IN THEIR INTRODUCTION TO Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (2011), editors Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner note that “the act of defining, circumscribing and demarcating has long been a principle activity of modern Jewish literary scholarship.” Because Jewish writing does not readily map onto a national literature, because certain authors may not even identify as Jewish (or be identified by others as such), and because a given book may not appear to have a Jewish theme—for example, diaspora or the Holocaust—the question of what is and isn't Jewish writing, Jelen, Kamer and Lerner continue, must “remain unsettled.” The volume in which this chapter appears adds to this debate by positing that there is such a thing as a German Jewish literature even as it interrogates this—after the Holocaust—always unavoidably jarring formulation. In her 1994 edited volume What Is Jewish Literature?, the Israeli scholar Hana Wirth-Nesher had already pondered whether the question in the book's title was in fact the only thing that unified scholars searching a definition that could encompass Jewish languages— that is, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino—non-Jewish languages, and the diversity of diasporic and non-diasporic writing both in the past and in the present.

Attempts to define Jewish literature often also suggest a designation of Jewish identity. Jewishness is posited as uniquely located between particularism and universalism, as assimilated or exceptional, or as productively diasporic or lamentably exilic. Or, Jewish identity is seen to be irreversibly marked by the Holocaust. In any event, the categorization of Jewish writing, and Jewish identity, is understandably taken to be first and foremost a primary interest of self-declared Jewish authors. This is most likely implicit in the present volume, in which a variety of contributions address the literary work of Jewish authors writing in German about their identity and their place in Germany and Europe.

This chapter explores what is at stake when non-Jewish authors concern themselves with definitions of Jewish literature, either when they reflect abstractly on what might constitute a “Jewish aesthetic” or concern themselves more concretely with particular Jewish writers or literary traditions.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that the terms transnationalism and cosmopolitanism have become central to debates across the humanities and social sciences in recent years. Broadly speaking, transnationalism has typically been employed by social scientists exploring the intensification of migratory flows across borders that has characterized the era of globalization—and by literary and cultural-studies scholars interested in postcolonial and minority writing, hybridity, and deterritorialized identities— whereas cosmopolitanism has been favored by political scientists interested in the apparent weakening of the state system, and in global instability and insecurity, particularly after 9/11. More recently, however, researchers from across all these fields have begun more explicitly to link the two terms. Which challenges—and opportunities—does today's vastly intensified mobility of goods, people, and ideas across borders create in relation to the ideal of a unified humankind living in peace? In short, scholars have been searching for answers to the question of whether, as Victor Roudometof puts it, “transnationalism [may] lead to greater levels of cosmopolitanism?”

In this chapter, I offer an overview of the way much of today's German-language literary fiction likewise links transnationalism and cosmopolitanism—of course in a less explicit, less programmatic, more allusive manner. In essence, my focus is on what might come after transnationalism, that is, on the utopian potential that is at least implicit in the erasure of boundaries that both contain and separate people. (If we accept that this is what is taking place. Many would argue that transnationalism simply means the unregulated flow of capital rather than progress toward a Kantian Weltgemeinschaft, or world society.) To this extent, transnationalism moves to the background of this chapter. Many German-language authors, I argue, are currently reflecting not only on how transnationalism has rendered borders both more and less significant—nations are more permeable and yet still regulate who and what may circulate—but also on the equally pressing question of how we can inhabit proximate but also worldly spaces simultaneously. As Maria Mayr, Anke Biendarra, Claudia Breger, Katharina Gerstenberger, and Christina Kraenzle will explore in subsequent chapters, with more detailed reference to individual texts than is possible in an overview chapter such as this, these writers are asking: How can we live with “others,” both at home and globally?

TRANSNATIONALISM IS “not new and has been around since ancient times,” Michael Howard reminds us. Yet in the contemporary era the “ties, interactions, exchange and mobility” that connect across and between nations, Steven Vertovec argues, “function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world.” Economic globalization, instantaneous electronic media, and the movement of millions around the globe today appear to be rendering national borders—and the cultures, polities, and frameworks of understanding that they are imagined to contain—more porous than ever before.

Transnationalism—understood in this volume as a plurality of intersecting, and crosscutting flows of products, ideas, and people back and forth over borders—presents a number of challenges to scholars working in the humanities and social sciences. How are they to conceptualize transnationalism beyond the conventional focus on the experience of those “minority” individuals or groups who span two or more cultures as migrants, refugees, or exiles? That is, how can they move beyond a focus on diasporic formations, hybridity, or notions of center and periphery in order to theorize how contemporary transnationalism's characteristic multidirectionality and saturation of all aspects of everyday life, from consumption to culture, impacts everyone, whether “settled” residents of a given national space or transient “guests”? How can they best conceptualize the nation's continued salience—the persistence of the nation in transnationalism—for its citizens, and for those it refuses to accept as such? And how are they to rethink the nation's continued centrality to persistent global imbalances in economic, geopolitical, and military power, even as transnationalism appears to weaken that nation's claim to be sovereign?

For literary scholars, specifically, the reality of contemporary transnationalism prompts us to think more closely about the ways fiction written in a particular time and in a particular place—in the context of this volume, in the German-speaking countries—connects to, circulates through, and is rechanneled by global patternings and global debates on identity, mobility, hospitality, universalism, self-forming, and cosmopolitanism.

Tadeusz Borowski was born in 1922 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. Beginning in 1933 Borowski lived in Poland, working as a builder and studying Polish philology at the underground University of Warsaw. He became later active as a prose writer, journalist, and poet. He was arrested in February 1943 and deported to Auschwitz soon after. Borowski was brought to Natzweiler- Daumergen concentration camp in August 1944, and later was taken to Allach, an external camp of Dachau. After his liberation in April 1945 he was brought to the displaced persons camp at Freimann, near Munich. There he met his fellow sufferer and writer, Stanisław Wygodzki (see pp. 178–79), to whom he dedicated the poem “Do ***” (To ***; pp. 220–21).

Borowski's poetry collection Namen der Strömung was published in Munich in 1945, and Bei uns in Auschwitz, an account written in cooperation with two fellow prisoners, followed in 1946. He returned to Poland in June 1946, working as an editor in Warsaw.

In 1949–50 he was a correspondent in Berlin. In 1951, not yet twenty-nine years old, he committed suicide in Warsaw. Borowski left behind an extensive body of poetry and prose, Utwory Zebrane (Collected Works, 1954), which is the source for most of the poems excerpted here. In a letter to his former fellow student, Zofia Świdwińska, dated October 6, 1945, he describes the conditions in which he was transported to Dachau concentration camp, how he escaped execution twice, and what he did to survive after liberation:

Léon Boutbien was born in 1915 in Paris. He became a doctor of medicine; he was arrested in 1943 and in July deported to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp as a Nacht und Nebel prisoner. He was later evacuated from Erzingen, an external camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, to Allach, an external camp of Dachau, in a brutal forced march in April 1945. Here, Boutbien worked as a doctor until his liberation, as is also clear from the poem reproduced here, which was first printed in a brochure titled “Natzweiler Struthof.” After his liberation Boutbien published several books and, as a socialist, was involved for a time in French politics. He died in Lanloup, France, in 2001.

Léon Boutbien's poem refers toward the end to a very specific incident that occurred the day Dachau concentration camp was liberated, April 29, 1945. The incident is described in another source in the following way: “American shells, which were targeted at German anti-aircraft fire, hit the periphery of the Allach camp and the Jewish camp, wounding and killing some of the prisoners, who were waiting for their liberation. A Jewish doctor who was standing next to Dr. Boutbien during an operation met a tragic end in this way….”

TWENTY YEARS AGO the German-language edition of My Shadow in Dachau (Mein Schatten in Dachau) was published—following eight years of painstaking detective work by Dorothea Heiser, a resident of the small Bavarian town indelibly associated with the first Nazi concentration camp, who was inspired by a poem by a seventeen-year-old inmate, Nevio Vitelli, to contact survivors or the families of the deceased and to compile an anthology of German translations of “poems from Dachau” (an Italian compilation came in 1997). Even before this, in fact, Dorothea had become aware of her historical responsibility as a German when she spent time as a schoolgirl in the late 1950s in Roundhay, a residential area of the English city of Leeds with a significant Jewish population. Here, and during the years that followed, she came to understand the importance of mutual understanding between peoples and nations, and of the way her own biography had been shaped by the Nazi past—her father, a German soldier, had been killed in Egypt in 1942, and a brother of her grandmother had been interned in Dachau concentration camp. Dorothea's work on the “Dachau poems” has been accompanied by a commitment to personal and national reconciliation, including establishing twinning arrangements between schools in Dachau and elsewhere in Bavaria and schools in France.

In this present edition, we present sixty-eight poems in English translation. In this way, we hope to honor, and continue, Frau Heiser's commitment to the preservation of these documentations of the inhumanity of the Nazi camps and of the trauma endured even after “liberation.”

I am grateful to Frau Heiser for drawing my attention to these lyric responses to experiences that were, in themselves, anything but poetic. Dorothea visited the University of Leeds in May 2011 to introduce the poems to undergraduate and postgraduate students and to work with them on translating extracts into English. Some of those students have been involved in the preparation of this edition as translators, editors, and formatters: Matthew Beaumont, Winnie Smith, and Rachael Plant. I am also beholden to the thirteen translators who—in their own time, and without compensation—lent us their expertise and created the carefully crafted English verses that fill this volume.

Rupko Godec was born in 1925 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Godec was initially interned in Perugia and then afterwards deported to Dachau on October 11, 1943 (prisoner number 56,271). Here he became co-editor of the Dachau camp paper “Dawn,” secretly conceived for the Slovenian youth. This paper, in spite of all dangers connected with publishing it, appeared twice.

The following poem was written in 1946 and finally finished on October 18, 1947, and is dedicated to the fellow prisoners who tragically perished in Dachau. The typewritten original manuscript is still in the possession of the author.

László Salamon was born in 1891 in Oradea, Romania. He began writing his first poems in his mother tongue, Hungarian, while he was a grammar school pupil. He was seriously injured in the First World War, where he served as an officer. After the war, during the time of the declaration of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, among other independent socialist or anarchist republics (or soviets) across parts of central and eastern Europe, he worked closely alongside the philosopher György Lukács as a professor of Hungarian, Latin, and philosophy and was sentenced to four years imprisonment by the Court of the Counterrevolution. After his release, he was the founder of several socialist journals, such as Auróra and A Másik Ut. He also worked as editor of the culture section of the journal Új Kelet until it was banned in 1940, as well as on numerous Hungarian and foreign journals. Over twenty volumes of his poems and essays have appeared in Hungarian.

His wife, Ella Salamon, tells of his detention and deportation: “When the Gestapo came to Cluj-Napoca … he was immediately arrested and taken to prison. Then he was taken to the ghetto and from there deported to Auschwitz, and later to other concentration camps including Dachau and its external camp of Kaufering near Landsberg, where he created some of his poems. It's worth mentioning that the Gestapo only learnt after his deportation that he was the author and publisher of a 1933 satirical epic about Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo then tried in vain to reach the train, but it had already left….”

In spite of the most adverse circumstances, Salamon witnessed the liberation of Dachau from the external camp of Allach and then returned to his homeland.

His wife offered the following explication of his poems, which she presented for this collection: “The bitter tone of many of his poems, which he wrote in Kaufering, is explained by the fact that he had been told that his loved ones—including his wife—had been killed….”

Fortunately, on his return he found his spouse, whom he had presumed dead, alive. He lived with her and their daughter in Cluj-Napoca until his death in 1983.