns our attention to Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List, a hugely influential film with a dual reception career: embraced by popular culture and by numerous journalistic critics, the film was simultaneously subjected to a vigorous array of scholarly critique. Schindler's List made not just filmic but also cultural history: it raised consciousness about the Holocaust and survivors, and helped to change the course of that genocide's commemoration worldwide. And it was this film that prompted Spielberg to spearhead the ambitious international effort to record the stories of all living survivors. In this sense, Schindler's List begat a rich trove of testimonial and documentary footage curated by the USC Shoah Foundation that is available digitally in a number of libraries around the world.

Revesz's is a frankly revisionist view—at least with respect to the scholarly reception. She finds more value in the film than many of us were willing to acknowledge in the mid-1990s, when, to be fair, we may have unrealistically thirsted for the “perfect” Holocaust story.

This chapter is reprinted from Martha Helfer's book, The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture (2011), about latent anti-Semitism in the classical German literary canon. Helfer's study treats German literary texts that were produced and read between 1749 to 1850, when the issue of Jewish political emancipation was fiercely debated among German political thinkers, writers, religious figures, and other intellectuals. This chapter reconsiders the literary legacy of the great Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), Germany's most famous advocate of religious tolerance and an icon of interfaith friendship. Reexamining Lessing's three major works promoting tolerance toward Jews and Judaism— his theological treatise, The Education of the Human Race (1780), and two plays, The Jews (1749) and Nathan the Wise (1779)—Helfer claims that there was a persistent tension running throughout this oeuvre, which helped to shape the rhetoric of anti-Semitism that subsequently informed modernizing German culture's views of Jews and Judaism. In shedding new light on the ideals of tolerance for which Lessing stood, Helfer's chapter offers a complex view of crucial aspects of Sara Levy's world.

The Word Unheard begins with a necessary provocation: Lessing and latent anti- Semitism. The great Enlightenment playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was unequivocally a pro-Jewish author and political activist. Lessing was very likely the sponsor of the first published document calling for the full emancipation of the Jews in Germany, and his theological and dramatic writings on Jews and Judaism form the de facto benchmark of pro-Jewish discourse in German letters. Lessing's influence on German literature and culture is profound. Just as every Jewish character in Western literature in some sense references Shakespeare's Shylock, every Jewish character in German literature in some sense references Lessing's Nathan the Wise. Lessing's merchant Nathan is a good Jew, a wise Jew, the embodiment of Enlightenment who famously advocates tolerance for the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lessing's Nathan is so good, so wise, and Lessing's reputation as a pro-Jewish German cultural icon so strong, that the Nazis peremptorily prohibited the production of the play at the beginning of the Third Reich in 1933. After the war, in 1945, many German theaters reopened with Nathan the Wise, the symbol of tolerance and Enlightenment humanism, and the play is still one of the most frequently performed on the German stage today.

MARTIN BUBER, philosopher of dialogue and champion of the German- Jewish symbiosis, initially refused to return to Germany in a public capacity after the Holocaust. Yet in the 1950s Buber did return: accepting two important peace prizes and lecturing to university audiences across the country. For this he was roundly criticized by fellow Jews, yet welcomed by the Germans. Why did he change his mind? Buber's decision to return to German soil was not a publicity stunt, not an act of self-promotion, not callousness or stupidity, and not an attempt to confront the past. Rather, Abigail Gillman argues, Buber returned out of sheer philosophical conviction to fight for the future, to reach out to humanists, to encourage like-minded people to fight for human truth in the face of Cold War ideology, to visualize what they have in common, to learn to say “We.” As Abby writes: “Buber denied on many occasions that he was the bearer of a teaching or gospel (Lehre). He did not return to be in a conversation (im Gespräch sein), he went to Germany to be the conversation (ein Gespräch sein). To be the conversation is to carry out one's role as a divinely created being, spoken into existence; to carry the vox humanus across so many hostile borders, even across the abyss of the Holocaust.” In an elegant analysis of Buber's speeches, Abby traces the development of Buber's message to postwar Germany, uncovering and explicating an important and—until now—unrecognized dimension of Buber's postwar philosophy. This is German Jewish Studies scholarship at its best: Abby has broken new ground and laid the framework for future research, for a new type of “dialogue” in the Buberian sense, encouraging us through her own nuanced language and thought to conceptualize a new Zwischen, a new “Between,” in German Jewish Studies, and to think about a philosophical message that has broad implications for a world badly in need of saying “We” today.

WE OPEN THIS VOLUME with a double celebration. Egon Schwarz was a founder, perhaps the principal one, of German Jewish Studies in the United States, long before it was known as such. In fact, when he looks back on the beginnings of our field of research, as he does in the first piece of this volume, he first uses the term that was common at the time, namely “exile studies.” Only gradually did it become clear that Jews would comprise a particularly important group of German exile authors, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, artists, and others, such that exile studies of the postwar period would in part metamorphose into what we now know as German Jewish Studies. Of course the field has since expanded to include myriad German-Jewish interactions of other times and places as well. But at its birth, and long afterward, it was indeed Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany who defined the field.

It therefore seemed to us to make eminent sense to name the first prize for the best essay in German Jewish Studies to appear inNexusafter Schwarz himself. After all, it may well have been his Harvard course on German Jewish literature that was the first of its kind, and one we now take for granted in the curriculum. Schwarz is himself a refugee from Nazi occupied Europe—that is surely more accurate than “émigré”—and his own life story is tightly entwined with the rise of German Jewish Studies, which, as he reminds us in the pages that follow, includes Austrian studies as well. In fact, and this is something Schwarz never tires of recounting, it was the eminent Harvard Germanist Bernhard Blume who helped young Egon get a start in this country as a teacher of German. We are pleased to present here Schwarz's award speech, which he gave at Duke University in 2015, in both German and English.

Abby Gillman, the first recipient of the Egon Schwarz Prize, is our second cause for celebration. Her remarkable essay on Martin Buber 's postwar return to Germany illustrates an equally important moment for German Jewish Studies, namely the overt and sometimes agonizing interaction of Jews with the politics and culture of the postwar Germanys— usually, but not always, the Federal Republic.

What does it mean to think “I,” to say “I,” to write “I”? These foundational questions of subjectivity inform Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's literary production to such an extent that one might arguably define her oeuvre in terms of the early German Romantic notion of autopoiesis, the self-reflexive, self-critical self-creation of the subject, das Ich (the I), in and through poesy. Yet in contradistinction to the unitary structure of early Romantic subjectivity, for Droste the self frequently is presented as an object, an object often watched by—and at times watching—the subject, an object that is irreconcilable with the subject. significantly, many of these scenes of objectified self-definition are explicitly presented as aesthetic events, indicating their programmatic status in Droste's poetics, and they recur emblematically throughout her writing.

The following analysis seeks to elucidate Droste's object-driven conception of subjectivity and poetic production through a series of examples. The first section considers the early prose fragment Ledwina (1818/19–26). The second presents brief readings of a selection of her more famous poems and ballads, written between 1840 and 1844: “Das Spiegelbild” (The mirror image), “Im Moose” (In the moss), “Das Fraulein von Rodenschild” (Lady von Rodenschild), “Das erste Gedicht” (The first poem), “Das alte schloss” (The old castle), “Im Grase” (In the grass), “Die todte Lerche” (The dead lark), “Die Taxuswand” (The yew wall), “Die Mergelgrube” (The marl pit) and “Lebt wohl” (Farewell).

In 1807 Goethe formed a small chamber choir in Weimar, which he referred to on occasion as his “Singschule” (singing school), “Singechor” (singing choir), or “Singstunden” (singing class); in his diary he would often simply write that he spent time with “die Sänger” (the singers). Thanking Bettine Brentano for a packet of music she had sent him, he called the choir “meine kleine Hauscapelle” (my little chamber group) in a 24 February 1808 letter to her, and with irony he called the choir “meine kompendiose Hauskapelle” (my compendious chamber group) in a 22 April 1814 letter to his friend and musical advisor Carl Friedrich Zelter (MA 20.1:343). Years later in the Tag- und Jahreshefte he once again and more seriously referred to it as his “Hauskapelle” as he recalled its most successful season, 1810-11.

That the name recalls an earlier Hauskapelle, which Goethe created in the fictive world of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, is not accidental: