ULJANA WOLF BEGINS her multilingual experimental poetry work, meine schönste lengevitch, with an epigraph, translated into German, by the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant: “Eine Spur in die Sprachen legen heißt, eine Spur ins Unvorhersehbare unserer nun gemeinsamen Lebensbedingungen zu legen” (To carve a trace into languages means to carve a trace into the unforseeable of our now shared conditions of living). Glissant, a Martinique-born Creole writer who spent his adult life in Paris, took as his motto to write “among all the languages of the world.” Yet despite its fundamental multiplicity, language for Glissant is always opaque, no longer capable of providing epistemological certainty; instead, it provides access to a world that could only ever be a “half-unknown.” And it is here that Wolf and Glissant provide us entry into the “halfunknown” of the poetic world of Paul Celan, in which the many neologisms that mark his work, in particular, enable us to slip into the opacity of that which is unpredictable (“das Unvorhersehbare”) evoked by Glissant. As Peter Middletown suggests in his article exploring poetic difficulty, it is this dwelling in the forever “half-unknown” of poetic difficulty that links Glissant and Paul Celan: “Glissant and Celan give us a sense … that poetic difficulty is not just due to verbal intricacy, hypertrophied allusiveness, or the poetic equivalents of quantum physics; poetic difficulty opens onto dark, historical depths.” Glissant's notion of translation as opening to “das Unvorhersehbare,” of enabling a tangle of multilingual or, rather, of postmonolingual textual encounters, helps explain why Wolf places his text as epigraph at the start to meine schönste lengevitch. Glissant's evocation of poetic space as “unvorhersehbar” is foundational for the multilingual work of Uljana Wolf and the work of the contemporary experimental poets explored in this essay, all of whom write intralingually, creating new poetic spaces that lie somewhere between English and German.

I begin with Wolf's evocation of Glissant as a way to explore the affective and poetic fibers that weave together a group of contemporary experimental poets who write in and between a number of languages, and for whom the figure of Paul Celan returns, again and again, sometimes as a spectral poetic presence, at other times as direct poetic interlocutor.

THIS ESSAY EXPLORES the links and the disjunctions between German studies, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies by first thinking about the hyphen between German-Jewish-Holocaust studies as a “third space”—a mark that both opens and potentially de/forms, enabling a polysemic textuality that complicates “Jewish” and “German” text and the matrix of German-Jewish history, memory, culture, and urban space. To speak of the hyphen as a “third space” that joins and separates the terms German and Jewish, however, is to merge—intentionally—discourses about German-Jewish culture with those about postcolonialism. To be sure, Homi Bhabha's “third space,” that hybrid space in which “the structure of meaning and reference [are] an ambivalent process,” the “cultural space” “where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences” operates in a distinctly different political field than the one that has occupied scholars of German and Jewish culture. And yet, I argue, the insights from Bhabha, Spivak, Butler, and others on the contingencies of postcolonial textuality and culture have much to contribute to the work of Jewish culture, including German-Jewish culture. For if we are to truly “locate” German-Jewish culture, and the resonance of the Holocaust within it, then we must take into account the complex, perhaps even “klezmerical,” mechanisms of place, history, and subject positions that have been at the center of discussions in literary and cultural studies of alterity.

I am less interested in exploring “hyphenated” national, ethnic, or disciplinary identities than in thinking more broadly about the disciplinary (in all senses of that word) role the hyphen plays in academic discourse about German-Jewish studies and the Holocaust. It is by now almost a truism that the abrasions, marks, and echoes of “the Jewish” are always present as traces within German text; similarly, the intrinsic Jewishness of German studies and the fundamental Germanness of Jewish studies point to the porousness and entanglement of the textual, philosophical, and cultural encounter between German and Jew. I thus propose that we think about the hyphen not as a mark of constriction or of limits, nor as a mark that preserves separate terms even while placing them in relation to each other, but rather as a sign that invites a space of encounter into which we can enter and that enables us to expand the text beyond the borders of German studies, Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies.