Research Catalog

Title

Jewish writers, German literature : the uneasy examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin ; edited by Timothy Bahti and Marilyn Sibley Fries.

Publication

Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press, [1995], ©1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 221 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• By any account, German-speaking Jews have made among the greatest contributions to world culture in this century - one thinks of Wittgenstein and Husserl in philosophy, Kafka in fiction, and Paul Celan in poetry. Yet most Jews were exiled from German-speaking lands (when they were not murdered there), and they have never been integrated within German culture as such.
• The poet Nelly Sachs, who won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for her poetry on the Holocaust, and the critic Walter Benjamin are two such German-Jewish writers: born just over a century ago in Berlin and exiled from Germany in the 1930s, both were acclaimed after World War II (Benjamin posthumously), yet neither, to this day, is anything but an outsider to German literature.
• The present collection of essays addresses the uneasy relationship between Jews who are masters of the German language and the German literary tradition that still cannot accept the otherness of Jewish writers.
• Before now, no work in any language has brought Sachs and Benjamin scholarship together under a single cover. Looking at these two internationally known and celebrated authors together reconfigures both the ways we understand them - neither just "Jewish writers," nor indifferently German authors - and the ways we understand German literature.

Subjects

• Jewish authors > Germany > Biography
• Authors, German > 20th century > Biography
• Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940
• Sachs, Nelly
• German literature > Jewish authors > History and criticism
• German literature > 20th century > History and criticism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-212) and index.

Contents

1. Introduction / Timothy Bahti and Marilyn Sibley Fries -- 2. The Search for Identity: Nelly Sachs's Jewishness / Ruth Dinesen -- 3. "My Metaphors Are My Wounds": Nelly Sachs and the Limits of Poetic Metaphor / Ehrhard Bahr -- 4. Nelly Sachs: The Poem and Transformation / Johannes Anderegg -- 5. The Poetics of Inadequacy: Nelly Sachs and the Resurrection of the Dead / William West -- 6. Nelly Sachs and the Dance of Language / Elisabeth Strenger -- 7. Approaches to a Theory of Language: Walter Benjamin's Early Essays and Nelly Sachs's Dramatic Scenes / Dorothee Ostmeier -- 8. Benjamin's Metaphors of Origin: Names, Ideas, Stars / Stephane Moses -- 9. Walter Benjamin's Variations of Imagelessness / Winfried Menninghaus -- 10. In Citing Violence: Gestus in Benjamin, Brecht, and Kafka / Patricia Anne Simpson -- 11. Works Cited.

ISBN

047210621X

LCCN

95025355

OCLC

• 33104727
• ocm33104727

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries