Introduction

Going into this interview, I had no real agenda, not even a set of prepared questions, because I conceived of it initially as two old friends taking up a conversation that had been interrupted by COVID and other vagaries of personal and professional life. I first met Barbara Honigmann and her husband, Peter, in 1996. We connected again briefly when she visited Rutgers in 1999; but I only got to know her better when she visited Duke for a month-long stay as a writer in residence in spring of 2013. We were both without on-site spouses, which gave us the time to supplement the many official activities surrounding her appointment with informal Sunday-morning walks and meals. Initially, the conversation below was conceived of as a natural extension of those perambulations.

Recording it for possible publication was almost an afterthought. It occurred to me that she’d of course say something really interesting and that later I’d regret not having preserved it for posterity. Initially, we’d been invited for Shabbat dinner, and Barbara suggested that I come early so that we could have our own chat just prior to that. But when I mentioned a recording and potential publication, she balked, remarking that that definitely sounded like work, which of course has no place on the Sabbath. So we settled on Friday morning, while Peter was out shopping. Without fully intending it, I was moving our discussion further and further away from the spontaneous exchange I had first proposed. And there was another snag. I was beginning to feel—as readers will notice in the very first exchange, below—the tension between my relationship as a friend and my role as a critic. I wanted to broach the sensitive matter of her uneven literary reputation. But how to do that without risking offense? My solution, if that is what it was, was simply to dive in.

My conjecture that Honigmann is in some quarters underappreciated, though shared by critics who admire her work (and who do not confuse accessibility with sophistication), elicited what I hope are fruitful reflections on the distinctiveness of her writing and its place within contemporary German letters. They reward careful consideration. Although in receipt of numerous important prizes indicating broad recognition, Honigmann is clear-eyed about those aspects of her writing that frustrate conventional and generic conventions.

It is hard to believe that it has been more than ten years since we first launched Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies. Nexus began as an outgrowth of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which we cofounded in 2009 in the hopes of fostering dialogue and growth in the nascent field of German Jewish Studies in North America. Since that time German Jewish Studies has become more mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic, and we are delighted to provide a meeting ground and publishing forum for dynamic research in the field. Nexus 6 showcases the breadth and vibrancy of German Jewish Studies scholarship in the rich essays, interviews, translations, and source material that comprise this volume.

It probably should come as no surprise that with any academic pursuit, particular institutional contexts matter. Where, why, and by whom is German Jewish Studies conducted and promoted? With this volume we are pleased to inaugurate a new section that we anticipate will become a standard feature of Nexus: “Contexts of German Jewish Studies.” The section is intended to shine a light on the ways in which local arrangements inform our practice and scholarship. We open with two thoughtful reflections on the significance of Jewish Studies at Notre Dame, the Catholic university that has graciously hosted and generously supported both the German Jewish Studies Workshop and Nexus since Bill Donahue joined the faculty in 2015. In an elegant address welcoming the German Jewish Studies Workshop to South Bend in 2017, John T. McGreevy, then Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and now Provost, outlines the history of Jewish Studies at Notre Dame and emphasizes its ongoing importance to the university as a Catholic institution. In his eloquent opening remarks to the Workshop two years later, Peter Holland, Associate Dean of the Arts in the College of Arts and Letters, reflects on his observations and experiences as a secular Jewish faculty member at Notre Dame. We are honored to include both speeches in this volume, and would like to take this opportunity to thank the University of Notre Dame for its ongoing support of Nexus and of the German Jewish Studies Workshop, in South Bend and at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, where the Workshop met for a special session in March 2018.

It is no secret that European studies has suffered a setback in the academy. Maligned in some quarters as the superannuated practice of “Eurocentrism”, or glibly sidelined in others as mere “area studies”, the field has clearly slipped from its once prominent place among institutional priorities. How can we revive and sustain a vibrant interest in European societies among those in higher education who have, over time, succumbed to the notion that Europe is passé? The answer, in our opinion, lies not only in making the ongoing argument for the topicality of Europe – which is implicit in all our work – so much as in developing institutional strategies that provide concrete incentives for students and faculty to engage with it.

The “unexpected Europeanists” of our title are, on the one hand, faculty whose research interests include unlikely or unacknowledged investments in European studies, and on the other, students who may be eager to include European studies in their curriculum, but have not yet been offered flexible curricular options that draw meaningful connections to their primary disciplines. Thus, while we would always welcome new faculty hires and fully declared undergraduate majors in the area of European studies, we focus here upon raising interest in Europe among current colleagues and students whose primary interests lie – or appear to lie – elsewhere.

Recognizing that without students there is little point to an enhanced European studies faculty, we propose a two-pronged approach. To cultivate the undergraduate base at both Georgia and Notre Dame, we have in collaboration with other colleagues created new and flexible undergraduate curricula featuring “transnational European studies”. At the University of Georgia, Benjamin Ehlers and Martin Kagel introduced a transnational European studies minor; at the University of Notre Dame, Heather Stanfiel, and William Donahue have introduced a transnational European studies major with multiple points of entry. To foster broader-based faculty interest, we offer an annual interdisciplinary, Berlin-based seminar that convenes a vertically integrated group of scholars ranging from advanced graduate students to established senior scholars.

THERE ARE CLEARLY very good explanations as to why the directors of A German Life allow their subject Brunhilde Pomsel to speak without interruption. For reasons of aesthetics alone, it makes good sense to focus the viewer's attention solely upon her, rather than punctuate our audio and visual impressions with interventions from interlocutors, including the four directors themselves. Moreover, it is generally not difficult to divine what she has been asked. Including her interviewers’ voices might indeed have come across as redundant and perhaps distracting. Yet even when there is some enigma about her vis-à-vis, or doubt about what has been asked, one can make the case convincingly that this is precisely what keeps the viewer intellectually engaged. It magnifies the puzzle that Pomsel already presents. And given her sometimes painfully slow cadences, one certainly cannot claim to be swept up in the narrative such that one is deprived of sufficient time for contemplation. Quite the contrary: keeping the camera focused exclusively on Pomsel, often in very confining close-ups, and subjecting the audience to her unhurried elocution and extended silences indeed possesses both an aesthetic and ideological justification, for these may be the very techniques that enable the film to function as critique. On both counts, then, the decision seems sensible.

But this is not quite the directors’ explanation. When Florian Weigensamer explains the directors’ decision to feature Pomsel exclusively, and to bracket out the questions, he instead highlights the filmmakers’ aim to present her as if she were speaking freely, on her own. In other words, bracketing out the questions gives the viewers the illusion that she is spontaneously reflecting on her past, without any prodding or prompting. The film, however, does not shy away from sourcing other kinds of interpolated material: each and every one of the thirteen intercut films is meticulously labeled with a citation appearing on an otherwise blank screen and for a considerable length of time. Each of these excerpted films is a rich topic in its own right and is presented as a counterpoint to Pomsel's musings.

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.

Introduction: Tabori, History, and the Holocaust

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE REMAINS a conundrum to some, an oxymoron to others. Can it at once give free rein to the imagination—as art presumably must do—and at the same time do historical justice to the genocide against the Jews? During the postwar period, when the Holocaust was as yet not well understood—and sometimes not even fully acknowledged—there was palpable anxiety about the role of art and its ability to represent what was to many unrepresentable. Art was frequently freighted with the responsibility of history (or historiography), at a time when there was widespread uncertainty about fixing the Holocaust within history. Like Bernhard Schlink's protagonist from Der Vorleser, the beleaguered Michael Berg, we were confronted with an impossible set of demands—above all to remember, and commemorate, what we can never really know or understand. It is not difficult to grasp, then, why no piece of Holocaust literature has ever been deemed wholly successful. George Tabori's The Cannibals (1968) is symptomatic of this dilemma.

The play attempts two apparently contradictory goals: the first, as many appreciative critics observe, is to “correct” or redirect a Holocaust discourse that was itself still in its infancy. By presenting a strikingly dissonant depiction of Jewish concentration-camp inmates—and thereby proudly breaking a taboo on the portrayal of victims—Tabori entered the field of Holocaust history, whether he intended to or not.

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.

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.