Prosaic Conditions : Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature 9780810166394, 9780810128675

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Prosaic Conditions

Prosaic Conditions Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature



Na’ama Rokem

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rokem, Na’ama.    Prosaic conditions : Heinrich Heine and the spaces of Zionist literature /   Na’ama Rokem.    p. cm.    Revised version of the author’s thesis (PhD)—Stanford University, 2007.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-0-8101-2867-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)    1. Prose literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Heine, Heinrich, 1797–1856—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Herzl, Theodor, 1860–1904— Criticism and interpretation. 5. Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, 1873–1934—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Zionism in literature. I. Title.   PN842.R65 2013  809.88924—dc23 2012030087 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii List of Abbreviations

ix

Prefacexi Chapter One Prose Regnant: World, State, and Subject in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics

3

Chapter Two Heinrich Heine, Explorer of the Current Prosaic Condition

20

Chapter Three Mediated Situatedness in the Reception of Heinrich Heine

47

Chapter Four Theodor Herzl’s Technocratic World-Making in Prose

73

Chapter Five Haim Nahman Bialik’s Icy River of Prose

95

Chapter Six Heine and the Israeli Novel

119

Conclusion153 Notes159 Bibliography193 Index213

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a formative experience, and I am deeply thankful to the teachers, colleagues, and friends who were part of it. My dissertation committee at Stanford University provided much-needed fuel in the form of both warmth and skepticism. Amir Eshel has always been willing to put things in perspective and to listen when I’ve needed a sympathetic ear; he has also never tired of asking me what is at stake for me in this work. The fundamental questions that initially propelled this investigation were formed in conversation with Franco Moretti. I deeply appreciate his will to engage in that conversation, even when it took turns away from his own fields of interest. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht was endlessly generous with his time and his attention, reading through multiple drafts of my proposal and my chapters and attending to both the details and the big (the biggest possible) picture. Russell Berman applied moderate and not so moderate forms of pressure on my argument and taught me clear thinking by example. Luba Golburt and Elif Batuman read and revised substantial segments of this manuscript in its earliest iteration, and I could not have wished for gentler or more solicitous co-conspirators and coaches in writing. Steven Zipperstein and Jeffrey Sammons both read chapters and offered important corrections and valuable encouragement. Bud Bynack edited the manuscript and saved me from much embarrassment and incoherence. Ilana Pardes read through the manuscript when it was near completion, and her enthusiasm came at just the right moment. I am deeply thankful to Paul Reitter and David Suchoff, whose readers’ reports gave me an entirely new perspective on this work and helped me improve it. The mistakes and infelicities that nevertheless slipped through are, no doubt, my responsibility alone. Without the faith of Henry Carrigan, at Northwestern University Press, this project would not have been completed. I also thank Henry’s colleague, Peter Raccuglia, for his help and support. Many thanks for all kinds of friendly advice, suggestions, and support go to Maya Barzilai, Aya Breuer, Margaret Cohen, Jonathan Decter, Marton Dornbach, Charitini Douvaldzi, Marisa Galvez, Mark Gelber, Ruth Ginsburg, Shai Ginsburg, Fabian Goppelsröder, Roland Greene, Jeffrey Grossman, Susannah Heschel, Hanan Hever, Ariel Hirschfeld,

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Florian Klinger, Chana Kronfeld, Jakov Kuharic, Indra Levy, Enrique Lima, Vivian Liska, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Kenneth Moss, Kurt MüllerVollmer, Reviel Netz, Todd Presner, Shlommith Rimon-Kenan, Gabriella Safran, Haun Saussy, Galili Shachar, Allison Schachter, Vered Shemtov, Eugene Sheppard, Christian Sieg, Art Strum, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Sigrid Weigel, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, and Liliane Weissberg. Adam Stern compiled my bibliography and references. Sasha Senderovich helped me obtain scans of materials from Harvard University Library (at the price of breaking a rule or two). Gita Bar-Tikva guided me through the mazes of the Central Zionist Archives. I thank James Dalgety and Menachem Gutman for permission to use images. Material support for research and writing came in the form of a graduate fellowship from the Division of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures at Stanford University, a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ben Gurion University, and a faculty fellowship at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Being a fellow at the Frankel Institute, under the leadership of Anita Norich, Joshua Miller, and Debra Dash-Moore, was a fantastic experience. At the University of Chicago, the chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Theo van den Hout, and the Dean of the Division of Humanities, Martha Roth, graciously granted me leave so I could travel to Michigan. I am grateful for the numerous forms of assistance they have offered to make my work possible and to my colleagues here for providing a stimulating and generous environment in which to teach and write. I am fortunate to have a loving and supportive family that cheered me on through the whole process. I’m especially grateful to my brother Ariel, and my in-laws Nissim and Tikva Francez. And, of course, to Itamar Alma, and Yasmin Francez, my loves. Finally, the love, support, and faith of my parents, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Freddie Rokem, is present in this book in myriad concrete and less concrete ways. I dedicate it to them.

Abbreviations

ALA G. W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 volumes.

Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. AN

Theodor Herzl. Altneuland: Roman. Berlin: B. Harz, 1919.

CPH Heinrich Heine. The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A

Modern English Version. Translated by Hal Draper. Cambridge, Mass.: Suhrkamp/Insel Boston, 1982. CZA Central Zionist Archives HJ Heinrich Heine. The Harz Journey and Selected Prose. Trans-

lated and edited with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. JI Heinrich Heine. Journey to Italy. Revised and edited by Chris-

topher Johnson based on the translation of Charles G. Leland. New York: Marsillo, 1998. ONL Theodor Herzl. Old New Land. Translated by Lotta Levensohn. Princeton, N.J.: M. Wiener, 1997. SS Heinrich Heine. Sämtliche Schriften. 7 volumes. Edited by Klaus Briegleb. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005. TP Heinrich Heine. Travel Pictures. Translated by Peter Worts-

man. New York: Archipelago Books, 2008. VA  G. W. F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 3 volumes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. WHH Heinrich Heine. The Works of Heinrich Heine. 5 volumes.

Translated by Charles G. Leland. London: W. Heinemann, 1893–1906.

Preface

The city of Berlin houses two memorials within short walking distance from one another that bear the name of Heinrich Heine, two landmarks of the cultural politics of public memory in postwar Germany and its transformations over time. The first is designated explicitly as a Heine memorial. Erected in 1966 in East Berlin by the German Democratic Republic, the monument at the Volkspark am Weinberg on Veteranenstrasse shows the poet seated and gesturing with his hand, as if caught in the middle of an utterance. It thus stages Heine in a frozen performance, making the spoken word into the ultimate point of reference of his work. The second brings Heine’s name and his words into the circle of remembrance of the events of the Holocaust. This is Micha Ullman’s 1995 memorial at Bebelplatz, the infamous location of the Nazi book burning of May 1933. Ullman’s subterranean library at the square is a monument hidden from public view, uncannily revealing itself only to those who walk right by it and confronting them with a library emptied of books. The monument consists of a bare white room that is located under the ground of the central city square and is visible through a rectangular glass surface that often reflects the clouded sky above or the nighttime city lights. It bears an inscription taken from Heine: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort / wo man Bücher verbrennt, / verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” “That was only a prelude / Where they burn books / In the end, they will burn people too.” Situated as they are, Heine’s words ring with premonition; he seems to speak for a Jewish collective, expressing a fear that would, in the twentieth century, turn out to be founded. In their original context, however, the words are spoken not by a Jew, but by a Muslim: this is the comment made by Hassan to Almansor, the Muslim refugee of the Spanish Inquisition who gives his name to Heine’s early play, when he tells him of public burnings of the Koran (SS 1:284–85). Does this render Ullman’s use of the quote ironic, or even irreverent? On the contrary, it makes his monument into not only one of the most captivating of existing Holocaust memorials, but also the most fitting and interesting Heine monument to have been erected to date. Rather than staging a performance, the monument produces an empty space from which both books and bodies are absent. And rather than invoking Heine

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the poet as a speaking performer, this monument performs the operation of severing a piece of his language from its context, showing that the location in itself has a power to transform the text. In this, Ullman echoes an important element in Heine’s writings: the insight and insistence that words are always spoken from a particular position in time, as well as in space. It also reflects Heine’s related fascination with the consequences of severing the written word from such a context. Ullman uses the medium of the memorial to create a context, a space that invites those who pass through it to perform an act of commemoration by rereading Heine’s words and rearticulating their meaning. In these two Berlin monuments, I see refracted two schematically opposed ways of thinking about literature. In the first, the text is seen as anchored in a space organized by the human body, whose gestures and performances allow texts to produce meaning. This phenomenological view of literary language traces the text—and the text in this case is more likely to be a poem—back to an enunciation, a spoken word in a world space. In the second, the language of literature is seen as undoing or challenging this phenomenological, embodied order. Here, literary language—which in this case is prototypically prose—functions in the absence of a performing body and constructs its own spaces against the space of performance. Here a clarification is necessary, for this may sound like a retrograde reinstitution of binaries rooted in the metaphysics of presence that decades of philosophy, deconstruction, and literary theory have labored to dismantle. In that metaphysical schema, poetry is said to align itself with presence and truth, whereas prose figures as the ultimate form of writing, mediation, absence, and therefore falsity. But reinstituting such binaries is not my intention. Instead, the formulation of this binary opposition should be seen as an ideal-typical schema in relation to which phenomena—texts, images, reception histories, archived notebooks, none of which fulfills the ideal type completely—can be measured and understood. Thus, in the classical Weberian sense, these ideal types are never instantiated in pure form, but rather versions of them circulate in culture and can be reconstructed by an observer as a way of understanding the scale that lies between the binaries. Another way of thinking about this is that the two monuments exemplify two pragmatic frames of reference: the first assumes a space of copresence, within which a gesturing body, spoken words, and context operate together to create meaning; the second, in contrast, assumes that neither context nor gesture are available and that language must compensate for this absence in order to speak clearly. Presence and absence are thus not mapped onto a binary distinction between mediation and

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immediacy, but rather seen as attributes of different media that operate in different pragmatic conditions. Prosaic Conditions argues that this schema is helpful in thinking about the operation of “prose” and “the prosaic” as figures of thought in the past two centuries, using this figure in particular in order to reread the literature of Jewish modernity and the Zionist revolution. Before I briefly describe the argument of the book, I will use this preface to present a condensed history of the concepts of prose and the prosaic; this is a crucial preamble to the argument, because it allows us to start mapping the ideal type that is “prose” in order to gauge how authors ranging from G. W. F. Hegel to the contemporary Israeli novelists Haim Beer and Yoel Hoffmann position themselves in relation to it. The composite figure of prose and the prosaic is closely associated with a form of historical consciousness that concerns itself primarily with the difference between the present and the past, as strikingly expressed, for example, in a statement from Novalis’s Allgemeine Brouillon: “Cosmology: prosaic nature of the contemporary skies and the contemporary Earth.”1 Such self-positioning of the present beyond a threshold that separates it, in an essential way, from the past has a broad range of philosophical and political implications; they are particularly drastic for aesthetics and the arts, an insight embodied by Hegel’s famous and controversial claim that “the conditions of our present time are not favorable to art” (ALA 1:10; VA 1:25). But how did “prose” and “the prosaic” become the terms that, for Novalis, Hegel, and others, captured the essence of this transformation? By the eighteenth century, the Aristotelian distinction between poetry and history and the stable hierarchies that formed a theory of rhetoric and a poetics rooted in oral culture were challenged by a flow of informative prose and the rise of the novel.2 While prose came to be thought of as natural, the shape taken by language by default in the absence of a conscious effort to create meter and rhyme, it concurrently continued to confront observers as something new, more modern than poetry. This only underscores the question: How, at the end of the eighteenth century, did a formal category or a literary mode, of all things, gain the status of cosmology and the power to capture fundamental transformations in the perception of the nature of the world? What does prose stand for in the cosmological statement by Novalis, as in other contemporary observations such as Friedrich Schlegel’s diagnosis of an “epidemic of prosaic soberness”3 or the prognostic gestures of Hegel and Heinrich Heine, to name an example that is central to my investigation? How did prose come to epitomize the serious sentiments of the serious nineteenth century?4

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Prose, etymologically related to a movement forward, hardly seems destined to become attached to this uneasy nostalgia, this sense that things have changed irrevocably and that the consequences for art and literature are serious. Prosa or prorsa is derived from the Latin verb provertere, “to turn forward,” and the adjective prorsus, “straightforward, straight, direct.” This dimension of prose is often present to the minds of those who theorize it. In their essay “The Prose of the World” Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea focus on the tension between “the linear, forward movement of prose,” its progressive nature, the fact that its “sense depends on what lies ahead (the end of a sentence; the next event in the plot of a novel)”5 and its various modes of looking and linking back.6 This allows them to isolate a “particular consciousness of time or historical consciousness” embodied by prose in which the irrevocability of the past, the fact that “there is no return,” seems to be the fuel of a movement forward: “time moves only forward, it is not cyclical, and we always move toward the new and the unknown.”7 Indeed, the literary term for straightforward discourse also shares a root with a Roman goddess—Proverta or Prorsa—who was called on by women in labor to ensure a straightforward, headfirst birth. Thus, prose guards the advent of the entirely new into the world.8 Yet concurrently, prose has been thought of as a particularly fitting medium to speak of the past, its independence from any formal constraints lending it the credibility to narrate history.9 Indeed, the same goddess who turns the fetus forward on its way into the world has been associated with a mastery over the past; as the Encyclopedie d’Yverdon, published by Fortune Barthelemy de Felice in 1774, defines it: PRORSA or PROSA, (N), Myth. Goddess who is invoked by women to procure successful labor. One also invokes her to repair those born ill, since she has power over the past.10

The thrust of the turn forward, in other words, is balanced by the call of the past, be it as something that is mastered, something that is truthfully represented by prose discourse, or as something that is irrevocably lost with the rise of prose and a prosaic consciousness, as in the example from Novalis’s Brouillon. In this way, Prosa bears a relation to another Roman deity, the double-faced Janus who stands at the threshold and looks both ways, to the future and to the past. But Barthelemy’s reference to the mythological roots of prose is an exception to the rule. The interest of the Enlightenment and its nineteenthcentury successors in prose focuses mostly on its status as a latecomer to

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the scene of language. Centuries before the Enlightenment, in the early thirteenth century, Buoncompagno da Siena was compelled to assert the primacy of prose by situating it both temporally and logically before metered language: “All writing originates from prose. For rhythm and meter are a poor suffrage, and they originate in prose.”11 He was to remain alone in this view. Vico, Klopstock, Herder, Condillac, and Schlegel all proposed accounts of the primacy of poetry and the belatedness of prose.12 Even the master of philosophy who famously teaches Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, that prose and poetry exist in a seemingly timeless, hierarchyless equation—“everything that is not prose is verse and everything that is not verse is prose”13—ultimately teaches the viewers of the 1670 comedy a lesson that anticipates the interest of the eighteenth century in the belatedness of prose. That lesson lies in the ridiculous enthusiasm with which Jourdain embraces the realization that the entire realm of his communications with others, even the orders he issues to his servants, is carried out in prose. Short of endorsing the philosopher’s neat formula, the text ironically stages prose as what needs to be recognized; and recognizing it constitutes a parodic moment of self-knowledge. The Jourdain who has gained this knowledge and made this realization is a representative of the latter-day, disenchanted, prose-speaking humans who populate the treatises of the eighteenth century. Twentieth-century scholarship of prose moved productively in the space between different senses of this belief in the newness of prose: between the problems that authors encounter when they attempt to use prose as a new technique or tool and the emergence of prose as both a discursive program and a viable object of academic study.14 Like Molière, literary scholars after World War II were mostly skeptical of the comical philosopher’s easy distinction between prose and poetry.15 And like the Enlightenment scholars listed above, they persistently returned to the idea that prose is something that emerges, that is invented, discovered, or taken on as a project.16 And yet, Buoncompagno’s view that prose is in some sense prior to poetry did have its echoes. For Mikhail Bakhtin, arguably the most prominent theorizer of prose in the twentieth century, prose is not associated with the melancholy of a loss or disenchantment, but rather with a far more positively charged gathering of multiple social voices in dialogue or heteroglossia. If for Bakhtin prose is belated, it is because it seems to represent the maturation of literary language, rather than its deterioration or fall, its catching up with the essence of language, since “this doublevoicedness in prose is prefigured in language itself . . . in language as a social phenomenon that is becoming in history, socially stratified and

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weathered in this process of becoming.”17 For him, then, prose is more natural or closer to the properties of language as such, whereas poetry is derived from a process akin to the estrangement that thinkers from Vico to Herder recognized as the source of prose.18 Bakhtin’s polemical favoring of prose over poetry is framed as a response to both the Romantic view that the world can and must be reenchanted through poetry and the Russian Formalist privileging of poetry and poetics as the key to thinking about literary language. Recalling Novalis’s statement, Bakhtin’s position is sometimes translated into the language of cosmology, for example when he describes prose as a “Galilean linguistic consciousness.”19 For Bakhtin, “the language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language, all equal in their ability to conceptualize and to be expressive, is organically denied to poetic style.”20 This is certainly a different galaxy from Novalis’s prognosis of the “prosaic nature” of his contemporary universe, yet the shared cosmological metaphor is thought-provoking and only underscores the persistence of a number of questions regarding the usage of the terms “prose” and “prosaic.” First, what is the relation between the two terms? What is so prosaic about prose? And why did this literary mode come to signify a world-historical rift that results in loss and disenchantment? Furthermore, how did this perception change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What is its afterlife in the present? Finally, what are the implications of this association for our reading of prose texts? Prosaic Conditions is an effort to supply some answers to these broad, but curiously rarely discussed, questions. In what follows, I treat prose as a signifying practice that emerges in competition with other existing practices, specifically, the practice of performance. What marks prose as an emergent signifying practice is the power to abstract from the particular time and place of a performance, to produce a discourse that replaces copresence through a range of rhetorical strategies that supply alternative scaffolding for discourse.21 However, this does not imply a binary picture, cut after the model of Monsieur Jourdain’s philosophy teacher, in which everything that is not prose is performance and vice versa. Rather, prose and performance represent the two ends of a spectrum along which utterances, texts, and other objects can be located, based on the degree to which they seem to assume a space shared with a listener or conversely to assume that no such shared context is available and things must be explained and explicated. Moreover, as they are reproduced in new media, translated into new languages or simply consumed in new contexts,

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objects might change their location on the spectrum, traveling closer to the poles of performance or prose. I use the term “performance” to signify actuated, spoken use of language that occurs in a context in which both speaker and hearer are present. This does not draw on the vibrant and highly theorized field of performance studies, but rather is related to the term as it is used in Chomskian linguistics in contrast with “competence,” to distinguish between the abstract ability to form an utterance and the actualization of this ability in an occurrence of speech. However, my interest is not in performance in contrast with ability, but rather in performance as a type of utterance that occurs within a context of copresence in contrast with non-performed discourses (prototypically prose) that operate without such contextual scaffolding. This brings me closer to a different field of linguistics, Pragmatics, as defined by figures such as Paul Grice, a field that is devoted to the study of the contribution of context to meaning. Of particular importance here is the notion that pragmatic conditions, constraints related to the context within which an utterance or a text is produced, influence the form taken by the utterance or text. The spectrum between prose and performance can be mapped according to the pragmatic conditions in which different texts or utterances operate and the formal ramifications that these conditions have. Performed speech is highly marked by the shared space of copresence that forms its context. For example, it can use deictics, expressions that point at persons, places or times (such as “you,” “here,” or “today”) with no further clarification. Prose likewise is formed by the pragmatic conditions under which it is produced and consumed, except in this case it is precisely the separation between speaker and addressee, between production and consumption, that defines these conditions. In other words, unlike performance, prose must construct the context for deictic expressions within itself, allowing them to operate anaphorically, that is to point back within the discourse rather than pointing at an object present in a given context. This becomes particularly clear in limit cases, for example cases in which the pragmatic conditions are flaunted, creating challenges for the reader. Another type of limit that makes pragmatic conditions visible are the borders crossed when texts appear in a new context, beyond the one in which they were originally circulated; this happens when texts are read in later times, other places, and for new purposes, when they are translated into new languages or when they are otherwise remediated (for example in the musical composition of a poem or the cinematic adaptation of a novel). But conceptualizing prose, and literary texts more broadly, in pragmatic terms has not only formal but also historical and political ramifications

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as it directs our attention also to the pragmatic impact of literary texts. This too is borne out in multifarious ways: texts can be thought of as having agency through their influence on other texts, but also through their interference in the formation of national movements and the expansion of political imaginations. An overwhelmingly clear example of such an impact of the literary sphere on politics and society is the case of literary Zionism in its two main languages, Hebrew and German. As Benjamin Harshav famously describes, Israeli statehood is the end result of “an ideology that created a language that forged a society that became a State,” a causal chain that would have been interrupted if it were not for the force of literature that carried the language through.22 But this leaves the question open what it would mean for texts to be agents in such world-historical transformations and it paints too monolingual a picture of the literary history of Zionism. By focusing on the pragmatic conditions that are implied by key Zionist texts in German and in Hebrew—the way that they write about their own relation to the world and ability to operate in the world—this book addresses the fundamental assumptions that have formed the scholarly discourse on the agency of literary texts in the transformation of Jewish life in modernity and the remaking of its spaces. Building on the model that presents prose as the medium diametrically opposed to performance, I focus on the changing pragmatic conditions of Jewish writing in the modern period. This entails an interest in the different contexts, the different places in which the texts I read situate themselves and in which they are read. Accordingly, my description of the transformation of Jewish cultures and literatures in Europe since the early nineteenth century centers on the transformation of space, both as the product of social construction and as a poetic category that forms the imagination and its products.23 Positioned at the heart of this transformation, Zionism is a constellation of grand spatial ambitions, aiming to relocate masses of Jews to Palestine and fundamentally transform its topography. As a national movement, Zionism devoted an exceptional amount of energy to engineering and architecture, and the ideal space of the Jewish state was seen as the vehicle for utopia, be it in the socialist vein of labor settlement or in the messianic vein of religious nationalism.24 The relatively recent construction of a massive wall of separation between Jews and Palestinians within the occupied territories on the west bank of the Jordan River is perhaps the most ambitious—and the most destructive—reorganization of space taken on by Zionism to this day. Among its myriad consequences, all of this energy devoted to the transformation of space has serious implications for the literary sphere. As Jewish spaces are

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transformed, so are the pragmatic conditions within which Jewish texts operate and the result is a literary tradition constantly obsessed with articulating and pointing out its contextual conditions. In the chapters that follow, I track a series of remediations: different kinds of transformations and translations that alter the pragmatic conditions in which texts operate. This makes different kinds of clarifying operations necessary. Think of a dance performance that is transposed into prose, to take a particularly clear example that will arise in the book. For every gesture, many words of description are required; at the same time, once these words have been produced, the significance of the dance has been irrevocably altered. The authors I discuss in detail— G. W. F. Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, and Haim Nahman Bialik—all explore the position of prose in a field of competing media and describe the remediating transformations and translations involved in producing prose. As I read them, they are at the same time both theoreticians and practitioners of prose, a duality that crucially forms their insight into the matter. In the first chapter, I read Hegel’s lectures on art as a text both symptomatic of and influential on the discourse that forms the figure “prose.” I show that a key concern of the lectures was the dissolution of the space of art in the modern world; in response to this dissolution, Hegel figuratively fashions prose as a worldly and world-producing medium. My reading focuses in particular on the switch between “prose of the world” and “world of prose” in one of the most widely read passages from the lectures and analyzes the role of the monarch—the “king of prose”—in that world. Heinrich Heine, the second chapter argues, was the contemporary author who drew the most radical conclusions from Hegel’s assessment of the current prosaic conditions. As a Jewish author writing in a Germany negotiating between emancipation and nationalism, he worked to expose these conditions as they delimited what he was able to say. This negotiation ranges from his quasi-technical preoccupation with the operation of pronouns—their ability to function as deictics and extend a pointing hand into the world, and the difference that medium and mode make in terms of that ability—to his provocations and challenges to censorship. Following a brief discussion of the complex pragmatic operations carried out in Heine’s epoch-making Buch der Lieder, I focus primarily on his writing on art and the theater and present Heine as a prolific theoretician of prose as an artistic medium that operates with a unique set of pragmatic conditions and concerns. With this in mind, I read his Reisebilder, his “travel pictures”—a series of experimental prose texts that are traditionally read as strikingly and provocatively unconcerned with the landscapes through

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which the author travels—as a treatise on the relation between prose and space and the world-making potential of prose. Heine had an immense impact on Jewish culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and as I show, his Jewish readers were often well aware of the generic and pragmatic negotiations that he carried out as a theorizer of prose. The focal point of my description of the history of Heine reception is its intensely intermedial character: Heine is by far the most widely composed of German poets, a segment of his Nordsee was the first poem to be broadcast on the German National Radio in the 1920s, his poetry was the subject of visual rebuses, and the decade-long debates concerning his monument became a platform for a vehement discussion of the relation of poetry and literature to visual arts and to public spaces. I make questions of medium, performance, and space the center of my reading of the Jewish and Zionist reception of Heine, a history that I flesh out by laying out the history of Heine translation into Hebrew and by analyzing in detail the relation of two Zionist authors—Theodor Herzl and Haim Nahman Bialik—to Heine. The common thread that runs through this varied and complex reception history is the preoccupation with the balance—or rather, the problematic imbalance—between performance and prose. As I show, the parameters of this history of reception are set, not surprisingly, in Heine’s own work, in which prose is fashioned as the modern medium that explodes and reconstructs spaces. Heine is thus a mediator in multiple senses: between romanticism and modernism, between German and Hebrew, and between multiple modes and media. The second part of the book moves into the twentieth century, presenting Herzl and Bialik as theoreticians and practitioners of prose who build on and revolutionize the positions of their predecessors. Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland (1902), is the most famous text to imagine forth the Jewish state and describe its space before the fact. Based on archival research and a reading of his mostly ignored works for the newspaper and the theater, I show that Herzl prepared for the writing of the novel by reflecting extensively on the key concerns that emerged from my reading of Hegel and Heine: the historic emergence of prose, the relation of prose to performance and other artistic media, and the pragmatic conditions under which prose is written and read. The implications for the novel as well as its reception by contemporary and later Zionist readers are spelled out in the second part of the chapter. The following chapter turns to the opposing camp within the Jewish national movement—cultural Zionism—to show that Bialik, one of its major literary practitioners, followed a similar path of exploration of prose in relation to other media in order to reflect on the relation of literature to the national space. The chapter analyzes

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Bialik’s literary responses to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, a process that demanded multiple forms of mediation, translation, and revision on the way to his monumental narrative poem “City of Slaughter.” I show that the crucial form of translation in this process is between the different media of the spoken testimony of the victims, the historical prose that Bialik attempted to produce in his unfinished report on the events, and the performative poetic idiom of “City of Slaughter.” Complementing this reading, I offer an interpretation of Bialik’s use of the term prose in his theoretical writing and show that the relation of prose to space carried both ideological and philosophical ramifications for this important poet. In the final chapter, I show that the phenomena that I pinpoint in the book have a remarkable staying power and relevancy to contemporary Israeli literature, culture, and politics. The final chapter completes the history of Heine’s Hebrew translations in the twentieth century to show that it is an efficient barometer of the transformation of Hebrew literature and its relation to questions of prose, media, pragmatics, and space. I describe the curious afterlife of the Heine monument debates in the Israeli debates concerning the naming of a street for Heine, discussions that have informed the work of Hebrew translators and authors who engage with Heine. The chapter, and the book, ends with a reading of novels by two of Israel’s most fascinating contemporary authors: Yoel Hoffmann and Haim Beer. As I show, both of them experiment with the pragmatics of prose in the context of post-state Zionism and use Heine as a crucial point of reference in this experiment. Prosaic Conditions aims to throw new light on the literary worldmaking pursued by Zionist authors, and by extension on the operation of literary nation-building more broadly. This approach allows me to pre­ sent a genealogy of contemporary Israeli literature that departs from the familiar teleological narrative of national fulfillment and the return to an autochthonous language. Instead, I show that the modern Hebrew language and its literature are formed by a series of translations, between different languages, spaces, modes, media, and literary genres.

Prosaic Conditions

Chapter One



Prose Regnant: World, State, and Subject in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics As the reader of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics soon notes, the figurative use of the terms “prose” and “prosaic” is a recurring leitmotiv in this text. Prose plays a crucial role in Hegel’s understanding of art, showing up at each step along the way as art’s other and bringing together different, seemingly contradictory aspects of what lies beyond art: the abstract thought of philosophy, the preoccupation of science with the natural world, the limitation of the natural in comparison with art, the bourgeois social order, and the limitations on freedom posed by the state. One might say that prose offers Hegel the tool with which to delineate the shape of art negatively, drawing its borders in different directions. This makes “prose” into a slippery but very useful term in the lectures, a term that defines the modern world with which art, and its consumers, are confronted in the present described by Hegel: the world of the bourgeois social order as upheld by the state, a world in which the individual can act only within certain strictures. The lectures on aesthetics, which were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and transcribed by Hegel’s students, combine two of the most salient and recognizable features of Hegel’s philosophy.1 First, they move along a historical narrative in which art becomes the reflection of a process undergone by spirit, going through three stages: the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic. Second, the description is anchored in a series of binary oppositions such as matter/form, sense/intellect, truth/appearance, finitude/ infinity, interiority/exteriority, and abstraction/concretion.2 This last opposition is instrumental to the rhetorical construction of the lectures, and in particular in the figurative description of prose. Prosa and prosaisch, as well as other terms such as Raum (space) and Welt (world), are harder to map onto the system of oppositions; they are rhetorical, rather than conceptual, metaphors used more loosely in order to explore through language some of the problems that interest Hegel. In the first part of the lectures, prosaisch is chosen as the key term to

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describe the present in distinction from the past. In two following sections, Hegel describes two sets of conditions or states of the world (Weltzustände): “Individual Independence—Heroic Age,” and, in contrast, “The Current Prosaic Conditions.”3 The term Weltzustand—condition or state of the world—is rooted in the structural logic of Hegel’s system and specifically in the lectures on aesthetics.4 Hegel sees the world as undergoing constant transformation in history, and he describes it as moving through different states of affairs, constellations of the sensual and the spiritual, of matter and form. The historical development of art is part of this spiritual development, but it is also conditioned by it. A Weltzustand hence determines the possibilities of the production of art at a given epoch, but art also functions as an indicator through which the observer can determine what the condition of the world is. Accordingly, Hegel’s “current prosaic conditions” are a description of the political and spiritual conditions of the present, a picture of the now that Hegel establishes before he embarks upon a detailed consideration of art in order, ultimately, to raise the question of what forms are available to art in the present. In other words, this is a description of a set of pragmatic conditions that constrain art in all its forms. At the center of this description lies a claim about the possibilities for action open to a modern subject. All citizens of the modern state, Hegel claims, operate not from their individual subjectivity, but within a system of obligations and laws. Thus, even though there is some freedom for action in particular matters or situations, the individual is ultimately part of an established order. Though he may “twist and turn,” he “does not appear himself as the independent, total, and at the same time individual living embodiment of this society, but only as a restricted member [Glied] of it.” (VA 1:254–55; ALA 1:194). Hegel’s description of the modern monarch is emblematic of this new condition, which limits the possibilities for action.5 The contemporary king is no longer “the concrete apex [Spitze] of the whole” as were the heroes of mythical times. Instead, he is transformed into a “more or less abstract midpoint [Mittelpunkt] of institutions already independently developed and established by law and the constitution” (VA 1:253–54; ALA 1:193, translation modified). To comprehend this modern monarch, this prosaic king, Hegel is moved to use geometric terms: the apex has turned into a midpoint—a triangle has turned into a circle. The same geometry can be related to the concept of prose as well: the Spitze belongs to the order of verse, each of its turns being a kind of apex, whereas an abstract midpoint is closer to the logic of a page of prose. But there is another, crucial aspect to this transformation: the concrete position of the absolute

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5

monarch, who embodies power, has become abstract.6 Or rather, “more or less abstract.”

Prose, Temporality, and Abstraction Following his initial description, Hegel’s picture of the current prosaic conditions presents another account of the world in which the modern, more or less abstract monarch lives. Hegel harbors violently ambivalent feelings toward forms of art that offer responses to the age of prose, including Dutch genre painting and the Bildungsroman, admiring their success, on the one hand, but expressing skepticism about their stature as art, since they refrain from presenting an image of the ideal, on the other. The Bildungsroman, for example, is Hegel’s paradigm for what he calls “Das Romanhafte,” translated by Knox as “Romantic Fiction,” which constructs the novel as the reappearance, through art, of chivalry in the context of the modern world, a world of “more or less abstract” authority in which the “chimerical ends” toward which knights errant strived are replaced by the “firm and secure order of civil society and the state” upheld by institutions such as the police, law courts, the army, and political government. In this world, the protagonists of romance face a new set of conditions, their “subjective ends of love, honor, and ambition” and “their ideals of world-reform” must fit into the firm and secure pregiven order of the law and the police. The modern novel thus gravitates naturally to the plot of apprenticeship, of Bildung, which is constituted by the assimilation of the hero into the “substantial order and the prose of actuality” (VA 2:219; ALA 1:592–93).7 Hegel’s world of prose thus presents a challenge to art because of the mediation through which all operations within it must pass. As Erich Heller suggests, “it is not a question of more or better poetry being written in an age of poetry; what Hegel means are different coinages of the mind, different currencies by which we pay for our attempts to understand the world.”8 Indeed, Heller’s metaphor itself already carries a decidedly prosaic valance, coming as it does from a world mediated first and foremost by money. As Hegel describes it: The individual, as he appears in this world of prose and everyday is not active out of the entirety of his own self and his resources, and he is intelligible not from himself but from something else. For the individual man stands in dependence on external influences, laws, political institutions, civil relationships, which he just finds con-

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fronting him, and he must bow to them whether he has them as his own inner being or not. (VA 1:197; ALA 1:149)

He continues to paint the picture in increasingly dark hues: This is the prose of the world as it appears to the consciousness both of the individual himself and of others: a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw. For every isolated living thing remains caught in the contradiction of being itself in its own eyes this shut-in unit and yet of being dependent on something else, and the struggle to resolve this contradiction does not get beyond an attempt and the continuation of this eternal war. (VA 1:199; ALA 1:150)

Sociability poses an insoluble paradox, an incommensurable gap between its members’ self-understanding, their freedom, on the one hand, and their position in a set of structures that limit that freedom, their dependence on others, on the other hand. In his attempt to make the paradox rhetorically visible and present to his reader’s mind, Hegel adopts the mode of intensification, beginning with the tension arising from the paradox itself—“the struggle [Kampf] to resolve this contradiction”—and reaching a much stronger statement that seems to refer beyond the paradox to the social existence that gave rise to it—“the continuation of this eternal war.” Nestled as it is within a discussion of the “current prosaic conditions,” this rhetorical intensification leaves the reader with a sense of crisis in relation to the political present, a sense that the civil institutions and structures that have come to condition the existence of the individual are precariously close to dissolution in struggle.9 If these are to be read as comments on the present political configuration—a gloomy version of the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel maps in detail the embeddedness of the individual in ever-growing rings of external influences, laws, political institutions and civil relationships—then prose functions here to emphasize precisely the presentness of this political configuration, its distinction from earlier, different times.10 To speak of the current prosaic conditions is to be engaged in differentiating the now from the past. However, the nature of this threshold in Hegel’s thought is quite surprising: it is in constant movement. How current, the reader is thus compelled to ask, are the current prosaic conditions that Hegel describes? In other words: what day is the heute (today) of his “heutige prosaische Zustände,” his “current prosaic conditions”?

Prose Regnant

7

Prose is a figure of the current, the present, as divided from an irrevocable past. But while the logic of this figure is rooted in Hegel’s understanding of the political context in which he lived and wrote, this currency is not to be taken to mean simply the beginning of the nineteenth century in Prussia; to do so would be to view Hegel’s historical model too strictly, as a self-fulfilling teleological narrative that leads to the present as a culmination of the historical process.11 If this were the case, describing Hegel’s “current prosaic conditions” would be a fairly straightforward matter, involving a division between the present and the past, and most prominently a difference between the now and the Greek world. The problem is that Hegel evokes prose not only to describe the present, but also as a marker of the originating points of the different transformations, at different moments in time, in the successive emergence of symbolic, classic, and romantic art, that ultimately, over a lengthy process, result in the now. In other words, the term “prose” does double work to describe both the end result—the “current prosaic conditions”—and the different moments of transformation along the way. Prose, then, stands at the beginning, but rather than the beginning, or a beginning, it stands at multiple beginnings. The line of division between what Hegel describes as “prosaic conditions” and the mythical past runs over thousands of years, producing the modern world over a lengthy, repetitive process. Thus, Hegel repeatedly recognizes the points of departure of prose in different moments along the historical trajectory that his lectures on aesthetics map.12 In his discussion of the symbolic form of art he describes no fewer than three originary moments, historical constellations that give birth to prose in the process of abstraction from the material to the ideal. Like the prosaic monarch, art occupies a midpoint—or a series of midpoints—between the material world and the world of ideas, and prose emerges from that process of abstraction that repeatedly reproduces the medial position. In the first emergence of prose, symbolic art appears as balanced between an unconscious, immediate existence in nature and a fully conscious position that results in a cleavage between subject and object. With art in the middle position, Hegel requires a point beyond art—“the completely prosaic consciousness”—in order to designate it as such.13 In the second, the most monumental transformation effected by monotheism is said to be the abstraction of God from the concrete phenomena of the world, since “existence both natural and human now acquires the new position of being a representation of the Divine only because its finitude appears on its own surface,”14 and this world of surfaces is pregnant with a future not only of secularization, but also of prose: “For the first time,

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Chapter One

therefore, nature and the human form confront us as prosaic and bereft of God [prosaisch und entgöttert]” (VA 1:482; ALA 1:374). And in the third, a criticism of the fable as represented by Aesop, the process of abstraction collapses back from the ideal into the concrete: Aesop treats animals “with prosaic eyes as something where circumstances serve only to picture human action and suffering. But yet his notions are only witty, without any energy of the spirit or depth of insight and substantive vision, without poetry or philosophy. . . . In the slave, prose begins, and so this entire species [Gattung] is prosaic too” (VA 1:497; ALA 1:387). In other words, the emergence of prose—and hence the distinction between an earlier, poetic, and a later, prosaic time—is recursive. Thus, in a sense, the newness of the current prosaic conditions is nothing new. The “current prosaic conditions” in that sense always are “current,” regardless of the temporal epoch involved. And what is recursive in the emergence of prose in the dimension of time is the process of abstraction that occurs in or applies to the dimension of space. For Hegel, the point is not where exactly in time the “current conditions” have come into being. Instead, it is how, in history, what is spatial recursively becomes taken up and transformed into temporal structures. Hegel’s historical narrative of the emergence of prose is thus in fact a series of negotiations about space.15 Like Hegel’s modern monarch, who is born out of the abstraction of what used to be a concrete position, prose in all these cases figuratively achieves a transition away from space. Although we are accustomed to think of Hegel as the philosopher of History (with a capital H) and as the exponent of a system founded on dialectical changes unfolding in the dimension of time, in Hegel’s description of the progression of art in history, the most significant dimension is not time, but space: the problematic of the taking up or inhabitation of space furnishes him with a model for the historical change through which the different art forms proceed.

The Space of Art There are in fact two different historical schemas operating in Hegel’s account of the history of art. While he divides the history of artistic production into three eras, the symbolic, classic, and romantic ages, he also claims that these three larger spiritual stages roughly correspond to the system of the five different modes of art: architecture is symbolic, sculpture classic, and painting, music, and finally poetry, are all romantic.16 As many readers have noted, the attempt to fit these two narratives of development together is one of the clear limitations of Hegel’s aesthetics; but

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the shift in emphasis from the one to the other elucidates Hegel’s turn to space in the lectures. It is a shift from “the prose of the world” in which the freedom of consciousness is always constrained by the finite, the mutable, the contingent, and the necessary, to a “world of prose”—a world that language can make, a world in which the freedom of consciousness can find a way to overcome the constraints of the “eternal war” that defines the modern world. This is achieved through a process of abstraction that takes up and transforms the spaces of the world and the spatial coordinates of art in the world. The trajectory that art follows in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics begins in the shaping of spatial constructs and ends in the shaping of structures of language: “the prose of thought” (VA 3:244; ALA 2:976). With each stage, from architecture to poetry, the sensual representation of the idea, which is how Hegel defines “art,” becomes less sensual, with language as the end point of this process. This is the narrative that ends with the current “current prosaic conditions.” With each step along the way, art is removed from the public sphere to be consumed privately. This is a process fundamentally rooted in the transformation of political space, the transformation that has produced the modern, more or less abstract monarch. This trajectory leads to the final dissolution of the sensual and the spatial, and with it the end of art, superseded by the spiritual realms of religion and philosophy. In this process language does not simply overcome space, as it might seem that the larger narrative that leads from the pyramids to poetry would have it. Instead, space increasingly becomes the fundamental medium through which philosophical language must pass in order to make sense. Hegel describes this process of abstraction as “the beauty of art as it unfolds itself, in the arts and their productions, into a world of actualized beauty” (VA 1:115; ALA 1:83, italics in the original). The emphatic reference to the world into which art unfolds is far from inconsequential. It is here paraphrased by “objektive Wirklichkeit” and also closely related to Äusserlichkeit, the world-space within which art appears and from which it gradually recedes. In the process of abstraction by which art takes up and transforms space, it makes—or remakes—the world. Art begins with this worldly, objective Äusserlichkeit, and hence it is only natural that its point of departure should be architecture. And the point of departure of architecture is, for Hegel, in Egypt. He describes the Egyptians as a building nation, whose great achievements were in the engineering and construction of canals, dams, and pyramids (VA 1:457; ALA 1:354).17 Following this first step in its development, as art is gradually idealized, its relation to space is transformed, and it concentrates

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Chapter One

more and more on subjectivity and interiority, but each of the steps along the way demands a reiteration of the entire process. It is as if in his historicizing Hegel were engaged in the work of building and furnishing a temple of the arts.18 Thus, in his view of the deterministic unfolding of the different forms of art, architecture is the first primitive step in the making of beautiful forms in the world, but it fairly quickly demands the next one, as if its empty spaces must be filled with something, with the equally spatial yet more spiritual form of sculpture, followed by the increasingly abstract forms of painting, music, and poetry. Nonetheless, each of the next steps repeatedly needs to be reminded of architecture, of the space within which this is all happening. This is how Hegel describes the step from architecture to sculpture: “The temple of classical architecture needed a god to live in it; sculpture places him before us in plastic beauty and gives to the material it uses for this purpose forms which by their very nature are not alien to the spirit but are the shape immanent in the selected content itself” (VA 3:222; ALA 2:959).19 The progression of this argument follows a recurring gesture of the return to space. With every step that he takes away from the world of matter, away from the Bildende Kunste and toward music, and poetry, and finally prose, architecture continues to be the basic point of comparison. Thus, music and poetry, each in their turn, must be specifically related to and differentiated from architecture. Music, it turns out, is symmetrically opposed to architecture, and hence in Hegel’s narrative closely related to it. The two share a muteness, a level of abstraction, unlike the representational content of the other arts. Moreover, sound itself has much in common with the heavy materials of architecture; architecture “derives its forms, not from what exists, but from the spirit’s invention in order to mould them according to the laws of gravity and the rules of symmetry and eurythmy,” and music, in following quantitative harmonic laws and being subject to regularity and symmetry, uses similar tools. This gives music an “especially architectonic character,” since “freed from expressing emotion, it constructs on its own account, with a wealth of invention, a musically regular building of sound [ein musikalisch gesetzmäßiges Tongebäude]” (VA 3:139; ALA 2:894). This “building of sound,” and specifically the sense that sound can be likened to the heavy stones that make architecture, continues to resonate when Hegel comes to discuss verbal art. In his introductory remarks to the chapter on poetry, Hegel goes through his customary positioning of the new element in relation to the previous parts of the discussion, explaining mainly how poetry relates to the other romantic arts, music and painting. Architecture seems to be positioned too far off to merit a discussion of its

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relations to poetry, yet it ultimately appears as diametrically opposed to— and again, therefore, in the logic of Hegel’s narrative, a close bedfellow of—poetry. Hegel here concedes that the spirituality of poetry is not only the basis for its production of “the totality of beauty once and for all,” but is also a potential deficiency, which becomes apparent in comparison with its polar opposite among the arts, architecture. In a passage that bears crucial implications for Hegel’s utilization of the terms “sign” and “symbol,” Hegel states that poetry “goes so far in its negative treatment of its sensuous material [ihres sinnlichen Elementes] that it reduces the opposite of heavy spatial matter [die schwere räumliche Materie], namely sound, to a meaningless sign instead of making it, as architecture makes its material, into a meaningful symbol” (VA 3:235; ALA 2:968).20 In other words, architecture is not simply, as Hegel seems to be saying some of the time, a primitive, limited form of art that is superseded by idealization and later interiorization; rather, it is the fundamental frame of reference within which he understands the different forms of art, setting the agenda first of all around the question of the relation of the arts to space. With each step in which this transformation of the space of art occurs, Hegel not only refers back to the element of space as the frame of reference within which the arts are conceptualized, but also incorporates the element of space into his own figurative language. A clear example of this pattern occurs when he writes about painting in his introductory remarks. Painting, as mentioned above, is the first step away from the spatiality of the material: it subjectivizes the quality of visibility, freeing itself from both the heavy matter of architecture and the “totality of sensuous spatiality which sculpture retains, even if concentrated and in organic shapes.” Painting, in contrast, makes things visible in a more ideal way, by using color, and this frees art “from the complete sensuous spatiality of material things [die sinnlich-räumliche Vollständigkeit des Materiellen] by being restricted to the dimensions of a plane surface” (VA 1:120–21; ALA 1:87). In this sense, painting follows the trajectory of removal from space that forms the Aesthetics, leading Hegel on to the even more idealized romantic arts of music and poetry and finally to the “current prosaic conditions.” However, this passage is immediately followed by further specification about the contents of painting; here, symptomatically, Hegel immediately allows space back into his discourse, through the back door of metaphor. I insert the relevant German terms in italics in order to highlight this phenomenon: On the other hand, the content too attains the widest particularization. Whatever can find room [Raum] in the human breast as feeling,

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idea, and purpose, whatever it is capable of shaping into act, all this multiplex material can constitute the variegated content of painting. The whole realm [Reich] of particularity from the highest ingredients of spirit right down to the most isolated natural objects finds its place here [erhält seine Stelle]. For even finite nature in its particular scenes [Szenen] and phenomena can come on the stage [auftreten] in painting, if only some allusion to an element of spirit allies it more closely with thought and feeling. (VA 1:121; ALA 1:87)

Having posited the abstraction of space, Hegel immediately proceeds to make “finding place” and “coming onto the stage” into the fundamental terms for describing the operation of art. Furthermore, this place that is found is bound to be conceptualized in political terms, by recourse to the modern state, as Hegel’s use of the term Reich here indicates. Hegel’s language follows a pattern: a philosophical undoing of space, followed by its figurative reconstruction or its reconstitution in language, which leads to a reflection on the political world. This pattern is of particular importance in Hegel’s figuration of prose as making worlds, rather than simply as what the recurring, eternal struggle of subject and object, spirit and matter, has determined the “current conditions” of the world to be.

Prose as Remediation For Hegel, who rejects natural beauty as part of the provenance of a philosophy of art (a radical move that separates him from earlier aesthetic theories, most notably Kant’s),21 the terms “the beauty of art” and “the ideal” are coextensive; art functions as a compensation for the limitations of the natural world and a counterbalance to the various things he calls “the prose of the world”: limitation, mutability, lack of freedom, or dependence on others. The role of art—indeed the necessity of art—thus lies in remediation, in both the common meaning of the term and the technical sense as it is employed in media studies.22 The role of art for Hegel is to supply and correct the deficiencies of immediate reality by translating them into new media. Art is called to take up the external and remake it in the image of the ideal; art lifts the truth out of its “temporal setting” and gives the external an appearance worthy of truth. At the same time, art is defined by the series of remediations—transformations of the same spiritual material from one medium to another—that repeatedly redefine the spatial context and the pragmatic conditions within which art operates.

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In effect, Hegel here is arguing that in the process by which art takes up and abstracts space, it institutes what today would be called a series of new “signifying practices.” In these serial adjustments in the conditions of artistic production, art itself is both constituted and eventually transcended, a process that involves a transformation of the relation between artistic productions and space. The arts operate in spaces of their own making, and, by the end of the process, the space that the arts make is prosaic. This means that it is a purely textual space that operates in the absence of a performing artist, rather than one of the physical presence, one that requires the presence of the artist who performs it.23 As Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich put it, “Prose . . . has neither the resources of the representation of natural space and time by natural space and time nor the constraints thereby imposed. In fact, the temporality and spatiality of prose have nothing natural about them . . . Prose constructs its own space and time, a textual space and time, according to the needs of the immediate textual environment.”24 In other words, the pragmatic conditions that define how art is understood change throughout the process of remediation tracked by Hegel, ending with their radical reformulation in the emergence of prose. With Hegel, we might name the pragmatic constraints under which art finally finds itself “prosaic conditions” (prosaische Zustände). As a signifying practice that operates in a space of its own making, prose is thus not easily disposed of or contained. Although Hegel claims that in poetry, art has achieved an appearance “through which the poverty of nature and prose no longer peeps” (VA 1:202; ALA 1:152), prose indeed continues to peep through and continues to demand Hegel’s attention, even as he turns his gaze to the ideal in art. The question of the relation between the ideal of art and the natural world must be rephrased repeatedly, and with each of these reformulations, prose makes its way back into art. Indeed, a few pages after art is charged with the role of covering up prose, not allowing it to peep through, Hegel reformulates the question of the position of art between the ideal and the natural as follows: “Is art to be poetry or prose?” If these are the terms of the dilemma, the question seems to answer itself: “For the truly poetical element in art is just what we have called the Ideal.” But the philosopher continues to hedge, pondering the degree to which the term “ideal” encompasses everything that is art, and the question immediately returns, with a seemingly slight change of parameters: “what is poetry and what is prose in art?” (VA 1:213; ALA 1:161–62). With this, the production of the ideal in art has turned from something that can simply be posited into a complicated and precarious task, achieved only in a particular Weltzustand, under a particular set

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of conditions. The stage is thus set for the most provocative claim of the lectures: the time for art is over; the contemporary Weltzustand is prose. Hegel’s second rephrasing of the question—“what is poetry and what is prose in art?”—reappears toward the end of his lectures. In a sense, by returning to it he closes a circle and returns to the general question at the basis of his philosophy of art. This occurs in the midst of the detailed discussion of a particular medium, the medium in which art reaches its own limits and through which it auto-destructs: poetry.25 In its structure and its rhetoric, Hegel’s argument leads teleologically to poetry, emphasizing its unique status as a linguistic mode of art. The section, or rather the succession of sections that approach the definition of poetry by distinction from the prosaic is constructed curiously, with a logic of deferral, rather than of progression. The entire section—titled “Das poetische Kunstwerk im Unterschiede des Prosaischen,” which Knox translates as “The Poetic Work of Art as Distinguished from a Prose Work of Art”26—refers to the prosaic in two conflicting senses and perpetuates the refusal of prose as a signifying practice to be contained or limited within Hegel’s own system: it is both what is beyond the provenance of art altogether and an element within art to be distinguished from poetry in particular. Indeed, at the center of this discussion he situates examples of linguistic expressions that in his own terms he cannot judge to be either poetry or prose. These “pregnant statements (gehaltvolle Sätze),” as Hegel refers to them—taken from the Bible (“I am the Lord, God, thou shall have no other Gods beside me”) and from Greek thought (the Golden Verses of Pythagoras)—“precede the difference between prose and poetry” (VA 3:250; ALA 2:980). Farther down he states: “The boundary line where poetry ends and prose begins can only be drawn with difficulty and indeed cannot be generally indicated at all with assured accuracy” (VA 3:284; ALA 2:1007).27 Despite the difficulty (or perhaps because of it), Hegel goes through the precarious differentiation between the prosaic and the poetic twice— once as two modes of perception and once as two modes of representation. And indeed, in both cases, the distinction unravels. As two modes of perception, poetry and prose are defined relationally: poetry is unlike prose because it is abstract, purposeless, theoretical. Prose is unlike poetry because it is a limited form of thought, one that looks at the world and sees cause and effect, purpose and means (VA 3:241–42; ALA 2:972–73). Within prose, however, Hegel is tempted to draw distinctions between different submodes of thought, and here he begins to undo the relational distinction. The reasoning, prosaic mind always sees things in relation to others: this is its limit. But there is an even more limited, an even more prosaic mode of consciousness: one that does not even bother to make

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connections. Finally, these two are transcended by a third—speculative thinking—in which phenomena are tied to totality. “These deficiencies of the Understanding’s categories and the ordinary man’s visions are extinguished by speculative thinking which therefore is from one point of view akin to the poetic imagination” (VA 3:243; ALA 2:976). Having pushed prose to its limits, Hegel thus finds himself with poetry. Nonetheless—or perhaps all the more so—the two spheres of consciousness (Sphären des Bewußtseins), poetry and prose, carry out a territorial war over the soul. In primitive times, poetry had an easier game to play . . . poetry was not confronted with prose as an independent field of internal and external existence, a field that it had first to overcome. . . . If, on the other hand, prose has already drawn into its mode of treatment the entire contexts of the spirit and impressed the seal of that treatment on anything and everything, poetry has to undertake the work of completely recasting and remodeling and sees itself involved on every side in numerous difficulties because of the inflexibility of prose. (VA 3:244; ALA 2:976)

As described here, prose is like a weed or a virus: once it has gained footing it easily takes over territory, forcing poetry into a secondary position, always “compelled to outbid prose”(VA 3:244; ALA 2:976).28 For a moment following this, it seems as if Hegel has put the prosaic aside, and he goes on to describe the particularities of poetic language as it has developed historically and in different nations. But he must immediately turn back to differentiating it from nonpoetry, and thus he adds one more section. The title, “Das poetische und prosaische Kunstwerk” (“The Poetic and the Prose Work of Art,” VA 3:247; ALA 2:979), is an echo of the reformulated question we considered above: “what is poetry and what is prose in art?” Once again, prose has made its way into the realm of art, where it peeks through the ideal. The term “prosaische Kunstwerk” refers, it seems, to the types of written prose that may be considered as related to art: history and rhetoric. But after they are both considered closely—a consideration that gives Hegel the opportunity to make his clearest statements about prose, defining it as the language of “literal accuracy, unmistakable definiteness, and clear intelligibility” (VA 3:280; ALA 2:1005)—they are placed, once more, outside the realms of literature. Again, the task of differentiating between poetry and prose leads to a conflict between the two: “Now that the poetic and prosaic way of putting things and looking at the world are bound together in the consciousness of one and the same individual, both these ways may possibly restrict and

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disturb and even fight one another [so ist hier eine Hemmung und Störung, ja sogar ein Kampf möglich]” (VA 3:282; ALA 2:1006). Hegel here repeats a rhetorical gesture we have already recognized: the intensification of a dialectic constellation, in which tension between different elements is a constitutive force which allows them to be what they are, into a picture of warfare that suggests crisis, and seems to refer above all to the present moment as distinguished from a harmonious past. This brings us back to where we started reading Hegel: the most fundamental meaning given to the term “prose” in Hegel’s writing refers to a basic condition of limitedness that inheres in immediate, particular existence. “The whole breadth of prose in human existence [Die ganze Breite der Prosa im menschlichen Dasein]” (VA 1:197; ALA 1:148) reveals itself in every aspect of this existence: the contrast of the merely physical with the higher spiritual purposes in life, and the contrast of purposes that arises out of the very condition of plurality of social life. Hegel describes this plurality as a necessary conflict of needs and purposes that arises in every human activity, a conflict whose violent potential echoes in his language. The lengthy passage merits a second read: The individual, as he appears in this world of prose and everyday is not active out of the entirety of his own self and his resources, and he is intelligible not from himself but from something else. For the individual man stands in dependence on external influences, laws, political institutions, civil relationships, which he just finds confronting him, and he must bow to them whether he has them as his own inner being or not. . . . This is the prose of the world as it appears to the consciousness both of the individual himself and of others—a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw. For every isolated living thing remains caught in the contradiction of being itself in its own eyes this shut-in unit and yet of being dependent on something else, and the struggle to resolve this contradiction does not get beyond an attempt and the continuation of this eternal war. (VA 1:197–99; ALA 1:149–50)

The transition between the first and the second part of this prolonged consideration of the prosaic is crucial. Hegel starts out with “this world of prose and everydayness” and takes the next step into the “prose of the world, as it appears. . .” While in the flow of the argument these may seem like two ways of saying the same thing, for Hegel the transition and the different senses in which the two expressions pluralize the term

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“world” do important conceptual work. First, the world of prose and everydayness—as differentiated from other worlds (say, the epic world of heroic deeds or the religious world in which the everyday is understood by reference to the godly or the holy); then, prose of the world—a fabric of the existence of the world as everything that is, here conceived as many smaller worlds all of which are ultimately prosaic (say: the world of carpenters, the world of philosophers, the world of mothers, and so on).29 Within this passage lies a basic dynamic that runs through the history of the term “world”: how to accommodate and understand plurality in a concept that denotes everything that is.30 To pluralize the term “world,” transforming it instead into a world of worlds, is a fundamentally secularizing gesture. Indeed, the possibility that there are in fact many worlds was a philosophical challenge to many Enlightenment thinkers, a fruitful ground on which to test the limits of the philosophical revolution that they were participating in.31 Hegel carried out his own secularization of the term Welt in the compound Weltgeist, which he extracted from the opposition between a godly Geist and the world, and made it into one of the fundamental concepts in his system. In this sense Hegel can be seen as an early example of a nineteenth-century tendency to use the word Welt to refer neither to theology nor to cosmology, in compounds such as Weltmarkt or Weltmacht.32 By the end of the nineteenth century the contrast between one world and many worlds would come to be articulated philosophically as a contrast between Le­ benswelt and the different practical worlds in which modern humans live, encoded as everyday-world.33 From another perspective the Welt von Welten as it took shape by the nineteenth century can be seen as the world system of capitalism, a global economy characterized by the contemporaneous neighboring of noncontemporaneous, smaller worlds.34 Indeed, in Hegel’s Weltgeschichte we see how the term that philosophically refers to all that is becomes useful in making geopolitical distinctions: the philosophy of world history, as many of its later readers have remarked, invests a lot of energy in the exclusion of the non-European from the realm of history altogether.35 Ranajit Guha has associated Hegel’s Prosa der Welt and his Weltgeschichte through a mediating concept: the prose of history. He forcefully claims that between the prose of the world and the prose of history there is a transformation, through which the fullness and broadness of existence in which Hegel had shown a brief interest when he thought of the prose of existence is given up for the ideological biases that govern how he thinks of the writing of history.36 Thus, Guha locates an inflection between two types of temporality: the prose of the world—a time dense with human

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experiences—and the prose of history—the totalizing time of the history of states. But what constitutes this density, in Hegel? How does his own language construct it? These questions can be answered by finally returning to the section on the “current prosaic conditions” in the lectures on aesthetics. From the outset, the prosaic state of affairs, or current condition, is described in markedly spatial terms. Once more, the italicized German words should highlight this figural tendency: If we look now at the state of affairs in the world of today, with its civilized, legal, moral, and political conditions, we see that nowadays the scope [Kreis] for ideal configuration is only of a very limited [begrenzter] kind. For the regions [Bezirke] in which free scope is left for the independence of particular decisions are small in number and range [Umfang]. . . . In the world of today the individual subject may of course act out of himself in this or that matter, but still every individual, wherever he may twist and turn, belongs to an established social order and does not appear himself as the independent, total, and at the same time individual living embodiment of this society, but only as a restricted member of it. (VA 1:253–55; ALA 1:193–95)

The terms geringer Spielraum or begrenzter Kreis, or the description of the individual as a bodily member, that twists and turns in order to find its place in society, are metaphors that describe the existing social order as a space, and cannot be read as referring to an architecture, or as descriptions of a topography in any concrete sense. Moreover, these are “dead” metaphors, employed by philosophy as a matter of course, without any significant consideration of their figurative resonance. Nevertheless, their use in these passages varies significantly from the standard philosophical employment of spatial language, because their very metaphorical nature is rooted in the prosaic conditions that they describe. The prosaification of the world, we realize upon reading these passages more closely, involves an abstraction of the spaces humans inhabit. Thus, “monarchs in our day, unlike the heroes of the mythical ages, are no longer the concrete head of the whole, but a more or less abstract centre [nicht mehr, wie die Heroen der mythischen Zeitalter, eine in sich konkrete Spitze des Ganzen, sondern ein mehr oder weniger abstracter Mittelpunkt] of institutions already independently developed and established by law and the constitution” (VA 1:253–54; ALA 1:193). Hegel here not only hedges on the question of how abstract the mod-

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ern political order is, he casts the entire passage in the same pattern of spatial figuration that I identified above—a philosophical unmaking of space followed by its figurative reconstitution—in a more condensed version. Prose thus becomes not only the figure for the historical narrative encapsulated in the lectures, but also the rhetorical mold within which this narrative is cast. This mold is interesting and noteworthy in itself, but it becomes even more fascinating in light of its surprising afterlife in the work of a group of Jewish authors. The first link in the chain, Heinrich Heine, was a perceptive diagnostician of the current prosaic conditions, in both the poetic and the political sense, and a shrewd critic of Hegel. Heine’s Jewish readers saw in him different things over the decades and centuries. Some of them—most notably those who devoted significant attention to the nexus of Jewish literature and Jewish space and to the political transformations of Jewish space in the era of nationalism and statehood—used him to reflect on the pragmatic conditions of their own writings. Hegel’s rhetoric thus ultimately makes its way into some of the foundational texts of Zionist literature and continues to echo even in contemporary Hebrew literature.

Chapter Two

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Heinrich Heine, Explorer of the Current Prosaic Condition Perhaps no other author in the early nineteenth century struggled so fiercely and so revealingly with what Hegel described as the “current prosaic conditions” as Heinrich Heine. After achieving literary fame in his twenties with both the romantic poetry of his Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs, 1827) and the biting political prose of the Reisebilder (Travel Pictures, 1826–31), the German-Jewish author continued to wrestle for the rest of his career with his doubly dual persona—as both a poet and a prose polemicist and as both a German and a Jew. Heine’s view of poetry was always ambivalent, sometimes amounting to simple rejection. As he writes in an 1837 preface to the Book of Songs, his greatest best seller, which had become vastly popular with romantic composers: “For some time something in me has balked at any poetic language, and, as I hear, a similar disinclination has shown itself in many contemporaries. It would seem to me that all too many lies are told in beautiful verse, and that truth shrinks from appearing in metrical garb” (CPH 4; SS 1:9). Of course, Heine would continue in the years after that statement was made to write some of his most widely read and well-beloved poetry. But these lines, which, as it happens, appear on the first page of Heine’s collected works, may indeed serve as a key to that body of work as it was perceived by its author as well as by his contemporary and later readers. Heine’s complicated attitude toward the relation of poetry to prose is reflected in the multiple crossovers between the two modes in his work: for example, the biting ironic tone and sophisticated political commentary that appears in the form of verse, or the internal distinction within his prose works—written both before and after the Book of Songs—between polemic, narrative, memoir, and other genres. As we shall see, these multiple crossovers are part of a whole network of remediations explored by Heine, who was fascinated by the pragmatic consequences of translation between media and genres. Through the dilemmas of writing prose, as

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opposed to poetry, Heine addressed the seemingly unrelated quandary of his place as a Jew in the German literary public sphere in an age defined on the one hand by emancipation and on the other by what Hegel had described as “the current prosaic conditions,” that is, as the ever-growing limitation of the freedom and independence of the individual by the state. Heine was negotiating at the same time the opening of the German literary public sphere to his voice as a Jewish author and its closing to his voice as a social critic, a closing and a censorship that ultimately led him to exile in Paris. This made the pragmatic dilemmas of prose writing— how does the absent author construct the place within which his writing can be understood?—particularly acute. Heine was an author perennially preoccupied with the question of the position of literature—in its different forms, modes, and media—in the public sphere. For Heine, as well as for some of his most sensitive readers, prose became a tool both challenging and attractive, that enabled him to highlight his situatedness in writing while pointing out how problematic it is to be situated in the modern literary world. As he moved between modes and media, Heine produced a body of theory on the question of literature as medium and on the stakes of using it to position oneself in the world.

Home and Homelessness: Adorno and Arendt on Heine Heine’s preoccupation with the problematic of the situatedness of the writer is reflected in the reception of his works. I will discuss this issue at length in the following chapter, but apposite examples here are Theodor Adorno’s essay, “Heine the Wound,” and Hannah Arendt’s references to Heine in “The Jew as Pariah.” Like Heine, Adorno and Arendt both experienced exile from Germany, a condition that defines their engagement with the German-Jewish poet, which focuses on questions of home and homelessness and thus raises one of the central issues for my reading of Heine, namely how his texts address their spatial context. Originally delivered as a radio address in West Germany in 1956 on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Heine’s death, Adorno’s essay is in fact a diagnosis of the transformed conditions in which Heine is to be read after the Holocaust.1 The “wound,” Adorno says—the problem Heine as a writer posed for his postwar readers—“is Heine’s lyric poetry.”2 What is wounding about Heine’s poetry, as Adorno criticizes it, is that it is oppressively, embarrassingly prosaic in its insistence on its status as commodity, whereas prose is redeemable, for Adorno, by nature of its political acuity.3

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To explain the problematic nature of Heine’s poetry, Adorno marks Heine as a foreigner: “Heine’s fluency and self-evidence, which is derived from the language of communications, is the opposite of a native sense of being at home in language. Only someone who is not actually inside language can manipulate it like an instrument.”4 As a Jew, Adorno seems to be implying, Heine must remain homeless, an exile in Paris and an exile from native fluency in language; hence, his name will always remain an irritant and his writing a wound in the German cultural sphere. In an earlier English-language “reappraisal” of Heine from 1949, Adorno had taken a very different position, rejecting as reductive the notion that Heine’s Jewishness defined his poetry in any significant way and representing Heine’s decision to write poetry under prosaic conditions as one of his great achievements. “Heine,” he writes was the first German poet who faced squarely the problem: how is lyrical poetry possible at all in the sober, cold, disillusioned world of early industrialism? He became conscious of the crisis of romanticism and gave account of this consciousness in his prose writings. . . . The question could be raised why Heine, determined to cut down the distance between poetry and the prosaic, insisted on writing poetry at all. The answer seems to be that the maintenance of poetic form as such was the only means by which he felt able to keep faith to what might be vulgarly called the “ideal.” Yet the ultimate consequence, the virtual impossibility of poetry itself, entered his poetic horizon, and each verse of his is tinged by this impossibility.5

By the time Adorno was speaking on a German public radio station in 1956, however, the impossibility of keeping faith with “the ideal” seems to have closed off the poetic horizon of Heine, for Adorno. What remained for him is precisely Heine’s spacelessness, his homelessness. Indeed, this is what ultimately redeems him, for Adorno, making him a symbol of the destinies of those persecuted and made homeless in the twentieth century, a position that could only be occupied by a Jewish author.6 A few years before Adorno wrote his “Toward a Reappraisal of Heinrich Heine,” Hannah Arendt used Heine as the first example in her essay on the “Jew as Pariah” (first published in 1944). Opting neither for the complete dissociation between Heine’s Jewishness and his poetics that Adorno articulated in English in 1949, nor for his revised view from the German radio address of 1956, Arendt describes Heine as “the only German Jew who could truthfully describe himself as both a German and a Jew” and “the only outstanding example of a really happy assimilation

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in the entire history of that process.”7 Nevertheless, she describes Heine as a prototype of the Pariah, a position that is not comfortable, though it allows him to see society more clearly. Describing the sensibilities of Heine and other contemporary pariahs, such as Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt observes that as persons who have “no place in the political and social world,” they are prone to notice the fundamental impartiality that governs “the natural order of things, in which all is equally good.” In contrast, “the fabricated order of society, with its manifold classes and ranks, must appear a comic, hopeless attempt of creation to throw down the gauntlet to its creator.”8 In Arendt’s biographical study of Varnhagen, on which she began working in the late 1920s though it was first published only in 1957, the significance of this description is clarified.9 Arendt narrates Varnhagen’s life story as a continuing struggle with what it meant to be a Jew in Germany in the age that straddled enlightenment and emancipation; for her, this entailed a peculiarly worldless existence, an existence taken over by interiority.10 Thus, Arendt’s formulation is even more radical than Adorno’s. For her, figures like Varnhagen and Heine were not merely living as foreigners in German society, not merely homeless, but in fact functioning in a peculiar detachment from the social and cultural structures that make a shared world. But Arendt does not consider what the implications are for Heine’s literary writing. What does it mean to write in a state of worldlessness? Where would such a worldless author be speaking from and what kind of a performance would that constitute? Or would he be required to always be constructing provisional spaces from which to perform or deliver his words?

Where Is the Song? Heine’s great best seller, the Book of Songs, responds to—or rather, it anticipates—these questions by systematically exploring the question: “Where?” It is a collection of poems and songs that investigates the location from which texts are written and spoken and the contexts within which they can be understood. In the book, Heine is preoccupied with the possibility of sharing a space with his readers and what that would allow rhetorically. To an equal extent, he explores the implications of writing without such a shared space at hand. The salient feature of the Book of Songs is the notorious irony with which Heine deflates the romantic imagery that he assiduously reproduces.11 Irony is a contextual strategy, a form of rhetorical gesticulation that

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points to the way words are understood in a particular context, a context that makes them mean something that is other than a “straight” reading would suggest. Thus, irony is variably viewed as either constituting communities or rather as being enabled by the preexistence of multiple, partially intersecting discursive communities.12 Heine’s irony thus puts in focus the discursive communities that enable his poetry and are able to understand it. The spatial semiotics of the book makes this focus on discursive communities concrete. Topographically, Heine’s poems are situated in loaded romantic settings labeled “forest,” “home” (as in the cycle titled “The Homecoming”), or “mountaintop,” and they wander through identifiable and equally loaded locations, such as the war-ravaged Europe through which the two French grenadiers who are returning from imprisonment in Russia travel, or Cologne and Cordova, whose churches are described in the “Lyrical Intermezzo” (SS 1:79) and in “The Homecoming” (SS 1:159). The representation of such seemingly universal European settings is repeatedly complicated by Heine’s introduction of Jewish subtexts that reorient these spaces. One example of such a complication is the geographical constellation that emerges from the contrast between the North and the East in a short poem from the “Lyrical Intermezzo”: A pine is standing lonely In the North on a bare plateau. He sleeps, a bright white blanket Enshrouds him in ice and snow. He’s dreaming of a palm tree Far away in the eastern land Lovely and silently mourning On a sunburnt rocky strand. (CPH 62; SS 1:88)

Read allegorically within the larger scheme of the Book of Songs, this appears to be a poem about lovers cruelly separated and about the impossibility of being in the same place. But this landscape of desire situates Germany, the North, in a matrix of coordinates laden with theological and political implications. Heine’s longed-for “eastern land” echoes the twelfth-century Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi’s famous exhortation of longing for Zion: “My heart is in the East—/ and I am at the edge of the West.”13 Heine would turn explicitly to the figure of Halevi—“Don Jehuda Ben Halevi,” as he fancifully misnames him—in the “Hebrew Melodies” of his Romanzero (1851),

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probably the most popular of Heine’s poem-cycles with Jewish readers. But Halevi also supplies a significant, if implicit, intertextual source to another section of the Book of Songs, the “North Sea” cycles. Dated 1825–26, the two North Sea cycles are considered the first significant foray into the maritime world in modern German literature; as such, they open onto a rich romantic landscape, rife with encounters with the sublime and peopled with Nordic mythological figures and folk traditions. But, as the insights of several critics have shown, for several reasons, Heine’s North Sea does not rest peacefully within the romantic model. First, the poem is a pointed polemic regarding the poet’s place as a Jew within German culture. In fact, one of the primary targets of this polemic is none other than Hegel.14 Furthermore, Heine’s maritime adventure is modeled upon an earlier depiction of a journey eastward, a journey undertaken not in the North but rather in the Mediterranean: Yehuda Halevi’s maritime journey from Spain to Zion (via Egypt) as he describes it in a series of poems written both before and after he set sail.15 And Heine borrows a whole list of metaphors and dramatic moments from Halevi.16 With this literary borrowing, Heine also inserts himself—perhaps unwittingly—into the history of German translations of Halevi; as Franz Rosenzweig puts it in the comments to his own Halevi translations, Heine haunts all German translations of Halevi that were created after his North Sea cycle was published. (The irony of Rosenzweig’s comment lies in the fact that the North Sea cycle is filled with ghosts and haunting).17 In fact, as we will see in a later chapter, Heine’s appropriation of Halevi haunts not only German translations of the medieval poet but also Hebrew translations of Heine’s German words. For now, let us simply note that the Book of Songs uses Halevi, and many other points of reference, to constellate one location (for example, the North of the lonely pine tree or of the North Sea) with a significant other (in this example the East of the palm tree or of Halevi’s pilgrimage) to create complex semiotic spaces. The resonances of these spatial semiotic fields are amplified by the fact that the poems of the Book of Songs repeatedly address the question of presence and absence of the speaker and his addressees or of sustaining discursive communities. In other words, Heine’s interest in places and their resonances is couched in what might be described as a more fundamental pragmatic preoccupation with what a shared space of speaker and addressee allows, rhetorically, and what is required when that shared space is not available. This experimentation with text-internal scenes and modes of address is then applied to the broader implied, text-external address of the poem to its discursive community. The result is a book that constructs a systematic and multilayered exploration of the location of the poem. Time and again Heine’s poems hesitate between speech that evokes a

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scene of copresence shared by speaker and addressee and discourse that takes this scenario apart or resists it in different ways. At one end of the spectrum are the poems that center on an addressee that is named simply with the second-person pronoun. A typical example is the short poem number IV from the “Lyrical Intermezzo”: When I am gazing in your eyes, Then all my pain and sorrow flies; And when I kiss your lips, my soul Becomes completely healed and whole. And when I lie upon your breast My godlike joy is mightiest; But when you say “I love you!”—see, Then I must weep, and bitterly. (CPH 53; SS 1:76)

In contrast with the poem about the pine and the palm tree, this love story is set up around the copresence of bodies and the contact between them, that is, around the mise-en-scène of a performance, which could occur on a stage. In a movement of escalating desire and fulfillment, the speaker moves from the lover’s eyes to her lips, to her breast. But with each progression, the speaker piously balances the mention of her body with statements not about his own body, but rather about his mental state. When the lover’s body finally speaks to utter the fateful words “I love you,” the ironic balance is abruptly toppled, and we realize that the speaker is always already prepared for disappointment and perhaps already expressing these feelings at a distance from the lover. On the other end of the spectrum are the poems that never name a speaker or an addressee, but instead describe a scenario, whether it is a natural scene or a social one, such as this second example from the “Lyrical Intermezzo,” number XXXIX: A young man loves a maiden Who chooses another instead; This other loves still another And these two haply wed. The maiden out of anger Marries, with no regard, The first good man she runs into— The young lad takes it hard.

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It is so old a story, Yet somehow always new; And he that has just lived it, It breaks his heart in two. (CPH 65; SS 1:90–91)

Here an entire cast of third persons replaces the speaker and his addressee. The narrator seems to be flexing his ability to put all of these characters in place and to clarify economically (and in measured rhythmic language) the relations between them all without ever stepping in to speak in the first person. This is thus a profoundly prosaic poem, a text that produces its own space rather than referring to a stage where a spoken performance occurs. Nevertheless, within the sequence of the “Lyrical Intermezzo,” indeed of the entire Book of Songs, it is immediately apparent that the “he who has just lived it” who appears at the end of this elegant exercise represents the speaker and is the same firstperson speaker who must weep bitterly at the end of poem number IV, glimpsing through the cast of characters that peoples the poem. In other words, in both cases an oscillation between copresence and absence is enacted within the poem itself, and tracking this oscillation is a central project of the collection. Such oscillation is often achieved at the end of a poem with one sudden violent gesture that turns the text on its head. Another instructive example of this is the poem from “Die Heimkehr” (“The Homecoming”) that Adorno uses to exemplify Heine’s homelessness. The poem starts as a description of a scene designed in ever-growing concentric circles around the central coordinate of the speaker’s body: My heart, my heart is heavy, Though May shines bright on all; I stand and lean on the linden High on the bastion wall. Below me the moat is flowing In the still afternoon; A boy is rowing a boat and Fishing and whistling a tune. Beyond in colored patches So tiny below, one sees Villas and gardens and people And oxen and meadows and trees.

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The girls bleach clothes on the meadow And merrily go and come; The mill wheel scatters diamonds— I hear its distant hum.

But at the end of this journey away from the speaker and into an idealized natural and social landscape comes the defining rhetorical gesture of the poem: On top of the old gray tower A sentry looks over the town; A young red-coated lad there Is marching up and down. He handles his shining rifle, It gleams in the sunlight’s red; He shoulders arms, presents arms— I wish he would shoot me dead. (CPH 77; SS 1:108)

As Adorno states, the last line effectively destroys the idyllic landscape that precedes it, unmasking the fact that it is no viable home for the speaker. In fact, the sentry in his tower is the first intimation of the power structures and potential violence that allow the peace and order that the speaker has been gazing at. It is the present absence of “more or less abstract” sovereignty and the present absence of the world of prose in the poem. By turning that violence onto himself and translating it into the language of desire, Heine’s final ironic gesture turns on its head not only the idyll, but also the presumption of state violence to control the subject. In these different ways, the poem uses this final utterance to move from the mode of description to a mode of performance, evoking a shared space of irony in which the reader is implicated. In the world of prose as it appears in the poem, the poem implies, the text cannot simply situate a speaker within such a landscape, suggesting that the reader, too, is in some sense an inhabitant of that idealized landscape, but must rather deliver both speaker and reader into a politicized here and now that demands irony. To summarize, the Book of Songs repeatedly tests the degrees of situatedness of its texts and their speakers. Thus, Heine delivers his own assessment of his homelessness or worldlessness, as diagnosed by Arendt and Adorno, in terms that build on and expand Hegel’s diagnosis of the current prosaic conditions. He points his readers not only to his identity

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as a Jewish author but also to his practices as an author moving between poetry and prose and constructing different types of stages for these different discourses.

The Place of Poetry in the Age of Prose Heine explicitly and polemically stages the encounter between poetry and the prosaic pragmatic conditions with which it must contend in the last chapter of his prose work Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca) where he satirizes the person and the work of the poet August von Platen and attacks the pretensions of contemporary poetry and its admirers. Heine, who did not hesitate to speak ad hominem and to direct his rhetorical ire quite literally at the persons, even the bodies of opponents, starts the attack by positioning the writer in relation to both the reader and the object of his attack, as if carefully setting up a mise-en-scène.18 Heine opens by referring to the physique of his reader, and proceeds to linger insistently on his own as well as Platen’s physical presence. The passage moves from the face of the reader, and the questions expressed on it, to the face of the writer, specifically, the eyes and eyeglasses with which he saw what he describes: So who is this Count Platen whose acquaintance we made in the previous chapter as poet and warm friend? Oh, dear Reader, I could read this question on your lips and only with a reluctant shudder dare I proceed to answer. . . . I will proceed in an absolutely faithful manner, stay true to the facts, maintain an altogether civil tone, as befits a proper bourgeois . . . I will always acknowledge the locus from which I considered him and sometimes even the lens through which I looked at him. (SS 2:429–30; TP 144–45)

Heine’s promise to apply the proper civil standards to his writing immediately entails a focus on Standpunkt, a term central to Hegel’s description of the “current prosaic conditions.” The issue here is not the relationship between the author and the reader, in a general, abstract sense, but rather a particular authorial ethos, constructed to address a reader within a particular historical context, defined here as properly bürgerlich. Heine not only ironically describes himself as a proper bourgeois (when in fact his intention in writing the attack on Platen is to upset and shock bourgeois readers), but also uses this comment to highlight the social structures that are the preconditions of his exchange with Platen.

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Heine mentions the position from which he speaks because this allows him to expound on the problem of making the object of his description present. As he explains, the affliction of German authors is that “they must first acquaint their readers, through dry character description and personal profile, with every genial or nasty nutcase they wish to pass under scrutiny.” The reader must also be sufficiently informed of the preconditions of this dry description: “so as, first off, to establish that this person exists, and second, to situate the target spot, below or above, front or rear, before cracking the whip” (SS 2:449; TP 144–45). This is thus a literary problem specific to the Germans, one met by neither the classics nor the British and the French “who have a folklife, and can, therefore, be said to have public characters” (SS 2:450; TP 145, translation amended). With that he translates a political observation into a comment on literary form. Germany is lacking in its formation of a public sphere, and there is an uncomfortable gap between Hegel’s carefully crafted architectonic structure of a civil society in The Philosophy of Right and the realities of Prussian politics. In this properly bourgeois world, the technologies and means of circulation are available for both sides in the polemic to quickly and effectively disseminate their mutual attacks, but strict limitations are applied to what they are allowed to say by the authorities who exercise censorship and social sense of propriety, insofar as the authors choose to adhere to it. Within this highly prosaic form of public life, Heine implies, the crucial question is whether and where the body of the author can be found and what the consequences—legal and social—of being located and found would be. This translation from the political to the literary in its essence involves the relation of prose and poetry in a prosaic, bürgerlich world, and to understand the implications of this translation, it is worthwhile to briefly dwell on the details of Heine’s noisy battle with Platen, which started on a curiously fluid note, as far as the position and the status of the author is concerned. The opening shot was fired when Heine appended a few poems by another poet, Karl Leberecht Immermann, to the 1827 publication of the third section of his North Sea cycle. Among them was one that attacked Platen for his derivative use of the form of the Oriental ghasel, an issue related to authorship and originality. But Platen was not interested in entering into a philosophical discussion about the origins and attributability of forms and ideas; instead he seized on another classic form—Aristophanic comedy—and wrote his Romantische Oedipus (Romantic Oedipus, 1829), in which he energetically attacked both Immermann and Heine.19 The Baths of Lucca takes some substantial cues from this text in terms of both tone and subject

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matter: Platen’s caricature of his two opponents focuses on their bodies, their embarrassing fluids and smells, a preoccupation that reaches its peak in a series of antisemitic attacks on Heine. Heine retorts with a comic text that refers not only to the accidental consumption of a laxative, but also repeatedly and derogatorily to the homosexual content of Platen’s poems. The scandal was extraordinary for its time, not for its intensity or violence, but because it presented readers with a choice between two subaltern positions—of the homosexual and of the Jew— neither of which could count on wide public support.20 However, as far as Heine was concerned, the conflict was as much about conflicting forms of literature as it was about competing forms of prejudice, and these two dimensions of the polemic were closely intertwined.21 Heine took to arms with such fervor because the reactionary literary formalism of Platen’s metric poetry, which aimed at a resuscitation of the singing, performed voice of poetry, represented a whole list of things that Heine abhorred: papism, aristocracy, and a politically reactionary position. All of these were matched by the aesthetic reaction of Platen’s classicism, that is, by his ambition to retain and revive old literary forms. In other words, it was not Platen’s classicism as such that so irked Heine, but the fact that he perceived this aesthetic position as entirely and programmatically unengaged with the present, unlike the dialectical relation to the present with which Goethe’s classicism was widely credited,22 and especially unlike Heine’s own political writings, his prose. Heine thus sets up his attack not only so as to ridicule his opponent, but also as a contribution to his investigation of the conditions of writing prose. While he overtly criticizes Platen’s attachment to old literary forms, Heine also implicitly offers his own writing—in its polemic force and in the formal preoccupations that it exhibits—as experimentation with the nature and limits of the new prose forms. In contrast with Platen’s ghasels, Heine casts his own prose as rooted in the contemporary. In his address to the reader in the beginning of the fourth chapter of The Baths of Lucca, he describes the present world as Zerrissen, that is, fragmented or torn, and the question immediately implied by this statement is how this influences the possibilities to write literature. “Once the world was whole,” Heine warns, “in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; all the wars waged elsewhere notwithstanding, there was still a unity in the world and there were complete poets. We rightfully honor these poets and take pleasure in their poetry; but any aping of their wholeness is a lie, a lie that any healthy eye can see right through, and thus justifiably worthy of scorn” (SS 2:406; TP 107). The Zerrissenheit evidenced in his own text is thus not a personal condition of the author,

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but rather a symptom of a world-historical situation that conditions his writing, the contemporary, prosaic world. Heine’s diagnosis of the “current fragmented conditions,” to paraphrase Hegel, comes after the narrator of this comic travelogue has been accused of being “a torn man, a torn soul, a Byron, so to speak.”23 Bitingly ironic as ever, he is not susceptible to the pathetic exaltation of the Italian landscape delivered by his fellow German traveler, a Jewish banker from Hamburg who, during his sojourn at the baths of Lucca, has renamed himself “His Excellency the Marquis Christoforo di Gumpelino” (SS 2:387, 2:405; TP 100). This figure is one of a whole group of characters who seem to be caught in the storm of Heine’s polemic against Platen. The Baths of Lucca uses a handful of antisemitic, misogynist, and homophobic insinuations to make irreverent fun not only of the Marquis and those who surround him (his footman, a Hirsch whose name has been Germanized to Hyazinth; the ladies he courts, who are aged and faded beauties; their other suitors) but also the bad poetry they all read. That bad poetry is of course poetry by Platen, which is consumed because “a cultivated sensibility can only be touched by a cultivated form” a wisdom that can only be acquired from the Greeks and from contemporary authors who “act Greek, think Greek, feel Greek and in this way transmit their feelings to men of consequence” (SS 2:442; TP 138). This paints a ridiculous picture of Heine’s opponent and his fans indeed, but what most commentators on the polemic tend to ignore are the ironic acrobatics that Heine performs in the parts of The Baths of Lucca preceding his final diatribe against Platen.24 In this main part of the text, he parodies Platen’s attachment to classical models by oscillating between an intimate conversational tone, addressing his reader with apostrophes such as “Oh, esteemed reader, if you wish to lament that torn condition. . .” (SS 2:405; TP 107; a gesture to which we will return later), and ironically adopting the voice of an epic poet, addressing his discourse to “ye muses of the Old and New World, and even you as yet undiscovered muses whom future generations will revere, whose existence I had long ago divined in the forest and in the sea” (SS 2:413; TP 114).25 What Heine leaves entirely to the opposing camp and does not mimic even ironically is the composition and appreciation of bad poetry. The consumption of such low-quality literature plays a strikingly central part in the preoccupations of the visitors at the baths of Lucca. The retired law professor who makes part of the entourage of the aged actress Lätizia replies to Heine’s attempts to converse of German scholars of the law, such as Edward Gans and Friedrich Karl von Savigny, by reciting silly rhymes, and Gumpelino and his footman Hirsch-Hyazinth are keen read-

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ers of Platen’s poetry who busy themselves counting the feet of the verse. The entire health resort is described as a comical masquerade of literary genres, where the false pretense of poetry reveals its prosaic underbelly. Lätizia interrupts her singing “and with the plumpest, most prosaic voice she added, ‘Bartolo, pass the spittoon’ ” (SS 2:408; TP 109). And the ninth chapter is a minor tragedy, modeled on Romeo and Juliet: Gumpelino is given a chance to be united with his beloved Juliet while her protective guardian is traveling, but the news arrives too late, after he has already taken Hyazinth’s laxative powder and cannot leave the house. “Weh mir, ich Narr des Glücks” (“Woe me, I am fortune’s fool”) he proclaims, paraphrasing Romeo, to which Hyazinth replies with an attempt at philosophizing: “Man is a mere mortal and does not fathom God’s plan” (SS 2:438; TP 135). When this does not satisfy the furious Marquis he makes reference to Aristotle as the author of a treatise on palmistry, but perhaps equally important, as the author of the Poetics: “Could I have foretold this turn of events? Am I Aristotle? Am I in the fortune-telling business?” (SS 2:439; TP 136). Hirsch-Hyazinth indeed embodies the generic confusions in which the visitors of the health resort are caught up: a “friend of poetry” who spends his time making lists of those who have played in his lottery in Hamburg (SS 2:423; TP 126) and has the habit of expounding his opinions “at epic length” (SS 2:431; TP 129). As Heine gears up for his open attack on Platen’s tiresome formalistic rhymes, he allows Hirsch-Hyazinth—who shares the initials of Heine himself26—to present his own “poetology.” The traveler finds him busy “bookkeeping” Platen’s poetry: “This business appears to be turning a bit sour for the little man; panting every time he bends down, he mutters, annoyed, ‘Spondee, trochee, iambus, annoy-us, anapest, what a pest!’ (SS 2:441; TP 138). Yet he, too, finds a use for the counting exercise, because, as he explains to the traveler, the metric feet are a “Conto finto” of the poem—a final calculation according to which the reader can see whether the poem has delivered the goods. He thus inserts poetry into a prosaic world picture, rooted in capitalist exchange and closer to Heine’s ironic commitment as a bourgeois author to give a full account of his first encounter with Platen than to Platen’s cerebral rhymes: Now that we’re in Italy, I have the time to write out the feet with chalk on the floor tiles and audit every ode. But back in Hamburg, where I have my own business to keep me busy, I just don’t have the time, and I have to trust the Count without counting, just as you trust the money bags you get from the bank on which are printed

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how many hundred Talers are contained within—these bags pass, sealed, from hand to hand, everyone trusts each other that the bag contains the amount it says it does . . . There’s so much slyness in the world nowadays, in poetry I’m quite sure as in every other business. (SS 2:446; TP 142)

Hirsch-Hyazinth lives in Hegel’s “world of prose,” a world in which the individual must rely on others and on a set of existing institutions and structures. His confused insertion of poetry into this order reads like a confirmation of Hegel’s prognosis that art is faced with severe limitations in such a world. Faced with this masquerade of superficial poetry, Heine does not respond by presenting superior and subtler rhymes (which, of course, he did do elsewhere), but rather by putting the pretensions of poetry in their proper place in a prosaic world. The upshot of Heine’s investigation of the conditions of writing prose thus is an ironic chiasm: to reply to the world of prose with poetry, Heine implies, is itself prosaic; the poet should not write in order to revive a lost totality, but rather write prosaically to reflect the world. Throughout his writing, Heine often uses the term prosaisch to refer to reactionary politics and artistic bad taste, but this is only a first, exoteric layer of his use of the term. Most prosaic of all are those who, like Platen, try to produce poetry as if they were not situated in the current prosaic conditions.27 And in The Baths of Lucca, Heine adds another layer to his use of the term prosaisch. In a crucial twist on the Hegelian position on a culture in which the representation of totality is no longer possible, famously articulated in Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel, for example, Heine uses prosaisch not to refer to the difficulties posed upon the representation of totality, but rather to the reactionary attempt to deny these difficulties altogether and to boast of a heart that has remained in its totality. Returning to the theme of a “torn heart” in a pronouncement that Hinrich Seeba describes as “ironically pompous,”28 he claims in his defense: “Oh esteemed Reader, if you wish to lament that torn condition, then better to lament that the world itself has been torn in two. Since the heart of the poet is the hub of the world, then it must surely be torn to shreds in this terrible time. Whosoever claims that his heart is still whole merely acknowledges that he has a prosaic, castoff, hemmed in heart” (TP 107; SS 2:405). Thus, the position that Heine takes in relation to the “current prosaic conditions” is to outbid them in Zerrissenheit; rather than attempting to undo them by producing a poetic counterpicture, Heine’s Dichter speaks in a voice that addresses itself directly to the current conditions and that adopts their prosaic

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terms. This involves him in a series of medial negotiations between prose and other modes of discourse.

Prose and Remediation To write under the current conditions and adopt their prosaic terms, for Heine, is in the end an act of repeated remediation. Heine situates prose in relation to other media while emphasizing the specificity of the pragmatic conditions of operation of each medium and the consequent divergence in their nature, and in particular in their relation to space. In his commentary on Shakespeare, for example, Heine describes the battlefield of Crecy as a theater in which poetry and prose confront each other. The concept of history he employs is, in principle, Hegelian. Transformations in different spheres of human action are seen to correspond to each other, and by implication to a more fundamental development of a historical Geist. He attributes the French loss to an “excess of chivalry” and credits the English not only with revolutionizing the use of infantry and changing the rules of war, but also with a fundamental spiritual change: “Hitherto war had been only a great tournament of knights of equal birth; at Cressy this romantic cavalry, this poetry, was disgracefully shot down by modern infantry, by prose in strongest disciplined order of battle [Prosa in strengstilisierter Schlachtordnung]—yes, even cannons here appear” (WHH 1:339; SS 4:228). Prose and the infantry both represent a loss that comes with modernity. Chivalry, honor, beauty, and romance are all replaced by what is strengstilisiert, with cannons chosen as the most radical embodiment of this modern, prosaic state of affairs. Heine thus positions the emergence of prose as a kind of Aufhebung or sublation of other genres and media, a next developmental stage that cancels what came before it.29 In his reports on the Paris Salon of 1831, however, Heine converts the remediation of art identified by Hegel as a stage through which spirit passes on its way to philosophy into a fundamental principle of art itself. His excursus on aesthetics asserts that the work of art is the material representation of an idea, its “sounds and words, colors and forms, that above all which appears to sense, are . . . only symbols of the idea—symbols which rise in the soul of the artist when it is moved by the Holy Ghost of the world” (WHH 4:38; SS 3:45),30 and in the last pages of his report he underscores “the end of the art period” and its anachronism. However, despite these Hegelianisms, Heine sees a future for art in a new guise that “will not need to take its symbolism from a faded past” and that “must

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even develop a new style of work [Technik], which will altogether differ from that which preceded it” (WHH 4:91–92; SS 3:72).31 On the one hand, the past supplies the model for understanding and representing the present, a point of reference in relation to which later events are made legible. Heine measures Napoleon against Cromwell, for example, and sees the beheadings of the two kings—Louis XVI and Charles I—as two events of one kind, inviting a comparison. On the other hand, however, Heine marks an unbridgeable gap between the present situation and the past. On the present side of this gap, the “current prosaic conditions” present a challenge to the very production of art. One possible response to the challenge is to dwell in the past. Thus, Heine notes that his contemporaries are compelled to produce representations of historical subject matter because the prosaic present—embodied in the modern tailcoat, which is diagnosed as “so very prosaic to its very depths [Grundprosaisch], that one can only use it as a caricature in a picture”—does not lend itself to artistic representation (WHH 4:50; SS 3:51). But prosaification is not a matter only of fashion; Heine also uses the term to explicate the political transformations brought about by the monumental events of the French Revolution. Here the tension between the two positions in relation to the past—positing a difference of essence between then and now and at the same time understanding the now through the then—becomes all the more apparent. Of course, this tension was not unique to Heine’s perception of the events that separated the nineteenth century from the known past. Like Karl Marx, who would later paraphrase Hegel in his “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” to say that all historical events appear twice, first as tragedy and then as farce,32 Heine has great interest in the echoes between more or less recent events in Paris and their historical predecessors, but also in the variations that occur within these repetitions. Thus, an encounter with Delaroche’s painting of Cromwell standing over the coffin of Charles Stuart is an occasion to engage in a comparison with their perceived descendants, Napoleon and Louis XVI, yet through it to question the very act of comparison. The recent past, Heine implies here, is comprehensible only in relation to past events that preceded it, but the juxtaposition is ultimately bound to dead-end at a radical difference. Heine, like Marx, describes this difference in literary terms, not as tragedy turned farce, but rather as the prosaic, the mode that holds up a mirror to the face of the modern revolution and the nineteenth century that has followed it and that shows it to be lacking in comparison with the past. In his comments on the painting, Heine measures the new in comparison with the old and finds it bereft of “poetic” qualities:

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What a great, what a general grief [Weltschmerz] the painter has here expressed with a few touches! There lies miserably bleeding the splendor of royalty, once the comfort and glory of mankind. The life of England has since then become pallid and grey, and poetry in terror fled the soil which she erewhile had decked her gayest colors. How deeply did I feel this when I once at midnight passed the fatal window of Whitehall and the modern damp and cold prose of England froze through my veins! . . . It is certain that [Louis XVI] did not die so grandly as Charles I, who first calmly delivered his long speech of protest. . . . The mysteriously masked headsman of Whitehall had a far more terribly poetical effect than Samson with his bare face. Court and hangman had let the mask fall, and it was a prosaic play. (WHH 4:70–76, SS 3:62–64)

Like the battlefield of Crecy, the beheading of Louis XVI turns into a primal scene in the history of literature, a violent upheaval after which poetry is severely compromised. In place of infantry and cannons, we here get the speechless king and his barefaced executioner, but the consequence is similar.33 However, Heine’s view of the dialectic between prose and other media is bidirectional. In effect, remediation can operate in either direction, from poetry to prose or vice versa, depending on the pragmatic conditions that each medium confronts. If here, as in his comments on Shakespeare, Heine seems to be sounding a regretful note about the appearance of “prose in strongest disciplined order of battle,” when he comments on his own prose he often embraces and celebrates the combative nature of this mode.34 While he writes his Travel Pictures, Heine often reflects on the polemical nature of his own prose, the force of which we have begun to intuit in our encounter with his dispute with Platen. In a letter from this time he contrasts the Book of Songs with the Travel Pictures: The Book of Songs is nothing but a collection of my well-known poems. I’ve already sent you a copy from Hamburg, through a book-selling opportunity. It is beautifully fitted and it will sail like a harmless trading vessel under the protection of the second volume of the Travel Pictures into the sea of forgetfulness. The fact that this latter volume is a warship carrying all too many cannons on board has upset the world terribly. The third volume will be armed even more fearsomely, the caliber of the cannons will grow, and I have already invented an entirely new powder for this purpose.35

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Prose and poetry must sail together, even though they are diametrically opposed. The sea in which both types of vessels—both literary mediums— coexist is one in which the transition and remediation between the different modes and media is always a possibility, though never one realized without significant implications. Heine situates prose in relation to other media while emphasizing the specificity of the pragmatic conditions of operation of each medium and the consequent divergence in their nature, and in particular in their relation to space.

The Medium of Prose—Performance, Space, and the Problematics of Co-Identity This ability to change direction is, at bottom, a response to the question of what discourse can perform in any given context of performance and the space in which that performance can take place. In Heine’s reviews of French theater, written in 1837, for example, he rejects prose as an appropriate mode for the stage because it is too close to the tones of social life. The French stage, he warns, has been taken over by a naturalistic style that “is as objectionable in high tragedy as the puffed-out windy imitation of Classic pathos.” The proponents of naturalism on the stage agitate against metric forms and measured speech, which have turned into “the quavering guttural tone [Zittergegröhle] of the old school,” and Heine concedes that this is justified. When meter is too strictly measured to fit classical molds, the stage is better off with “plain prose and the most commonplace tones of ordinary life [der nüchternste Gesellschaftston].” But with the advent of prose, “true tragedy must perforce perish because it requires measured language [Rhythmus der Sprache], and a very different style of declamation to that of society [Gesellschaftston]” (WHH 4:202–3; SS 3:315). Despite appearances, what interests Heine here is not a poetics of tragedy; the key word in the passage is Bühne, “stage.” He continues with a description of the theatrical performance, with its transformed and marked prosody, its combination of media, and its peculiar spatial configuration as the absolute form of artifice. The theater becomes an effective antidote to the current prosaic conditions, a magic that, unlike the misguided attempts at poetry we have seen him criticize in the work of Platen, still works. The theater is another world, apart from our own, as the stage is from the pit. Between the theater and reality lie the orchestra, the

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music and the dividing line of footlights on the front. Reality, after having crossed the realm of music and the impressive row of lights, stands before us on the stage transfigured and revealed as poetry. The charming euphony of the music rings from her in dying echoes, and she is illumed as in a fairy vision by the mysterious lamps. It is all a magic sound and a magic gleam, which readily seem to a prosaic public to be unnatural, and yet are far more natural than ordinary nature, for it is nature elevated by art to its fairest divinity. (WHH 4:203–4; SS 3:315–16)

A prosaic reality and a higher reality: here the contrast that Heine often returns to is materialized in the spatial organization of the theater and in the entire machinery that it employs to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk. As a remark on theatrical performance, however, this account conspicuously lacks any reference to one important element: the performer or actor who occupies and actuates the space of performance. The presence of a performing body is in fact a central problem with which Heine’s prose has to contend, and his strategy for dealing with it is not by supplanting performance with description, but by a further act of remediation in which prose itself is said to be supplanted and its shortcomings remedied by other media, which then undergo a further remediation in Heine’s own prose. This displacement, however, does not remedy, but rather reproduces the problematic of identity for the German-Jewish polemical prosaic poet. Heine’s encounter with a beautiful young dancer in The Baths of Lucca, for example, affords him an opportunity both to point out the limitations of his written prose and to remediate those shortcomings. As in his commentary on the theater, performance is seemingly privileged over prose; here, however, it is not the architecture of the theater, but the charismatic presence of the actress that holds the secret of enchantment. The passage opens with a promise to describe Franscheska in prose. But this promise must immediately be broken, and rather than a description of the dancer, the reader is presented with a meditation on the conditions of possibility of description, of making something present, in the different media. Jocularly suggesting that the young woman is the most attractive monument that he has encountered in his journey through Italy, Heine conflates the tasks of making her body present to the reader and describing the place in which she stands. This leads him to the field of the visual: perhaps what he should be offering his readers is a map, or better yet an etching in the likeness of Franscheska (SS 2:416). But the whole field of two-dimensional representation is quickly dismissed as well, since dealing with the presence of a body demands a form of

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representation that takes up space: “Even the finest painter cannot make us perceive this, for painting is, after all, nothing but a flat lie. The sculptor might be better able to do so” (TP 116; SS 2:416). But having broken the limits of what he might reproduce on the page, Heine is not content with the notion of a statue that represents his young idol, either, and is quick to proceed to the body of the dancer herself and the artistic media of which it is part, rather than the representation of it. “It was the sound of [her] voice that graced each of her words with the loveliest and most profound meaning, and if I related her words it would only give you a dry herbarium of dead flowers whose priceless value is limited to their scent. Indeed, she often leapt into the air and danced as she spoke, and perhaps the dance itself was her real language” (TP 116; SS 2:416). Here, although the performed language of dance has superseded the language of prose, the space of performance has in turn been remediated as a space constructed within the text. Heine’s prose refers back to this remediation, using its basic terms in order to articulate the pragmatic and political implications of writing prose in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the Travel Pictures, Heine is interested not so much in the question of how he might reproduce or compensate for a space of performance in his written prose, but in how he might make the gap between a performance-based discourse and prose visible. For this purpose, one of the clearest cases of a deictic use of language to refer to something that is present in a particular context of discourse—pronominal reference—becomes a kind of litmus test that makes visible the limits of the ability of prose to extend a pointing finger into a pre-given, natural space of performance, thus highlighting the need to construct an alternative space of reference without actually carrying out that operation. As Emile Benveniste observes, personal pronouns are unique in that they refer only to a “reality of discourse” and have “no value except in the instance in which [they are] produced.”36 Heine employs this linguistic fact with great sophistication in his prose. The references made to the speaker’s own self and to an embodied, personalized reader compose the most prominent example of Heine’s experimentation with pronominal reference. But that experimentation, even in its playfulness, dances around an underlying problematic: who is named by such pronouns? While Heine often invites his reader into the conversation with exclamations such as “Ach, dear reader” and “you see, dear reader,” he is prone to make his own self present in the text ironically, inviting the reader to puzzle over the question of to what extent the “Johan Heinrich Heine, Doctor of Law, so renowned in German legal literature” (TP 108) who is introduced to Signora Lätizia in The Baths of Lucca is

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identical with the person whose name appears on the cover of the book (who was not, of course, an author of legal literature). These gestures frame the author’s ironically concerted effort to position characters—be it his rival Platen or the attractive dancer Franscheska—on the stage of his prose. But it is precisely this irony, the trope of distance, the figuration of what is being represented by what is not, that reveals that the problem posed by a performance enacted from a particular space and under a particular set of pragmatic conditions is not so easily remedied. The problem is in essence a question of identity—a question of the mutability of the “I” who performs in different spaces, on different stages, in different contexts. The entire project of the Travel Pictures is haunted by the possibility that to speak from one place is not the same as speaking from another, that location plays a part in the production of meaning, indeed in the production of who one is or might be. Another section of the Travel Pictures, Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand (Ideas: The Book of Le Grand), takes the investigation of the slippery and problematic nature of pronoun reference one step further. The text has a miseen-abîme structure, in which the identity of the first-person speaker and his addressee is repeatedly shifted. The main narrative line, the address of the text by the first-person speaker to his “Madame,” is continually interrupted by the subplots in which the scene of action shifts abruptly and the two appear under different guises, reincarnations, and pseu­ donyms in such formulations as “I myself—it is the Count of Ganges who is now speaking, and the story is set in Venice—I myself. . .” (HJ 93; SS 2:250), “Madame! I have been lying to you. I am not the Count of the Ganges” (HJ 98; SS 2:256), and so on. The references to the Madame herself alternate between the third person of description and the second person of address, so that ultimately all the idealized female characters described in the text seem like they could be her. Indeed, the ambiguity is hardly resolved in the last pages of the text, when the speaker suggests that the protagonists of the different versions of the unhappy love story that he has been repeating throughout the text are all in fact reincarnations of one and the same couple. The deictic references of the terms “I” and “Madame” are altered when they are inserted into a prose text, the text itself demonstrates. The prose text is a text written to highlight the current prosaic conditions and explicate them as pragmatic conditions that govern what modes of address and of performance are possible within it. In accordance with that, toward the end of Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, Heine sets down a set of rules that follow from these conditions, a kind of etiquette for the reading of prose which follows from these conditions. Noting that his

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addressee is interested in hearing a description of his childhood friend, the little Veronika, he states: “You, Madame, cannot be forced to read any further than you want, and I in turn have the right only to write what I want” (HJ 138; SS 2:303). In order to refer to Veronika properly in prose, the author would have had to describe her. However, precisely because he is writing a prose text, to be read in complete separation from the event of its enunciation, he does not need to follow any of the requests of his audience. The disconnect that separates the “I” that takes on the identity of the author (or an author) in the text from the reader, in the current pragmatic conditions of literary production, commodifies their relation and, in fact, all social relations. Indeed, Heine describes in great detail the economic conditions of writing prose, in particular the fact that he is paid to produce volume, to fill up pages with plenty of text. Here, character description turns out to be quite useful, since it always supplies him with material, and thus other persons become useful principally as potential material for description and hence for writer’s fees. Heine thus humorously realizes this economy of description—the production of a bulk of text, possible only in prose, carries immediate gain for the author—with a description not just of the different fools that he “owns” but of what he plans to buy with the fee that they will produce (HJ 129; SS 2:292). In the prosaic world, prose has much more earning potential than the feet of the verse that Hirsch-Hyazinth so busily counts and accounts for, and the characters that might inhabit it (including Hirsch-Hyazinth himself) immediately enter an economy of exchange, representing their potential value on the market. However, the distance between the text in its original context of performance and any reading of it makes pronouns harder to use in any way that achieves a stable identity. Heine opens the first chapter of Ideas: The Book of Le Grand with an epigraph: “She was loveable, and he loved her; but he was not loveable, and she did not love him. (Old Play)” (HJ 91; SS 2:249). The citation belongs to another—an older—literary sphere or poetic system in which “he” and “she” immediately point to stable identities, objects within the space of performance or at least in an implied space of performance that is within the reader’s recollection.37 But Heine is prosaically removed from any such space of performance. His epigraph has thus been reduced from a gesture that has implications within a particular context of discourse—a context that would either clarify who “he” and “she” are or suspend the need for such clarification—and turned into a quote, an allusion to the absence of such space. Indeed, by the third time that Heine places the exact same epigraph

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at the head of a chapter—“She was loveable, and he loved her; but he was not loveable, and she did not love him. (Old Play)” (HJ 142; SS 2:308)—its power to signify within a pre-given order of sense has been greatly diminished. The epigraph can function only as a citation, as a piece of text removed from its context and from the pragmatic conditions in which it was produced.38 Of course, Heine’s readers have found ways to make sense of this epigraph and of its repetition.39 But rather than interpreting the phrase, one could also say that by thus echoing himself, Heine empties the words of any sense at all. The reader no longer expects the deictic pronouns to stretch out a finger and refer to a particular body; it is no longer even guaranteed that the “he” and “she” of the first sentence of the quote are the same ones as those of the second sentence. A performer could conceivably have turned his hand from one pair to another midway and have said “She was loveable, and he loved her; but he [some other he, for example the Count of Ganges, Heine himself, or some unknown new person who has appeared on the stage in the meantime] was not loveable, and she [yet a fourth person who has been placed—be it virtually or in person—upon the stage] did not love him.” Heine’s reader is confronted with the fact that the prose text does not resolve this issue, and that this follows from its pragmatics, specifically the fact that it is produced and received in different contexts and different places. Indeed, while it marks a transition away from the deictic mode of performed verse to a prosaic mode that must somehow contain its own spaces, Heine’s prose continues to point into space: the space of the European landscape through which he journeys. But the relationship with this landscape is belabored. Shifty and unstable as it has become over years of continental warfare since the revolution, it fails to provide the author with a stage on which he can position himself. Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey), one of Heine’s early journeys, ends abruptly as the author is about to foray deeper into the romantic landscape of forests, mountains, and cliffs. But his announcement that the text is bound to remain a fragment is to be read not as an espousal of a romantic aesthetic, but rather as amplifying the fact that the Travel Pictures are an experiment with a new type of genre and that in this genre, Heine’s understanding of the problematics of location was changing. “In the end, in any case,” he declares in The Harz Journey, “it amounts to pretty much the same when and where you say what you say, if, indeed, it finally be said” (TP 65; SS 2:162). But in the later Reise von München nach Genua (Journey from Munich to Genoa), one of the most descriptive sections of the Travel Pictures, Heine makes clear that no one location along the

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journey can be described on its own terms, without reference to another location in relation to which it makes full sense. The trip to Genoa begins in Munich, but it is impossible to talk about Munich without comparing it to Berlin. Thus, the description that opens this travel narrative is like a doubly exposed photograph, a picture of two places at once. It might seem like Berlin, the prosaic city, is drawn into the description of Munich, the city that thinks of itself as a new Athens, for the purpose of contrast. But the dichotomy, the reader senses immediately, is a false one, both cities suffering from a similar combination of self-importance and parochialism. Clothing his enthusiasm for Munich in irony, Heine explains that he praises the city “as I always praise the location where I happen to find myself” (SS 2:316). In other words, his discourse is entirely conditioned by his geographical position at the time of writing, making it radically deictic: it cannot be understood without taking into account its particular context. On the other hand, by beginning with a double exposure, a picture of two cities in one, Heine sets the tone for the entire journey, making it a central question to what extent it is possible to speak from any particular place. This question remains implicit as Heine makes his way south into Italy, playing along with the conventions of travel writing and allowing the places to dictate his discourse, along the lines of the deictic principle that the writer praises the place “where he happens to find himself.” But as the journey continues, Heine becomes visibly impatient with this convention, his tone becomes more digressive, and he becomes more interested in a metapoetic discussion of the conditions of writing than in the task of describing his journey. His explicit reference to Goethe and the exceptional veracity of the venerable predecessor’s description of this exact same journey (in chapter 26) is an important signal of this shift. Another signal occurs when Heine steps out of his carriage in Marengo, intent on a private commemoration of Napoleon’s military feat. In Journey from Munich to Genoa, Marengo is fashioned not only as a kind of place of pilgrimage, but also as another context, another scene or stage that conditions the discourse that occurs upon it. Heine’s fellow journeyman, a Livonian, is eager to talk of contemporary politics rather than about military campaigns of the past. “Who now thinks of Marengo?” said my traveling companion, the Liefland Russian, as we rode over the fallow field. “At present all eyes are turned towards the Balkans, where my countryman, Diebitsch, is fitting the turbans to the Turk’s head—and you’ll see

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that we’ll take Constantinople this very year. Are you for Russia?” This was a question which I had rather have answered anywhere but on the field of Marengo. I saw, in the morning mists, the man in the little cocked hat and the gray cloak of battle—he darted onwards, swift as a spirit, and far in the distance rang a terribly sweet “Allons enfants de la patrie.” Yet, notwithstanding all this, I answered, “Yes, I am all for Russia.” (JI 118; SS 2:379)

The question, and Heine’s answer to it, are inflected by the location from which they are spoken, reinforcing the deictic force of the text within which they appear. At the same time, Heine here returns to the mode with which he began the description of his journey, a double exposure in which you cannot speak of one place without traveling through another, such as other battlefields of more or less recent European history or Saint Helena as a symbol of the end of the era of Napoleon. In this sense, Marengo is a fault line in Heine’s text, marking a transition from discourse that preoccupies itself with description, in reaction to the places through which the speaker travels, and to a digressive mode that inevitably moves between many different locations in Europe in an attempt to understand the current conditions. This turns Marengo into a stage of a different order, not a space of performance within which the speaker can locate his own and others’ bodies and speak of them, but a stage that invites the performance of a political and philosophical commentary. An important part of this performance is devoted to a dialogue with none other than Hegel, and an opportunity to challenge the philosopher’s use of the term Welt: “Every age has its task whose solution advances the world. . . . But, alas! Every inch which humanity advances costs streams of blood. And is not that somewhat too expensive? Is not the life of the individual worth as much as that of the entire race? For every single man is a world which is born and which dies with him; beneath every gravestone lies a world’s history” (JI 114–18; SS 2:377–78). Hegel’s association between prose and world is part of his figurative description of the transformation of literary language in spatial terms. In contrast, Heine’s Marengo becomes a concrete spatial embodiment of the “prosaic conditions” under which literature is written and the strategies with which this author chooses to confront them. But Heine reads Hegel not simply as an enthusiastic, yet critical disciple. He reads him as a Jew, with the knowledge that he is by definition excluded from the philosopher’s understanding of world history.40 And he writes about the history of Europe with a sense that it is difficult to find a place in it from which to write under the current prosaic conditions. By resolutely speaking back

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to the philosopher while positioning himself on the map of a European world history at the battlefield of Marengo, Heine nevertheless refuses that exclusion and writes it into the very prosaic conditions that make it such a precarious exercise to write from Marengo, the very prosaic conditions that were diagnosed by the philosopher.

Chapter Three

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Mediated Situatedness in the Reception of Heinrich Heine The relation of medium to space, and the location of the performing body within that matrix, has profound poetic and political implications, structuring Heine’s perception of his writing and of its place in the world. Heine’s writing is always already to a striking degree preoccupied with the question of how it will be read, by whom and where. The issue for Heine is not primarily time (Will he be read in the future? Will his words allow him to make his mark on posterity?) but rather space (Where is he read? And what are the implications of this location and contextualization?). As his experimentation with prose and his writing on artistic media show, Heine was continually investigating the pragmatics of writing and examining the implications of transmitting his words through the world, away from a shared space of copresence and across geopolitical borders. Hence the great importance of the issue of reception within the field of Heine studies, which goes beyond the manifest fact that as a Jew writing in German he was not easily incorporated in the canon.1 Many of those who reacted strongly to his writing over the centuries—whether that reaction was positive or negative—found in Heine a powerful vehicle through which to meditate precisely on their own situatedness, their own ability to transmit their words into the public sphere and to produce world-space through writing. This is evidenced in the fact that the nexus of space and medium is fundamental to the history of Heine reception. This history moves between partially overlapping contexts that illuminate, complicate, and clarify one another: German and Jewish, Hebrew and German-Jewish, Zionist and non-Zionist, pre-state and Israeli. In all of these contexts, Heine is at once both a mediating figure, connecting romanticism with modernism, German and Jewish writing, German and Hebrew, prose and poetry, and a figure that must be mediated, rewritten, translated, composed, memorialized, illustrated, and recontextualized. The history of Heine reception can and should in fact be told as a series of medial transformations, of remediations, a fact that escapes from

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view when scholars neglect to view these media—such as music, art and architecture, literature, and political commentary—as one larger picture, as I propose to do here. All of these circles of remediation bridge text and context. With each new act of medial translation, new contexts are created, and they in turn lead to further remediations and further texts. Heine’s work, for example, is by far the body of texts in Western literature (excluding the Bible) most widely used as the basis for musical compositions, a fact that has only recently become a subject of scrutiny in its own right.2 Estimates of the number of songs composed to Heine’s words run between eight and ten thousand, and they include some of the great cycles in the history of the lied (art song), such as Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, or the six songs each that were composed by Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. Indeed, composers consistently turn to a relatively narrow corpus of eminently “singable” texts from Heine’s oeuvre. About a dozen poems—all from the Book of Songs—exist in more than one hundred compositions each. The most popular text with composers is “Du bist wie eine Blume” (“You are like a flower”), for which Peter Shea lists almost 450 versions (of course, many other of Heine’s poems remain, for a variety of reasons, untouched by composers). But if during his lifetime and shortly after his death Heine’s poetry was a vehicle for musical innovation, by the time the nineteenth century had ended, musical compositions using the very same poems were overwhelmingly sentimental and seemed to labor at maintaining intact a world of social mores that Heine had been set on unmasking.3 Heine’s great popularity with lied composers offers us an image of his work as entirely focused on the voice of a performer, highlighting the gesturing, copresent speaker and his listener and hiding from view the author who wrote prose to explode the space of performance. If poetry is often staged in contrast to prose as a performed mode that highlights copresence, then the art song can be seen as a medium that harnesses music and performance to confirm this staging.4 As Roland Barthes puts it in his essay on the romantic song, “For the most part, the romantic Lied originates in the heart of a finite, collected, centered, intimate, familiar site which is the singer’s—and hence the listener’s body.”5 The art song was a powerful vehicle in the creation of a bourgeois sensibility: its proper place is the intimate space of the salon, rather than the theatrical space of the opera or the communal and national space produced by the voices of the chorus in the nineteenth century.6 As Barthes argues, the subject produced by the art song is peculiarly erased of sexual difference because, unlike operatic or choral roles, they are not written specifically for male or female singers.7 The voice of the lied is thus at the same time

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both ephemeral and intimate, making the implicit addressee a crucial figure in its poetics. But the question of who speaks in the song and where this event of speaking or singing takes place is of course far from straightforward. As Barthes indicates, the enjoyment of the unified body in the lied is phantasmagoric, for “it is always the affect of the lost, abandoned subject that the romantic song sings.”8 And while the song centers on the single voice of the singer, to an equal extent, it situates that voice within a plurality inhabited by instrument, text, and composition, raising the question of whose voice the song ultimately sounds. In the early 1970s, for example, Robert Cone famously posited that the art song is “spoken” by a vocal persona, a unified voice that represents the implied composer, who in some sense stands in for the persona of the poet. The divisions within the song, he clarified, represent the division between conscious and unconscious dimensions in what is said by this implied speaker.9 But Cone was subsequently compelled to revise his position by a consideration of Schumann’s relation to Heine. Schumann, Cone insists, created in the Dichterliebe “a Dichter of his own” who “inhabits a different world from that of his poetic original: a world in which words give way to music as the primary vehicle of expression.”10 For Cone, this explains the common complaint that Schumann failed to understand Heine’s irony, or at least to provide it with appropriate musical representation.11 However, the numerous song compositions are but one form of remediation in the complex history of Heine reception. The most instructive cases are perhaps those in which the modes of remediation multiply. Thus, one way to think through the fate of Heine’s irony in the medium of music is to consider what happens when another juncture that could be construed as a form of remediation—translation—enters into the production of a Heine song. In 1928 Samuel Alman, a British-Jewish composer of eastern European origins who has been remembered mainly for his liturgical work, composed five poems from the Book of Songs in Itzhak Katzenelson’s Hebrew translation (which is briefly discussed below). Among them were “Benisan, ba-yafe” (“Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “In the Beautiful Month of May”), “Naar ahav naarah” (“Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,” “A Young Man Loves a Maiden”), and “Ani ba-halom bahiti” (“Ich habe im Traum geweinet,” “I Cried in My Dream”), all of them famously part of Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle. Alman’s compositions situate themselves in relation to both Heine and Schumann, rhetorically raising the question whether it would be possible for all three of them to share one world, to share a space of irony beyond the mediation and

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Figure 1. Geographical love puzzle, artist unknown, circa 1905. Copyright ©2012 Hordern-Dalgety Collection. http://puzzlemuseum.com

remediation of translation and composition. Listening to Alman’s songs, one potentially hears not only both his and Schumann’s melodies, but also the synagogue music with which he is so much identified. Alman composes a distinctly Jewish—a Hebrew-speaking—Heine to mirror Schumann’s German poet and thus raises the question of which is the more authentic or even whether both Heines could coexist simultaneously, forming a polyphony, rather than a solo lied. Yet other adaptations and echoes of Heine’s short love poems further complicate the picture by adding other forms of remediation. Take, for example, an anonymous illustration, dated circa 1905, that uses one of Heinrich Heine’s well-known love songs in order to form a “geographical love puzzle.” (See figure 1.) The imaginary map is divided by color into four separate geopolitical units, which are also the central clue of the puzzle. As the legend explains, the viewer is invited to follow the color division in reconstructing the shape of the poem’s single stanza on the written page and put the words spread out on the page into coherent sentences. Users of the map riddle perhaps turned to another clue as well: “Wenn ich in deinen Augen seh” (“When I Am Gazing in Your Eyes”) existed as a lied in dozens of compositions, probably the most famous being the fourth song of Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle.12 Schumann chose

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the poem because it thematizes the question of the space of the song through its oscillation between copresence and distance. The maker of the map riddle was addressing this issue as well. Humming the well-known Schumann melody—or one of the many others—viewers of the map may have been able to reconstruct the poem from the words scattered on the page without quite using the map. And yet the map is there to be used, not only in reconstructing Heine’s poem, but also in reflecting on it. Though parts of the map might remind the viewer of the contours of the southern coast of Europe, recalling Heine’s journeys through Italy, the map represents a nonexistent space, making little effort to endow the landscape with details which would give it a reality—rivers, mountains, a city—and replacing such marks with Heine’s words. The poem thus seems to be enunciated by an absent lover who turns to a disembodied addressee, his words inhabiting an abstract, imagined landscape. However, a second, closer look reveals that the speaker and his beloved are there, the silhouettes of their faces forming the outline of the shores that face one another in the map. What had seemed for a moment to be a city called “Augen” (“eyes”) turns out to be the single eye of the addressee, who is drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of the map in a position that suggests more submission than the poem attributes to her. The pair of red islands—“Deinen” and “Mund” (“your” and “mouth”)—float outside of the faces, to the south of two smaller, purple, nameless islands that represent the speaker’s tears. There is more than one riddle to this map, then, a multiplicity that resonates with the ambiguity and ambivalence of the poem, which mixes love with pain and ends on a note of bitter weeping. The poem reiterates its temporal situatedness thrice, emphasizing the moment of conversation in which the words of the poem are imparted to the addressee and its close association with other moments of copresence by repeatedly using the word “Wenn” (“when”). When the addressee finally answers the speaker and says “I love you,” he must weep bitterly, leaving the reader to wonder whether all those moments of copresence ever amounted to real intimacy.13 We do not know who produced the map-riddle, where it was published, or what the target audience was, but it seems safe to assume that the map capitalizes not only on the user’s acquaintance with one of the existing compositions of the poem, but also on the heated debates attached to Heine’s name around the turn of the twentieth century. The debates centered on the question whether, where, and how a monument for Heine should be erected, and in their light the map appears as a shrewd comment on the difficulty of allowing Heine to appear in public spaces and to take a place on the map of Europe.

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The monument is an additional medium through which the author, his words, and the spaces in which those words can be performed are remediated. How, why, and where this remediation was to take place—if it was to take place at all—engendered a series of debates in which the place of the author, in more senses than one, was at issue. In these debates, both Heine’s detractors and his supporters betrayed a profound ambivalence over how the body of Heine (or its representation) and the body of his work was to be placed and to be seen in the public sphere.14 Forming the prehistory of the two Berlin monuments with which I opened this book and other monuments to Heine, which now stand in places such as Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and New York, a heated and lengthy dispute began in the late 1880s with a campaign for a monument in Heine’s birth city, Düsseldorf. The debate had several recurring themes: first, the conflict between those who felt the poet was “Denkmalwürdig” (worthy of a monument) and those who, for reasons more or less outspokenly antisemitic, denied him this honor. Second, the question arose what city would be worthy, or willing, to make space within its public sphere for the monument. After the Düsseldorf campaign encountered difficulties, other cities, such as Frankfurt, Mainz, and Hamburg became candidates for the honor and had opportunity to reject it. German Heine detractors often made the suggestion that Paris, the city of Heine’s exile and his burial place, would be a more appropriate location for a monument for this “non-German” German poet. Early Heine monuments were finally erected in places far removed from the German public sphere: in the castle of Kaiserin Elisabeth of Austria on the island of Corfu and in the Bronx in New York.15 In December 1913, the first Heine monument in a German city was dedicated in Frankfurt am Main and others followed in Hamburg and other German cities. Most of them were torn down by the Nazis, and the question of rebuilding them and memorializing Heine in the German public sphere on both sides of the Iron Curtain was not free from controversy even after the war, as I will discuss briefly in the last chapter. A final source of contention that ran through the debates, however, was the thorny question of what form the monument—if and when an agreement on its location would be reached—would take. This aspect of the debate was structured by the dichotomy that Heine himself thematized in some of his metapoetical writings between the lover and the fighter—that is, between the writer of poetry and the writer of prose and between the performing body of Heine’s literary project and the written word. Should the monument be a representation of the writer himself, or of some elements of his works? If Heine was represented, should the portrait show

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the handsome young lover or the aging martyr of what he called his “mattress grave”? What would a portrait of the political Heine look like? Or if the work was to be depicted, what element should be chosen? An early proposal for the Düsseldorf monument, which was ultimately adopted by a German-American singing circle and erected in the Bronx, was Ernst Herter’s “Lorelei Fountain,” a depiction of one of Heine’s most famous female figures. Georg Kolbe’s design for the monument dedicated to Heine in Frankfurt in 1913 goes even further by representing Heine’s love poetry at large through two dancing figures.16 While the debate centered on the questions of artistic design, urban planning, and the design of public space, what it produced more than anything else was written words. The result is a circle of media: from Heine’s published words to the monument as a medium that potentially mobilizes the cityscape and the bodies of those who move through it and back to the printed page. Supporters of the monument published appeals and petitions that boasted the signatures of many prominent authors and artists, such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gerhart Hauptmann, Max Liebermann, and Käthe Kollwitz, to name a few.17 On the other side of the debate, newspaper columns, pamphlets, and entire books were published to protest the very idea that Heine would be given a place of honor in a German city. Some participants in the conversation wrote directly to this circle, staging their texts as replacements for the monument in different ways. The antisemitic literary critic Adolf Bartels, for instance, proposes to cut the medial back-and-forth short by titling his 1906 book Heinrich Heine— auch ein Denkmal (Heinrich Heine—Another Monument). The central thesis of the book is that “Heinrich Heine never felt himself to be a German, but only a Jew” and from this it follows that a monument can be erected in the name of the German Jews, but never in the name of the German people.18 The final page of the book contrasts the acceptable and the unacceptable plaques to the monument. The empty page, containing nothing but the representation of the two plaques, is thus a final gesture that models itself visually on the medium of the monument and completes the book’s stated intention of supplanting any physical monument. In contrast, Richard Dehmel’s 1895 poem “Ein Heine-Denkmal” (“A Heine Monument”) eschews the monumental and is measured by the gesture of a speaker, a king who has decided to step down from his throne and who plans a Heine monument as his parting gift to his people. Thus, it refuses to be the monument for Heine and emphasizes the necessity of building that monument in the world, rather than with words. The poem begins in medias res with the king thanking a sculptor for arriving at the palace to

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take the commission; opening a window, he points: “There, at the square in front of the Cathedral, I’d like to see the monument erected.”19 This sets up the axis that structures the rest of the poem: between the monarch’s gesturing hand, which proceeds to describe the monument as he envisions it and the empty space where the monument will stand in the future. With this fairy-tale cast of characters, the poem seems to imply that this space is irreconcilable with the current political reality, and this becomes its most biting critique. However, to stage the debates simply as a confrontation between Jews and their friends, on the one hand, and antisemites like Bartels who were offended by the notion of giving a piece of German land to a Jew, on the other, is a misrepresentation. Ambivalence concerning where and how to place Heine appeared on all sides of the debate. Orthodox Jews, above all, were loath to support the apostate who had converted to Christianity, a reluctance that was carried over in the establishment of the state of Israel, as I will discuss in the final chapter. Moreover, drawing firm lines between philosemitism and antisemitism is often a tricky business. The Dehmel poem, for example, draws explicitly on the antisemitic discourse in describing Heine as the “sick Jew and great artist” and in its use of the figure of the wandering Jew.20 Dehmel underscores the fact that Heine wrote in “our mother tongue” and did so better than “all the German Müllers or Schultzes.”21 His poem thus constructs a collective identity centered on language, rather than religion, ethnos, or nationality. At the same time, it also perpetuates the perception that as a Jew, Heine did not belong in the category “German” to the same extent as the Müllers and the Schultzes. Of course, objectors to the monument aimed much of their rhetorical ire precisely at Heine’s way with “our mother tongue,” but here again, the division into philosemitic enthusiasts and antisemitic rejecters unravels. The case of Karl Kraus is highly instructive. In his essay “Heine und die Folgen” (“Heine and the Consequences,” 1910), Kraus famously accused Heine of “loosening the corset of the German language” and of infecting it with the French malady of the feuilleton. The consequences he identifies are dire, especially for German-Jewish authors who are all too eager to adopt the lowly form.22 However, as Paul Reitter has argued, Kraus’s use of antisemitic discourse is far from straightforward, nor is his attack on Heine and the agitators for a monument. When he wrote his first commentary on the monument debates, Kraus in fact came to the conclusion that it was not Heine, but Germany and the Germans who were not “Denkmalwürdig,” not worthy of a monument.23 Finally, many Jewish-national observers were similarly ambivalent concerning the notion that Heine can and should find his place in a German

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city and more broadly concerning the possibility and importance for Jews of gaining this foothold in the European public sphere. Zionist readers wove their own engagement with Heine into the intermedial web formed by musical compositions, illustrations, and monuments. In doing so, they produced new spatial constellations to suit their own needs. In what follows, I focus on two comments in the monument debates that come from Zionists, one made in Hebrew and the other in German, and the context that surrounds them. In the first case, understanding the position of Haim Nahman Bialik involves the broader history of translations of Heine into Hebrew and the debates that surrounded them. In the second case, the focus is entirely on one author, Theodor Herzl, and the myriad ways in which he engaged with Heine over the course of his multifaceted career. As I show, questions of medium and space persist as Heine’s work makes its way into new Jewish contexts.

The Hebrew Heine In his essay “Ha-sefer ha-ivri” (“The Hebrew Book”), the Hebrew revival poet Haim Nahman Bialik calls on his readers to “remember Heine” and explains: Under no circumstance would I ransom the statue on Heine’s famous gravestone, but would rather let it be thrown from place to place from now and till eternity. For this is Heine’s sharpest song, his most bitter and hasty laugh, the song he sang after death. Let this wandering tombstone be a tangible symbol of the soul of the son of Israel and its many wanderings, this soul that cannot be digested by a foreign stomach, cannot be buried in borrowed shrouds, and something of it remains irreducible.24

The essay, which argues that modernizers of the Hebrew language and its literature must build solid foundations by maintaining a living relation with an existing Jewish literary tradition, is based on a speech that Bialik gave at the second conference for Hebrew Language and Culture, which convened in Vienna in conjunction with the Eleventh Zionist Congress in 1913. As we will see, the speech and the essay would reverberate in discussions of Heine and his Hebrew translations for decades to come. Comparing the transcription of the speech with the version later printed in Bialik’s collected works, Shmuel Werses shows that the polemical tone of the original speech was softened. On the matter of Heine, however,

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Bialik’s view is more radical in the printed version. In the speech, Bialik describes Heine as a “loyal son to the tradition of his people, even after his death, who wanders in the guise of a monument from state to state, from city to city, never coming to rest on a beautiful island in the waves.” Referring to Heine and to other well-known apostates such as Spinoza, he adds: “these Hebrew souls call for our correction with a Hebrew translation, and, unfortunately, the translation is their only gravestone, a wandering gravestone.”25 On the way from Vienna to the printed page, however, the note of regret was replaced by defiance, and the stakes of translating Heine were articulated with increased force in Bialik’s metaphorical use of a Jewish legal term—pidyon shvuim, the ransoming of prisoners—to describe that work of translation. “There is no greater prescription of prisoner ransoming [mitzvat pidyon shvuim],” he states, “than a Hebrew translation of Heinrich Heine, that Jew whose sins were cleansed in suffering and whose death made peace between him and the God of Israel.”26 The metaphor transforms the linguistic conversion of the text into a pious imperative and supplies a narrative framework that casts Heine as a lost, captive son. In this description, the remediation of Heine’s text into a new language, Hebrew, appears not as translation per se, the transformation of a text into a new language, but rather as a return, a restoration of the text to the language to which it truly belongs. As we will see, a number of Heine’s Hebrew translators shared this perception. The main polemical thrust of the speech (and its printed version) is directed at another speaker at the conference, David Frischmann, an author, essayist, and prolific translator who had a defining influence on the Hebrew republic of letters in its early decades. Frischmann’s address at the conference highlights the unmet material needs of a young generation of Hebrew authors who would cater to the tastes of a young generation of readers. This younger generation, with its European education and its European literary sensibility, Frischmann warns, is at the risk of losing its interest in Hebrew literature altogether, a development that would spell the end of the project of the revival.27 Building on this sense of impending crisis, he calls for institutional support that would allow the young authors to thrive and to break new literary ground. But the key point of the speech is that this new literary ground, as envisioned by Frischmann, would have to insert itself into a “universalist” cultural sphere—that is, contemporary European modernist culture. What Bialik delivers in response is a call for enrichment not from borrowing from that sphere and not from providing stipends to authors, but from the existing treasures of Hebrew letters; in other words, it is a defense of particularism, embodied in what he calls “the Hebrew book.” The Hebrew book, in his proposi-

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tion, is not to emerge as something new at the hands of a young generation, but rather to result from the ingathering and reassessment of what has been handed down in tradition. As a concrete example, he sketches an editorial project that would create a definitive canon of Jewish literature. To include Heine in this canon and to describe his German language as a form of captivity, from which a Hebrew translation would ransom him, is without a doubt a radical position.28 Zionism was a nationalist movement in which language and literature played a constitutive, foundational, even world-making role, and translation played a particularly important part in that process. However, as the ambiguity involved in the notion that translation can be a kind of restoration suggests, it is impossible to mark a clear division between universalists, those who supported translation, and particularists, those who opposed it. As Kenneth Moss shows in his illuminating portrayal of both the debates on translation and the publication translations by Hebraists and Yiddishists in the 1910s, even those who positioned themselves on the indigenous side of the divide contributed their own translations of great works of world literature to the emerging Hebrew literary sphere. The most poignant examples are probably Bialik’s own Hebrew translations of Schiller and Cervantes and his Yiddish translation of Heine’s “Prinzessin Sabbath” (“Princess Sabbath”) of which I will say more below.29 Indeed, as Lawrence Venuti argues, although translation may seem like an insult to the exclusionary logic of nationalist thinking, it is often in fact mobilized by those who strive to extend the range of the national language and enforce a standard dialect as a literary norm. Furthermore, what he terms “translation nationalism” is particularly attractive to agents involved in the programmatic assertion of national unity at moments of transition when its putative members do not universally accept this unity. “Translation nationalisms,” he explains, “are based on performative acts of this sort because they assert a homogeneous language, culture or identity where none is shared by the diverse population that constitutes the nation.”30 Of course, when Bialik stood to make his disquisition on “The Hebrew Book,” translations of Heine to Hebrew like those he calls for in the speech were already in existence, though he does not mention this. In fact, Heine’s writing supplied one of the fruitful grounds on which Hebrew translators and critics experimented with and debated the standards and stakes of translation, both before and after the 1913 Vienna conference. The first Hebrew translations of Heine go back to the Hebrew Enlightenment in the mid-nineteenth century, though only a single poem—“Frau Sorge” (“Dame Care”)—was translated into Hebrew in Heine’s lifetime.31

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Translations appeared in larger masses toward the late 1880s as the Hebrew publishing world was transformed by the appearance of new periodicals and newspapers. The first book publication of a translation was Shlomo Zalman Luria’s 1886 annotated translation of “Yehuda Ben Halevi,” a poem obviously chosen because it belongs to Heine’s “Hebrew Melodies” and describes a Jewish cultural hero. Luria’s extensive annotation to the translation moves seamlessly between explications of Heine’s references to Jewish tradition and of references that are added in his own translation. This blurs the borders between author and translator, a phenomenon that we will see repeated in later Hebrew translations. Luria and these later translators all use this blurring to frame Heine as not only a Jewish author but even, paradoxically, as a Hebrew author. Indeed, the Jewish themes in Heine’s poetry were frequently privileged in the selection for translation, and even when poems were chosen for translation that did not refer to Judaism explicitly, translators sometimes followed the traditions of Enlightenment Hebrew translation and introduced Jewish themes in their adaptations of the texts. In his 1895 translation of the “Zwei Grenadiere” (“Two Grenadiers”), for example, Israel Ish-Berlin turns the two Napoleonic soldiers of Heine’s poem into two Hebrew soldiers—he refers to them as two Ariels—after the fall of the Second Temple and the advent of exile.32 The next book publication was Tsvi Yoseph Fefferman’s translation of selected writings, published in 1901 by Tushiya, the same Warsaw publisher that published Bialik’s own first collection of poems in that same year.33 For his own translation of one of Heine’s most famous Jewish poems, “Princess Sabbath,” Bialik chose not Hebrew, the main language of his literary career, but Yiddish, its rival in the politics of Jewish national and cultural revival. Bialik’s translation appeared in a 1907 pamphlet protesting new employment laws in the Russian empire that threatened the Jewish Sabbath by prescribing Sunday as a day of rest. Like earlier Hebrew translations of that poem, it circumvents much of Heine’s irony and domesticates the poem into an orthodox Jewish, eastern European context.34 In the following year, Bialik published another series of Yiddish poems that might also be read as aligning him with Heine: his three adaptations of Yehuda Halevi’s sea poems, the same texts that supplied Heine with significant parts of the vocabulary of his North Sea poems. Indeed, Bialik’s Yiddish “Yam lider” (“Sea Songs”) can be read as situated in a linguistic space between Halevi’s Hebrew and Heine’s German. Given the degree of overlap between the two Germanic languages, it is almost by necessity that Bialik’s Halevi adaptations borrow some of their vocabulary—for example “mastboim” for mast or “berg”

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for the mountainous rising wave—from Heine’s depiction of a storm in the “North Sea” cycle. And a related effect occurs in the Hebrew translations of the “North Sea” cycle. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Hebrew periodicals and newspapers continued to publish a steady stream of Heine translation. But it was David Frischmann, the target of Bialik’s polemic in 1913, who was the first to publish translations in book form after that speech; in other words, he was the first to heed the call of “The Hebrew Book”—Remember Heine!—with his translation of the “North Sea” cycle, which appeared as a volume in 1919. Frischmann chose a text that spoke directly to the disagreement between him and Bialik, but it is not clear that it was speaking for his side of the debate. With its Nordic setting, its polytheistic cast of characters, and its polemical dialogue with Hegel’s philosophy of world history, it may seem to fulfill Frischmann’s aspiration for a broad, universalist selection of translation that would not be limited to Jewish themes.35 Yet “The North Sea” is a text laden with biblical and Hebrew literary references, in particular to the sea poetry of Halevi. In fact, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, these allusions proffer on the “North Sea” cycle a fraught role in the history of Hebrew-German translation, casting it as a ghost, in Franz Rosenzweig’s loaded formulation, that haunts subsequent translations of Halevi. Ironically, Frischmann’s translation thus in some sense fulfills the dictum set by Bialik, to redeem Heine’s imprisoned words and bring them back to their proper place in Hebrew, because they return to the Hebrew language used by Halevi as well as the Hebrew Bible, Heine and Halevi’s shared source. For example, in Frischmann’s translation of the eighth poem in the first “North Sea” cycle, “Sturm” (“Storm”), a poem that draws on Halevi’s depiction of the soundscapes and landscapes of a stormy sea and responds ironically to the Hebrew poet’s repeated expression of faith in a God who will deliver him from the storm, Frischmann translates Heine’s exhortation in the first line of the second stanza—“O Meer!”—as “hoi, shibboleth yam,” using a term that appears twice in Psalm 69 to describe a flood or strong stream of water. This is the same “Shibboleth” that appears in the Book of Judges as a code word, distinguishing the sons of the tribe of Manasseh from others, and Frischmann’s use of it might be read as fulfilling a similar function and marking Heine as an insider, a prisoner being redeemed, rather than a foreigner being translated into the tradition. The translation was published by Stybel, the Warsaw publishing house founded by the wealthy Hebraist Avraham Yosef Stybel. As Moss describes it, Stybel chose to entrust Frischmann with a generous endowment devoted to Hebrew publication, and the two “shared the view that

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Hebrew literature could not confine itself to any Jewish form of expression but must instead strive to be part of a posited universal literature, and that translation . . . was the key means of facilitating this development.”36 And while Heine, so broadly recognized as a Jewish poet, seemingly exposed the limits of this project, it was evidently this universalist ideology that also drove the publishing house to commission and publish Itshak Katzenelson’s Hebrew edition of Heine’s Book of Songs in 1923. The volume includes the first three parts of that enduring best seller, complementing Frischmann’s North Sea translation to complete the entire Book of Songs, a feat of Heine translation that would not be repeated in Hebrew letters for decades. Katzenelson prefaces the translations with an address to the poet in the form of verse, explaining that he was not created to translate the words of another, since he himself is a poet. Nevertheless, he writes, he has devoted himself to the task: Not because you are a great poet, oh poet and dreamer! and not because you are a Jew, a Jew in your heart and your mouth, not because of your reputation in the world— did I translate you. . . . But you have loved . . . For that merciless love, oh genius lover, a love born out of the pains of the world, for which you found a language. I became a collaborator of your song, and my sorrow was swallowed by it.

As Katzenelson professes in closing his preface, his identification with the poet that he has translated leads him to feel more strongly about the Heine volume than about his own published poetry. Looking through the page proofs, he wonders: “I do not remember translating these poems . . . Did I really translate them? When? For they are my poems.” The dilemma is resolved in the very last lines of the preface by recourse to Bialik’s metaphor of the redemption of prisoners, which Katzenelson amplifies by retelling it as a family drama, now in prose: “These poems—Heine sang them, but I sang them a little bit as well. I am like that man who went out to redeem prisoners caught among heathens; after he had redeemed them and brought them to his country and homeland, he looked in their faces—and they were his sons.”37 In other words, translating Heine, of all authors, into Hebrew, of all languages, produces a particularly dense and intimate relationship between the author and his translator, riddling the question of authorship and elevating translation into a form of coauthorship. And if Katzenelson sees himself as a coauthor of the poems, he thus also turns Heine, in some sense, into a Hebrew author; he would not be the last Heine translator to claim this feat.

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It should be noted that Heine’s presence in the Hebrew press and in Hebrew literature goes beyond these and other translations. As Bialik’s statement indicates, the German monument debates did not go unnoticed; through their reports on these debates, starting in the 1890s, Hebrew authors positioned themselves on a range of ideological maps. For Hebrew readers, Heine’s conversion remained a blot on his reputation, one that had to be explained away as the result either of youthful folly (with an emphasis on Heine’s putative return to Judaism toward the end of his life) or of material necessity.38 His German language was also not without its liabilities to Heine’s Hebrew fans. The near-canonical status that a poet who in some sense was one of their own had achieved in the language of literature and philosophy was a potential source of pride, but in that pride lay the risk of losing sight of the importance of reviving Hebrew as the Jewish national language. Shimon Bernfeld’s lengthy essay “Ah rahok” (“A Distant Brother”), published in Hashiloah in 1898 (under Ahad Ha’am’s editorship) as a commentary on the centennial of Heine’s birth in 1897, embodies the dilemma in its attempt to find the perfect balance between acceptance and repudiation. Having rejected both the antisemitic attacks on the Heine monument and the philosemitic arguments in its favor as equally imbalanced, he proceeds to diagnose Heine’s tragedy as a case of misplaced and mistimed birth: if he had not been born before the Jewish Enlightenment had evolved sufficiently, he might have become a great Hebrew poet. In fact, Bernfeld proceeds to state anachronistically: Heinrich Heine was a “national” Jew, in the sense common today. He left the religion of Israel, though in his heart he felt remorse; but in feeling remorse for this action, he did not regret the business of religion, but he felt in his heart that with this action he had left the nation of Israel. Therefore he made an effort from then on to express his affection for Israel more and more.39

But his ultimate assessment is negative: Heine has no place in “the history of our people,” he concludes. He is nothing but “a passing shadow,” born too soon to be a part of the national revival and “lost” to the German language.40 Writing in response to the antisemitism of the German Heine controversies, Bernfeld strikes a note of cautious mediation. Participants in Hebrew literature’s own Heine debate were not as circumspect. The debate, which raged in the second half of the 1890s, was sparked by the 1893 publication of Y. L. Peretz’s collection of Hebrew love poetry, Ha-ugav

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(The Organ). It focused on two seemingly unrelated questions: accusations of plagiarism, on the one hand, and the place of love poetry in the Hebrew tradition, on the other. Frischmann was the most prominent figure to address the first of these questions, virulently attacking Peretz in his Mihtavim al dvar ha-sifrut (Letters on Literature) for plagiarizing Heine.41 The problem of originality in contemporary Hebrew literature and the all too fine distinction between authors who are fruitfully inspired by Western literature and those who cross the line of legitimacy into derivation and even plagiarism is a central preoccupation of the letters as a whole. Frischmann’s own persona as a critic and enlightener, whose letters are all addressed to a female “nice friend” or “pleasant friend,” was itself crafted on a model propagated by Heine in his Ideas: The Book of Le Grand.42 But Frischmann goes to great lengths to distance himself and, for example, S. Y. Abramovitsch, whom he favorably compares with Turgenev, from the mere plagiarists whom he castigates in the letters. These inauthentic authors threaten to undo the entire project of a modern Hebrew literature. This sense of danger is deep-seated in the worldview of Frischmann, who believed that Hebrew literature was quickly losing its audience because of its failure to become a European literature. But mimicking Western authors such as Poe, Verlaine, or Petöfi is not, Frischmann insists, a viable path to take. And the most offensive form of literary theft, to his mind, is the Hebrew imitation of Heine. “Imagine” he turns to the addressee of his Letters on Literature, what degree of impertinence the man needs who would come to imitate Heine while he should know that these days even the child who is still lying in his crib already knows this poet by heart. It is as if a man would steal a woman from her husband’s bosom and would bring her back to that husband himself to sell her back to him. But it is true! Heine is the bone in the throat of all of our poets, they come with Heine and go with Heine, lie down with Heine and rise with Heine. I shall yet find a time to present to you all the deeds that have been done in our literature with this Heine.43

In place of the redeemed prisoners who are mobilized in favor of Hebrew translation of Heine in Bialik’s and Katzenelson’s rhetoric, Frischmann depicts a stolen wife whose redemption is shameful, implying that the Hebrew adaptations and translations of Heine are “deeds that have been done” with his work, deeds that should scandalize the upstanding reader. But the most ironic comment that Frischmann makes on the matter

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of plagiarism comes early on in the letters, when he links the issue to the status of love poetry in the Hebrew tradition by quoting the intimately familiar, yet contentious poet directly. For this purpose, he chooses one of the poems from the Lyrical Intermezzo on which we focused in the previous chapter, “A Young Man Loves a Maiden.” Frischmann quotes the final lines of the poem, lines that suggest that the experience of love is always both old and new, in a sense bedeviling the very notion of plagiarism: “It is so old a story, / Yet somehow always new; / And he that has just lived it, / it breaks his heart in two.”44 The same line is echoed in an exchange between Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Yoseph Klausner—two of the prominent critical voices of the Hebrew republic of letters around the turn of the century—that focused not on the issue of plagiarism and the authenticity of Peretz’s voice, but on the propriety of his subject matter.45 In his attack on Peretz and others, published in his Luah ahiasaf in 1897, Lilienblum makes two arguments that seem to be in tension with each other. He first argues that modern Hebrew literature lacks the medieval foundations of European love poetry. In his view, the love poetry of “Heine and others in the languages of the world” is rooted in the traditions of courtship in the Middle Ages, which provide it with a “solid foundation.” “We,” on the other hand, he cautions, “who do not have this foundation in our lives, do not have a peg on which to hang such poems.”46 Lilienblum does not pause to consider Heine’s position within this tradition as a Jew, nor does he address the related matter of the ambivalent nature of his medievalism.47 Nevertheless, these questions seem to be implied when Lilienblum quotes one brief phrase from Heine’s poem—“es ist eine alte Geschichte” (“it is so old a story”)—to make the opposite point in the second part of his essay. Here, Lilienblum argues that the true roots of love poetry are not in the European Middle Ages, but in the Hebrew Bible, with examples such as Jacob’s devotion to Rachel and the great poetry of the Song of Songs, an old story indeed, and for Lilienblum one for which his Hebrew-writing contemporaries lacked adequate inspiration. But as Klausner reminds the reader in his rebuttal, Lilienblum quotes only half of the line. As if carried by the force of Schumann’s famous melody, Klausner adds: “und bleibt doch immer neu”—“yet somehow always new”—and insists that love is a universal theme, one into which members of all cultures and races can write themselves.48 For Klausner, Peretz’s love poetry is vital proof of this universalism. More importantly, it is proof that the Hebrew language is capable of producing genuinely “European” poetry, poetry that would not embarrass Heine himself.

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That the entire conversation should keep returning to this one lied, intoning and reintoning the words “es ist eine alte Geschichte,” quoting the German and transcribing it in Hebrew letters, seems beyond coincidence. Time and again, the participants in the debate repeat Heine’s staging of the poem in the staging of their own debate about Heine and the place of Hebrew poetry in the current cultural conditions of Europe. After all, the first two lines of the poem, which none of the commentators quote, establish its theme as unrequited love: “A young man loves a maiden / Who chooses another instead.” If the heart of this discussion concerning the implications of Hebrew-language imitations or adaptations of Heine’s love poetry is the wish shared by Frischmann and Klausner that Hebrew literature should become European, then the theme of unrequited love seems to cast an ambivalent shadow on that enterprise because the poem describes a narrative of mutual misunderstanding, betrayal, and disappointment that ruins all parties involved. Like the young man in the poem, this controversy seems to imply, Hebrew authors can only long for a place in the European literary sphere but never attain it.49 And insofar as the poem is about Heine’s staging of the text, positioning next to each other the young man, his beloved, and finally the object of her desire, as I have argued in the previous chapter, it thus becomes—in the Hebrew authors’ reuse—a poem about the preconditions for their own debates, a poem about the stage that they all share and compete on, like so many jealous lovers. In his 1913 speech and essay, Bialik does not join the chorus in quoting the song, but his gesture of placing Heine, whom he describes as a prisoner in need of ransom, within his planned “Hebrew Book” indicates his reversal of the stakes of the discussion. Heine is no longer a vehicle—legitimate or not so legitimate, depending on the position of the critic—through which Hebrew literature seeks its way into Europe. On the contrary, he rejects the piece of European land on which the poet’s fans are attempting to erect a monument (“Under no circumstance would I ransom the statue on Heine’s famous gravestone” he writes. “Let this wandering tombstone be a tangible symbol of the soul of the son of Israel”) in favor of the space of a Hebrew canon and a Hebrew book that incorporates “lost sons” such as Heine and Spinoza. Bialik’s own long narrative poem “City of Slaughter” was to become a vehicle through which European spaces were dismantled in favor of a space of Zionism, and in doing so, the poem addressed the question of the relation of poetry to prose and the possibility of remediation between those two modes. But first, another region of the Zionist reception of Heine needs to be explored.

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Herzl’s Fascination Let us return, by way of transition, to Karl Kraus. As Paul Reitter has argued, Kraus’s reaction to the monument debates was an ambivalent composite of parody and appropriation: Kraus’s real object of criticism was not Heine, but rather his own contemporaries, the feuilletonists who saw themselves as Heine’s followers and rushed to protect him and his monument. It was as a strike at them that Kraus agitated against the monument; Germany (and the German-speaking cultural sphere) in its present form, he argued, was not “Denkmalwürdig.”50 Curiously enough, an author who exactly fit Kraus’s acrimonious description had made a strikingly similar argument several years earlier (though, for reasons unknown, he chose not to publish it). This was a feuilletonist who wrote in the mold of Heine’s prose and sought to reproduce his irony; indeed, it was an author that Kraus would later attack head-on, when he became a Zionist leader and began campaigning and collecting money not for the Heine monument, but rather for the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Theodor Herzl’s essay on the Heine monument, tentatively dated 1887/1888 by the Herzl Archive in Jerusalem, is one of numerous drafts that remained unpublished, but meticulously preserved, by the prolific journalist and feuilletonist. Though it did not make it into the public sphere and become part of the Heine monument debates it provides an illuminating glimpse into the stakes of the debate for Herzl. My reading of the feuilleton reflects on Herzl’s use of Heine as a kind of Jewish “code word,” a concept I will explain further; it also reveals Herzl’s nuanced understanding of Heine’s complex relation to space in texts such as the Travel Pictures. The manuscript of Herzl’s feuilleton opens with a reference to the collection of money for the Heine monument: “I would happily spend the five pfennigs that it would cost. I might be a poor devil—I say this with no bitterness towards Rothschild—but I would not mind the five pfennigs. For I imagine it in its grandeur. It would have to stand in an open, attractive square, often swept by wind, always lit by the sun.”51 But as the closing lines of the feuilleton reveal, Herzl intends his five pfennigs not for a Heine monument, but for a caricature of it: “Heine needs no monument, he would not bear one. But since our souls already long for a monument, I modestly venture another suggestion. A monument for cringers [Ein Muckerdenkmal]! That’s still missing. I would contribute five pfennigs to the national collection with delight. It would have to stand in an open, attractive square, often swept by wind, always lit by the sun.”52 The feuilleton leads to this conclusion in two steps. In its second part,

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Herzl depicts an imagined conversation between the figure of Heine as represented in the monument and a drunken youth. “Na, you filthy fellow up there—I hear you are a filthy fellow, and I be- believe everything I hear . . . hic.” So the youth turns to the statue, informing it that his generation is no longer interested in the roses and nightingales of his songs. Heine’s imagined reply begins with a defense of poetry and evolves into a defense of humanity: You will have to recover the blessed spirit of poetry one day! . . . You will return to me! For see, my heart has bled with humanity in its greatest pain, I loved the light of freedom . . . Don’t go yet, dear youth! Tell me one thing! I see that you have made much progress in the sciences, but how are things with what we used to call humanity? Is the human race also operating electrically? And the progress of the spirit, is it powered by steam?

The inability of the drunken youth to answer this call, his inability to appreciate the importance of “Humanität,” supplies Herzl with the final proof that Heine is not monument material. Or in the words of Kraus, it proves that his contemporaries are not “Denkmalwürdig” when it comes to Heine. In the first part of the feuilleton, Herzl comes up with an additional set of proofs. Here, he practices his mimicry of Heine’s ironic style by listing several contradicting answers in a row: In fact, Heine needs no monument. First, he is not dead at all—at least they keep trying to kill him off. Second, it will probably take a while before we come to a final conclusion, whether he was one of the greatest poets—after Goethe. . . . Third, the poet, who has already spent thirty-three years in the eternal springtime of Avalon, would have a frosty surprise if he was suddenly to be planted in modern life. Ah, he would be pretty surprised! And if it came to that, I would warmly recommend that he would be represented with his eyebrows raised and drawn high and his lips slightly opened.

Behind the feuilletonist’s wit of these enumerated proofs lies a substantial position based on Herzl’s understanding of Heine’s attitude toward space, performance, and the status of prose in contemporary contexts. By the end of the passage, the Heine monument has turned into a performing body, which represents the ultimate failure of those embroiled in the debate to recognize the true subversive nature of his writing. For Herzl,

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picturing Heine as a ghost who stays behind to track the changing ways in which his words are understood in ever-changing contexts is absurd, since even in his lifetime the author insisted that once it had left his hands, his prose was completely severed from the context in which it was produced and the person who had produced it, who was no longer there to gesture, clarify, and perform. Herzl’s best-known reference to Heine appears in his Zionist novel Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902, a text I will discuss in further detail in the following chapter), as a reply to one of the central questions that the text raises. A utopian depiction of the Jewish state founded in Palestine, it follows the genre’s traditional format, bringing two outsiders to visit the Old-New Land and using their tour as an opportunity to describe it in detail. Herzl’s utopia, however, is not projected on a far-off island; it is not on terra incognita, but rather in the overdetermined space of the terra sancta, with Jerusalem as its capital. It is hard to speak of climaxes in Herzl’s plot; with its rhetorical enthusiasm, the narrative portrays every corner of the Old-New Land—its cities and villages, its factories and its prisons—as an edifying and exciting experience. Yet the visit to the rebuilt Temple in the city of Jerusalem seems to heighten the enthusiasm even further. Here, the man-made achievements of the new society are outdone by the presence of the sacred. Furthermore, here surface not only the messianic underpinnings of Herzl’s Zionist utopia, but also the question: In what sense is it specifically Jewish?53 The answer presented at the Temple is complex: Herzl’s protagonist hears the voices of the worshipers in the Temple and recalls the German translation of these Hebrew melodies, Heine’s “Hebräische Melodien” (“Hebrew Melodies”). The cycle, which is part of the Romanzero (1851), is here an object of intense nostalgia and the medium through which the rebuilt Temple can be described in the novel. But it is also a representation of the frustrated hopes for assimilation for which Zionism offers a solution. “Yes,” the young German-Jewish protagonist reflects, “Heine was a true poet who sensed the romance of the national destiny. He had sung German songs ardently, but the beauty of the Hebrew melodies had not escaped him.”54 The novel offers itself as an alternative to Heine’s bilingual songs, which are both German and Hebrew at the same time, suggesting the Old-New Land as the solution to failed assimilation. Herzl thus uses Heine here as a type of “code word”: a recognizable point of reference that functions to denote a cultural ambivalence and to position the author in relation to it.55 Indeed, the code word is flexible; not only can it be manipulated by both antisemites and Jewish nationalists, but how an author uses it can also change in the course of a career according to changes in the situations in which it is used and the uses to which it is put.

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Herzl initially wrote Heine into German national culture, using the adopted predecessor—with whom he often explicitly identifies56 and whose ironic voice his feuilletons consistently attempt to mimic—to pre­ sent himself also as a member of this culture. In these earlier texts, such as the review “Heine und die Liebe” and the feuilleton manuscript on the Heine monument, the fact that both the author and the object of his writing are Jews goes completely unmentioned.57 In his play Prinzen aus Genieland (Princes of Geniusland), written in 1892 and performed with some success at the Viennese Carl Theater, “Heine” becomes a code word, albeit still only implicitly a Jewish code word. Much of the play’s energy is devoted to the question of social “readability” and “passing.” None of the characters in the play are identified as Jewish, yet Herzl ties the question of how to recognize someone for what they genuinely are, be it in terms of social status or artistic genius, to Heine as a cultural marker that conjures up the dilemma of the Jew who travels in society but will always remain recognizable. One character, Weber, carries around a seven-year-old newspaper clipping that explains why another, the composer Witting, has composed nothing since an early success, by suggesting that Witting is not its true author. Four different characters read the clipping, which is titled, like the play, “Princes from Geniusland,” onstage. But only the first of them reads it aloud for the audience to hear and exclaims: “Gentlemen, this phrase is by Heine!” To which someone replies “Don’t get excited! We know!” and another concurs: “It is used ironically here.”58 “Princes from Geniusland,” like the “Hebrew Melodies” referred to in Herzl’s Old-New Land, is a quote from the collection Romanzero; the poem from which it is taken, titled “Platenieden” (“Platenides”), is the last in the lengthy exchange of blows between Heine and August von Platen, a polemic we have already encountered in the previous chapter. As the reader may recall, as the public animosity between the two grew, Platen’s attacks became increasingly antisemitic; Heine’s replies, full of irony and scorn, refer to Platen’s homosexuality and ridicule his classicist poetry. As in the Platen episodes in The Baths of Lucca (1829), Heine here ridicules his fellow poet’s pretense to greatness and implies that he does not deserve the title of a true artist. In both cases, he satirizes these presumptions by translating Platen’s poetry into the prosaic realm of banking and moneylending, a choice that also produces an ironic echo with Platen’s antisemitism. In the poem, Heine contrasts Platen with the true artists of German poetry: “Real princes from genius-land / Paid in cash for what they own; / Schiller, Goethe, Lessing and / Wieland asked no credit loan” (SS 6:97; CPH 630, translation modified).

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The title of the newspaper clipping is indeed ironic, as Weber remarks in the play: the review suggests that Witting is no “real prince from geniusland” but, like Platen, an impostor. But as we reflect on the resonances of the quote, its irony gains dimensions. “Heine” functions here as a cultural code, one that is both triggered by the figures onstage and shared by the playwright and his audience. The moment of recognition in the play—the exclamation “This phrase is by Heine!” along with the assurance that everyone has already recognized it—is an echo of the cultural self-positioning already achieved by quoting Heine in the play’s title. But it is also an interesting transformation of the classic moment of dramatic recognition, which, in the comedy, is traditionally tied to birthright. Like many contemporary comedies of manners, Herzl’s play deviates from that model: his hero can finally marry the girl not because of his parentage, but because—despite the allegations of the newspaper clipping—he is a true artist. But it also divorces this solution from the moment of recognition, which remains tied to the deterministic logic of parentage, to the unmentioned Jewish identity shared by those who recognize the Heine quote. In other words, Heine—whose poem not only appears repeatedly in the play as an object of recognition, but also gives the play its title—is the reference point in relation to which the play’s preoccupation with social passing and the identity of the true artist is organized, a reference point that turns the play into an allegory about Jewish passing. If we take Princes from Geniusland as our cue for reading Herzl’s comments on the Heine monument, they appear as yet another allegory of Jewish assimilation. The dialogue between Heine and the drunken youth is a dialogue between a Jew and an antisemite, and Herzl’s resolute rejection of the monument is a gesture to restore Jewish honor, anticipating his Zionism. But this is only part of the picture. To complete it, we must consider another aspect of Herzl’s dialogue with Heine, this time on the level of poetics. In his feuilletons, Herzl turns to the Travel Pictures, rather than to Heine’s poetry, and refers to Heine not as a code word, but as a poetic model for his negotiation of space. Once we recognize the fact that Herzl’s feuilletons are modeled on the poetics of space developed in Heine’s Travel Pictures, we can reread the unpublished manuscript as rejecting the monument not because of Herzl’s Zionist withdrawal from the public spaces of central Europe and construction of an alternative public sphere in the Old-New Land, but because Heine’s writing poses difficulties to the construction of space on which a conventional monument is posited. As I have shown in the previous chapter, Heine was fond of playing with the deictic nature of pronouns, planting them in his prose text without providing the context that would allow them to point and thus

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supply them with a clear referent. Heine’s reader is confronted with the realization that in the absence of description, a prose text does not resolve this issue because of its pragmatics, specifically because it is removed from the space in which it originated. This confrontation is registered in Herzl’s prose. As he began his career as a feuilleton author, the young Herzl explored the genre by mimicking existing models, showing an acute awareness of the fact that he was learning to master an existing language. In several early letters, Herzl refers to himself as “the writer of these lines (to use the language of the feuilletons),”59 as if rehearsing the phrase of an actual feuilleton to become a speaker of the language, rather than one who quotes it. In many of the feuilletons, he plays not only with the references to his own persona as a writer, which becomes entangled with the act of writing—its product rather than its source— but also with the references to his “dear” or “respected” readers, even quoting Heine’s Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, and addressing his reader as “Marquise.”60 Journeys—to Italy as well as Berlin, Paris, and London—are the matter of countless feuilletons throughout Herzl’s career, supplying him with abundant material for worldly and ironic remarks. And Heine’s Travel Pictures are an important influence on these feuilletons, posing the central problem with which they contend poetically: the difficult relationship of the feuilleton with space. In a group of short texts about Italy collected under the title “Aus Wandertagen” in the last part of Das Buch der Narrheit (The Book Folly, published in 1888, around the time when the Heine monument feuilleton was drafted), Herzl retraces Heine’s footsteps and rehearses the separation of prose from the space of performance.61 Herzl’s visit to Lucca is an opportunity to speak directly with his German-Jewish predecessor. Like Heine, who had flirted with dead women in an Italian picture gallery, Herzl expresses his hopes to meet a Tuscan beauty of the past: “that laughing beauty . . . of which we are told by our beloved master Heinrich Heine.”62 In the tradition of the master, Herzl immediately takes an ironic stance toward the object of his desire, pointing out that the woman is probably old by now: “But she too cannot have been passed by time without it leaving its traces, and while I hold no superstitions, I would be deeply out of sorts if I were to encounter an old hag instead of a young beauty on the road.”63 The remark puts Heine’s position as the master into question, hinting that his example, like the women he admired, might already have grown old. The dialogue continues and reaches its most reflexive point in Pisa

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where Herzl, like Heine, uses the journey in order to reflect on the distance between prose and performance, that is, on the difficulties that prose encounters when it tries to use deixis to refer, to point physically at a particular object. Unlike the travel guidebooks, which both master and disciple enjoy mocking, Herzl does not want to describe Pisa as a stable monument, waiting to be revisited by generations of tourists. Rather, he chooses to fashion Pisa as a space of performance, a stage on which one particular body, the body of a beautiful woman, appears. But the prose of the feuilleton has limited powers to capture the performance; it cannot simply point at it, referring to it deictically. Following Heine’s example, Herzl ironically refers to the removal of prose from the space of per­ formance. On that sunny day of early spring, in some past era, this place must have been exactly the same as today. The tower was crooked, a girl stood at the well and the Misericordia Brothers turned around the corner. Only one sight was not to be seen in Pisa in that far-off time. That is the charming blond Englishwoman, who is to be seen at the church square when one is in Pisa on the morning of 20 February 1887. I specify time and place exactly, so that she cannot be missed.64

The young woman to be seen on the Pisa square on a February morning in 1887 is the polar opposite of the prototypical monument. Her body appears in a particular place at a particular time and disappears, whereas a monument fixes a representation of the body at one place. But in the Italian feuilleton and the feuilleton on the Heine monument, Herzl reverses this order. He describes the English tourist as though she were a monument and the monument as though it was a living body, capable of expressing surprise. Thus his suggestion for the Heine monument is that it should depict the author “with his eyebrows raised and drawn high and his lips slightly opened,” as if he had arrived at the town square just in time to witness the present cultural and political conditions. As both authors show, their prose can do nothing more than mark the absence of a body, indicating that it was there before and has passed on, or ineffectually mimic the deictic gesture that would be possible in a space of performance. And it is this affinity that forms the motivation for Herzl’s rejection of the monument, which would fix his literary role model to the given and delineated space that his prose had worked to question. This gesture, finally, is also rooted in Herzl’s growing sense of Jewish pride, which was

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to become a central element in his Zionism. The monument debates, like Herzl’s famous confrontation with the Dreyfus Affair, were one of many instances in which Herzl encountered efforts to expel Jews from the European public sphere. Through Zionism, he replied by setting up an alternative, Jewish public sphere. In his Zionist novel, Old-New Land, Herzl thus had to abandon Heine’s model and adopt a form of prose that constructs spaces, rather than undoes them.

Chapter Four



Theodor Herzl’s Technocratic World-Making in Prose

The highway going north from Tel Aviv passes through the affluent suburb of Herzliya, named after Theodor Herzl, the “visionary of the Jewish state.” Herzl’s figure, carved in thin wood, towers over the highway, as if inspecting the materialization of the detailed plans for the Jewish state that had filled his diaries and were the subject matter of his Zionist utopia, Altneuland (Old-New Land, 1902). The novel was translated into Hebrew by Nahum Sokolov and published under the title Tel Aviv by the Zionist press in Warsaw shortly after its German publication; indeed, the model, modernized cities that fill the novel are inscribed in the foundation of the Jewish metropolis and the plans to make it the centerpiece of the Zionist modernist transformation of Palestine. The notion that the state of Israel is a realization of Herzl’s plans is a “truism” that is often articulated in the public sphere: his icon not only looks down on the city of Herzliya and its highways, it was also hanging over the head of David Ben-Gurion when he read the Declaration of Independence and founded the state, and it (alone) presides over the Israeli Parliament to this day. The motto of his novel—“if you will, it is no fairy tale”—is a popular slogan that celebrates the state’s achievements. Thus, while there has been a continuing ideological resistance to Herzlian Zionism from different directions of the political map of Zionism, it is a commonplace of the reception of his novel that its status as a utopia is unique, because it was realized and materialized in the state of Israel.1 Even those readers who emphasize the gap between Herzl’s political plans, rooted as they were in late nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian liberalism, and Israel as it exists since 1948 share the same basic orientation when considering the relationship between this text and the world, seeing it as a less, rather than more accurate representation of the reality that followed it by almost half a century.2 Of course, Herzl’s text did influence the Zionist project, “providing one

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of the first spaces for working out the particular shapes and boundaries” of the Jewish state, to use Philip Wegner’s description of the work done by utopias as a genre.3 This influence goes beyond the foundation and naming of the city of Tel Aviv, though its extent and nature are far from easy to pinpoint. Herzl clearly intended for his text to have such an influence and wrote it as a program for action for the future founders of the state. But the claim that a novel is a blueprint for a state, whether that claim is made by the author of that novel or by later readers, is one that has important theoretical implications. More accurately, it is a claim necessarily implicated in a particular theory of prose, a theory that needs to be articulated and clarified. In order to understand how Herzl used the medium of novelistic prose to present a projected image of the Jewish state of the future, we must first consider the resonance of this generic choice in the context of his earlier writing. Herzl’s use of prose comes with a complex constellation of assumptions about the relationship between text and world, and specifically text and space. For him, the prose of the novel is situated against other modes and media and differentiated from them in its ability to construct spaces, which makes it the ideal tool for presenting a blueprint of the future Jewish state. Old-New Land fashions prose as a tool of technological imagination and more specifically as a kind of literary corollary to the worldmaking and technological transformation of space in which Herzl sees the great success of future Zionism. Through the example of Herzl, utopia appears as a generic hybrid that uses the codes of the nineteenth-century novel and its claim to represent reality—that is, its prosaic nature—in order to present an alternative to that reality.4 Moreover, Herzl staged his Zionism as a solution not only to the political dilemmas of Jews in Europe, but also to the prosaic conditions diagnosed by Hegel and Heine. Old-New Land tells the story of a despondent young man in Vienna, well educated, but unemployed, who must watch as his beloved is married off to a richer man: he is a character that might very well have appeared in Herzl’s drafts for a Viennese novel, in his comedies, or in his many feuilletons, texts I will discuss below. But unlike the desperate young men that Herzl often fashioned, Dr. Friedrich Löwenberg, the “educated, desperate young man” of the title of the book 1 of Old-New Land, is offered a way out.5 Not by joining the Zionists, as one might expect from a novel that sets out to convince its readers of that cause, but by joining Kingscourt, a non-Jewish millionaire who is tired of the world and has decided to spend the rest of his life on a desert island with an intelligent young companion. Thus, Herzl sends his young protagonist to the location of the original Utopia, a remote island, cut off from civilization.6 However, this is not

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where his vision of an ideal society unfolds; sailing their yacht across the Mediterranean to their island, Löwenberg and Kingscourt make a stop in Palestine and witness the dilapidation and abandon that rules the local Palestinian villages and towns, above all the city of Jerusalem. As they sail off the coast of Haifa and head to the Suez Canal, leaving a few Jewish pioneers behind, the narrative breaks for twenty years. It now jumps to 1923 and returns to the two men, who have decided to take a break from their life on the island and are heading for a visit in Europe with the inevitable stop at the shores of Palestine as they make their way through the Mediterranean Sea again. This second visit to Palestine, now transformed by mass Jewish immigration into the Old-New Land, is the main part of the novel, in which Herzl presents his sociopolitical vision. This is both a plan for the future of the Jews when they have emancipated themselves from life in exile and a plan for a utopian society, applicable, as Löwenberg excitedly realizes, to the entire industrialized world. The utopia that the Jews have constructed in Palestine, as they encounter it now, is a new society, built with the aid of the best Western technology and based on principles of mutualism, equality, and honor.7 As their journey in Old-New Land progresses the two are increasingly fascinated with and attracted to the new society, and the final twist in the plot indeed allows them to stay and become its members.8 The text, which gives such prominence to the description of landscapes and cityscapes and lingers most of all on human-made spaces, is nevertheless remarkably vague about the borders of the Jewish state that it describes. Herzl chooses never to draw a map, and the different characters who host the two visitors in their journey from Haifa to Tiberias, through the Jordan Valley and Jericho, and finally to Jerusalem have opportunity to refer to places such as the mountains of Lebanon, Damascus, Baghdad, and the Euphrates River, never mentioning explicitly whether these are within their own land or belong to a neighboring country. The vagueness is not an oversight of Herzl’s, nor is it a deliberate tactic of leaving options open on an issue that will later be decided. Rather, the topographical vagueness is inherent in the political system that Herzl’s novel describes. The “New Society” that the Jews have founded in Palestine is emphatically not a nation-state, and its most important task lies in the past: to organize the mass immigration of the Jews to their new land, and to buy up the lands that would be leased to these immigrants.9 In other words, Old-New Land maintains a complex relation to territory. The novel is written to make the occupation of this space by Jews plausible, but at the same time, it hesitates to define the space too

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concretely and leaves the matter of ownership of the land open-ended and permutable.10 In place of a map that would draw the borders of a state and make a claim for a certain territory, Herzl allows the New Society to own space insofar as it makes and shapes it. The novel thus envisions landscape as a kind of text, and the human-made landscapes through which the narrative moves belong to the New Society as a matter of something like copyright, and only as derivative of that, of territorial conquest. For this text to be inscribed in his novel, Herzl turns to his own technology, a technology which he now—after a long career of experimentation—finally knows how to put to work: prose.

Prose and Politics: Herzl’s Long Road to the Novel The publication of Old-New Land in 1902 was not only a culmination of Herzl’s writing as a Zionist but also the final realization of a longstanding interest, predating the author’s turn to Zionism, in the novel as a genre. Readers of Herzl have noticed that the idea of a novel, both in the sense of an idea for a specific novel and of the novel as an idea, as a concept, was tightly woven into his political plans from the start. Shlomo Avineri describes Herzl’s diaries of the early 1890s as a Bildungsroman, a text in which “pragmatic political proposals, aimed at the existing world of Realpolitik,” are mixed with “confused jottings for an imaginary novel.”11 Michael Gluzman has emphasized the gendered language with which Herzl reflects on the possibility of writing a novel, initially rejected because he preferred to write a “book for men.”12 As both imply, Herzl first thought of the literary and the political not as complementary, but rather as conflicting fields of operation. He would have to choose, he was convinced, between Realpolitik and the imagination. What he produced, in the first instance, however, was a political pamphlet. And indeed the first challenge that he needed to answer in the pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), is to differentiate it from a novel. He does so in strikingly ambivalent terms, however, at the same time assuring the reader that what he reads is no utopia and that it would not have been a shame to have written a novel—it may indeed have been a better proposition economically.13 By the time the century had turned, though, Herzl seems to have regained his confidence in the ability of literature both to educate and entertain. The epilogue to the Jewish novel that he finally did write explains that it was written as a Lehrdichtung, a piece of educational literature, in the belief that “dreams are not so different from deeds as some may think. All the deeds of men are only dreams

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at first. And in the end, their Deeds dissolve into Dreams” (ONL 296; AN 330). In this statement, the pathos of Dichtung and dreams has replaced the novel, relieving Herzl of the generic worries about the novel and its feminized entertainment value. But Old-New Land functions as a solution to Herzl’s generic problems not as educational poetry, as he would have it in the epilogue, but rather as novelistic prose. It is not surprising that Herzl first thought of the new political ideas that preoccupied him in literary terms nor that he lingered on the question of the appropriate genre in which to present them. When he reinvented himself as a prophet of Zionism in the first half of the 1890s, he already had the beginnings of a literary career behind him. He had published more than a dozen plays, though only a few of them had been produced in theaters in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin and they had not met with much success.14 He had developed a distinct voice as a feuilleton writer, mostly on the bottom half of the pages of the daily Neue freie Presse, and had published two feuilleton collections: Neues von der Venus (News from Venus, 1887) and Das Buch der Narrheit (The Book of Folly, 1888). In 1895 two additional feuilleton collections were published: Das Palais Bourbon: Bilder aus dem französischen Parlamentsleben (The Palais Bourbon: Pictures of French Parliamentary Life), and Philosophische Erzählungen (Philosophical Tales). In these writings, Herzl often reflects on generic choices. The subject matter of his very first published feuilleton, dating to his gymnasium days in Budapest, is the feuilleton itself as an art form and the question of how to excel in it.15 Indeed, the feuilleton and the theater were the two genres that most prominently vied for his attention and his creative powers. In the early correspondence, we often find him making statements, in a tone that mixes self-importance with irony, about the need to choose one medium and renounce the other.16 Moreover, the possibility of writing a novel was not something that emerged in Herzl’s diaries and in his written work only when he became a Zionist. A short, humoristic text about lovers in a button shop that appears in The Book of Folly is the occasion to parody novelistic naturalism and its aspirations to portray society in full by representing it in all its segments, one novel at a time: It is only out of consideration for the room that has been allotted to me that I make a stop already now. For I am still quite fresh, not tired yet at all. I could easily turn this sketch into a humoristic novella “Romeo and Juliet in the Button Shop,” a novel “In the Button-business” and even extend it to a novel cycle that would fill my entire life, “Button or Coat of Arms.” In this comprehensive

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framework I could represent all of modern life and its struggles, the heights and depths of society. It would simply be a matter of page number.17

When these lines were published, Herzl had already attempted to do just what he here ridicules. He had penned several manuscripts and plans for novels and novellas, but these were to remain in his personal archive.18 Herzl seems to have been particularly eager to write a novel that would bring to life the city that had become his home at the age of eighteen, Vienna. In 1882 he wrote a “Schreibelektion”—a writing exercise, as he titled it—with notes for a “Viennese Novel.” The exercise begins with what seems like a fantasy of wish fulfillment: the young Erwin is at an elite ball, looking for adventures, honor, and the love of women. But it continues on a more autobiographical note, with memories of Herzl’s childhood city, Budapest, and of his only sister, Pauline, who died of typhus at the age of nineteen, in 1878.19 In other notes, apparently dated from the beginning of the 1880s as well, Herzl makes a more thorough attempt to represent Viennese society. The manuscript includes descriptions of the characters with which Herzl planned to people his novel, a colorful collection in the best tradition of Viennese decadence, which includes an impoverished widow who needs to marry off her daughter and an aging baron who owns a collection of “pairs of boots, which he shines with his own hands. His last sport.”20 In addition, the manuscript includes plans for specific scenes that betray a strong naturalist influence, down to the plans to carry out some preparatory research by visiting one of the sites: “Once a sad view from a higher position (from my window) of the crowds that swarm, the hurrying—with the question: how and why do they live, how and why do they die these people? Morbus viennensis. A view of the box factory (Swoboda, Webgasse), with its glue fumes, the pale faces, the suffering. How, why? Socialism. Billroth and his clinic (visit).”21 Indeed, naturalism is one of the crucial, though rarely recognized, literary points of reference with which Herzl was working. This is evident in the first part of his Jugendtagebuch (Youth Diary, dated 1882), which is devoted primarily to what he calls “Lesefrüchte”— “fruits of reading.” Herzl’s reading material is varied, ranging from French novels to Ernst Dühring’s Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), an antisemitic diatribe that arouses indignation but also some appreciation in the young Zionist-to-be.22 His reactions to his reading are remarkably uniform, however: his sense of propriety is offended time and again, and he repeatedly records his disgust with the “dreadful Naturalism” to which he nevertheless keeps returning.23 Over a decade later,

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Herzl seems equally fascinated, though little more able to acknowledge his ambivalence in relation to naturalism, and specifically Zola, in the literary reviews that he published in the Neue freie Presse. To my knowledge, Herzl reviewed two of Zola’s novels: La bête humaine (The Human Beast) and Le rêve (The Dream). He also mentions Zola in a review manuscript of the novel Was Will das Werden (which has been translated as What Meaneth This) by the German naturalist writer Friedrich Spielhagen.24 Together, these pieces reveal Herzl’s consistent preoccupation with naturalism as a provocative and disturbing novelistic discourse. In the reviews, the embarrassment of the young reader is replaced by the ironic stance of the worldly feuilletonist. Herzl is pointedly ironic about Zola’s thoroughness in representing the social world (the great detail in which he describes train schedules or the work of stone masons) as well as about his sensationalism. Drawing no doubt on his own experience, he points out that Zola’s readers love to be scandalized and always come back for more. In the earliest text, his review of Spielhagen, Herzl is still categorically critical of Zola’s harsh tones and prefers the German author’s more balanced, less revolutionary prose.25 What the two share as naturalist works, Herzl states with a tone of disappointment, is that while they describe the present in all its deficiencies, the reader cannot expect any utopian suggestions from them. Yet the sorcery of naturalism, its ability to conjure a full life-world in a convincing manner, fascinates Herzl. In both Zola reviews, he tries to explain its mechanics by solving the riddle of milieu. In his review of The Human Beast, Zola’s ability to make a world present is articulated in terms of conquering a space: This time the world of the railway is the “milieu.” An entirely new world. Surely we remember that we have already encountered this circle of life here and there in literature. . . . But Zola still enters this ground with the force of a first owner and puts his flag up. This makes the man so great despite all his exaggerations: he sees and instructs in seeing [er sieht und lehrt sehen].26

As a naturalist, Zola is described as a colonizer whose force of selfpersuasion gives him the right to a territory, even if others have inhabited it before him. Herzl was to choose the utopian, rather than the naturalist mode in writing his novel, but he did learn his lesson from naturalism and made use of it when it came to staking a claim to possession, conquering the spaces of Old-New Land with his own prose, entering “with the force

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of a first owner” and erecting the Zionist flag by instructing his readers in seeing what his political imagination envisions. In fact, in writing Old-New Land Herzl heavily drew on a Zola novel that, to the best of my knowledge, he had not reviewed, but that he certainly owned: L’argent (Money, 1891).27 Like Herzl’s Zionism, this novel is rooted in the political antisemitism of Paris of the 1880s, and it shows that, like Herzl, Zola was preoccupied with the position of the Jews in Europe long before his famous involvement in the Dreyfus Affair.28 This novel includes all the basic elements of Herzl’s Zionist imagination; in a sense, all he needed to do was to rearrange the puzzle supplied by Money to reach his solution to the Jewish question.29 Of course, Money was certainly not the central text on Herzl’s mind when he wrote drafts for his Jewish novel turned Zionist pamphlet; to my knowledge, he never mentions it in either private or public writing. Nonetheless, its relations to Herzl’s Zionist imagination help to explain how prose turned into a tool for the engineering of space in his hands. Money is the novel devoted to banking and the Bourse in Zola’s great cycle, in which he famously meant to describe all elements of French society of the Second Empire. Zola based the novel on historical events that transpired in Paris in the early 1880s: the collapse of the Catholic bank Union General.30 The president of the bank was accused of mismanagement and illegal actions, leading to its collapse and costing the many middle-class shareholders, who had put their faith in the bank, their life savings; he attempted to deflect his guilt by accusing Jewish financiers of conspiring with the Freemasons to ruin the Catholic endeavor. The press, in an atmosphere of rising antisemitism, readily took up such claims; Edouard Drumont, for example, widely discusses the collapse of the bank in his La France juife (Jewish France), a text that was a major influence on Herzl’s evolving awareness of antisemitism.31 In the novel, Zola favors the official version, rather than the conspiracy theory, and portrays the founder of the bank, the charismatic but dishonest Saccard, who is a member of the Rougon-Macquart clan and a bearer of its volatile genes, as the culprit in the events. Nevertheless, he peoples the novel with unattractive Jewish schemers and businessmen, some of them crooked, some just very greedy, but all of them conforming to antisemitic stereotypes in one way or another. But while this makes it plausible that Herzl, who arrived in Paris shortly before the novel was published, read it carefully, it is not what makes the novel so important for Herzl’s budding Zionist imagination. Rather, it is the oft-ignored subplot that describes Saccard’s two innocent and idealist collaborators, the engineer Georges Hamelin and his sister Caroline. The two have returned from a journey in the Near East

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with great plans to construct roads and railways, factories and mines, and “to shake this old land, slumbering in the ashes of dead civilizations.”32 Their ambitious plan holds many of the key elements that make Herzl’s ideal society a success: a large financial company that centralizes the entire endeavor, a modern transportation system that turns the area into a center of commerce for the entire Mediterranean and the entire world, and an industry that brings happiness and prosperity: “Oh the Carmel! What a desert, and what days of solitude! Covered with myrtle and brush, the warm air is perfumed by their fragrance. And there are eagles, gliding relentlessly high above . . . But all this money which sleeps in this grave, beside such misery! One would want crowds mad with happiness, construction sites, budding cities, a people regenerated by work.”33 Old-New Land realizes the frustrated dream of Zola’s fictional brother and sister, with Herzl’s modifications (Zola’s Catholic protagonists dream of restoring the pope to Jerusalem, Herzl converts the plan into a rebuilt Temple).34As Herzl had observed in his review of Spielhagen, however, utopian dreams are foreign to naturalism. Hence, he would have to rewrite Zola’s novel in order for this utopian dream to be described as a realizable plan. Zola’s novel would not venture into the realization of this colonial fantasy. It ends with the collapse of the bank and returns to the proper subject matter of naturalism: the life of poverty and squalor that follows economic devastation for the many shareholders of the bank. Zola returns to plant his flag within the spaces of the Second Empire, conquering them in the sense that he makes visible what had not been visible before: “he sees and instructs in seeing,” as Herzl puts it in his review. Herzl, on the other hand, chooses to describe with the same kind of detail not an existing European space, but a future colonized one. He devotes his novel entirely to the engineered Middle East, and it is for the engineering forth of its spaces, for the construction of a new world, rather than the representation of the existing one, that he finally uses his novelistic prose.

“The Shirt Came into Being!”: The Emergence of Prose in Die Glosse Herzl’s novel is formed by conflicting conceptions of time, a paradoxical structure in which the initial gesture of projecting to a utopian future is repeatedly challenged. How does one get from a problematic present, burdened with a problematic past, to a better future? How does one convert the current prosaic conditions from a stumbling block into a threshold to a better life?

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The articulation of the problem begins with the dyad that forms the novel’s double protagonist. Two modern-day Robinson Crusoes, Löwenberg and Kingscourt spend twenty years in seclusion from civilization on a deserted island that, in some of its details, is fashioned after Defoe’s imagination.35 But unlike Defoe, Herzl chooses to leave this time blank and not to depict life on the island. This is not where human ingenuity makes achievements in this novel, but rather Palestine, the Old-New Land. Herzl sends his characters away from the scene of action, putting them in a kind of sleep, so that they awaken and witness the transformations that have occurred.36 This narrative structure, like the novel’s protagonist, the young frustrated lawyer, has precedents in Herzl’s early, pre-Zionist literary work, which is peopled with many Rip van Winkle–like characters who disappear for a long time and then resurface to face a new reality.37 In The Jewish State, Herzl calls upon the readers not to slumber and to recognize the social transformations brought about by technology: “Now we have no need of first awakening from many years of sleep, like Rip van Winkle, in order to recognize that the world is transformed by the unceasing appearance of new goods. In our times, made wonderful thanks to technical progress, even the spiritually poorest sees with his clotted eyes all around him the new goods that appear, created by the spirit of enterprise.”38 But by the time he wrote Old-New Land Herzl seems to have changed his mind and decided that a true appreciation of the redemptive powers of technology is possible only with the distance and estrangement of a journey in time and space. As we have seen, the bulk of the novel is a journey in the transformed Palestine of the future, during which Löwenberg and Kingscourt listen to long speeches by various members of the new society about the successful planning and execution of the mass immigration of the Jews from Europe and North Africa to Palestine.39 They visit the new villages, cities, schools, and factories, ride the modern electric train, and attend an opera performance, a ceremony at the rebuilt Temple, and a session of the parliament, all of which are occasions for detailed descriptions and explanations of the genesis and machinations of the new society. Of course, the utopia that projects itself into the future, rather than removing itself in space, is not an invention of Herzl’s. A prominent predecessor is Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward (1888) portrayed the city of Boston in the year 2000 as the site of fortuitous technological advancement that had brought an end to social injustice. Herzl was aware of Bellamy’s example when he wrote Old-New Land; in his notes, he attempts to clarify to himself the difference between the two projects.

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For Herzl, Bellamy’s “Träumerei” is unsatisfying because there is no indication of the road that leads from the reality of the nineteenth century to the utopian image of the third millennium. “We, on the other hand,” he observes, “are the people of transition. We have a people and a leader for the transition.”40 In the novel, Herzl solves the problem of transition by essentially undoing the time gap that his narrative had produced. The members of the new society of Old-New Land repeatedly insist that there is nothing new about the means with which they have built their utopia; they thus exist in a reality that has paradoxically been able to inherit all its goods from history precisely because it has no history. The old society was rich enough at the beginning of this century, but it suffered from ineffable confusion. It was like a crowded treasure house, where you could not find a spoon when you needed one. Those people were no worse and no more stupid than we. Or, if you like, we are neither better nor cleverer than they. Our success in social experiment is different. We established our Society without inherited drawbacks. (ONL 78; AN 86)41

Thus, with every surprising new feat of technology or engineering that they encounter, the two guests are reminded that the means to produce it were already available around 1900, when they left Europe and when the novel was written. Kingscourt finally understands the principle when he exclaims: “It’s a mosaic. A Mosaic mosaic” (ONL 272; AN 301). But the transition from the past and present to the future persists as a challenge, which is perhaps why prose becomes such a useful concept for Herzl, for prose is often figuratively associated with a historical threshold, a transition. The “current prosaic conditions” as diagnosed by Hegel, Heine, and others are always understood in contrast to a non-prosaic time that came before. Literature, and specifically prose literature, is what Herzl sees as having the potential to effect such a transition. Herzl both posits that the transformation of the possibilities for human action has altered the possibilities open to literature and offers prose—ultimately, his own novelistic prose—as the answer to the problem of connecting the past and present to a new and better future. In Old-New Land, Herzl has found the formula that allows prose to effect this transition. However, “Solon in Lydien,” which opens Herzl’s Philosophical Tales, poses the problem of transition to a better future in pessimistic terms. The story is a reflection on utopia and dystopia and the fine line that separates them. This is a moral tale that brings together Solon the lawmaker and Aesop the author of fables at the court of King

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Kroisos of Lydia.42 The two are called on to pass judgment on the fate of a young man whose very name suggests that he might hold the keys to utopia: Eukosmos, “good world.” The young man claims to have invented a device that produces flour artificially and could thus end hunger on earth. Aesop, the antihero of Hegel’s reflections on the emergence of prose, readily advises the king to give him the award he claims for this invention, the hand of his daughter; the wise lawmaker is more skeptical and urges the king to execute the young man. The king cannot decide between the two positions and in the meantime tries out the invention, giving his people a taste of the “hard fate of excess.”43 Herzl’s description of the unrest that follows from excess reads like an allegory of modern times: technology has given people leisure, and they pass the time accumulating possessions, causing political unrest, and, as the story progresses, becoming increasingly violent. But the story ends not by projecting into the future and presenting a humanity that has solved these problems by using technology wisely—the utopian narrative that Herzl constructs in Old-New Land—but rather by restoring the order of the past. Kroisos and Solon sadly agree that work is necessary for humanity—“It’s good for them, they’ll make something out of it.”44 They kill the young and noble Eukosmos and the world of ancient Greece returns to its old self. However, “Solon in Lydien” is not only an early reflection by the author on technology and its utopian/dystopian potential. Herzl uses the story’s emphasis on the radical difference between the past and the present to stage precisely what Hegel called the “prosaic conditions of the present.” Most readers of Herzl’s literary works have focused on what seem to be conspicuously unprosaic matters such as the great importance given to honor and the pathos of his Zionist discourse,45 for example his desire to restore honor to the Jews, to make them Satisfaktionsfähig, worthy of participating in a duel.46 As Herzl continued to work on his Zionist plans and returned to his plan to write a novel, however, he found that it was even more important to become “Prosafähig,” capable of using prose and the novel in the service of a political plan. Men of law were interesting to Herzl precisely because their current prosaic environment paradoxically seemed to have no use for them.47 While his Solon, a lawmaker of the past, is a wise and noble character, as is Philippus, the medieval legal scholar depicted in Die Glosse (The Glossary), to whom we will turn in a moment, in contrast, his contemporary lawyers are desperate and bored at best, and ridiculous at worst.48 And as Herzl’s Zionist ideas developed through the 1890s, he formulated this position more specifically: their environment had no use for them because they were Jews. Das Neue Ghetto (The New Ghetto, 1894/1897) tells the

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story of one such Jewish lawyer, Dr. Jacob Samuel, who perishes due to the conflicting loyalties imposed on him as a Jew, a member of Viennese society, and a social idealist. It is impossible and pointless, the play concludes, to inhabit all of these roles simultaneously.49 Old-New Land begins in a similar state of mind. The novel’s young protagonist, Löwenberg, belongs to a group of “budding physicians, newly baked jurists, freshly graduated engineers. They had completed their professional studies, and now they had nothing to do” (ONL 4; AN 6).50 This sense of pointlessness leads Löwenberg to leave Europe, and ultimately—decades later—to settle in the Jewish state of Old-New Land. In other words, Herzl’s Zionism is rooted in the sense that Jewish men of law, unlike their ancient and medieval models, have become futile and misplaced. In contrast, his earlier men of law are posed at the threshold of new, exciting developments, presaging the emergence of something new rather than indicating that change has already happened and left them behind. In “Solon in Lydien,” Solon has left Athens so that the citizens have time to get accustomed to his new laws. And Herzl imagines Philippus, the protagonist of his play The Glossary, as the agent who embodies various interrelated evolutions, ranging from the development of the modern shirt through the laying of the foundations of civil law in Europe, and to the transformation of literary language and the emergence of prose. In this last sense, The Glossary is written not only in preparation for Herzl’s entrance into the world of law, of politics, and of diplomacy, as some of its readers have argued, but also as an exercise necessary in preparation for the writing of Old-New Land, that is, in preparation for the conscious and strategic use of novelistic prose. Herzl writes The Glossary—and, equally importantly, he carries out the studies necessary to this writing— in order to make clearer to himself the conditions of writing prose and to situate that practice historically. The plot, situated in thirteenth-century Bologna, is simple: Philippus von Montaperto has given up his vocation as a troubadour and is busy writing a glossary of the Roman law; his wife, Regina, feels neglected and is hence susceptible to the advances of an old friend of Philippus, Aimeric von Péguilain, who still produces chivalric songs. At the last moment Philippus saves his marriage by reciting his commentary on the Roman marriage code, which turns out to be a performance even more poetic than his rival’s.51 While prose and the novel are hardly mentioned explicitly in the text, they are the implicit objects of its reflection on literary history. The play, which Herzl dutifully dedicates to his “good parents,” repre-

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sents the same bourgeois home that is at the center of all of Herzl’s dramatic production, despite the guise of a medieval marriage. Philippus and Regina fight and make up, and the text ends with the seemingly universal comment on the riddle that is woman: “The glossary is missing, which will explain women to us!”52 But Philippus is of interest to Herzl because he stands for a transformation in the world of law: the events take place in medieval Bologna, where the study of Roman law was revived from the eleventh century onward and from which it spread to the rest of continental Europe to form one of the foundations of civil law and hence one of the instruments that formed the emergence of vernacular prose.53 The historical transformation at the center of The Glossary is important to Herzl not only as an allegory of the present, but precisely because of their difference and separation from the present. This text thus centers on Herzl’s prosaic historical consciousness: an interest in the past as essentially different from the present and in the past transformations that have produced the present. Thus, the historical past of the troubadours and legal scholars that appear in the play is of interest to him because of its anterior relation to the present, that is, for the causal relations between the past and the transformation that occurred in it and the present, which is seen as existing beyond this transformation and hence, again, as essentially different from the past. It is perhaps not unusual for a budding national leader to be engaged with the past: looking back for cultural roots and models in the past is one of the basic gestures of the modern national movements.54 But Herzl is not interested in constructing a stable picture of the Jewish past, which would then serve as a possible source for renewed Jewish national culture.55 Instead, he portrays a cultural space that is in flux and dialogue: between the Roman past, on the one hand, and a future of the European civil law on the other, between Provence, with its troubadours, on the one hand, and Bologna, with its scholars of the law, on the other. Furthermore, Herzl’s literary representation of the troubadours is far from conventional, highlighting and valorizing not their image as great lovers or creative poets, but rather the marginal position of the troubadour turned legal scholar. The conflict between the two troubadours, Philippus and Aimeric, can be read as a paraphrase of Richard Wagner’s historical opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master Singers of Nuremberg).56 In act 1, scene 3 of the opera, and then again in its closing scene, the young and enthusiastic Walther von Stolzing performs a song that fails to conform with the rules and regulations of the guild of mastersingers, and this is precisely its success. Wagner ridicules the men who constantly refer to their law books and obsessively count the feet of Walther’s verse and valorizes

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the romantic individualism and spontaneity of Walther’s song as a revolt against oppressive rules. Herzl presents a mastersinger that has turned to a different kind of law book, the glossary, and while Wagner’s troubadour opera comes as a comical afterthought to the nationalistic mythmaking of the Ring, his von Stolzing, with his loving songs for Nuremberg, is still far easier to understand as a national hero than Herzl’s Philippus, who has admiration only for a rather abstract entity:57 The glossary is the work: with a new basis to find out the kernel of old things The Roman law! Think of a lilac turned to stone— The glossary gives it air and life again Spring rises from the old works That strengthen our spirit and our will The old times are revived in new constructions In my glossary and in the tones of the lute The Romans are dead and Hellas is buried The mission that God hid in them lives So I work for the Lord who knew how to hide secret purposes in the poor heretics.58

From the remaining notes and manuscripts, we learn that Herzl took the historical background of the play quite seriously. Thus, he seems to have devoted careful attention to a book titled Histoire du costume en France (History of French Dress, 1876) by Jules Etienne Quicherat, making detailed notes on the costumes of the different characters, and focusing on the transformation of clothes. “Clothes became more complex,” he remarks, “the shirt came into being!”59 He also refers in his notes to Friedrich Karl von Savigny’s Geschichte des Römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, 1815–31) from which he collected details on Roman marriage law, as well as the practices of the makers of glossaries.60 Herzl’s main philological sources were FrançoisJust-Marie Raynouard’s Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (Selection of Troubadour Poetry in the Original, 1816–21) and Claude Charles Fauriel’s Histoire de la poésie provençale (History of Provencal Poetry, 1846). The former is essentially the first philological, linguistically oriented work to be done on the troubadours.61 The choice of such an early source, which had since been antiquated and challenged (to a great extent by German philology) seems to reflect mainly on the ignorance of Herzl, who had no formal educational background in philology and who after all was in France when he wrote the play. However, perhaps

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the choice to circumvent later scholarship was made consciously, in what Herzl perceived as a return to the sources, choosing to focus on the philological resources in Raynouard’s work, rather than the more ideologically biased works that came from Germany following A. W. Schlegel’s reception and critique of Raynouard.62 Since he does not refer to the research for the play in his letters or diaries, it is hard to say with certainty why Herzl chose these rather than other sources. What we can reconstruct, however, is what he was particularly interested in while preparing to write the play: the transformations undergone by the different genres of troubadour poetry, which lead to the rise of a new discourse, embodied in his play by Philippus’s commentary on law. Thus, he reads Raynouard and gathers quotations (interspersed with his own German comments) that refer to the matter of texts with commentaries: Pieces avec commentaries (il reste dans ce genre un pièce de Ramband d’Orange un plus anciens troubadours connus) Zwischen Strophen prosaische Erklärungen . . . Pierre de la Tour avait la défaut de donner des explication plus longue que les poesies qu’il débitait . . . Gloses en verse: Girard de Calanson fit une pièce sur l’amour, elle fut commentée en vers par Girard Riquier (fin du XIII s.) (die 4 Strofen zur Liebe) dans le manuscript ce commentaire est suivi de [unclear word] en vers ègalement de Henri comte de Rodez. Pieces with commentaries (there remains of this genre a piece by Ramband d’Orange, one of the earliest known troubadours) explanations in prose between the stanzas . . . Pierre de la Tour made the mistake of giving explications which were longer than the poetry which he delivered . . . Glosses in verse: Girard de Calanson made a piece about love, which was commented on in verse by Girard Riquier (end of XIIIth c.) (the four stanzas about love) in the manuscript this commentary is followed by an [unclear word] in verse as well by Henri comte de Rodez.63

Herzl constructs a continuum between these commentaries—in particular, the prose commentary on one of Ramband d’Orange’s songs—and the legal commentary with which his protagonist is busy. In other words, he thinks of the medieval legal gloss primarily in literary terms, as a mode that competes and interferes with the song of the troubadour and that has its likeness in other interfering modes, such as the prose commentary on Ramband.64

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When Philippus has finally had enough of his rival’s flirtation with his wife, he produces an interesting hybrid between the discourses of love and law and claims Ramband d’Orange as his model: philippus: I strike my chords upon the corpus iuris—and my understanding of it I sing a song of the law . . . reads: marriage Prose. Nupitae sunt coniunctio maris et feminae, consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio. . . takes his harp My song is a glossary, like Ramband D’orange often sang aimeric: he grabs the emptiest straw philippus: plays some opening chords. Speaks: Conjunctio maris et feminae recites: May in the country young May! Then we found each other and were tied in marriage.65

And so the song continues as a commentary on the entire legal passage with which Philippus had started and as a parody of romantic poetry, which mixes references to the cuckoo’s song, the sunset, and the night with an admonishment of the woman who would think of abandoning her duties to her husband and child. But it is Herzl’s instructions to the actor that are the most interesting part of this passage. As Philippus draws his sword and later his harp the verbs lesen, sprechen, and recitiren—read, speak, and recite—apparently refer to significant modulations in the performance; they draw our attention to the different modes or discourses through which Philippus’s speech moves: quotation from the law (liest), commentary on his own performance (spricht), and the performance of the song itself (recitirt). To these Herzl adds the noun Prosa before the Latin phrases from the law. It is hard to assume that Herzl thought it necessary to warn the actor that he here momentarily abandons the clumsy and heavy-handed rhymed verse to which he sticks more or less throughout the play. Rather, prose is mentioned here because it represents the limit of the range of discourses or modes available to Philippus, as well as to Herzl. The explicit reference to prose amplifies the act of reading and suspends the troubadour’s performance, as well as the theatrical performance within which the troubadour appears. By mentioning prose at this moment, Herzl turns it into a literary crossroads reminiscent of Heine’s battlefield of Crecy, where the prose of

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infantry defeats the poetry of chivalry. Philippus and the linguistic practice he is engaged in open the road to prose and ultimately the novel. But at this point, and within the medium that Herzl has chosen for his reflection, prose can make only a short appearance, and Philippus ends up performing a kind of literary alchemy, a reverse remediation by which prose turns into poetry. Since The Glossary is a play, it can only refer to written prose, not offer the space of experimentation with this tool that exists in the novel. This, in fact, is the key lesson that Herzl “learns” from The Glossary: that prose does not lend itself to performance. It is the replacement of one space— the stage of performance—by another, prosaic space, that Herzl carries out in Old-New Land.

Old-New Land—Engineering on the Page The bulk of Herzl’s utopian novel is devoted to descriptions of the Jewish state as it is seen through the eyes of Löwenberg and Kingscourt, the two visitors. But description was not a mode in which Herzl, the dramatist and feuilleton writer, was at home. Rather, his novel engages in a series of dramatistic remediations and transmissions to clarify and qualify where the descriptions come from. Reverting to a common device of the genre of the utopia, he interjects various “natives” who lecture to the visitors about the land. The longest lecture presented to the two visitors in the novel is a gramophone recording of one of the founders of the “New Society for the Colonization of Palestine,” Joseph Levy. Herzl describes the machine that allows the guests to hear the speaker in his absence at length and takes several opportunities to pause the recording and restart it, allowing David Littwak, who had produced the recording, to demonstrate how technology has supplanted the performance of the human body and giving Herzl the chance to present a series of remediations within the novel. As Friedrich Kittler puts it: “Ever since the invention of the phonograph, there has been writing without a subject. It is no longer necessary to assign an author to every trace, not even God.”66 The gramophone represents an intermediate position between the performance of the bard, to which Philippus the commentator on the law is still tied, the performance that does not allow him to speak only prose, on the one hand, and the descriptive prose of the novel, on the other. Levy’s recorded speech refers to the spaces described by the novel, describing their transformation under the modern hands of the Jewish Company. The absent speaker devotes large parts of his discourse to various

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aspects of the relationship between technology and space. This starts with the elaborate system of maps that were used by the New Society to organize the buying of lands, the transportation of masses of immigrants, and the procurement of raw and processed goods from the entire globe: I divided a map of Palestine into small squares, which I numbered. It was kept in my office, and an exact copy given to Alladino. He was simply to wire me the numbers of the parcels he had bought, and so I knew from hour to hour just how much land we already owned, and what kind of land it was. (ONL 201; AN 219)67 In order to visualize the situation as it developed from day to day, I used a little technical device. I had glass-headed pins made in many different colors—dark blue, light blue, red, black, green. Maps of various countries were stretched on boards, and I used the pins to indicate the situation in the various local groups. For example, a white-headed pin meant merely that a local group was compiling lists of workingmen; green signified agricultural workers; red, artisans; yellow, master-workmen. (ONL 204; AN 222)

The maps are a technology used by the Zionist pioneers to regulate and rationalize space. This endeavor reaches its climax with the monumental project of building a canal between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, a radical transformation of topography. However, the recorded voice of the gramophone is a medium essentially differentiated from the written prose within which it is represented, and Herzl emphasizes the differentiation by allowing the two technologies to touch upon one and the same space: the canal. This difference lies not in what the two media are capable of doing; clearly, Herzl could have chosen to put the words used in his descriptive passages, which I will quote shortly, in Levy’s mouth, allowing the voice in the gramophone to perform the same role as his written prose. He did not choose to do so, but rather gave the voice in the gramophone and his written prose two different roles, thus making an implicit statement about the standing of prose as a technology and a medium in its own right. Thus, Joe Levy is a successor of The Glossary’s Philippus: both are characters that represent a step on the way to novelistic prose. In the recorded version narrated by Levy, the canal and the circumstances of its planning are referred to among the different projects of the new society:

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Once Steineck was gone, I found leisure to study Fischer’s plans. His sketches for streets, water and power supply, railways, canals and harbors were classic. It was at that time that he submitted to me his plans for his greatest work: the canal from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, in which he utilized the difference in levels very cleverly. In drawing up the canal plans he was helped by a Christian Swiss engineer, who was so enthusiastic a Zionist that he became a Jew and took the name of Abraham. Fischer, who was very modest, always put him forward as the real author of the plan. (ONL 209; AN 229)

The recorded discourse has its source in a speaking first person, and it is preoccupied with questions of authorship, even when it comes to the topography of the Old-New Land. The canal, in this version, or in this medium, is still on paper, and its authorship is a matter of negotiation. But, as Michel de Certeau explains, “In front of his blank page, every child is already put in the position of the industrialist, the urban planner or the Cartesian philosopher—the position of having to manage a space that is his own and distinct from all others and in which he can exercise his own will.”68 By presenting a fictionalized character who is too modest to claim authorship of the canal, Herzl is in fact wrestling this claim for himself, against the real, historical figure that the passage mentions, Abraham Bourcart. Bourcart was a Swiss engineer, a Christian who, in his enthusiasm for Zionism indeed converted and embarked on a journey to Palestine to make plans for a canal between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea.69 During the late 1890s, Bourcart was in close contact with Herzl, sending him detailed maps and notes about the construction of the canal. These, along with other technical information, such as a brochure of a French construction company that sold prefabricated houses, found their way to the files that Herzl used when writing OldNew Land.70 However, within the recorded narrative there is no place for a description of the canal. It is only when the travelers’ itinerary brings them to the Dead Sea that Bourcart’s engineering vision is incorporated into the novel and he in effect turns into a coauthor. At the end of Levy’s recorded nonperformance, Kingscourt refers to the uncanny, bodiless voice and takes up one element from the many projects and places that it had described, as if underscoring the fact that this medium had not managed to make the space present: “Seems to be a charming fellow, this Joe. Very charming fellow. Too bad he’s not here. Should like to shake his hand. Hope to see him before we move on. There’s one thing he’s got me excited about—that

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dead canal. Seems to be a kind of world’s wonder. When do we get a peep at this myth?” (ONL 233; AN 256) Having listened to what must amount to hours of the recorded voice, Kingscourt is left with the desire for copresence and physical contact. Likewise, the description of the canal, as presented through the medium of the gramophone, leaves something to be desired. For Herzl’s character, the solution is to visit the location itself and view the canal. But on the level of Herzl’s metamedial or metatechnological reflection, Kingscourt’s dissatisfaction signals the difference between the kind of performance of which prose is capable and the one carried out by the gramophone. Kingscourt thus prepares the reader to encounter a space engineered by prose. The description of the canal itself is a counterpoint to the different gestures on the way to prose that I have discussed in this chapter and the previous one: the ironic use of pronouns in Herzl’s dialogue with Heine, the inability to perform prose that concludes The Glossary, and the disembodied performance of the voice in the gramophone, a technology in some sense parallel to prose. Here Herzl finally becomes an engineer on the page, having found a proper use for prose: to construct spaces. And now they were in front of the power station. While driving down from Jericho, they had not been able to get a full view of the Dead Sea. Now they saw it lying broad and blue in the sun, no smaller than the Lake of Geneva. On the northern shore, near where they stood, was a narrow, pointed strip of land, extending behind the rocks over which the waters of the Canal came thundering down. Below were the turbine sheds; above, extensive factory buildings. There were, in fact, as far the eye could reach around the shore, numerous large manufacturing plants. The water power at source had attracted many industries; the Canal had stirred the Dead Sea to life. The iron tubes through which the waters of the Canal beat down upon the turbine wheels reminded Kingscourt of the apparatus at Niagara. There were some twenty of these mighty iron tubes at the Dead Sea, jutting out from the rocks at equal distances. They were set vertically upon the turbine sheds, resembling fantastic chimneys. The roaring from the tubes and the white foam on the outflowing waters bore witness to a mighty work. . . . They stepped into one of the turbine sheds. Friedrich was overwhelmed by the immensity of the power development shown to him, but Kingscourt seemed quite at his ease in the tumult of this industrial apparatus. With all his might he screamed comments no one could possibly hear. (ONL 243–244; AN 268–270)

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The noise of the canal drowns human speech, precluding any kind of human performance or performative speech in its presence and dwarfing the human hand that might reach out and try to point at it. The canal itself is the human performance that Herzl is interested in here, one that does not simply occupy a space, but rather is space. The only voice left is that of the disembodied narrator, and what this narrator is most interested in are the spatial dimensions and details of this great human feat, of mythic—cyclopean—proportions. This descriptive voice is the core of Herzl’s prose, and its ultimate raison d’être.

Chapter Five



Haim Nahman Bialik’s Icy River of Prose

Herzl’s political, territorial Zionism is commonly contrasted with the cultural branch of the movement, represented most prominently by the thinker and ideologue Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) and by Hebrew authors such as Haim Nahman Bialik. In the third chapter, I described the similarities between Herzl’s draft for a feuilleton on the Heine monument debates and Bialik’s remarks on the same debate in his seminal speech “The Hebrew Book.” Both authors polemically concur with the antisemites who would deny Heine a piece of land, a final and permanent home in the shape of a monument. This common ground that crosses the accepted historic divisions within Zionism goes beyond the anecdotal. Bialik, like Herzl, though perhaps not as directly, inherited from Heine a set of assumptions regarding the genre system and the place of prose within it. Like Herzl, he came to associate the Zionist search for a ground from which to speak with the challenge and potential inherent in the medium of prose. In his monograph on Bialik, Yakov Fichmann recalls his surprise at the poet’s admonishment: “You too differentiate poetry from prose?”1 As Fichmann describes, the celebrated poet often emphasized that he valued prose at least as highly as poetry and questioned the distinction between the two. His most admired mentors were the novelist S. Y. Abramovitsch (Mendele Mokher Sforim) and the essayist Ahad Ha’am, and it was perhaps partly in deference to them and to their achievements in extending the horizons available to the Hebrew language in the age of its revival that the roots of Bialik’s preoccupation with prose lie. But Bialik’s interest in prose is broader than that. In fact, it is a red thread that allows us to tie together different strands of his work. And, as I will discuss in the main part of the chapter, prose is a formative element in some of Bialik’s most powerful and striking poetic work. Like the other authors I discuss in this book, Bialik positions the medium of prose in contrast to other media,

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most importantly, performed speech, using it to probe the question of the space of the literary text. The argument in this chapter is constructed in reverse chronological order, starting with a group of essays that contain Bialik’s most explicit philosophical statements on prose, and working its way backwards to his “practice” of this theory of prose in writing the poem “Be-ir ha-harega” (“City of Slaughter”).2 Like both Heine and Herzl, Bialik was both a theorist and a practitioner of prose, and the two dimensions of his work are significantly intertwined.

Bialik’s Essays on Prose: Reconstructing a Dialectical Argument In his essays—in particular “Gilui ve-kisui ba-lashon” (“Revealment and Concealment in Language,” 1914), “Halaha ve-aggada” (“Halakhah and Aggadah,” 1916), and the essays on Abramovitsch—Bialik repeatedly returns to the question of the distinction, or the impossibility of a distinction, between prose and poetry and the difficulty of defining prose. The essays differ markedly in the positions they take on the status of prose; that is, they do not present a single, unified position on prose. In “Revealment and Concealment,” Bialik presents poetry and prose as a dichotomy, whereas in other essays he sees them as two stages of one process. In the early philosophical essay, the dichotomy serves to valorize poetry in distinction from its shabby sister, prose; in contrast, in “Halakhah and Aggadah,” prose is placed in an ever-regenerating process of movement between the different modes and thus vindicated. The contradiction, Ziva Shamir notes, is compounded by the fact that Bialik’s disparaging remarks about prose language in the philosophical essay, “Revealment and Concealment in Language,” seem undermined by the beauty of his own prose literature and even by the densely figurative prose of the essay itself.3 Nevertheless, it is useful to think of the different essays as parts of one whole. This whole is not a conclusive statement on the nature of prose, offered by Bialik the philosopher, but rather an open question that could only be answered by Bialik the poet. Read as one unfolding argument, rather than a series of arguments that contradict each other, the essays work dialectically: the first essay sets up a fundamental distinction between prose and poetry, the second shows that the distinction does not hold absolutely and can be taken apart, and the essays on the novelist Abramovitsch, finally, return to one of the terms from the dialectic— prose—to look at it on its own, beyond the opposition.

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For the small and tightly knit cultural circle within which Bialik was operating and for which he was writing, the distinction between poetry and prose came with particular associations and stood for two schools of thought in Hebrew literature: the “poetic” neo-Hassidism of the Warsaw authors in contrast with the skeptical, careful “prosaic” position/opposition (as in the misnagdim, those opposing Hassidism) of the Odessa authors whom he admired (Abramovitsch, Ginsberg).4 Ahad Ha’am was deeply skeptical concerning the possibility of a Hebrew poetry that would answer the spiritual and political needs of the day. He assumed that only the transformation of Hebrew into the spoken language of a population inhabiting a national territory would supply the preconditions for poetry and that the task at hand was philosophical and spiritual and best pursued in prose.5 This weighty position formed Bialik’s thought on the distinction between prose and poetry and remained a significant challenge to think of the opposition dialectically throughout his career. At the heart of this dialectic is the essay “Halakhah and Aggadah,” which builds philosophically on the distinction in the Jewish tradition between the law (halakhah) and the legend (aggadah).6 Bialik uses these two strands in the tradition, which, in the most important body of texts in which they are represented, the Talmud, are not strictly differentiated but rather intermingled, to reflect on the nature of contemporary Hebrew literature and the sources to which it should at present turn. The essay argues that the law, halakhah, is an equally valid source for literature as the more attractive, more literary aggadah. It opens with a stark differentiation of the two modes. One of the iterations of this distinction is the pair poetry-prose: Halakhah wears a frown, Aggadah a smile. The one is pedantic, severe, unbending—all justice; the other is accommodating, lenient, pliable—all mercy. The one commands and knows no half-way house; her yea is yea and her nay is nay. The other advises, and takes account of human limitations; she admits something between yea and nay. The one is concerned with the shell, with the body, with actions; the other with the kernel, with the soul, with intentions. On one side here is petrified observance, duty, subjection; on the other perpetual rejuvenation, liberty, free volition. Turn from the sphere of life to that of literature, and there are further points of contrast. On the one side is the dryness of prose, a formal and heavy style, a gray and monochrome diction: reason is sovereign. On the other side is the sap of poetry, a style full of life and variety, a diction all ablaze with color: emotion is sovereign.7

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This differentiation echoes the differentiation between prose and poetry as Bialik had articulated it in his essay on the philosophy of language published two years earlier, “Revealment and Concealment in Language”:8 There is a vast difference between the language of the masters of prose and that of the masters of poetry. The former, the masters of exposition, find their sanction in the principle of analogy, and in the elements common to images and words, in that which is established and constant in language, in the accepted version of things—consequently, they walk confidently through language. To what may they be compared? To one who crosses a river walking on hard ice frozen into a solid block. Such a man may and can divert his attention completely from the covered depths flowing underneath his feet. But their opposites, the masters of allegory, or interpretation and mystery, spend all their days in pursuit of the unifying principle in things . . . And to what may those writers be compared? To one who crosses a river when it is breaking up, by stepping across floating, moving blocks of ice. He dare not set his foot on any one block for longer than it takes him to leap from one block to the next, and so on. Between the breaches the void looms, the foot slips, danger is close . . .9

For Bialik, the solidity of prose covers the truth with a thick layer of ice; it is only when the ice thaws that the poet can take his precarious steps across the abyss without making his language cover it.10 Nevertheless, both modes ultimately allow a passage across the abyss. In “Halakha and Aggadah,” Bialik modifies this judgment. As the essay unfolds, Bialik offers a dialectical model to replace the stark opposition with which he opens the essay in the passage I quote above. This dialectical model is encapsulated in the metaphor of a flower and a fruit: As a dream seeks its fulfillment in interpretation, as will in action, as thought in speech, as flower in fruit—so Aggadah in Halakhah. But in the heart of the fruit there lies hidden the seed from which a new flower will grow. The Halakhah which is sublimated into a symbol—and much Halakhah there is, as we shall find—becomes the mother of a new Aggadah, which may be like it or unlike. A living and healthy Halakhah is an Aggadah that has been or that will be. And the reverse is true also. The two are one in their beginning and their end.11

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The essay thus vindicates the prosaic mode of the law, arguing that a culture that turns exclusively to the poetic mode of legend cuts itself off from a rich resource. To make the point that the law can be a rich source for the literary imagination, Bialik returns to the image of the frozen river that he had used in “Revealment and Concealment in Language.” But here the river is observed from the safety of the shore; instead of the practical question of passing safely to the other bank, the author addresses the theoretical question of the nature of water and ice: “Those who so conclude [that halakha and aggadah—and by extension prose and poetry—are irreconcilable opposites] are confusing accident and form with substance; as who should declare the ice and the water in a river to be two different kinds of matter.”12 Ironically, the image is subjected to this transformation—from the practical question of passing the river to the theoretical question of the substance of water and ice—in the service of an argument for the role of daily life and the mundane in the literary imagination. Bialik himself, we should remember, was an agnostic, a thoroughly secular Jew; clearly, in constructing his apology for the halakhah he did not intend his readers to understand that its laws are to be followed to the letter.13 This point is emphasized in the scathing review of the essay written by the prominent Hebrew novelist and critic Y. H. Brenner under the pseudonym Bar Yohai in 1919.14 Brenner starts by emphasizing, with Bialik, that the discussion in the essay is not of halakhah as such, but of halakhah insofar as it continues to be a vital cultural force. But this is as far as Brenner can go with Bialik, since he is deeply skeptical of the notion of the halakhah as vital in any way. At the heart of his critique is the uncovering of Ahad Ha’am’s influence on Bialik’s essay: “Ventriloquising Ahad Ha’am . . . Bialik here speaks of the poverty of Hebrew literature that has nothing but ‘beauty’ and from which ‘you cannot truly learn anything’ because it is all aggadah and no halakhah. Here the author uses halakhah as a synonym for science.”15 Brenner’s strongest point against Bialik’s argument is directed at this synonym: halakhah and science are both abstractions, and hence, both are removed from the realm of lived experience. He ends the review by alluding to Bialik’s own poetic statements about the sources of his work, suggesting that the author himself derives his poetry from a realm of lived experience that is aggadic, rather than halakhic. One element of Brenner’s misunderstanding of Bialik’s point is his reference to Heinrich Heine. But the Heine to whom Brenner turns is not the Heine of “Yehuda Ben Halevi,” the Heine who pokes fun at the pettiness of halakhic casuistry and the seriousness with which it treats seemingly

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immaterial questions. 16 Rather, he transcribes Heine’s German in Hebrew (that is, he “translates” Heine into Judendeutsch) to quote a comment on the Roman law from the memoirs written very late in Heine’s life. Heine complains about the years he squandered as a law student, memorizing the Corpus Juris, which he describes as the “bible of egoism.” He adds, with indignation, that all the European state institutions are based on this source, even though it “crudely contradicts religion, morals, human feeling and reason.” Surprisingly, Brenner uses the quote from Heine not to emphasize the inhumane nature of any kind of casuistry—an argument that he goes on to make at the end of his review—but rather in order to introduce a comparative perspective to Bialik’s argument: the division between halakhah and aggadah is not unique to the Jewish tradition, because the Romans, too, produced both codices and epics, he comments on the quote from Heine, even though in this passage Heine says absolutely nothing of the hated Romans as authors of literature. Brenner continues by broadening the perspective yet further by alluding to the central role played by casuistry and legal thinking in the literary traditions of India, China, Persia, and the Arabs. These gestures generalize Bialik’s statement, making it more theoretical than he himself had ventured to present it to begin with. Nevertheless, Brenner fundamentally misunderstands Bialik’s attempt to call for a revival of literature through halakhah. For Bialik, halakhah stands not for a natural law that is derived from a transcendental order and hence essentially removed from the space of experience, but for law in the sense of a system regulating daily life and confronting the richness of this life. This is why the halakhah—and the prose associated with it—are described as an invigorating force within the project of the revival of Hebrew: they are a resource through which the quotidian, the current prosaic conditions, can emerge as a vital force in literature. This argument is completed in Bialik’s essays on Abramovitsch, to whom he refers by his pseudonym Mendele and as the creator of the nusakh. Bialik uses the term nusakh, borrowed from Jewish liturgy and from the medium of oral performance, to describe Abramovitsch’s great innovation, his achievement in creating a unified style for modern Hebrew literature and in particular modern Hebrew prose.17 Bialik fashions Mendele as the first Hebrew author to liberate literary language from biblical quotations and to unify all the different sources from which a Hebrew author could borrow into one viable language. This feat is formulated in the terms of novelistic realism: Just as Mendele was the first to offer artifice and illustration in Hebrew literature, so he was the first to produce a Hebrew style, a re-

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alistic and complete style. Before Mendele we had language games, or language trickery, prances of language and patches of language; Mendele gave us one whole language, a “human language.” Mendele put an end to all child-play of the Hebrew language and to all its monkey faces. He is practically the first of the new authors to cease from imitating the book—he imitates nature and life. Mendele imitates neither the Bible nor the Mishna and the Midrash, he creates a likeness and an image, according to the inner nature and the proper spirit of the language.18

It is inherent to the logic of Bialik’s argument that Mendele can achieve this feat because he is writing prose.19 Mendele’s achievement, of which Bialik was a very early theoretician, is one of the foundations of the historiography of modern Hebrew literature and in particular of the description of the emergence of Hebrew prose in the nineteenth century. As Dov Sadan describes it, the problem of a gap between a reality lived in Yiddish and a literature written in Hebrew was a riddle to which different authors offered different answers. In the middle of the century, the authors of the haskalah—Mapu, Smolenskin, and Broides—chose the so-called melitsah of the biblical style. Toward the end of the century, two other ways were opened, both of them by authors who moved between the two languages: Yoseph Perl chose to transpose Yiddish structure into Hebrew; Abramovitsch, in contrast, chose to look for easier idiomatic forms in a broader range of Jewish sources later than the Bible.20 Another way of describing Mendele’s achievement, then, is to say that he replaced the question of style with the question of representation and made it his task to turn his prose into a tool that could contain as much of the world as possible. He concerned himself, in other words, with the Welthaltigkeit of prose, with its ability to contain the lived world in all of its multiplicity, and this is what is of such great interest to Bialik. Despite his enduring interest in a range of theoretical and philosophical questions pertaining to prose, an interest that becomes even more visible when the essays are read as facets of a single dialectical line of thought as I have read them here, Bialik the essayist did not bring that thought to a close. The truly interesting conclusions are to be drawn rather from his literary work, specifically, and perhaps surprisingly, from his poetry. The counterpoint to my reading of the essays lies in the generic complexity of one of Bialik’s most famous poems, “City of Slaughter.”

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Inscribing Prose in Poetry: Bialik in the “City of Slaughter” Around the turn of the century, Bialik had focused much of his ambition on the possibility of writing a long narrative poem, a poema in the tradition of Pushkin and Lermontov, or, within the Hebrew context, in the tradition of Y. L. Gordon. Bialik, like others in his cultural milieu, took this to be the true measure of his success as a poet. And indeed he passed the test: “City of Slaughter” is one of five poemas that Bialik wrote in the first years of the twentieth century, forming a monumental body of work that remains among the masterpieces of modern Hebrew literature.21 But, as I have suggested above, for Bialik, the idea of success as a poet was also strongly peppered with an engagement with prose, an engagement that would gain increasing importance in Bialik’s thought in the following decades, when he would come to write the essays discussed above. And as we will see, this interest in prose is not absent from the composition of “City of Slaughter.” Written in the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, the poem describes a visit to the site of the event, stylized as a prophecy of doom and a harsh indictment of the Jews of the city for not defending themselves in face of the attacks.22 Like Old-New Land, which was published a year earlier, the poem was written to inspire its readers to political action,23 and, as in the case of Herzl’s novel, this text positions descriptive prose in a matrix of different modes and media. Moreover, even more so than Old-New Land, Bialik’s poem was widely influential, and it holds a place of great importance in the Hebrew canon to this day.24 The poem was quickly translated into Russian, by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and then Yiddish, by Y. L. Peretz. Subsequently, Bialik himself published a revised Yiddish translation of the poem, which also introduced significant revisions in the poem.25 In Hebrew and through these translations, the poem had a huge impact on a wide audience of contemporary Jewish readers. Jabotinsky remarks in his diaries that the poem had a deep influence on his own political career, inspiring him to take a leading role in the formation of groups of self-defense in imperial Russia, which were the nucleus of militant Jewish groups in Palestine. Following the Holocaust and the formation of the state of Israel, the poem was widely read as anticipating both the victimization of Jews and the Zionist ethos of Jewish heroism. Part of the poem’s influence, no doubt, lies in the great importance of the events to which it reacted. In the course of a few days in April 1903, forty-five men, women, and children were killed and dozens were wounded in attacks often carried out by their neighbors in Kishinev. For the Odessa circle, this was an important moment of self-reckoning, chal-

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lenging their Enlightenment hopes for progress through education and for a Jewish cultural revival in Russia.26 The members of the circle, headed by the cultural Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am and the historian Simon Dubnov, decided to form a historical committee that would document the events and publicize them in order to inspire Jews to defend themselves in the future. For this purpose, they sent Bialik to Kishinev to collect testimonies from the victims of the pogrom and rework them into a unified text. In his letters to Bialik, Dubnov refers to this text as an “ordered historical picture of the events” and instructs him on how to compose it so that it would be an organized synthetic picture of everything that transpired during the pogrom. Dubnov advised Bialik to use the map of Kishinev as a template for his text, leading his readers through the city and unfolding the effects of the pogrom as they permeate this space, rather than presenting the pogrom chronologically by creating a timeline of the events. The professional historian may have anticipated the difficulty the poet would have in producing the ordered historical report, offering him the topography of the city as a rhetorical tool.27 Armed with the advice of the historian, Bialik thus set out to Kishinev with the intent of writing descriptive prose that would give a vivid and ordered picture of the events. But when he returned, he filed the testimonies he had collected and partially edited and instead wrote the poem “City of Slaughter.” Bialik followed Dubnov’s advice and modeled his text on a map of the city, but this map was an abstract, symbolic one, rather than a representation of the concrete spaces in which the pogrom occurred and in which Bialik encountered its victims. The ordered story turned into a highly figurative representation of Kishinev in the aftermath of the pogrom. Cast in the language of a biblical prophecy, the poem describes a visit to Kishinev soon after the events of the pogrom and follows a symbolic itinerary. The poem moves through the city’s yards and houses, continues in the marginal locations of the attic, the cellar, and the barn and the sacred spaces of the cemetery and the synagogue and ends with an allegorical banishment to the desert, where the prophet is directed to keep silent, rather than speak of the horrors that he has witnessed. However, the description is repeatedly supplanted by a different rhetorical gesture: a violent and abusive accusation of the Jews who were victimized without rising to defend themselves. Bialik describes the victims as mice and roaches, their deaths as vain, and their lives as without cause. Perhaps the harshest moment in Bialik’s attack on the Jewish men of Kishinev is his description of their reaction to the rape of their wives and daughters.

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And see, oh see: in the shade of that same corner under this bench and behind that barrel lay husbands, fiancés, brothers, peeping out of holes at the flutter of holy bodies under the flesh of donkeys choking in their corruption and gagging on their own throats’ blood as like slices of meat a loathsome gentile spread their flesh— and they lay in their shame and saw—and didn’t move and didn’t budge, and they didn’t pluck out their eyes or go out of their heads— and perhaps each to his soul then prayed in his heart: master of the universe, make a miracle—and let me not be harmed and those who survived their contamination and woke from their blood— their lives abhorred, the light of their world dunned and all their lives made loath for ever, the profanation of soul and body inside and out— and their husbands emerged from their holes and ran to the house of God and blessed the miracles of the Holy One Blessed be He their refuge and respite; and the priests among them went out and asked their rabbis: “Rabbi! My wife, what is she? Allowed or not allowed?” And everything returned to its course, and everything fell back into line.28

Referring to the cohanim (the members of the priestly line) who turn to the rabbi for his opinion on the aftermath of the rape as an issue of Jewish family law, Zipporah Kagan has described this part of the poem as a “halakhic moment,” that is, a moment in which the discourse of the law impinges on the poem.29 On the other hand, as Sara Horowitz observes, this is also one of “the most extended narrative sections” in a text within which “the absence of storytelling draws our attention all the more to the few narrative moments in the poem, each associated with the feminine.”30 This, then, is an intersection of the discourse of law with literary narrative; as such, it points us back to the questions raised in “Halakhah and Aggadah.” What are the ideational and ideological materials that are the sources of the poem? Is it the prose of the mundane, the stuff of law, of halakhah, or the legend of the extraordinary, the stuff of aggadah? In other words, is this poetry or prose? To begin to answer this question, we need to return to the issue of deixis, of using language to point. As we have seen, deixis is a key prag-

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matic marker of the transition from performance to prose. Bialik’s episode begins by setting up a mise-en-scène: the men are hiding behind the barrels, watching the women. But that space is abruptly dissolved as the text progresses to pronounce its judgment on the men and jumps to the scene of their conversation with the rabbis, which presumably occurs after the pogrom is over. This abrupt dissolution is related to the shifting that occurs in personal reference in this passage. As the scene is set up, the text clearly distinguishes between three groups: the Jewish men, the raped women, and the Gentile rapists. But Bialik does not make explicit this shift from one group to another, instead relying on the gender markings of the Hebrew verb to shift between speaking of the men and the women. However, even in Hebrew, the text makes no formal distinction between the Jewish men and the attackers, referring to both groups in the third-person male plural.31 As in Heine’s Travel Pictures, such slippage is highly significant in articulating the generic classification of the text and specifically its relation to the idea of prose. Of course, the generic classification of this text is difficult: it is the product of an investigation that was cast in a prophetic mode and was received as a call to action by masses of Jewish readers. The generic multiplicity is perhaps rooted in the nature of Bialik’s mission to Kishinev, which might have strategically required vagueness. Bialik’s historical, fact-finding mission was both a collection of evidence for restitution and the groundwork for Jewish political action and for an indictment of those responsible. Since all of these had subversive potential, it may have been prudent to forge a new, hybrid form for the text that arose from this mission, rather than speak clearly in the genre of a report. Even as a dense poetic text, Bialik’s description of the aftermath of the pogrom still required revision before it passed censorship and the poet was required to change the title to “Masa Nemirov,” a reference to a seventeenth-century riot against Jews. Critics have compared the poem to Dante’s “Purgatorio,” to Zola’s “J’accuse,” and to pamphlets by Sieyès, Paine, and Herzl;32 it has been described as an anti-epic, a dramatic monologue, a travelogue, reportage to be read in the tradition of investigative and sensationalist journalism, and as modeled on the tour through a battlefield in Tolstoy’s story “Sevastopol in December.”33 The poem, furthermore, uses the biblical genre of prophecy, but changes it in a vital way: the series of imperatives that form the poem present the reader with an enigmatic speaker, understood to be God himself only with some difficulty and potentially only after reading about a fourth of the poem. Bialik uses the language of Ezekiel, referring to the prophet as “son of man,” but rather than writing in the voice of the prophet, who is sent by

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God to admonish the people, his poem is (mostly) a first-person monologue spoken by God himself, who commands his addressee to go to the city of slaughter, but ultimately to remain silent in reaction to the horrors he encounters there. As Dan Miron indicates, this and other poems by Bialik are part of a romantic tradition of “the poetization of prophecy or the prophetization of poetry.”34 Bialik thus uses the prophetic mode to situate himself in a tradition that encompasses Pushkin, Lermontov, Coleridge, Novalis, and Walt Whitman, to name a few. But Bialik’s poem radicalizes prophecy by making God the speaker and thus engages this tradition in a critical manner. This has significant implications for the generic positioning of his text between prose and performance. Bialik uses prophecy to set the stage for his poem. I mean this literally: his use of prophecy produces the fundamental coordinates along which space is organized in this text. If we ask ourselves how prophecy generally organizes space, we encounter a tension: on the one hand, the prophet as social critic (in the model of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, who are both extensively quoted in Bialik’s poem) performs his speech in a space he shares with his audience; in this sense, prophecy is a performance that evokes a given, implied space. But on the other hand, the transcendental nature of prophecy will always destabilize this space. As Maurice Blanchot has put it: “When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence.”35 Or in Ian Balfour’s succinct formulation: “the prophetic moment has momentum.”36 In “City of Slaughter,” Bialik’s evocation of prophetic speech results in this destabilization. And as I will show in reading the poem more closely, this pushes him into prose: the discourse that constructs space, the discourse that by describing evokes a firm, stable, lasting presence. Indeed, the prose description of Kishinev played a fundamental role in the composition of the poem. In 1991, the unfinished manuscript of the report that Bialik began to prepare on the basis of the testimonies he had collected was finally published with the expressed intent of correcting the historical record and restoring the honor of the Jews of Kishinev. Following this publication, scholarship has focused on the glaring discrepancy between the testimonies and the poem: the poem admonishes the victims of the pogrom for failing to defend themselves from the attacks, but the testimonies clearly show that different strategies were used for selfdefense and that they were successful in many cases.37 Bialik’s revision has been interpreted from a number of perspectives. Iris Milner, for example, describes the preparations Bialik made for the interviews: lists of people to meet, places to go, questions to ask. All of

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these, she emphasizes, predetermined—and hence distorted—the outcome of his investigation. According to Milner, this urge to order the information works in the service of both the ideological agenda of the historic mission, that is, the interest to show that the lack of preparation for selfdefense doomed the Jews of Kishinev to become helpless victims, as well as a psychological defense mechanism, mediating the confrontation with the horrors of the events. What is most threatening to Bialik about the stories he hears in Kishinev, she suggests, is the chaos: the deep disorientation caused by the fact that the Christian neighbors were both their friends and their attackers and that sometimes one and the same person was both: “in the trauma of the pogrom lies the experience of a shattered, broken, chaotic, unpredictable, undecipherable, and, therefore, uncontrollable, reality.”38 Rather than focusing on the facts involved in the account, I would like to approach Bialik’s revision of it from the vantage point of form and ask: how is the prose report that Bialik did not write inscribed in his poem? To my mind, the most important generic choice registered in the poem is the decision not to write a report in prose. The poem thus refrains from giving voice to the victims of the pogrom and instead sets up a complicated scenario of a dialogue between two interlocutors who are both removed from the scene of the events, God and the prophet who is being sent to Kishinev. The repeated emphasis on silence in the poem is an interesting trace of this generic decision: the poem is, in some sense, about silence, about the inability to speak of the events that transpired in Kishinev. Building on the allusion to Ezekiel, the prophet who is repeatedly ordered to silence his cry and to refrain from delivering his message to the people, the poem insists on the multiple forms of silence that follow the events. Thus, the prophet is repeatedly ordered to remain silent: “why do you weep, son of man, and why do you hide / your face in your hand? Gnash your teeth and dissolve.” Or: and I’ll be cruel—and you will not low with their crying and if your roar bursts out—I will stifle it between your teeth; they can profane their catastrophe alone—you will not profane it. The calamity will stand for generations—a calamity unmourned And your tear will be hoarded away, a tear unspilled And you will build on it a fort of brass and wall of steel Of deadly fury, hatred deep as hell and secret loathing

But while this secret, silent loathing separates the prophet from the people of Kishinev, it is not his alone. The poem peoples Kishinev with mysteri-

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ous beings that share the prophet’s silence, such as the ghosts of the victims that continue to hover in the space where they were murdered and “silently raise their eyes to protest their disgrace and ask: why?” Or, with reference to the feminine divinity of Jewish mysticism, the Shekhinah: a single black Presence, weary with sorrow and exhausted, broods here in every corner and cannot find comfort, wants to weep, and cannot, wants to roar and keeps quiet, and silently festers in mourning and secretly stifles, spreads its wings over the spirits of the martyrs with its head under one wing keeping its tears in the shadow and crying without tongue— And you too, son of man, shut the gate behind And be locked here in the dark and bury your eyes in the ground And stand here till you lose track of time and are one with the sorrow ... and you will bear it in your bosom to the four corners of the earth and you will seek and you won’t find for it a sound of lips.39

In this context, it is all the more productive to mark when and where reported speech does occur in the poem, a question to which I return below. However, Bialik destabilizes the very distinction between speech and silence, turning the silence itself into a speech act, or a speech performance. The roots of this silence, on which the poem insists, are in the testimonies collected, but left silenced and unpublished by Bialik. Conceived as a report on the events, this text naturally focuses on what was said by the victims. Yet it repeatedly returns to the question of what cannot be said. In the opening remarks that Bialik prepared for one of the narratives, a local guide introduces the victims and attests to their reliability. He says: This is a separate chapter, a separate story in the recent history of Kishinev. And this story is composed of many smaller stories from which one can glean much. I would like to recount one of these smaller stories to you verbatim, just as it was told to me by a reliable man, a young lad, who experienced the story himself, and not a word of it is untrue. Indeed, plenty of it is omitted in my version, because as is well known, not everything that is spoken can be written, and not everything that is written can be printed.40

As Milner comments, this is a disavowal that, in positing the reliability of the narrative, alerts us to the fact that it is edited and processed and

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thus in some sense unreliable.41 The promise to recount the story verbatim is immediately contradicted by the statement that much of the story is in fact omitted. But this disavowal also alerts the reader to the great importance of medium and mode in conditioning what can and cannot be said: the printed text, which at this point is expected to be a prose text, is posited as a reduced, silent version of the spoken narrative. This problematic comes to a head at key moments of the text that Bialik had edited, particularly in some of the passages that were extensively reworked on the basis of interviews with multiple victims, sections of the unpublished report that most closely resemble the ordered prose text that Dubnov was expecting to read. In this context, speaking of silence becomes an opportunity to reflect, if only implicitly, on the silencing effect of the editing work itself. The flow of the prose that Bialik managed to produce based on the interviews is repeatedly interrupted by direct quotes from the witnesses, their speech rendering it dialogic: In the yard a pregnant woman, Mrs. Goldstein, was standing with a two-year-old baby in her arms and murderers around her and with the wooden poles in their hands they pushed her and beat her belly, her breasts and her ribs, and also the boy in her arms was beaten with a wooden pole. Both of them received the blows in silence. (“In general the tortured children in the yard were exceptional: most of them accepted the sufferings in silence.” When the beautiful daughter of the pregnant woman mentioned above saw blood streaming from the wounds in her small head she asked the killer, in tears and in the Jewish language: “Why do you beat me?”)42

As if enacting the difficulty in speaking, the direct quote—the spoken language that parenthetically interrupts the flow of prose—is about moments in which spoken language was suspended, moments of silence. But again we encounter a contradiction: the voices that intervene in the text first describe the children as silent and then break this silence by quoting the young girl who does speak, though she turns to the aggressors in Yiddish, a language that they would not understand, a language that does, ultimately, leave her mute. Furthermore, this dense passage indicates some of the problems Bialik faced in editing the testimonies, problems that led him away from fashioning prose, but followed him when he went on to write the poem. Thus, the silence referred to here is to be understood not only as a theme that resonates with the explicit references to silence in the poem, but also as an element of the larger problem of editing the testimonies

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into prose and hence a cue that will ultimately help us to understand how prose is inscribed in the poem. In his editorial work, Bialik dealt with testimonies that were spoken in a particular time and place. The witnesses could refer to the space around them using deictic expressions: they could speak about themselves and their neighbors and refer to the space in which the events unfolded, since they were still standing in it. Bialik’s intention had been to take these testimonies and transform them into what Dubnov had called “an ordered story”: a prose text that supplies all of the information around those deictics, that compensates for the lack of the space within which the testimonies were spoken by constructing a space in the text. It is important to keep in mind that the testimonies that Bialik collected, like the little girl’s plea to the attackers—“Why do you beat me?”—were spoken in Yiddish. Bialik and his assistants translated the testimonies into Hebrew on the spot, as they were transcribing them, a method of work that has very serious implications, since given the limits of even the most skilled simultaneous translator and transcriber surely parts of the testimonies were thus lost. Beyond that, however, the act of translating into Hebrew was the first step in abstracting the testimonies from the space in which they were spoken, a space of daily life conducted in Yiddish. This act of translation between the two Jewish languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, is related to the distinction between performed speech and written text. On the one hand, Hebrew was the language of texts, whereas Yiddish was the language of daily life, the spoken language. Yet on the other hand, the nature of Jewish prayer and traditional learning is such that the Hebrew texts were constantly being recited and performed. And the project of reviving the language of which Bialik was a part revolutionized the standing of the Hebrew language in making the production of texts in Hebrew possible, and the production of texts in prose, the production of novels, was arguably the most revolutionary part of this revival.43 Nevertheless, in this case, the act of translation into Hebrew was a significant step in removing the testimonies from the space in which they were articulated. At the basis of Bialik’s editorship, then, lies an act of translation. Yet Bialik could not translate the testimonies in their entirety, as we will see in a moment, and he did not succeed in rewriting the testimonies into a prose text that does not refer to the space of Kishinev deictically. The unfinished text that was published in 1991 is full of traces of the difficulty in transposing the deictic references into the order of prose: there is constant hesitation about voice, the text moves between first and third person,

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and the references to the scene of the events move between pointing and describing. The testimony of Joseph Trachtenbroit is a good example. In the notes as they were republished, it appears immediately before the section quoted above, in which Bialik had reworked the testimonies of seven different witnesses into one relatively ordered text. This section is less edited, closer to the spoken language of the single witness with which it is associated, and more indicative of the stakes of translating the testimonies into prose, as a long passage effectively shows. Two elders. His wife weeps, the house of the type of old landlord. Four rooms a pile of rags, they broke utensils, the oven is shattered. A big old closet (the picture of Alexander III and his wife remains whole), the picture of Montefiore is torn. His face is calm and straight. On Sunday his neighbor Mitia told him “here there will be peace, because we will come out with sticks and chase them away.” On Monday after I came from prayer. We ate peacefully. After prayer he sent his sons to see what was happening in the city. (I had, my good man, a wardrobe of children’s clothes, I myself had two fur coats) they came and said that they were destroying. He collected 410 rubles in a bundle and hid them under the bed . . . I didn’t think that they would come to the house to ask. The riots began. He asked the Gentiles to be redeemed with money. His son shot to the street into the sky to scare them (A Jew has the heart to kill?) The rioters were angered and they stormed through the gate that they had broken, and the door of the house turns to the street. He said, let us escape. The eldest came jumped from the window to escape, they attacked him with sticks. I jumped with my second son—to rescue him, they dragged me by my beard. . . . “I’ve been a decent landlord for almost forty years, the utensils are covered with silver.” He keeps returning to his son’s wardrobe every once in a while. “The Passover silver utensils have been defiled. It was the property of my children.”44

The text, like all of Bialik’s notes, is in Hebrew, but the parts here italicized remain in Yiddish. These are moments of performance that he could not translate into Hebrew, let alone translate into prose. Around these direct quotes, the text moves with uneasiness between different modes of pointing at the persons it describes. In the initial description of the room, this uneasiness is manifest in the ambiguity of the phrase “his face is calm and straight.” Clearly, the reference is to the old man who lives in this

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room, yet as it is positioned, the possessive “his face” (panav, in Hebrew) seems to refer to Montefiore, whose picture hangs on the wall. The uneasiness continues in the description of the events, where single sentences oscillate between the first and the third person in referring to the old man and his sons: “We ate peacefully. After prayer he sent his sons to see what was happening in the city.” “They came and said that they were destroying. He collected 410 rubles in a bundle and hid them under the bed . . . I didn’t think that they would come to the house to ask.” “He said, let us escape. The eldest came jumped from the window to escape, they attacked him with sticks. I jumped with my second son—to rescue him, they dragged me by my beard.” These segments are the first signs of the unfinished labor of the production of prose, where Bialik’s text starts to talk about the victims of the pogrom in the third person and to construct spaces around them, such as the bed under which the rubles are hidden or the window through which the man and his sons try to escape. In order to turn the testimonies into prose, Bialik would have to describe these spaces in far more detail. The pogrom was not an incidental cause for the problems Bialik encountered in composing a prose text. The uneasiness of using deictic expressions to point at bodies begins with the confusion produced by the events themselves. The relation between these two levels of disruption is evident in another section of the text: the testimony of the wife of Israel Salishman, one of the victims of the pogrom. Salishman, who herself remains unnamed, describes different kinds of misrecognition and confusion: the victims cannot recognize who is a friend and who is an aggressor, because their neighbors and acquaintances turn against them and participate in the attacks; some of the women try to hide their identity by wearing crosses, but fail to be misrecognized by their neighbors; and several women mistakenly identify the dead man as their husband. She describes the scene: “One gang entered the yard and broke the door of the cowshed, where the women and children were hiding, with their sticks. Among the robbers were four acquaintances. The thugs meant to hit them, my eldest daughter begged for our lives and they let us go.”45 The fact that the sentence speaks of “them” adds to the general confusion: did the thugs mean to hit the four acquaintances? In fact, Jacob Goren, the editor of the unpublished notes—himself a historian who is looking for the ordered story—sees a need not only to clarify that “them” refers back to the women and children, but also to remark that in the original interview notes the sentence was simply “the thugs meant to hit” and that Bialik felt it necessary to add the pronoun for clarification, thus contradicting his explicit editing policy, according to which he aimed to reduce .

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the text, not to contribute to it. But, again, the logic of prosaic deixis—in which the context for pointing is coherently constructed within the text, rather than by context—fails him. The performed speech of the witnesses, with its gestures and its confusions, will not be translated into prose. With these problems in mind, we can return to recognize yet another layer of meaning of the two spoken quotes that parenthetically interfere in the first passage that I quoted from the testimonies: “(‘In general the tortured children in the yard were exceptional: most of them accepted the sufferings in silence.’ When the beautiful daughter of the pregnant woman mentioned above saw blood streaming from the wounds in her small head she asked the killer, in tears and in the Jewish language: ‘Why do you beat me?’).”46 Like the transitions between first and third person in Trachtenbroit’s testimony, this, too, is a moment in which traces of Bialik’s work of editorship, specifically, traces of his effort to translate the testimonies into prose, are visible. The two quotes are two different moments of performed speech: one at the time of the pogrom and one retrospectively at the time of the interview with Bialik. By referring to the two quotes as performance, I should emphasize, I do not mean to imply that they are artifice or not genuine in any way. I am simply emphasizing the pragmatic conditions in which they were spoken and distinguishing them from the pragmatic conditions that govern the use of prose. To rework them into prose Bialik must make them speak with each other across this divide, make them part of one discourse. But in this case, this entails making the tension between them, the fact that the first describes the children as silent and the second breaks this silence, disturbingly apparent. By speaking of silence, the witnesses resist being translated into prose. And indeed, the translation was left unfinished. However, even though he ultimately wrote a poem, not the ordered text of historical prose, Bialik did not leave either the task of translating the testimonies into prose or the technical problem that it involved behind when he finally did write a text of the Kishinev pogrom. As we saw in the testimonies of Trachtenboit and Salishman, the partially edited testimonies oscillate between the first and third person. The poem is composed out of this oscillation. More accurately, Bialik’s un­ orthodox choice to make God the speaker of the poem brings the oscillation to a halt; in this sense, it resolves the problem of translating the language spoken in Kishinev into language about Kishinev. If the challenge of editing the ordered story was how to allow the witnesses to speak through the prose, how to take their deictic expressions and build a space for them within the text, then the poem meets the challenge by undoing the space of Kishinev and by silencing the witnesses completely. Not only

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does Bialik silence their stories of successful self-defense, he also re­places the witnesses with another first-person speaker, and allows this other speaker to carry on a dialogue with an addressee, the visitor prophet who is also not one of them, over the heads of the victims. As Dan Miron has shown, the identity of the speaker is a key element in Bialik’s early poetics. “City of Slaughter” is written at the tail end of the early period described by Miron, in which Bialik had fashioned a poetic speaker that balanced between the personal and the national and that made him such a popular figure for the revival movement. Miron claims that this is made possible by situating the two elements—the personal and the national—dialectically in relation to the third element or persona, the persona of the poet as inspired by the muses. At the end of the first decade of his writing, Bialik abandoned this model and turned to the use of genre as the driving force of his poetry, writing lieder, long narrative poems, and prophetic texts.47 But “City of Slaughter” puzzles this generic system because it belongs to two of its categories, as a long narrative poem that makes extensive use of the prophetic idiom. Furthermore, this is the most radical of Bialik’s prophetic poems: it enacts the destabilization of the present by prophetic discourse and evokes another discourse or medium—prose—in its own stead. As I have suggested, the most important generic choice that forms the poem is Bialik’s decision not to write a report in prose. More accurately, the set of problems that rose out of the attempt to produce prose from the testimonies shapes the poem in significant ways. Bialik’s first-person speaker, the God who sends his emissary to the city of slaughter and instructs him where to go and what to see, presents a radical solution to the problem of deixis, the problem of how to point at things in the text, because he is completely, indeed, metaphysically removed from the location in which the events unfold. From its divine vantage point, the poem describes Kishinev and its inhabitants extensively, but it does not use deictic language to point at them as if they were present in the same space. Heine used pronouns in order to insert the language of poetry into his prose and to show that the pragmatics of poetry were not operational within a prose text. Bialik in a sense does the opposite by writing a poem that answers to the pragmatic conditions of prose in the way that it positions bodies in space or in the operations that it must undergo before it can position bodies in space. The poem never quotes the spoken testimonies that Bialik heard in Kishinev, but it does report several moments of speech that occur in Kishinev. Instead of the persons he met in Kishinev, Bialik describes the spider and lizard hiding in the roof of a barn as the only living witnesses, to whom the prophet must turn if he wants the story.

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When the Jews of Kishinev do speak in the poem, Bialik turns the scene into a farce: he quotes the husbands who turn to the rabbi to find out whether their raped wives are permitted, and he describes an absurd scene in which a preacher speaks to a slumbering audience. All of these moments of performed speech in the poem are juxtaposed with a single moment of resounding silence, the brief scene in which God himself actually appears in Kishinev: And I too in the heart of night will go down to the graves, stand and look at the bodies and be secretly ashamed and yet, by my life, says God, if I shed one tear. And great is the pain and great is the shame. And which is the greater? You tell me, son of man! Or better yet—shut up! And silently bear witness, for you found me in my shame and saw me in the day of my distress.48

The poem thus describes God as an “antiwitness.” His witnessing is a secret and is immediately transformed into an imperative: “you witness.” This silencing of God as a witness underscores the most important characteristic of God in this poem: he does not speak from within Kishinev, but rather from a position fundamentally removed from Kishinev. Because, of course, in the text as a whole, God is not silent: he produces the imperative that opens the poem—“rise and go”—and everything that follows in it. The entire poem is spoken in God’s voice, and it is God, from his removed vantage point, who describes Kishinev. So, if the quotations in the poem bring us to Kishinev, where this speech occurs, then the description has the opposite effect: it moves us away from Kishinev. That is, it moves the poem in the direction of nonperformed discourse, in the direction of prose that is removed from space. In fact, the description in this poem is radically removed from space (or radically unperformed), because the entire visit is hypothetical: the verbs are all imperatives and thus describe not actions taken, but actions that might be taken, or should be taken, and views that would be seen if the journey were to take place.49 Bialik’s poem takes the form of an address, turning to a person who does not need to be described and does not need to have a body or a name but is simply there. As such an address, the poem is, in a sense, deictic. But the actual scene of the event and the people in it are not assumed as objects that can be pointed at; instead they are described. And the dominant figurative modes of Bialik’s descriptions are metonymy and synecdoche.50 Bialik uses these figures to fragment bodies in order to give an impression of the horrors:

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the case of a disemboweled chest filled with feathers, the case of nostrils and nine-inch nails and skulls and hammers, the case of slaughtered human beings hung up from beams like fish, and the case of a baby found by the side of his stabbed mother51

The description of the beggars who are hawking their different damaged body parts to make a profit off of their suffering intensifies this fragmentation, bringing it to the level of farce: And if you rose early tomorrow and went to the crossroads you’d see many bits of men all groans and sighs, swarming the windows of the rich and hanging about their doors crying around their wounds as a hawker does his goods.52

As is evident in the first of these passages, the text has to start with the metonymies—the ear, the belly, the nostrils, the skull bones—and can only then, somehow through all of these parts, get to the references to persons: the murdered men, the infant, the mother. From this we can deduce that these are actually not metonymies, strictly speaking. A metonymy uses a part to refer to an entire thing, whereas these fragments do not, in themselves, refer to the whole bodies. Bialik’s description of the horrors of the pogrom thus achieves not only the rhetorical effect of shocking the reader, but also a reconfiguration of the possibilities of the text to point. It moves away from gesturing to objects in a context of discourse and toward constructing both space and objects within the text. If we use reference to persons—and deixis more broadly—to construct a scale between performance and prose, this poem is decidedly prosaic. The combined use of a speaker metaphysically removed from space and of metonymic descriptions produces a text that presents the violence that occurred in Kishinev, but resists any of the literary forms that would construct the space of Kishinev. It moves away from performance, but does not produce the ordered prose of a historic report. This is what gave this poem such a power to influence its Zionist readers: it does not construct a space of performance, yet it does not use any of the tools that a prose text would use to construct and build a space. Instead, it leaves it up to its readers to construct spaces and perform in them.53 This point might be made clearer by comparing “City of Slaughter” to another poem that Bialik wrote in 1903 in response to the pogrom: “Al ha-shhita” (“On the Slaughter”), a poem written in explicit reaction to the pogrom, before Bialik left for Kishinev. By comparing the two poems, I emphasize the choices involved in writing “City of Slaughter” and

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highlight the formal element of this poem that bears the mark of Bialik’s editorship of the testimonies, which we might describe as the inscription of prose in the poem. Both poems take the form of an address, but in each case, the relation between speaker and addressee is fundamentally different, forming the space of the text differently. “On the Slaughter” was written soon after Bialik heard news of the pogrom in Kishinev; like the poem at the center of our discussion, it uses the tropes of prophecy extensively, but it does so in a fundamentally different manner. First, the poem is spoken by a prophet of rage who expresses his anger and shock at the events in Kishinev and turns to the empty heavens in accusation. In “City of Slaughter,” Bialik would reverse this relation, making God speak to the prophet. “On the Slaughter” thus emphasizes the performed aspect of prophecy, the aspect that the later poem would deemphasize in favor of the destabilizing effect of prophetic speech. Second, unlike the enigmatic speaker of “City of Slaughter,” who judges and denigrates the Jews of Kishinev, the speaker here expresses identification and sympathy for the victims of the pogrom and questions the value of heroism in the face of such brutality: And cursed be he who cries: vengeance! Such a vengeance, the vengeance for a small child’s blood —Satan himself never dreamed— and blood would fill all space! Blood will fill the dark abyss and eat away in darknesses and rot All the dark foundations of the earth.54

The poem ends with these lines, leaving its reader in the enigmatic space of the dark abyss and the foundations of the earth, but up to this point, it operates within the concretely and clearly delineated space that is constructed around a gesturing, performing speaker. The fact that this is an address spoken by a person sharing a space with his implied addressees, rather than an apostrophe spoken in the solitary interiority of a lyrical subject, is emphasized when the speaker points at his own body: Hangman! Here’s a neck—come and kill! Crop me like a dog, you have the axe-arm, and all the earth is to me a block— and we—we are the few in number! My blood’s fair game—hack skull, let murder’s blood leap, the blood of suckling babe and sage is on your shirt and will not out for good, not for good.55

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This deictic gesture that Bialik plants at the center of his poem turns the entire text into a performance, anchoring the more abstract spaces to which it refers—the dark abyss, the earth that has turned into a butcher’s block or an execution ground—in relation to this event of speech. The title of the poem enhances this effect, as it is rooted in Jewish ritual practice, referring to the prayer recited upon the slaughter of animals. “City of Slaughter” does something else. Rather than positioning a speaker in a given space, it removes the stage and confronts us with a paradoxical, despatialized speaker. This operation should be read in generic terms, as the ultimate fulfillment of Bialik’s attempts to translate the testimonies into prose, to replace the deixis of the spoken performance with the fullness of prose. Perhaps the most effective way of describing this operation—and thus closing a circle and ending this chapter—is to return to Bialik’s metaphor of the frozen river of prose. In using this metaphor, Bialik concerns himself with the question of the ground from which a literary text is written: Is it the stable passage of the frozen river, or the precarious position of poetry, with its view to the abyss? And, we might extend the question, does a text make that ground part of its pragmatics, part of the conditions that make it possible as an enunciation? Or does it suspend the performance, the act of balancing itself on a precarious piece of floating ice, in favor of turning itself into a space constructing discourse, taking it upon itself to freeze the river? In fact, reading both Bialik’s later essay, “Halakhah and Aggadah,” and the earlier poem, “City of Slaughter,” offers us a more complex view of the relations between water and ice or prose and poetry. As Bialik emphasizes in the second essay, it is really a matter of a common substance, the water of the river, taking on different forms in different moments. That is, prose and poetry, law and legend, are most productively thought of as categories that suggest rather than exclude each other. “City of Slaughter” is thus not to be categorized as either one or the other, but rather to be read as a document of its author’s strategic oscillations between both modes or media.

Chapter Six



Heine and the Israeli Novel

Old-New Land and “City of Slaughter” are both Zionist texts written in Europe and thus must negotiate the gap between the context in which they are written, that is, the pragmatic conditions in which they originated, and the ideal space of national fulfillment that they envision in the future. For both Herzl and Bialik, prose becomes a productive medium to work through what they perceive as a challenge of groundlessness. This raises an obvious question: if this is a significant issue in Zionist literature, what becomes of it during the rest of the twentieth century? There are several significant overarching developments that would come into play here: the rise of Hebrew as the dominant and ultimately the exclusive vehicle for Zionist thought and literature; the transplantation of that tradition away from Europe and, with increasing exclusivity, to pre-state Palestine; and finally the transformation of Hebrew literature into Israeli literature with the foundation of the state in 1948.1 All of these shifts could be described as changes in the pragmatic conditions in which Zionist literature operates and hence should transform the way authors think about and use prose. This can serve as an entry point for a discussion of the development of the Hebrew novel over the course of the twentieth century, raising questions such as: How do authors write about Palestine/Eretz Israel in situ, and how does their prose negotiate between deixis and description? Does deixis operate differently once the context of discourse is defined as an autonomous and sovereign national space after 1948? And do the pragmatic conditions change through the history of the state of Israel, under the pressure of war, occupation, and social and cultural change? These very broad questions will be addressed here through one very particular test case. I return in this chapter to the history of the Jewish reception of Heinrich Heine that was the focus of the third chapter and extend it to the second half of the twentieth century and the present. This will lead us through several key moments: the relation of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine to Germany (and, by extension, its own broader

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European past) during the Nazi period and the war, the foundation of the state as a reorganization of the context of discourse within which literature operates, and the complex relation of Israeli culture and literature to the question of territory. As we will see, the evolution of the relationship between the two languages and literatures, German and Hebrew, during this period is complex; however, contrary to what is sometimes assumed, it does not dissipate, to be replaced by silence in the period immediately following the Holocaust.2 Two contemporary Hebrew novels that position themselves, in different ways, on the German-Hebrew fault line offer ways to illuminate these issues. Like Herzl and Bialik, Yoel Hoffmann and Haim Beer, the two novelists I discuss in the second part of the chapter, use Heine as an index of the limits of Jewish identity and as a medium through which they explore their self-positioning as Jewish authors. Writing in Hebrew as Israelis, they come to the problematic represented by Heine—the question of the relation between place and writing and the position of prose within the changing dynamics of space and medium—with different assumptions and stakes than their Zionist predecessors. Nevertheless, they provide clear evidence of the afterlife of the prosaic conditions of writing within Israeli culture. Heine thus continues to operate as a powerful medium, connecting German and Hebrew literature and allowing Israeli authors to situate themselves in multiple senses.

Since 1932 On November 3, 1923, the first broadcast of a German poem occurred on the radio airwaves of Berlin. The poem was Heine’s “Seegespenst” (“Sea Apparition”) the tenth poem in the first cycle of “The North Sea,” which, as we have seen, is a cycle rife with cultural allusions ranging from the Bible to Yehuda Halevi to Hegel. In “Sea Apparition,” the speaker leans over the side of the ship that has taken him into the North Sea and sees a sunken city with tree-lined streets, a town hall, a magnificent dome, and upright citizens; to his surprise, he recognizes his beloved, who has been hiding from him there for centuries, unable to emerge from the water. About to jump and save the apparition, the speaker is saved at the last moment by the ship’s captain, who admonishes him: “Doctor, what the devil’s got in you?” (CPH 143). With its long description of the sunken city and its abrupt ending that verges on violence, the poem was not popular with composers, who preferred the adjacent “Nachts in der Cajute” (“At Night in the Cabin”), with

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its six shorter sections that mix nature descriptions with pronouncements of love. The first poem in that section—famously starting with: “The sea has its pearls, / The heaven has its stars, / But my heart, my heart, / My heart has its love” (CPH 137)—has alone been used as the basis of a musical composition more than a hundred times. In contrast, the poem that the Berlin radio producers chose, “Sea Apparition,” stands out as a nonsong, highlighting the fact that radio was being used for novel purposes, rather than reproducing existing practices of consumption of music and poetry.3 Furthermore, as Daniel Gilfillan notes, the poem was also useful in singling out the place of radio in competition with other contemporary new media, first and foremost among them the cinema: the broadcast uses folkloric themes that were fashionable in early German cinema, but molds them to reflect on radio’s aural space. This is not the only reason that it appealed to the producer of the 1923 broadcast, however. The sea and the attempt to communicate with what lay out of sight within it made particularly resonant material for experimentation with the new medium of radio, since maritime communications had been at the forefront of early discussions of the new technology and its potential.4 But “Sea Apparition” offered those who chose it and their listeners other associations, as well. As the words of Heine’s poem were spoken on the Berlin radio airwaves, the city depicted in the poem offered Berlin an ironic mirror image of itself: tree-lined streets, a dome, upstanding citizens.5 Of particular irony is Heine’s reference to the “marble statues of emperors” who guard the town hall with sword and scepter; they bring to mind not only Berlin’s monuments to the German kaiser but also the years of debate that had preceded the erection of the handful of Heine monuments that were in existence when the poem was broadcast in 1923. In this light, the poem appears to position the radio in competition not only with the contemporary new medium, cinema, but also with the much older art of monument building. Like the formation of monuments, the poem indicates, radio is a medium with the potential to form and fashion public spaces. In other words, broadcasting the Heine poem was a way of highlighting the potential of radio to offer a radical alternative to the public sphere in which it was so difficult to build a monument for the author. In the poem chosen for the broadcast, Heine describes himself as one who sees ghosts. The intentions of the Berlin radio producers of the mid1920s notwithstanding, he himself was soon to become a kind of ghost in the German public sphere. Soon after taking power, the Nazis turned the radio from a medium with the potential to forge a radical alternative public sphere into what they called “Volksämpfenger” (literally: the people’s receiver, but also a gatherer or capturer of people). With these

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affordable receivers, the party disseminated propaganda, monitoring the communal listening with appointed “radio wardens.”6 And as discrimination and violence toward Jews escalated, they also destroyed the Heine monuments in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and other German cities and went about the task of obliterating his presence from German cultural memory. In Nazi Germany, Heine’s songs thus appeared as words unattached to a body: the popular Friedrich Silcher composition of his “Lorelei” was famously reprinted with the author designated as “anonymous,” and there are reports of “a recital program in which the poet of Dichterliebe was identified only as ‘seit 1932, unbekannt’ [unknown, since 1932].”7 The task of separating Schumann, the German genius, from Heine, the Jewish poet, gained particular urgency for the agents of the Nazi state who enlisted in the project of forging a “clean” Aryan cultural sphere. For them, it was necessary to draw a map of German culture that would locate Heine and Schumann in two separate realms. Heine’s irony, and the shared space that it triggers in doing its work, once again came to the fore. Schumann, it was emphasized by Nazi hearers and interpreters of the Dichterliebe, could not possibly have inhabited the space that Heine formed by being ironic.8 At the same time, Jewish readers of Heine were compelled to ask themselves whether and how he continued to be relevant after Germany had become a place of danger for Jews. For some, Heine was an attractive vehicle for defiance against the Nazis; others felt his German language and his will to assimilate in the field of German literature embodied a world that came to an end with Nazism. Max Brod’s Heine biography, published in 1934, is emblematic of the dilemma. First, the circumstances of its publication indicate the threat that was already felt to Jewish culture in Germany one year after the Nazi seizure of power: though it was published by E. P. Tal and hence carried the imprint of Leipzig and Vienna, the book was printed in the Netherlands, where Brod would soon be forced to publish his subsequent works with Allert de Lange, one of the most important publishers of exile literature.9 Furthermore, a central aim of the biography is to draw parallels and lessons from Heine’s time to the time in which it was written. To begin with, Brod speculates that a Benjamin Wolf Broda, mentioned by previous biographer David Kaufmann as the illustrator of a haggadah belonging to Heine’s maternal ancestor, is his own ancestor, hence, “I may pause here in the congenial thought that once before a member of my family has been in the service and at the behest of the house of Heine.”10 The analogy is extended and broadened in Brod’s discussion of the Berlin social circles in which Heine moved, in particular the Jewish salonnières

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such as Rahel Varnhagen, the subject of Hannah Arendt’s biographical study. “I can appreciate fairly accurately,” Brod states, “the situation in which the German Jewess found herself about 1800. I have a special reason for being able to do so; I experienced it myself.”11 Like Arendt, Brod is pessimistic in his assessment of the lives and the psychologies of Varnhagen and her Jewish contemporaries, though for him, the problem is not their failure to live in the world, to paraphrase Arendt’s diagnosis, but rather their failure to live in a Jewish world and their desire to assimilate in a German one. But if Brod judges Heine’s contemporaries—and some of his own— quite harshly for their futile effort to assimilate culturally, he portrays Heine as the exemplary exception to the rule by describing him as a mediator: “Heine succeeded in doing what no one else did in his day, in striding out in opposite directions. He did it almost unconsciously, as if it were child’s play. He walked out of the Jewish Middle Ages into the modern era laughingly, even, to a certain extent, frivolously, and yet succeeded in preserving his continuity with living Judaism.”12 Brod uses the term “living Judaism” in explicit reference to the cultural-Zionist endeavor to draw on a vital Jewish culture, making Heine an early augur of Jewish nationalism.13 The book is dedicated to Felix Weltsch, a fellow cultural Zionist described by Brod in the dedication as “My Friend on Life’s Journey.” The dedication reappears in the English translation, published in 1956 to coincide with the centenary of Heine’s death. In the interval, the narrative behind it has dramatically unfolded and the reference to the shared journey has become uncannily concrete: Brod and Weltsch had both left Prague, escaping Europe in time to avoid Nazi persecution, resettled in Palestine, and become active (though, retrospectively, sometimes forgotten) participants in Israeli culture. As he writes in the preface to the translation: “The destruction of a large part of the Jewish nation and the re-establishment of the State of Israel after an interruption of nearly two thousand years has forced us to modify our view of the historical epoch in which Heine lived and worked and to revise our judgment of its emancipationist and assimilationist strivings.”14 In other words, the analogy between Heine’s experiences and those of Brod’s generation goes only so far, and reading Heine in Tel Aviv in the mid-1950s is a task that requires substantial reorientation, as we will see in further detail below. In early March 1936, the daily Davar featured a commemoration marking eighty years since Heine’s death on the front page of its literary section. The centerpiece of the edition was a Hebrew translation of Richard Dehmel’s poem, discussed in the third chapter, which had

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fashioned itself in 1895 as an alternative to the Heine monument and which draws equally on philosemitic and antisemitic discourse, calling Heine a “sick Jew and great artist.” B. Efraim’s translation does not gloss over the phrase, though in Hebrew, the contrast between the two terms— Jew and artist—is somewhat blurred as they become two attributes that describe the noun ish or “man,” forming the phrase “ish yehudi hole oman gadol.” Dehmel’s insistence that Heine had gained the right to a monument by what he did to the German language is also metamorphosed in this rendition of the poem, where “our mother tongue” can refer either to the German of the author or to the Hebrew of the translator. In their accompanying commentaries on Heine and the poem, both the translator and the prominent modernist poet Leah Goldberg portray Heine as a figure of paradoxes; indeed, Goldberg titles her brief text “Paradoxical Sketches.” But the contradictory position was one that they, as Hebrew writers who remained fascinated by German culture and literature even after Germany had become an unwelcoming place for them as Jews, shared with their subject. The posthumous 1938 edition of Simcha Ben Zion’s translation of Heine’s Deutschland ein Wintermärchen (Germany a Winter’s Tale), titled in Hebrew Eretz ashkenaz: Haggadah shel stav, is an additional instructive example of the modes in which Heine and his writings were used to express indignation with the political developments in Germany. The translation appeared with prefacing remarks and a lengthy commentary by Dov Shtock, who would later change his name and become the Israeli literary scholar Dov Sadan, and with illustrations by the translator’s son, the painter Nahum Gutman. In this apparatus, Sadan pursues several separate agendas. The postscript opens with a reference to Bialik’s famous essay on the Hebrew book; Sadan quotes the passage that I analyzed in the third chapter and states that the mission that Bialik outlines in it, of redeeming the captive Heine from the prison of the German language, has not been achieved. The numerous translations that have been published, he judges, are all inadequate to the poet’s greatness. Ben Zion, he adds somewhat tepidly, is one of the most diligent of those who have tried, “and yet to say that his conquest of Heine is full and definitive and does not leave unfulfilled demands, would be ignoring the truth.”15 This is the judgment passed on Ben Zion’s earlier attempted translations: his 1922 book publication Tslilim (Sounds, a collection of Heine poems for youth) and several shorter translations that were published in newspapers and literary magazines. When it comes to the translation of Germany a Winter’s Tale, which he is prefacing, Sadan finally sounds a note of approval. To demonstrate

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the translator’s success, he presents in the second, longer part of the postscript a detailed demonstration of the different strategies used by Ben Zion to maintain Heine’s metric scheme. To do so, he tracks the varying forms of difference produced by the work of translation: places where the Hebrew must say more than the German and vice versa, or places where Heine’s German and Catholic references are replaced with biblical or Talmudic language and even by allusions to the poetry of Bialik. Sadan’s commentary takes the form of a list, but what it performs is more complex. The significant subtext of this exercise is to raise the question to what extent Hebrew and German are commensurable. On the one hand, the coexistence of the two languages seems posited by the very terms that define the project undertaken by the commenter. Sadan sets out to track the excesses and the deficiencies that are involved in the work of translation, but his assumption is that he and his readers can maintain a simultaneous view of the German and the Hebrew that is required for this assessment (both languages appear on his page in the Hebrew alphabet). In other words, his assumption is that his reader understands both languages and in that sense embodies their coexistence. Nevertheless, the volume ultimately dwells equally on the barriers that separate German from Hebrew at the moment of its publication. Of course, Sadan’s Hebrew transcription of Heine’s modern German is not an isolated phenomenon. Visually resembling Yiddish, a Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, Sadan’s idiom is a form of “Judendeutsch,” the most famous example of which is perhaps Moses Mendelssohn’s German-language Bible translation, which was printed in Hebrew letters so that non-German-speaking Jews could read it and benefit from its potential as a German-language teaching aide. Brenner had used the same idiom when he quoted Heine at length in his polemic with Bialik, as I mention in the previous chapter. German Jews broadly used Judendeutsch throughout the nineteenth century (it was, for example, for decades the preferred language of correspondence between members of the Rothschild family).16 But by the time Sadan used it to transcribe Heine in 1938, this linguistic practice had largely given way to the use of either standard, Roman-letter German or, by Zionists and other immigrants to Mandatory Palestine, to the use of Hebrew. Sadan’s choice to revive the practice illuminates his perception of the implications of translating Heine into Hebrew at that moment, especially as it mirrors some of Ben Zion’s choices as translator. One such decision that Sadan does not expand on in his commentary is

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Ben Zion’s preference for “Ashkenaz,” the traditional Hebrew designation for the German-speaking cultural space in central Europe, rather than the more contemporary geopolitical designation “Germania,” to translate Heine’s “Deutschland.” Of course, the borders of the entity designated by Heine as “Deutschland” when he wrote the poem in the mid-1840s are anything but determinate. Likewise, the designation “Ashkenaz” is significantly fluid. Originating in the Book of Genesis, the name appears in the genealogy of the offspring of Yeffet, son of Noah, who was considered the progenitor of the people of Europe, but by the twentieth century, it had come to serve also as an internal designation of those Jews, the “Ashkenazim,” who lived in the German-speaking cultural sphere and later to European Jewry more broadly.17 When the poem was published in Hebrew in the late 1930s, “Ashkenaz” was still a comprehensible reference to Germany, but that would change, and “Germania” would soon become the only way that Hebrew speakers referred to the different political entities named “Germany” during the twentieth century and even before. All of this colors the translation decision to situate Heine’s poem in “Ashkenaz.” Ben Zion had died in 1932, before the rise of Nazism and before his Hebrew translation was published, but by the time Sadan and Gutman collaborated on the publication in 1938, their perception of the correlation between Heine’s “Deutschland” and Nazi Germany was clear. In his prefatory remarks, Sadan quotes Heine on the expansionist aspirations of German nationalists and states: “This excellent poem of the great poet who was of our people and who was lovingly devoted to the land of Ashkenaz describes, through witty, excited, and painful criticism, a dark and frightening background. It may terrify us greatly, since we, too, in our days, days of darkness in Germany [Germania] seem to see before our eyes its sequel.”18 Sadan’s transition from “Ashkenaz” to “Germania,” and his association between the poem and the present political situation in Germany, is powerfully borne out in Gutman’s illustrations for the book. (See figures 2, 3, and 4.) Gutman’s cover depicts a Prussian eagle clutching a sword in one claw and a swastika in the other. The swastika reappears in many of Gutman’s illustrations. In one, a soldier is seen marching from a drawing of the Prussian coat of arms toward a swastika, with the words “before” and “today” clarifying the temporal nature of his movement. Elsewhere Gutman portrays a figure burning a large heap of books and, in the volume’s final illustration, a group of people carrying a banner that says “Freedom” and trampling over a swastika that has been buried with a skull and a Prussian eagle.

Figures 2, 3, and 4. Nahum Gutman, illustrations for Hebrew edition of Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen. S. Ben Zion, Eretz ashkenaz: Haggadah shel stav, Tel-Aviv: Davar, 1938. Reproduced by permission of Menachem Gutman.

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Gutman’s illustrations offer an alternative translation—to use the term metaphorically—to the linguistic one carried out by his father. First, they underline the distance between the Hebrew reader and the German language, on the one hand, and the current identification between the German language and the persecution of Jews, on the other; this makes the poem, in some sense, untranslatable. At the same time, the illustrations turn precisely to Heine’s poem and his German language in order to understand and critique the violent turn taken by the Germans. The volume thus also offers an alternative history to the Nazis’ own myths of origin and millennial rhetoric.19 A similar dynamic arises from Natan Alterman’s use of the Lorelei figure—the mythic siren of the Rhine River described by Heine in one of the most famous poems of the Book of Songs. Alterman, who established himself as a major voice in Hebrew poetry with the collections Kohavim bahutz (Stars Outside, 1938) and Simhat aniyim (Poor Man’s Joy, 1941), started publishing political commentary in rhyme in Ha’aretz in 1934 and his weekly “Seventh Column” appeared in the daily Davar from 1943 to 1967. A central preoccupation of Alterman’s topical poetry in the early years was the fate of Jews in Europe. With poems such as “Mi-kol haamim” (“Of All the Nations,” 1942), Alterman was one of the first creators of the Hebrew poetic vocabulary for writing about the Holocaust. He published his first Lorelei poem in 1942, in response to the arrival of the German army at the Don River. The poem moves back and forth between Heine’s German and Alterman’s Hebrew and between two dark, yet fundamentally different, visions: Heine’s romantic image of the alluring, yet threatening female figure of Lorelei, on the one hand, and Alterman’s perception of the violence and danger inherent in the Nazi advance eastward, on the other. Alterman produces a grotesque parody of Lorelei in the image of the Nazi führer who rises on a cliff overlooking the river; the poem paraphrases Heine, transcribing his German in Hebrew letters: “Er kämmt seine goldenen Haare / mit einem goldenem Kamm” (“He combs his hair with a golden comb”). It depicts the soldiers who kill and die for this alluring, yet dangerous figure while “ruhig fliesst der Rhein” (“calmly flows the Rhine”), culminating with a vision of the apocalyptic violence that will end this war and ending with Heine’s own concluding words “Und das hat mit ihrem Singen / Die Lore-Ley getan” (“And this was done by the Lorelei with her singing”).20 Alterman returned to Lorelei in a poem published in September 1944, as news of the arrival of American troops at the Rhine reached Mandatory Palestine. Titled “Liberation of the Lorelei,” this later poem is more measured in tone; the German language is now relegated to brief and

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circumscribed quotations, and the poet appears to be taking stock of the cultural implications of the years of violence. Stars from above watch over the Rhine. In the cities Heine’s statues have been shattered, and Lorelei rose with a mincing step came out of the book to the sound of the drum. And the city lit bonfires of books and Lorelei danced on a barrel of beer. She shouted and cheered “verrecke” and “Nieder” and threw into the flames the “Buch der Lieder.” And after this book burnt in the flames she mounted the vehicles of the conquering army. For before the officers who tortured and killed rode the Valkyries walked the myth . . . And as the vehicle rode on living and on dead the maiden Lorelei walked past Heine. And she turned the fire to him— and he fell to the wall. ... the poet is mortal the poem is eternal.21

To Alterman, the conclusions were clear. As Ziva Shamir reports, he removed all German books from his library—excluding his volumes of

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Heinrich Heine—and he discarded his own earlier works of translation from that language.22 Furthermore, he used his journalistic poetry to express his ardent support for the Jewish national struggle and, when the state was formed, the leadership embodied by David Ben-Gurion. Alterman was thus influential not only in fashioning the poetic vocabulary in which Hebrew authors wrote about the Holocaust, but also in furnishing Hebrew literature with its earliest representations of the events of 1948. Before the “48 generation” of authors who had fought as soldiers in the paramilitary groups that were to become the Israeli Defense Forces wrote about the experiences of war and the responsibilities of independence, Alterman used his “Seventh Column” to paint a portrait of the young Jewish soldiers of liberation as brave and self-sacrificing men and women. One poem in particular, his “Magash ha-kesef” (“The Silver Platter,” 1947), a poem that was written in response to a statement made by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that the state would not be given to the people on a silver platter, came to symbolize the attitude of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine, toward the war and the standing of Alterman as a kind of prophet figure in that community. In the poem, the nation is personified and described as “torn of heart and yet breathing” as it prepares itself for the ceremony of the foundation of the state; the nation is faced with a young couple, which approaches it wearing uniform and hovering between life and death. The young man and woman pronounce the words: “we are the silver platter / on which you were handed the state of the Jews” and fall dead at the feet of the nation. Like Bialik’s “City of Slaughter,” Alterman’s war poem occupies a central position in the Hebrew literary imagination as it touches on questions of violence, heroism, and self-sacrifice, and the divergence between the two poems is indicative of the development of the self-perception of the national movement as well as the changing relations of literary texts and public spaces, and hence it is worthwhile to dwell on it for a moment here. Bialik fashions himself as a chastening prophet who castigates his Jewish audience for failing to defend itself; Alterman replaces anger with solemnity and glorifies the fallen soldiers for their sacrifice. But Bialik’s poem can also be read as an investigation of the spatial conditions within which national Hebrew poetry was being written at the turn of the century. Indeed, for Bialik, the impossibility of writing and performing in a shared national public sphere demanded particular literary attention and a form of generic maneuvering that produced a poem that could be described as poetry written under prosaic conditions. Alterman was in a different position. His poem was written a brief few weeks after the United Nations had ratified the partition plan, which

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was meant to lead to the formation of a Palestinian and a Jewish state side by side. The poet and his readers were gripped by the question of how the lines of partition would be drawn, whether those would indeed be the final borders of the state of Israel, and how much blood would be shed in the process of defining them. In other words, his description of the young men and women who had sacrificed themselves for the nation is a projection of what was about to happen, rather than a description of what already had. The poem begins with the words: “And the land fell silent. The eye of heaven grew red / and silenced slowly / on smoking borders.” This is the scene in which the nation is positioned; the lines that follow are an exercise in mediating between that abstract textual space and the concrete impending struggle over geopolitical space and its borders. In this light, the poem’s central metaphor, the silver platter, appears as a paradoxical space that defines this text, in a fashion strikingly similar to Bialik’s otherwise very different poem, as a statement suspended beyond or perhaps before performance. Like Bialik’s God figure, who speaks of Kishinev from a position removed from the actual city and addresses a prophet who is equally absent from it, Alterman’s nation and the young soldiers who have died for it appear in a non-space, away from what was quickly becoming a battlefield as Alterman wrote the poem. The silver platter becomes a replacement for that battlefield, a clean and empty slate on which to project the formation of the new state. But unlike Bialik, what Alterman’s operation works to highlight is not the fact that the author and his readers are still in Europe, negotiating a problematic distance from the true space of national performance in Palestine, but rather the fact that current actions are forming that space as it comes into being in the form of the political territory of the new state. Similar anxieties continued to form the Hebrew reception of Heine as it entered its Israeli phase.

Heinrich Heine Street The Israeli phase of Heine’s Hebrew career was inaugurated with Avigdor Hameiri’s collection of translations under the title Manginot ivriot (Hebrew Melodies), published in December 1947 to coincide with the beginning of the first Arab-Israeli War and the expected foundation of the state. Hameiri’s choice of the title is misleading, because the volume contains a selection of poetry spanning Heine’s career, rather than only those late poems of the Romanzero that Heine actually designated as “Hebrew Melodies.” Hameiri justifies the selection by emphasizing that he has chosen

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Heine’s Israeli poems, including some (such as “Für die Mouche,” “For Mouche”) that are not ostensibly Jewish and yet somehow, in his mind, essentially Israeli, and excluding others (such as the “Gedächtnisfeier,” “Memorial,” from the “Lamentation” section of the Romanzero, in which Heine predicts that upon his death, neither a mass nor the Jewish Kaddish will be recited) that he judges as lacking Israeli character, despite the fact that they do refer explicitly to Heine’s Jewish identity.23 Thus, despite the fact that the logic of the distinction between Israeli and non-Israeli poems remains unexplained, the volume’s stated criteria of selection directly bespeak the nationalization of Hebrew as an Israeli language. In Old-New Land, Herzl had mused about the place of Heine’s German-Hebrew melodies in the German-speaking Jewish state that he projected into the future; by the time Hameiri’s translations appeared, Herzl’s mis-estimate of the importance of Hebrew as a national language for the Zionist project had been proven, and it was taking its new place as the state language. Heine’s “Hebrew” melodies were thus now finally fully admissible into the Hebrew language, though as we will see, this admission was not without resistance. Like earlier Hebrew translators of Heine, Hameiri prefaces the volume with comments that indicate the stakes of his projects as he sees them. He begins the preface with an anecdote from the Zionist congress in Vienna in 1913. At this conference, David Frischmann and Haim Nahman Bialik had sparred over the question of which was the higher priority: supporting young authors so that they would be able to produce new and great works in Hebrew or anthologizing and publishing the already existing riches of Hebrew and Jewish literature so that they would be widely available and enrich the emerging new Hebrew literature.24 It is in his argument for such an anthology—“The Hebrew Book,” as he calls it—that Bialik calls his listeners and readers to remember Heine and ransom the prisoner by translating him into Hebrew. In Hameiri’s anecdote, the conflict between Bialik and Frischmann gains nuance. As he recalls, Frischmann struck up a conversation at the congress in which he exhibited his thorough knowledge of Hungarian literature. “You have that one, what is his name, Madach, the one who wrote The Tragedy of Man, you should translate that into Hebrew. A decent book. A deep book. And you have that other poet, a distinct lyricist, what is his name, that, Petöfi, a great revolutionary. You should translate him. Such a wild one, died young—.”25 What Hameiri does not need to spell out is that these words express Frischmann’s allegiance to the idea of a universal canon of “decent” and “deep” literature that should be translated into Hebrew, to his translation nationalism.26 At this mo-

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ment, he continues his anecdote, Bialik came into the room and, having heard these words, joined in a mimicking fashion: “And you have that other poet, what is his name, the one who wrote poems. His name is Heine, you should translate him. Not bad poems.” “He is not theirs,” said Frischmann, as if correcting Bialik’s mistake, “he is German.” “Germany, Austro-Hungary, it’s all the same,” said Bialik, “translate, translate, young man. We need a good translation, from the original.”27 Here Hameiri spells out some of the subtext, indicating that the closing words of this comment were a personal stab at Frischmann, a hint that the prolific translator may sometimes have worked with existing Russian translations.28 Hameiri leaves the anecdote at that, summarizing that even though Bialik was joking, the suggestion struck a chord and did not leave him. The rest of the preface is devoted to the frustrations of translating Heine’s deceptively simple poetry while keeping the rhythm and rhyme intact. Like Katzenelson before him, Hameiri argues for the artistic freedom of the translator and ultimately claims Heine as a Hebrew poet: “In not a few cases, the translation is better than the original, that is, the Hebrew Heine is more Heine-esque than the German.”29 But of course there is much more to Bialik’s comment than Hameiri explicitly unfolds in his recounting of the conversation. Let us remind ourselves once more that it took place in Vienna in 1913; for Bialik to turn to Hameiri, a Hungarian-speaking citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and say “Germany, Austro-Hungary, it’s all the same” might seem like blatant disregard of the many nationalist voices that were clamoring that it was not “all the same.” However, Bialik was not disregarding contemporary national movements, but rather indicating that for him and his interlocutors, as Zionists and Hebraists, Heine stood beyond the distinctions between Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, and so on, because he was a Jew. Moreover, the exchange between Frischmann and Bialik, as Hameiri recalls it, echoes the debate between them as it is documented in the transcriptions from the conference, though the debate is never mentioned in the preface to the 1947 translations. To reiterate, Frischmann had expressed the hope that Hebrew literature would truly become a European literature, answering to a universal standard of high modernism. In the following years, his agenda as Stybel’s editor would reflect that hope, as he commissioned translations of a range of European authors (among them his own translation of “The North Sea” and Katzenelson’s translation of the rest of the Book of Songs). Bialik, on the other hand, used the occasion to oppose the universalist position strongly and to argue for a Hebrew literature that builds on a specifically Jewish sphere of predecessors, aesthetic values, and standards, which he aimed to promote by

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compiling a “Hebrew Book.” By finding a place for Heine within the Hebrew book, Bialik signals his own unique position in the cultural-Zionist camp and a willingness to extend the limits of his canon to include translations of non-Hebrew works and even the writings of an apostate. On the eve of the foundation of the state, Hameiri uses the anecdote to position his translations within the bounds of Bialik’s project, representing Heine as a Jewish author who could finally become more truly, more authentically himself in Hebrew translation and implying that with the transformation of Hebrew into a state language, Frischmann’s aspiration to universalism was invalidated. Hameiri’s volume was soon followed by most of Shmuel Perlman’s ambitious series of translations of Heine’s prose, begun in the early 1940s. Over the course of the 1950s Perlman’s translation work would systematically encompass almost the entire body of Heine’s prose writing and gain him the prestigious Tchernichovsky Translation Prize (a prize that had been established by the municipality of Tel Aviv in 1942). This endeavor, too, is implicitly based on the assumption that with the transformation of Hebrew into a state language, Heine had become not simply adaptable to the Hebrew language, but in fact fully and systematically translatable. Perlman’s translations appeared in a Mossad Bialik series that he himself edited that was devoted entirely to fulfilling Bialik’s call for a ransoming of prisoners, in the sense that it featured translations of Jewish authors who had written in languages other than Hebrew.30 Heine’s prose took up the bulk of Perlman’s list, along with a few translations of usual and unusual suspects, ranging from Moses Mendelssohn through Georg Brandes and Henri Bergson to Sigmund Freud.31 Perlman and his colleagues at Mossad Bialik replaced the prisoner metaphor that Bialik had used with another, in some sense far more ambitious, theological reference. The series is titled Ligvulam (literally translated as “to their border”), which is an allusion to Jeremiah 31, a prophecy of consolation that promises an end to exile. Perlman’s readers would undoubtedly recognize the reference, and so would any contemporary Israeli reader, because the promise that “thy children shall come again to their own border,” as the verse is rendered in the King James translation, is often utilized in Zionist political rhetoric.32 By using this term, Perlman situates his work of translation within a grander messianic scheme than that alluded to in Bialik’s proposed plan for the ransoming of prisoners. In this scheme, the foundation of the state and the drawing of its borders constitutes not just a return, but the return that had been promised by Jeremiah. It is only once this circle has been closed, he seems to be suggesting, that the mission of ransoming the prisoners and bringing them back to their borders can be taken on in earnest.

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In a review of the first couple of Heine translations in the series, Immanuel Bin-Gorion highlights the resonance of the designation ligvulam. Bin-Gorion remarks that Perlman set out to “naturalize [Heine] within the governance of the Hebrew language” and proceeds to set forth an elaborate claim about what he calls the two trials against Heine—“The trial of Ashkenaz and the trial of Judah”—both of which Bin-Gorion to some extent legitimizes. Yet the first, he contends, is no longer relevant once “Ashkenaz has taken upon itself, knowingly and in malice, the role of the Sodom of our day,” whereas the second is invalidated through Zionism as the overcoming of exile. “The lengthy war of the community of Israel for Heine’s soul has ended,” he pronounces, and this without the need even for a verdict. The essence of this trial is exilic and its spirit is the spirit of exile. . . . Once the possibility for the reparation of the nation on its soil is achieved—the preconditions for canceling this mistake [the mistaken view that Heine must either be revered or reviled] have also been achieved. Not necessarily by the reconversion of Heine as a Jew, or by supposedly replanting him in the soil of his true homeland, but because the basis for the national literary zeal is canceled and with it is canceled also her sister hatred, both of them daughters of a love that knows not its soul. The Hebrew who returns to his land is no longer resentful of the German language for the fact that it is within its bounds that this talent rose and bloomed.33

Although he ultimately criticizes the loaded choice of title for the series, denying that it is possible to bring Heine “back” to a homeland that was never his, Bin-Gorion is in agreement with its underlying logic: grounded in a Jewish national territory, the Hebrew Heine becomes legible like never before. But though in Perlman’s series Heine and other non-Hebrew Jewish authors are used to underscore the borders rising to delimit the new Jewish polity, neither part of this equation was firm in its place at the time the books were being published. Israeli independence came without a resolution or agreement on the borders of the state, a matter that continues to plague Israel and the region to this day. During the first decade after 1948, Israel was locked with its neighbors in enmity over unresolved borders and disagreements regarding the use of demilitarized zones. The Israeli public sphere was particularly preoccupied by the danger posed by Palestinian infiltrators who were trying to cross the border and reoccupy houses and villages that had been lost to the Israelis in the war. Thus,

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the achievement of the territorial goals of the Zionist movement did not resolve the spatial anxieties that had been driving the movement from the outset. At the same time, though hardly on a similar scale of importance, the place of Heine within the emerging Israeli public sphere was far from undisputed. This became especially apparent around the hundredth anniversary of his death in 1956, the year that also saw, toward its end, the escalation of the regional conflict in the Suez crisis, also known as the Sinai war or as operation “Kadesh.” In comparison, in 1956, the two German states still maintained a clear division of labor as far as Heine was concerned. As Jost Herman describes, it was almost exclusively the German Democratic Republic to the east, where Heine was viewed as a prophet of the Communist Party, that celebrated the anniversary. It would take the Federal Republic of Germany at least another decade before it began even debating Heine.34 In the Israeli public sphere, however, Heine’s ideological relevance certainly was a matter of debate, centering on the question of whether he should be viewed as an apostate and a traitor or on the contrary as an early representative of Jewish national sentiment, an idea that goes back to Moses Hess in the 1860s, Shimon Bernfeld in the 1890s, and Max Brod in the 1930s. The debates that erupted in 1956 expose some of the nerve centers that defined Israeli society in its first decade and offer a test case of how negotiations were carried out about this definition. To mark the anniversary, the Schocken library in Jerusalem organized an exhibition of Heine manuscripts from Salman Schocken’s private collection, and several daily newspapers reported on this and marked the anniversary with Hebrew translations, biographical sketches, assessments of his work, comments on the question of his Jewishness, and discussions of his relevance to Israeli culture.35 Laudatory notes came from all sides of the political camp: Ab”a Achimeir, revisionist and founder of the militant nationalist group Brit ha-birionim, published a column titled “You Are Our Brother,” claiming that Heine’s writings were proof that “no man has the mental power to turn his back on his origins [kur mahtsavto]” and that his wit and critical bite were signs of his Jewishness.36 Both Ma’ariv and Yediot, mainstream evening papers, made headlines of the fact that some of the letters displayed in the Schocken archive are signed with a Star of David.37 And the Labor Movement newspaper Davar published a commemorative issue of its literary supplement that centered on Heine’s contemporary relevance. The portrait that emerges from the issue is contradictory, claiming for Heine both Jewish and German identity and celebrating him at the same time as poet and political visionary.38 Similarly, the front page of the literary supplement of Ha’aretz was

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devoted to essays by a group composed primarily of prominent representatives of the German-Jewish community in Israel, especially Jerusalem, of the 1950s. These “Yekkes,” as they are colloquially referred to in Hebrew, were refugees from Nazi Germany, and they constituted a major part of the fifth and last wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine in the pre-state era. Their arrival changed the Jewish settlement in Palestine economically, since they brought capital, and culturally, since many of them were architects, artists, scholars, and authors. In the first decades of statehood, they continued to play central cultural, intellectual, and political roles.39 The Ha’aretz issue devoted to Heine includes a brief essay on Heine and Schopenhauer by Ernst Simon, philosopher of education and one of the founders of Brit Shalom, a group that had agitated for a binational Jewish-Arab state in the 1920s and 1930s. The other contributors are the Czech Zionist and author Miriam Scheuer; the director of the Jewish National Library, Curt Wormann; the German-Jewish literary scholar and poet Werner Kraft; and the Russian-born architect, translator, and poet Shmuel Shetel.40 It was only the last of these, the only non-Yekke in the group, who reproduced Heine’s words in German (transcribed in Hebrew letters) on the pages of the Hebrew newspaper. His brief essay compares different Hebrew translations of several of his poems and concludes that the task of translating Heine is very difficult, especially when the audience was raised on the originals. As we will see in a moment, this last assumption was evidently unfounded. The Heine that emerges from the Ha’aretz essays is not the carrier of Jewish essence described by Achimeir, but rather a figure of paradoxes, much like the one described by Leah Goldberg in her 1936 essay. Indeed, like Goldberg, these German-speaking Israeli intellectuals use the occasion of the anniversary to take stock of a German-Jewish past and to reflect on their continuing allegiance to it in a cultural sphere that was turning away from the languages and cultures of the diaspora and in which German was sometimes associated exclusively with the perpetrators. “We can no longer understand,” Scheuer seems to be lamenting, “what Heine meant for generations. Generations of assimilation, for whom he was a Jew who acknowledged his Jewishness and felt certain without the shadow of a doubt of his Germanness.” She adds: “Heine’s life is an illustrated chapter of the history of Jewish emancipation. His poetry belongs in the intermediate field between Jewishness and Germanness.”41 For Scheuer, Wormann, Kraft, Shetel, and their audience, however, that field was no longer a viable location, no longer available as a context in which you could speak, a context to which you could point deictically.

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Indeed, the enthusiastic chorus was soon joined by other voices; these were the sounds of the second Heine debate in Hebrew letters, a conversation that sometimes echoes the earlier German monument debates. The first of them, Osnat Yavin, in a letter to the editor of Ha’aretz entitled “Heine and the Sabras” written a few weeks after the Heine commemorative issue was published, presented itself as unassuming enough, especially in contrast with the learned German-Jews who had filled the pages of Ha’aretz’s commemorative Heine issue. The crux of Yavin’s argument is pragmatic in nature and refers to the absence of a shared context of discourse within which the Heine essays published by Ha’aretz can make sense. “I admit and am not ashamed: I was not born in Germany and did not have the privilege of being educated in its culture. I am nothing but a native of this country and I was educated here in Hebrew,” writes Yavin.42 As she continues to describe the extent of her ignorance, she maintains a neutral tone: “Of Heine I knew, until now, nothing more than his name. At some point my ear also picked up the fact that this great German poet was a converted Jew. Nevertheless, his language, his thought, his entire spiritual world is completely foreign to me.” But the ignorance, she underscores, is not hers alone, and it encompasses not only other members of the “educated Hebrew youth,” but also “the sons of the old settlement of Sephardic and Ashkenazi origin and the sons of the entire new emigration, from Morocco to Bulgaria.” In light of this, Yavin expresses her surprise at the editorial choice to devote an entire issue to commemorate the German-Jewish poet and to allow “the elders of the German emigration” to discourse at length “on the assumption that the entire public of readers, or at least most of it, is well acquainted with the details of Heine’s poetry.” In the absence of a shared context of discourse, the issue and other publications and broadcasts appear as an “artificial cultural commotion that fills our space.” In other words, the letter highlights the replacement of what Wormann had described as “the intermediate field between Jewishness and Germanness” with “our space,” demanding that the Israeli newspaper speak to the latter, rather than the former. The contrast between Yavin, the native Hebrew speaker, and Scheuer, Simon, Kraft, and Wormann, the German immigrants (and, to a lesser extent, Shetel, who had emigrated earlier than them and from eastern Europe), is so neatly presented that in response to an inquiry about the controversy Dov Sadan—jokingly?—questions the authenticity of the letter.43 His skepticism goes further and extends to those who reacted to the letter in indignation, diagnosing Yavin’s ignorance as a symptom of the shortcomings of the Israeli education system. Such a reaction, penned by a member of the editorial staff, had indeed accompanied the letter when

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it was first published, and others followed in the form of numerous letters to the editor.44 From Sadan’s point of view, however, the pandemonium is unjustified, since Heine is only one of the authors regretfully not taught in Israeli schools and probably less important than Byron, Pushkin, or Mickiewicz. His response is printed under the title “Intellectuals on the Heine Debate,” a survey that includes responses to Yavin’s letter from the poets Uri Tsvi Grünberg (who summarily states that the young woman was right), Yitshak Shalev (who is more skeptical and joins those who find fault with the education system), and others.45 At the center of the broader “Heine debate,” however, was not the new Israeli education system but rather its municipal governments, which grappled with the question whether Heine was “Strassewürdig,” that is, worthy of having a street named after him, to paraphrase the term that had animated the German monument debates.46 Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, which traditionally has been associated with left-wing labor Zionism, had already named a neighborhood for the author during the British Mandate period, but in the larger, more conservative cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, a Heine street was in fact a legal impossibility, since both had municipal bylaws that prevented streets named for Jews who had converted. For a while, Tel Aviv was to resolve the issue by naming a southcity alleyway “Rabbi of Bacherach,” in recognition of one of Heine’s great Jewish figures. The battle for an Israeli Heine street continued for decades, though mostly far away from the attention of the Israeli public. In fact, this side of the debate is also concerned with the same questions raised by Perlman’s choice of ligvulam, the biblical catchword paraphrasable as “back to their own borders,” as the title for the series in which he published his Heine translations. Now that the territorial ambitions of the Zionist movement had been achieved in the form of the state of Israel, how was the space within those borders to be administered? What would be its cultural values, and could they accommodate a Heinrich Heine street? And what were the implications, political but also cultural, of the fact that the return to “their own borders” did not leave Israelis within an internationally agreed upon, stable border? The relations between these two perhaps seemingly only loosely related sides of the existence of the state in its first decade—the uncertain geopolitical conditions and the disagreements regarding a shared cultural frame of reference and whether Heine could possibly belong in it—emerge in an op-ed by another prominent German-Jewish voice in the Israeli media during this time, Robert Weltsch, who published “Dictators in Egypt and Heinrich Heine” in early April 1956. Like Ernst Simon, the Prague-born

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German-Jewish Zionist and journalist had arrived in Palestine in the wake of the Nazi seizure of power and had become a supporter of binationalism and Jewish-Palestinian coexistence. In the 1950s he was living in London, working as a foreign correspondent for Ha’aretz; it was in this capacity that he published the column. Appearing at a time when Israeli attention was focused intently on its Egyptian neighbor as the signs that tension along the border would escalate into an armed conflict multiplied, the short text presents a bold comparison between the Jewish and Arab national movements and their respective relations to space: “perhaps Nasser and his friends learnt nationalism also from the Jews. For the nationalist Jews claim that the Jews of all the world are united by their national purpose and should concentrate their forces on the execution of unified national plans embodied by the State of Israel.” Nasser similarly—so the logic of Weltsch’s argument goes—strives to unite the larger Arab world under the umbrella of an Arab nationalism embodied by the Egyptian state. Heine enters the argument in a seemingly loose, associative manner. Weltsch professes to have stumbled on a reference to Nasser’s predecessor, Muhammad Ali, in Heine’s writings, through which he was leafing to mark the hundredth anniversary of the author’s death. But once he has entered, Heine’s role in Weltsch’s argument is decisive: he becomes the linchpin for a broader consideration of historical analogy, a topic that was also of great interest to Heine himself as evidenced, for example, by his comments on the Paris Salons of the 1830s. The conceptual link is made via Max Brod’s biography (incidentally a book that was dedicated to Robert’s cousin, Felix Weltsch, as I discuss above), which, in Weltsch’s summary, depicts “Heine as one of the great precedents of the modern national Jew, who 50 years after Heine’s death would necessarily become a Zionist.” But if Heine would necessarily become a Zionist, the question arises, does that imply that Muhammad Ali necessarily led to Nasser? And does it further entail that the dynamics of imperial interest in the Arab world analyzed by Heine in the 1830s must be applicable to the present? “There is no doubt,” he concludes, without answering any of these questions conclusively, “that Nasser is well aware of Egyptian history.”47 The problem of borders—their porosity and their controversial nature—would continue to play a central role in Israeli politics and culture in the following decades and remains decisive to this day. And the figure of Heine curiously continues to haunt Israeli literature, to borrow once more Franz Rosenzweig’s charged term, especially at points at which it is preoccupied with the nexus of space and identity, with its own porous borders, and with the threat of the dissolution of the space of the Jewish homeland. My final two examples illustrate this in striking fashion.

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Novelizing Heine As generations of Zionist and Hebrew pre-state authors, from Bialik and Herzl to Alterman and Hameiri, had intuited, the foundation of a Jewish state created not only a new political reality for Jews in Palestine but also a new set of pragmatic conditions for Hebrew authors. With the political transformation brought by the war of 1948 and the foundation of the state, the frame of reference within which literary texts could gesture performatively had been altered as well, as can be demonstrated by briefly considering the first line of one of the quintessential War of Independence poems. This is Haim Gouri’s “Hineh mutalot gufotenu” (“Here Lie Our Bodies”), which was written during the battles in 1948 and published a short time later. The initial rhetorical gesture with which Gouri opens the poem can be read as a direct response to both Bialik and Alterman, whose poems “City of Slaughter” and “The Silver Platter” had defined the literary discourse of Jewish death in political violence in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike his predecessors, for whom the question of where the poem was spoken remained problematic, Gouri frames his poem as a first-person monologue spoken by the dead soldiers, and their voice is established with a deictic reference to the place of their death: “Here [hineh] lie our bodies.” With that, even as they have died for the foundation of the state, Gouri’s dead speakers are in a fundamentally different position than both the victims of the pogrom described in Bialik’s poem and the paramilitaries in Alterman’s poem. Unlike them, these speakers are located in a space within which performance is possible, a shared context that allows for the deictic gesture to make sense.48 With this deictic gesture, Gouri’s poem defines the space within which and against which Hebrew poetry and prose would operate for decades to come, a shared “here” that either was taken for granted as the new context inhabited by both authors and their readers or, in the case of many important prose works, was to be described in great detail in order to establish its parameters, contours, and borders. Israeli novelists were thus no longer in the position of Herzl, who had fashioned his prose as a spaceproducing technology to anticipate the project of creating the state. Their prose was being written after the state had been founded on the battlefield and while a whole range of social and other technologies were being applied to the creation of Israeli public space. It is impossible here to survey the development of the Israeli novel from this point of view. Instead, I turn to two contemporary novels that grapple with the question of the pragmatic conditions within which their prose operates and do so by turning to the same interlocutor as Herzl and for strikingly similar reasons:

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Heinrich Heine. Like Herzl, Yoel Hoffmann and Haim Beer are sensitive not only to the complexity of Heine’s relation to his Jewish identity but also to his sophisticated moves between prose and poetry and his grappling with the anti-performative nature of prose. These Israeli authors turn to Heine in order to revive the questions that underlie these generic experiments— What is the position or the space from which a Jewish author can speak? Is there a common context or common space that she shares with her audience, within which gestures like Gouri’s hineh are possible? And what does it mean to write against such a shared space?—even as they have seemingly become irrelevant in the age of the Jewish state. Yoel Hoffmann’s experimental novel Bernhard was published in 1989. And as its readers have noted with alternating frustration and excitement, this text is particularly hard to describe, because it does not supply its readers with a plot or round characters, proceeding with a Zen-like minimalism that resonates strongly with Hoffmann’s work as a scholar of Japanese literature and thought.49 The eponymous protagonist of the novel, Bernhard, is a German-Jewish émigré living in Jerusalem during the Second World War. A Yekke like Miriam Scheuer, Curt Wormann, Werner Kraft, Ernst Simon, and others, Bernhard is a philosopher compelled by the death of his wife to reflect on the nature and meaning of life. But unlike many members of the Yekke community, including the ones mentioned above, the fictional Bernhard does not involve himself in scholarship, publishing, or librarianship. Instead, he seems to drift aimlessly through a foreign and sometimes incomprehensible cityscape inhabited by a multilinguistic gallery of characters who can scarcely communicate with each other. The novel ends with the end of the war, which is the occasion for Bernhard to send two letters, to his deceased wife’s sister in Berlin and to a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University. Both missives are presented as tentative letters in a bottle that may or may not arrive at their destination. On the one hand, Berlin, the city that was once Bernhard’s home, has become entirely foreign; by the end of the war, there is no certainty that the recipient or the house that she once dwelt in are still there. The letter sent to the campus of the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus, on the other hand, has a much shorter and safer road to traverse, and yet it is fashioned as an incomplete—impossible to complete—message, faltering before the writer can truly articulate his relation to German philosophy. This atmosphere of dissociation and dislocation finds its correlative in Hoffmann’s fragmented, experimental prose. Hoffmann’s novel brings a German character to Jerusalem in order to examine the effects of that premise on his Hebrew writing and on his

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use of prose. A key concern of his experiment in the novel is the nature and limits of prose, an inquiry directed specifically to the fundamental feature that distinguishes this mode: the fact that its words are printed in sequence and are not repeated or interrupted until the end of the page. In contrast with the elusive nonplot of the novel, which resists summary or paraphrase, the means by which this investigation is carried out are seemingly simple to describe. The novel is fragmented into short episodes, each printed on the left-hand side of a separate page, leaving the reverse side blank; on the left-hand bottom corner of each page, Hoffmann prints the first few words of the episode that will follow on the next page. The brief texts that make up each section of the novel are numbered and centered on the page, leaving space in the margins for the translation of foreign words (mostly German) that are sometimes transcribed in Hebrew and sometimes appear in the Roman alphabet within the text. Though their nature is simply described, the implications of these means are hard to measure. Is this still prose, or rather a form of antiprose? The novel focuses attention on the experience of reading and its pace, offering the anticipatory hint of the next page as a mechanism that is both accelerating and retarding at the same time. But the same device also reflects on the space of prose, its architectonics or layout on the page. And just as Hoffmann’s words only uncomfortably inhabit the page, refusing to become conventional prose, his plot and his characters encounter similar difficulties when it comes to inhabiting the spaces described in the novel. The novel is located in Jerusalem, yet its multilingualism, especially its frequent recourse to German, destabilizes this self-situation.50 Moreover, the novel handles with great deliberation and typical minimalism the place references that produce a picture of the two apartments inhabited by Bernhard, of Mandatory Jerusalem, and of a world gripped by war. The two scales, the local and the global, are ironically superimposed to create a nonspace that houses wordplay rather than a realistic setting for human action: “Towards the end of September the Americans reach the outskirts of Aachen. Gustav lies (because of a stomach illness) in ‘Misgav la-dach,’ [a hospital in Jerusalem, N.R.] and Bernhard goes there every day (but because “Dach” is roof in German and the Hebrew for roof is “gag,” he says absent-mindedly “Misgav la-gag”) in the afternoon and sits with Gustav for two whole hours.”51 The passage constructs contiguity between Aachen and Jerusalem, which is based on the euphonic relations between the Hebrew “la-dach” and the German “Dach,” favoring that associative bordering over the actual map of Europe and the Middle East. This produces a very different type of space, and a very different set of pragmatic conditions, than Gouri’s “hineh,” a rhetorical gesture that

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occurs within a given space, measured by the outstretched arm that points in it. The nonspace that Bernhard moves in is a linguistic space created between the German and the Hebrew languages and providing the paradoxical setting for Hoffmann’s experimental prose. Hoffmann also measures the distance and the proximity between the two languages, German and Hebrew, by having his characters quote Heine. Recalling the function of a quote from Heine in Herzl’s play Princes from Geniusland, here, too, the poet’s words are a kind of code word that allows the characters to situate themselves culturally and allows the author to use that act of self-situation to raise questions related both to identity and to literary genre. But the point of the characters’ self-situating in this case is not to reveal their Jewish identity but rather to emphasize their German cultural allegiances, despite the Nazi genocidal war against Jews in Europe. And Hoffmann’s characters cannot simply quote Heine; this is always a gesture that occurs in a certain place and a certain context, even as it works to destabilize the space constructed in the text and to emphasize the fact that Hoffmann’s prose refuses to construct Jerusalem mimetically as a space within which people can act and gesture deictically. In other words, it insists on revealing its prosaic conditions and differentiating them from the pragmatic conditions of performance. One character that quotes Heine is Elvira Neuwirth, a widow from Vienna who is one of the allusive figures that people the Jerusalem of the novel. The Hebrew text that she recites to Bernhard is a translation of the first stanzas of one of the famous (and often set to music) poems of the Book of Songs and can be read as an astute comment on the poetics and geopolitics of copresence in the literary text.52 In Hal Draper’s English translation: A pine is standing lonely In the North on a bare plateau. He sleeps; a bright white blanket Enshrouds him in ice and snow. (CPH 62)

The version that appears in Hofmann’s novel, Y. Ben Zakkai’s Hebrew translation from 1944, is somewhat different, as an English translation of Zakkai’s Hebrew version reveals: On a High Pasture in the North Stands a lonely pine Covered with a blanket of frost and snow It sleeps and dreams and trembles.53

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Hoffmann does not have Elvira quote the second stanza of the poem, but it is certainly instrumental in understanding his allusion to Heine: He’s dreaming of a palm tree Far away in the Eastern land Lonely and silently mourning On a sunburnt rocky strand. (CPH 62)

The distance between the pine and the palm tree is not only what Heine’s poem describes but also, insofar as the two trees are representations of the speaker and his beloved, the precondition that explains why the poem is necessary. Moreover, through its reference to Yehuda Halevi’s exile poetry (especially his proto-Zionist poem “My heart is in the East but I am at the ends of the West”), the poem also activates an entire discourse about the yearning for the land of Israel, a discourse that was not without its complexities and ambivalences for the young poet who sought his place in Germany. In contrast with the pine, and with Heine who wrote the poem in Europe, Elvira and Bernhard are “far away in the Eastern land,” the home of Heine’s palm tree, though, ironically, the part of the poem that refers to the palm tree and its location is omitted from the dialogue.54 Their conversation about the poem reflects a German-Jewish identity that had gone through a turbulent century since Heine had written the poem and that, in the time represented in the novel, was under the threat of annihilation by the Nazis. By the late 1980s, when the novel was published, Hoffmann was in a position to look back to German-Jewish culture in its moments of crisis and to reassess its legacy for Israeli culture. What emerges is an examination of the shared spaces within which different interlocutors operate—both within the novel, in the representation of the conversation between Elvira and Bernhard, and on the level of reception, in the construction of a conversation between the novelist and his audience—and of the pragmatic conditions that result. In what language, one might ask, is the conversation within the novel, a marker of German-Jewish identity, carried out? The question is hardly a new one in modern Hebrew literature, which in its early years found many different strategies to refer to the fact that the protagonists who were described and quoted in Hebrew were in fact speaking Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, or other languages. Yet rather than opting to use one of these strategies, presenting the conversation about Heine between the widow from Vienna and the widower from Berlin as a symptom of their dissociation from the Eastern land in which they find themselves,

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which must necessarily occur in German, Hoffmann in fact underscores the fact that the poem is translated into Hebrew and that this translation is rooted in the location in which it occurs. When Bernhard asks her “what’s that?” Mrs. Neuwirth answers: “Heinrich Heine, in Palestine,” to which he replies—now briefly in German, written in the Roman alphabet within the Hebrew prose—with a disbelieving “unmöglich” (impossible). Moreover, as Bernhard is quick to expose, the poem is made odd in the process of translation in several ways. The first oddity is revealed inadvertently, when the male protagonist asks what “sut” is, repeating Elvira’s sounding of Ben-Zakkai’s Hebrew translation for “cover.” The more common version of the word, in fact, is “ksut,” though “sut” is an option that appears both in the Bible and, rarely, in Israeli literature.55 Indeed, in his gloss of Elvira’s response to Bernhard’s question—“It is Hebrew for decke” (once more, the word appears in Hoffmann’s prose in Roman letters)—the author translates the German word on the margin of the page with the more familiar Hebrew “ksut.” This makes it ambiguous whether Elvira is meant to be pronouncing the more archaic word or rather to be mispronouncing “ksut” with her Yekke accent and highlights the contingency of the work of translation by making present multiple options for the translation of this single word. The stakes of all of these subtle gestures—adding or omitting the initial k of the Hebrew word for “covering,” switching to the Roman letters for the single German words that appear in the text or refraining from doing so—become clearer in relation to a second passage in which Heine appears in the text. Elvira Neuwirth loves Schiller though actually (she says) she loves Heine even more. “It’s simply unbelievable,” Bernhard thinks, “that you also need legs to love Heine.” Sometimes legs are no more than a proverb (as when one says “A lie hath no legs”) but Elvira’s legs are covered with fine hair (not very old). Bernhard imagines that Elvira is a prostitute who has taught herself to say “eigentlich” [German for “Actually” N.R.] in the right place. Any man who exposes her real nature will earn a wonderful regard (Elvira will be happy, at last, to be herself).56

Here, the German word “Eigentlich” is transcribed in Hebrew letters, much like the German quotations from Heine that appear in transcription in Alterman’s Seventh Column and in Sadan’s commentary of Ben Zion’s translation, for example. Like Herzl, who situates the code word “Heine” at the nexus of a whole range of questions regarding social and artistic

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passing in Princes from Geniusland, Hoffmann weaves Elvira’s happiness to at last be herself into an entire set of discrepancies between authentic and performed identities embodied by the figure of the prostitute, but encompassing also the person who knows how to say “actually” in the right place and to align herself with Heine, rather than Schiller. Even the odd observation that “you also need legs to love Heine” (which perhaps evokes Aristotle’s famous definition of the human as a rational two-legged animal) turns into a meditation on authenticity through Hoffmann’s play on the idiom “a lie hath no legs.” It is equally unbelievable, it seems, that Elvira quotes Heine in Palestine and that her legs take part in her admiration of Heine, though unlike the lie, she does have legs and thus seems more reliable, less unbelievable. The first “unbelievable” is expressed in German, whereas the second is in Hebrew, so what changes in the translation? Bernhard’s second comment on the Ben-Zakkai translation recited by Elvira underscores the stakes of the question, what changes in translation: “But, Bernhard says, Heine’s tree does not tremble. True, says Elvira, Heine’s tree does not tremble, it only sleeps and dreams.”57 This does not necessarily imply that Ben-Zakkai has mistranslated the poem, but rather that the transformation from “Heine’s tree” to the tree that appears when the poem is recited in Mandatory Palestine is somewhat like a wind that blows through its leaves. And like the pine in the poem, all of the other translated words of the dialogue between Elvira and Bernhard are likely to start to tremble as this wind blows through them. Thus, Elvira’s recitation of the poem becomes radically localized, rooted in the context in which it is performed and defined by it. A similar contextualization of Heine’s words recurs in a more recent Israeli novel, Haim Beer’s Lifne hamakom (Upon a Certain Place, 2009). While Bernhard brings a German character to Jerusalem in order to examine the effects of that premise on his Hebrew writing and on his use of prose, Upon a Certain Place does the opposite, bringing a Jerusalemite to Berlin in order to ask whether and how Hebrew literature can exist outside of its new territory in the state of Israel. As he does in several earlier novels, most notably Havalim (The Pure Element of Time, 1998), Beer employs an autobiographical voice that draws on his experiences as a child in an Orthodox community in Jerusalem, as a scholar of Hebrew literature, and as a prominent Hebrew novelist. But whereas Havalim and other autobiographical works focus primarily on the early part of this life experience, marking Beer as an important chronicler of Jewish Jerusalem in the 1940s and the 1950s and of the experience of Orthodox Jews within the Jewish state in its early years, Upon a Certain Place is set in the

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present and documents a series of trips taken by the autobiographical narrator to Berlin, the last of which takes place during the second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. In further contrast with Hofmann’s novel, Beer’s narrative is tightly woven, involving a colorful set of characters, a romantic triangle of sorts and a series of twists and turns. The plot, which I will not attempt to summarize here, might be read as an academic and literary roman à clef, focusing in particular on the world of rare-book traders and collectors. In addition to the different persons that fill it, a series of rare books play the role of quasi-characters in the novel, and their journeys away from the places where they were printed and back to them comprise an important part of the drama of the novel.58 In addition to following the itineraries of these historical books and pamphlets (among them first editions of Else Lasker-Schüler, the suppressed early poetry of Yehiel Dinur, and eighteenth-century Hassidic polemical pamphlets, for example), the narrative tracks the dynamic relation between two additional books: the novel that the narrator had intended to write (titled Milim le-lo eretz, Words Without a Land) and the one he ended up writing. The discarded novel, so the narrator explains, centers on a library containing all of the books ever printed in Israel. The library is located somewhere in North America and is the product of the apocalyptic vision of a Jewish philanthropist, who predicts that it will be the only remnant after the destruction of the state of Israel. The unwritten novel could be read as a rueful or skeptical comment on the identification between “Hebrew Literature” and “Israeli Literature.” As a description of Jewish life after the destruction of the state of Israel—as ironic as his account of the fantasies of destruction that fuel the creation of the library may be—it posits that prose will play the role of a replacement for space once again, as it did for authors such as Bialik and Herzl. In this case, instead of imagining the space of a Jewish state by describing it in prose, as Herzl had done in his Old-New Land, the novelistic prose contained in the archive becomes the only trace of the existence of a Jewish state after its destruction. But of course Words Without a Land remains unwritten, and thus we only read about it, rather than reading it. As a mirror image to these “words without a land,” Upon a Certain Place, the book that was written, presents itself as words that exist in a complex relation to the territorialization of Hebrew literature within the state of Israel, words that have a land but sometimes choose to travel away from it. The narrator repeatedly underscores the fact that he must leave Israel in order to write his Hebrew prose, but on the other hand he resolutely decides that his own library must stay in Israel, rather than being sold to the library of an

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American university, ultimately aligning himself with the Israeli context of Hebrew literature. The completed novel’s Hebrew title—Lifne ha-makom—activates a range of theological and political associations for the term “place” or “makom,” most prominently the fact that this is one of the Hebrew designations of God.59 But the novel also supplies several concrete locations as possible referents for the designation ha-makom. In his own comments on the book, Beer describes two of these places and ties them together: At the two ends of an imaginary line of about 2900 kilometers, two pits were dug up in the second half of the twentieth century. The first pit was opened in the modern part of Jerusalem at the campus of Giv’at Ram, and above it were built the reading rooms of the National Library. The other pit was dug up in the heart of Berlin, right under the legs of the passersby of the Opera Square, known as Bebelplatz today, and above it there is a rectangular plate of glass. The pit in Jerusalem is filled with numerous manuscripts, documents, books, brochures, newspapers and journals, vinyl records and cassette tapes, films, videos and DVDs, and other modern forms of archiving and storing information. The pit in Berlin, in contrast, is empty. In it there is nothing but white, smooth shelves, exactly fourteen of them, which in the Hebrew Gematria produces “Yad.” These are shelves on which there will never stand a thing. But neither the separating distance between the two pits nor the imaginary line that connects them have the power to hold the sonic waves that carry the silence and the whispers, the swallowed words and the crying clearly heard, the despair and the hope from one pit to the other. This line, whether it is a thread or a cord, runs in both directions, and it is the topic of my book Lifne ha-makom.60

The second of these pits is Micha Ullman’s memorial to the book burning at Bebelplatz, with which I opened the preface to this book. This is one of the important focal points of the visits of Beer’s narrator to Berlin and the basis for his dialogue not only with Ullman’s artistic work but also with Heine as a figure that represents the German-Jewish past and clarifies the stakes of the novel’s engagement with the question of the spatial contextualization of literary texts. The narrator is brought to the monument by Salomon Rapoport, a Berlin book dealer, who describes it as “the world national library.”61 Like Hoffmann’s Elvira Neuwirth, Rapoport recites Heine’s words to his interlocutor in Hebrew translation, and like Hoffmann, Beer chooses to

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highlight this fact of translation, moving back and forth between German and Hebrew, and to truncate Heine’s words. At the monument, Rapoport and the narrator enter a theological debate concerning the place of God in a world filled with evil. To make a point, the narrator quotes the Book of Psalms, to which his interlocutor responds by wondering whether “here in the land of Ashkenaz, the merciful and forgiving Lord may prefer Martin Luther’s version to the original Hebrew of David his messiah” and recites the same psalm in German. Immediately thereafter, the narrator tells us that Rapoport “translated for me the immortal Heine quote that is recited every time one mentions the burning of books.”62 But even though the German original had appeared only a few pages earlier (it is quoted partially and without explicit attribution to Heine in Rapoport’s description of his father’s testimony after he had witnessed the aftermath of the book burning at that same square in 1933), here, the phrase remains unquoted for the reader to fill in from her own knowledge. With this gesture, Beer perhaps responds to Ullman’s invitation to the visitors of the monument—to perform Heine’s words anew in a new context—with a form of refusal. Within his prose, Beer seems to be saying, he will not stage such a performance, but rather only allude to words spoken by two copresent interlocutors. Beer connects this scene at the monument directly to a key preoccupation of the novel: the relation between contemporary Hebrew writing and the territory of Israel and the struggle to “delineate a new space for my work,” in Berlin.63 The novel ends in Dusseldorf, where the narrator is staying at the Heinrich Heine Institute, an honor he has earned, he speculates, because “many years ago, I joined the handful of Hebrew authors who were pained by the ostracism of the poet by his own people and, on their own accord, changed the name of a central Tel Aviv square and called it after him.”64 As an alternative redress to the municipal concessions to lovers of the German poet that have occurred in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,65 Beer produces a comical fictional inversion in his novel: instead of a street named after Heine, he creates a person named after two Dusseldorf streets associated with Heine: the street of his birth (Bolker Strasse) and the street that currently houses the Heine Institute (Bilker Strasse). This is the novel’s Viennese literature professor, a sharp parody of a self-important and not particularly wise scholar who is nicknamed “little Heine” because he bears the euphonic double name “Bilker-Bolker.” He is the ultimate prosaic character, drawn after the model of Heine’s philistines such as August von Platen or the Marquise Gumpelino and creating an effect closely akin to Heine’s experiments with the limits of the deictic powers of prose. Rather than being depicted as walking on a city

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street, “little Heine” is made to refer to two of them, defying spatial logic in favor of a uniquely prosaic logic of his own. Beer thus finally declines to answer the question definitively of whether and how Hebrew literature can exist outside of its new territory in the state of Israel. Instead, with his construction of “Bilker-Bolker” he shows that Israeli prose continues to confront the question of its pragmatic conditions and is thus still closely aligned with the dilemmas that had animated the prose of Heinrich Heine. Hoffmann and Beer both use Heine’s name and his poetry as a medium that situates their Israeli prose in relation to a series of translations between different languages, spaces, modes, media, and literary genres. These Israeli novels thus do not stage themselves as an answer to the questions posed by earlier generations of Zionist authors such as Herzl and Bialik. Instead, they show that prosaic conditions continue to prevail, forcing literature to come up with ever more creative solutions when it comes to self-situation.

Conclusion

This book shows how a literary term—“prose”—was utilized to solve a set of historiosophic, political, and pragmatic problems encountered by Zionist authors. In different ways, these problems all have to do with mediation, with getting from one place, language, or state of being to another. Indeed, it is precisely prose as a medium and the kinds of translations and remediations often involved in its production that allow it to do the political, philosophical, and literary work it does for these authors. When prose emerged as a signifying practice in Europe during the Middle Ages it was characterized most prominently by its ability to abstract from the particular time and place of performance, producing a discourse that replaces the individual. This new discourse strives to be comprehensible to a reader far distant in time or space from the moment of its production, and therein lies the most important difference between it and performance. As we have seen in several instances, the seemingly innocent pronoun is one of the most effective litmus tests to recognize the transition from prose to performance, because deictic expressions are the first thing that will require scaffolding in order to make sense once they have been removed from the time and space of a performance. In different contexts in which prose is highlighted as an emergent discourse, the use of pronouns and other deictic expressions has to be recalibrated so that they can do their discursive work of pointing in the absence of a world-space in which to point. However, the emergence of prose is not an event that ever comes to completion. Rather, the possibility of such an emergence continues to constitute a productive point of reference for authors for centuries and into the present. And the operations that they carry out to position themselves on the spectrum between prose and performance often indicate their understanding of the world within which they write. Texts that are positioned on the different positions along the spectrum from prose to performance are all ultimately readable and comprehensible in print, away from a performative context, especially to a reading audience that has grown accustomed to filling the gaps. In other words, a reader who encounters a deictic expression that appears in print without the relevant information and spatial descriptions that will allow her to

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follow the pointing finger and recognize the place or object pointed at is not likely to put the text down in exasperation but will rather fill in from her imagination who “he,” “she,” or “you” might be. Yet there is a substantial difference between texts that require such filling in and texts that supply all the information, using deixis only anaphorically, when they can point back to given information in the discourse. Indeed, since the two ends of the spectrum are ideal types, by definition, no phenomenon is purely prosaic or purely performative. But texts that operate under what I call “prosaic conditions,” as many of the texts I read in this book do, choose to highlight their dissociation from a given context by lingering on the act of constructing their context from within the text or, in some of the more interesting cases, by resisting such constructions in places where they are generically to be expected. And it is by reading such operations of highlighting and resistance that we can begin to understand the emergence of the prosaic from the idea of prose. This line of argument opens new roads in the study of modern Jewish literatures in more ways than one. First, it exposes the connections between German thought and literature and modern Hebrew literature, connections that have for decades mostly been ignored and only now are starting to enjoy a revived scholarly interest. Second, it positions the experiments of Jewish authors within a larger context of the transformation of Jewish spaces in modernity. This is because the questions that I ask about literary texts are pragmatic in nature: How do different literary discourses relate to the contexts in which they are written? And, more importantly, what kind of assumptions do they make about the availability of that context to their readers? Finally, it shows us how modern Jewish authors not only react to, but also participate in the formative discourses of modernity, in this case, the larger drama of the ongoing emergence of prose and the world of prose. I find a usable model from which to begin drawing this conceptual history in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics. The basic Hegelian insight that continues to animate Jewish authors such as Heine, Herzl, and Bialik is that the transformation of possibilities for human action has altered the possibilities open to literature. For Hegel, prose provides both a figure for the historical narrative he constructs in the lectures as well as the rhetorical mold within which this narrative is cast. The emergence of prose can be seen as the core of the movement forward of art charted in the lectures: what emerges with prose is abstraction, or the need to create space in language, rather than simply position a sculpture, a painting, or a declaiming performer/poet within a given space. This abstraction will ultimately lead to the famously dire conclusion of the lectures, that the current condi-

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tions (which Hegel dubs the “current prosaic conditions”) are no longer suitable for art. But it is the power of language to compensate for this abstraction with its own spatial metaphors and spatial descriptions that ultimately becomes the great rhetorical experiment of the lectures. This experiment becomes fertile ground for the authors that I proceed to read in the following chapters of the book. Hegel’s rhetoric ultimately makes its way into some of the foundational texts of Zionist literature and continues to echo in contemporary Hebrew literature. Of course, this is not to say that modern Jewish and Zionist literature is inherently Hegelian. Rather, the point is that Hegel’s writing is the clearest place in which to get a sense of a dynamic that reappears in many places, among them, interestingly, modern Hebrew literature. This first move in my argument also indicates another important strategy that I employ throughout the book, namely, reading authors both as the strongest source of theoretical insight on their work and as readers and reactors to the work of others. This becomes most pronounced in my sustained and detailed engagement with the reception of Heinrich Heine (but other examples are Herzl’s reading of Zola or Bialik’s reading of Abramovitsch). Heine is the direct link between Hegel and the Zionist authors that are the subject of the second part of the book, because he was on the one hand an acute, but deeply subversive reader of the philosopher and on the other a persistent (though sometimes elusive) point of reference in the selfunderstanding of modern Jewish authors. Heine goes a good part of the way with Hegel in his perception of world history and the world history of the arts, and yet, as others have noted, he strategically undoes Hegel’s writing of Jews out of his idealized version of the European public sphere. In my reading, Heine emerges as an author whose central preoccupation is the place of literature in the public sphere, a question that gets refracted and complicated by his acute perception of the fact that different modes and media occupy space differently. Heine’s writing, and in particular his experimental movements between modes and media, are the source from which I reconstruct his theoretical position on the question of literature as a medium and on the stakes of using the literary medium (in contrast with other possible media) as a tool of self-positioning. As I show, Heine intuits the problematic described by Godzich and Kittay in their essay on prosaics: the emergence of prose as a new signifying practice produces pragmatic challenges (or, to adopt and expand Hegel’s term, it produces “prosaic conditions”). For Heine, this is precisely what makes prose and the prosaic such a useful tool in working through the dilemmas of finding his place as a Jew writing in German in the age of emancipation. Heine’s own prose is often written not in “compliance”

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with the pragmatic prosaic conditions, but rather to flaunt and thus highlight them, making the gap between performance and prose visible. For example, Heine is fond of playing with the deictic nature of pronouns, planting them in his prose text without supplying the context that would allow them to point and thus supply them with a clear referent. Heine’s reader is confronted with the realization that, in the absence of description, a prose text does not resolve this issue, and this is because of its pragmatics, specifically because it is removed from space. In other words, I read some of Heine’s important prose pieces as experiments with the nature and limits of the new prosaic conditions, experiments that document the ongoing process that is the emergence of prose. To create these experiments, he carefully spells out the prosaic conditions under which these texts are written. These aspects of Heine’s literary project—his interest in the differ­ences and intersections between different media and his insistence to insert prose into this intermedial zone of interference—define its afterlife in the often stormy history of Heine reception. Some of Heine’s most acute readers picked up on the experiment with prose, using it as a tool with which to highlight their situatedness in writing while pointing out how problematic it is to be situated in the modern literary world. I recast the history of Heine reception as a succession of medial transformations, or remediations. In fact, the pattern is of circles of remediation that bridge text and context: with each new act of medial translation, new contexts are created, and they in turn lead to further remediations and further texts. For example, the numerous musical adaptations of Heine’s lieder into art songs echo in the efforts of some of Heine’s translators and of the Hebrew readers who discussed him. The translations, in turn, became opportunities for new compositions, this time of Hebrew songs, in which both the liturgical tradition and the new Zionist culture offer a counterpoint to the tradition of the German art song. My central examples are from the Zionist reception of Heinrich Heine. Here, Heine’s dilemma of finding his place—the dilemma that was worked through by experimenting with the pragmatic conditions of writing prose—is answered by imagining the Jews in a national space of their own. This does not mean, however, that the generic experimentation is over; on the contrary, the experimentation becomes all the more acute because the gap between the aspiration for a national homeland on the one hand and the lack of a recognized and internationally (as well as internally) agreed-upon space that would provide this home on the other must be bridged, a challenge taken on primarily by the literary imagination. Herzl and Bialik, two of Heine’s most astute Zionist readers, both

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situate their own written prose in a network of modes and media, reflecting in particular on the necessity to construct spaces in prose. For both, the flip side of this necessity, the power of prose to create space, becomes an important part of the allure of this medium. For Herzl, this makes prose into the ideal tool for presenting a blueprint of the future Jewish state. His Zionist novel presents prose as a technological instrument, akin to the inventions celebrated by the characters that lead his readers through Old-New Land. In other words, Herzl stages his Zionism as a solution not only to the political dilemmas of Jews in Europe, but also to the prosaic conditions diagnosed by Hegel and Heine. In fact, Herzl’s novel is about prose and the age of prose in more ways than one: some of the basic rhetorical features that I analyze in relation to this figure are encoded into both its relation to history and its relation to space. In the creation history of Bialik’s “City of Slaughter” we encounter another fascinating example of the relations between translation, remediation, and the creation of prose, here through a case of failure to produce prose. Bialik’s big problem is how to “translate” performed testimonies into prose. He is unable to transport the testimonies that he has recorded in Kishinev away from the space in which they were performed. The gestures and the confusions of the witnesses will not turn into prosaic, anaphoric deictics that manage to point to persons, things, and places previously alluded to and constructed within the text. The choices involved in writing “City of Slaughter” highlight the formal ramifications of this unfinished struggle to turn the testimonies into prose. In the final chapter of the book, I ask: what are the implications of this reading of the literary history of Zionism for our understanding of contemporary Israeli literature? For authors such as Bialik and Herzl, prose becomes a useful tool to negotiate the gap between the ideal space of the national homeland and the given place in which they were writing. It stands to reason, then, that the function of prose would shift once authors were writing in Eretz Israel and even more so once that space had been defined as the Jewish state. Of course, the borders of that nation-state have never been agreed upon, either internally among Israelis nor externally, in negotiation with Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East. Hence, the powers of prose as a space-defining discourse continue to shape its role in modern Hebrew literature.

Notes

Preface 1. Novalis, Novalis Werke, 464. On the—impossibly broad—topic of changes in historical consciousness, see in particular Koselleck, Futures Past; Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. 2. Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 90. 3. Ibid., 94. 4. For Franco Moretti, it is “prose as work, and, more precisely, as work of analysis” that embodies the spirit of the nineteenth century as a “serious century.” He suggests that prose became the symbolic form of the bourgeois century by enabling the stylistic achievements of the novel of the nineteenth century: extended description and free indirect discourse. Moretti, “Serious,” 382. 5. Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” 245, 253. 6. The most salient way of linking back would be prose rhythm as described by Werner Krauss. Krauss, Grundprobleme, 41–42. 7. Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” 257. In an earlier— perhaps more quirky—version of the argument, Viktor Shklovskii describes the rhythm of prose as a force that can propel a worker or a walker forward, since “it is easier to walk with music than without it. Of course, it is just as easy to walk while talking up a storm, when the act of walking disappears from our consciousness. In this sense, the rhythm of prose is important as a factor leading to automatization.” Paradoxically, Shklovskii describes continuity— the avoidance of pauses or interruptions—as the closest parallel of the strictly ordered interruptions that form the rhythm of a work or a marching song. For him, this explains the force of prose to carry forward not only the legs of a walker but also the energy of a narrative. Shklovskii, Theory of Prose, 14. For Shklovskii, artistic prose is distinguished precisely by its disruption of the continuous rhythm, but he leaves the mechanics of this disruption unexplicated. Another twentieth-century scholar who comments on the continuous rhythm of prose is Northrop Frye; for him “the rhythm of prose is continuous, not recurrent, and the fact is symbolized by the purely mechanical breaking of prose lines on a printed page.” Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 263. See also Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 164–66. Werner Krauss gives a simple and illuminating exposition of prose rhythm and of its persistence in modern prose. Krauss, Grundprobleme, 41–42. 8. Prorsa, then, might be the mother-goddess of what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” the birth of every human as the advent of something entirely new in the world. In a related vein, Gary Saul Morson uses the term “prosaics” to describe an openness to the contingencies of the future and to the freedom

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inherent in human existence in time. This concept of prosaics was first put forward by Morson and Caryl Emerson in their work on Bakhtin. There, they define prosaics as a “philosophy of the ordinary and the messy.” Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, 23. Morson elaborates the concept of prosaics, focusing it on an anti-deterministic understanding of temporality that emphasizes freedom and the existence of alternative possibilities (what he calls sideshadowing). Morson, Narrative and Freedom. See also the discussion between Morson, Thomas Pavel, Caryl Emerson, and Michael André Bernstein in New Literary History: Pavel, “Freedom, from Romance to the Novel”; Morson, “Contingency”; Morson, “Sideshadowing and Tempics”; Bernstein, “Keeping the Conversation Going: Prosaics and Literary Theory.” Since I focus on space in my analysis of prose, it is worth noting that Morson has argued against the spatializing of texts that is inherent to structural analysis insofar as it perceives all of the parts of the text as simultaneous; however, in what follows I arrive at a spatial conception of the text from a different direction, as a feature of the pragmatic conditions that define different modes and genres. 9. This assumption is the foundation of a number of studies of the emergence of prose, for example: Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose; Spiegel, Romancing the Past; Stempel, “Die Anfänge der romanischen Prosa im XIII. Jahrhundert.” 10. Quoted in Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 98. 11. The Latin—“tota scriptura trahit originem a prosa. Nam rithmi et metra sunt mendicata suffragia, que a prosa originem trahunt”—is quoted in Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 57. 12. Vico writes in the Scienca Nuova (1725), it is a “necessity of human nature” that “poetic style took place before prose style.” Quoted in De Gennaro, “Croce and Vico.” A similar perception of the primacy of poetic speech to prose recurs in Klopstock’s Von der Sprache der Poesie (1758) and in Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1771), both quoted in Barck, “Prosaischpoetisch,” 93. On Vico as anticipating German ideas of the late eighteenth century, in particular the similarities and differences to Herder, see Auerbach, “Vico and Aesthetic Historicism.” On the competing positions of poetry and prose in the eighteenth century, mostly in France, see Krauss, Grundprobleme. Friedrich Schlegel translates the question of the origins of prose into the terms of media history when he suggests, in his Geschichte der europäischen Literatur, that prose begins with the emergence of writing. Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 112–16. See also Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 98. Finally, in an interesting variation on the theme of the belatedness of prose, Condillac maintains in his Essai sur l’origin des connnoissances humaines (1746) that prose begins with philosophy, suggesting that Pherekydes of Syros, a philosopher, was the first to “take the risk of writing prose.” Ibid., 91. As Barck notes, Jacques Derrida refers to Condillac in his description of the history of philosophy as “devenir-prose du monde” in De la grammatologie (1967). Perhaps coincidentally (and perhaps not so) Derrida is one of several important twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—among them Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas—who use the term “prose” in highly interesting ways.

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Wohlfarth, “The Politics of Prose and the Art of Awakening: Walter Benjamin’s Version of a German Romantic Motif”; Robbins, Altered Reading, 79. 13. Molière, Théâtre complet, 4:334. 14. This last sense is articulated most clearly in the introduction to Greene and Fowler, where the choice to make prose the red thread that connects a group of interdisciplinary studies of early modern culture becomes a litmus test for trends in literary studies and its broadening historical interests. 15. Monsieur Jourdain, it probably comes as no surprise, is the hero that reappears in many contemporary (meaning here something like post-1945) studies of the concept of prose. Northrop Frye coined the phrase “Jourdain fallacy” to claim that written prose is different from speech. Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 268 n. 9. Godzich and Kittay offer a fascinating reading of Moliere’s text. Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, ix–x. 16. At the center of this scholarship one might locate the philological work on vernacular prose as a new phenomenon in the European Middle Ages (see references in note 9 above). Around this center we find studies that span two millennia of the emergence and invention of prose: Goldhill, The Invention of Prose; Fowler and Greene, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World; Alter, Invention. 17. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 326. 18. There have been attempts to “rehabilitate” poetry from within the Bakhtinian framework, that is, to claim that his views on poetry are not in fact as negative as they have seemed to most of his readers. For example, Eskin, “Bakhtin on Poetry.” 19. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 327. 20. Ibid., 286. As mentioned above, Bakhtin’s “prosaics” have been theorized as the basis of an ethical-existential understanding of literature in the work of Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. Not surprisingly, similarly affirmative descriptions of prose recur elsewhere in the canon of theoretical writings on the novel. And with them the tendency to view prose in cosmological proportions reappears as well. Georg Lukacs’s famous opening lines to his Theory of the Novel depict a current world where the totality enjoyed by earlier ages—the happy ages “when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths”—is lost. As Margaret Cohen has argued (in her spoken remarks as an introduction to a conference on “The Maritime in Modernity” at Stanford University in the spring of 2005), Lukacs’s choice to explain his thoughts on the fundamental shifts in the relation between consciousness and the world by painting a picture of the transforming globe, and specifically his choice to open with the navigatability of the world as the key problem of modernity, is not mere rhetorical ornament. 21. Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, 34–76. 22. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, viii. 23. The scholarship on Hebrew literature and Jewish culture has had a lot of interest in space in the recent decade. See, for example, Ben-Ari and Bilu, Grasping Land; Hirschfeld, “Locus and Language: Hebrew Culture in Israel 1890–1990”; Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism”; Glaser, “The Marketplace and the Church: Jews, Slavs and the Literature of Exchange, 1829–1929”; Fonrobert

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and Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space”; Mann, A Place in History. 24. Chowers, “The End of Building”; Yiftachel, “Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time, and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine”; Troen, Imagining Zion; Zakim, To Build and Be Built; Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality: The West Bank as an Architectural Construction”; Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness.”

Chapter 1 1. The edition that became the standard text of Hegel’s aesthetics is based on lectures held in Berlin between 1820 and 1829 and edited by Hegel’s student Heinrich Gustav Hotho. In accordance with conventions of the time, Hotho’s editorial work was aimed to produce a coherent whole, rather than to preserve existing tensions and contradictions. Hence, the authenticity of this text as a text authored by Hegel is questionable. Jaeschke, Hegel-Handbuch, 421; Schneider, “Neue Quellen zu Hegels Ästhetik.” For my purposes, this is not a serious handicap; I am interested in the figurative language employed in the lectures—from which I will quote extensively in this chapter—insofar as it is symptomatic of the first half of the nineteenth century and indicative of the solution that a number of writers came up with in thinking about and theorizing prose. Nevertheless, I follow convention in referring to the author of the text as Hegel throughout this chapter. For an extremely clear overview of the lectures, see Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie. 2. On another important opposition described in the lectures, see de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics.” 3. Knox translates the latter heading—which reads in German “gegenwärtige prosaische Zustände”—with the more cumbersome “Prosaic State of Affairs in the Present” even though elsewhere he too translates “Zustand” as “condition.” 4. Herbert Marcuse comments on the concept Weltzustand in Reason and Revolution, 95. 5. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into the contested question of the place of the monarch in Hegel’s political philosophy, which ultimately amounts to the question whether Hegel was a democrat. F. R. Cristi surveys the different positions in Cristi, “The Hegelsche Mitte.” 6. As Cristi mentions, in his political writings Hegel rejects the notion of an “abstract monarch”; in addition, some interpreters of Hegel mobilize the opposition abstract /concrete to explain the implications of Hegel’s distinction state /civil society. Cristi, “The Hegelsche Mitte,” 606–18. 7. As described in detail by Franco Moretti in The Way of the World. 8. Heller, In the Age of Prose, 4. 9. Ginsburg and Nandrea have a different take on this oft-quoted passage of the Aesthetics. They bring it into dialogue with the model of prose and prosaic consciousness that arises from the modernist writing of Virginia Woolf: “Syntax—the ability to combine things horizontally, ‘articulate,’ add, and extend—suggests the relational, the dependent, and the joined. But because it is a linear medium, prose lacks the capacity to articulate simultaneously, and

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thus pulls irresistibly back toward the individual, the separate, the unifocal. Syntax is thus proposed as both what can ‘involve’ one in this world of prose (world of relations) and as what occludes relations, retaining the discreteness of that which is joined while channeling for the reader a single central course.” Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” 253. 10. Like the comments on the monarch in the current prosaic conditions, quoted above, many of Hegel’s comments on prose and the prosaic are closely related to his political philosophy. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into a thorough discussion of Hegel’s ideas on the state and civil society, their transformations in the course of his career, and their complex legacy. From the vast literature, I would mention Marcuse, Reason and Revolution; Pelczynski, Hegel’s Political Philosophy, Problems and Perspectives; and Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Specifically on the place of the present in Hegel’s political philosophy, see Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 27–29. 11. As Walter Kaufmann, among others, has stressed, this is more of a received knowledge about Hegel’s philosophy of history than a view substantiated by a careful reading of the philosopher’s works. Kaufmann, Hegel. Haun Saussy reflects on linearity, and the lack thereof, in Hegel’s history, in relation to Hegel’s use of the term “prosaic”: “Whatever happened to Hegelian ‘linearity’? The forward movement (prorsa oratio) of history keeps leaping ahead of itself, saying two things at the same time, undoing its recognition plots by enacting them backward or all at once: making, in a prose medium, the turns and returns of verse. Hegel, as historian, ought to write in prose, but he succeeds no better at that than at being literal.” Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, 183. 12. Saussy discusses this recurrence, as well as the description of the emergence of prose in Hegel’s Philosophy of World History. Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic. On the emergence of prose in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion see Nancy, The Muses, 51. 13. “It is for this reason, after all,” Hegel here adds, almost as an afterthought, “that the completely prosaic consciousness only arises when the principle of subjective spiritual freedom [first] on its abstract and [later in its] genuinely concrete form, succeeds in attaining actuality, i.e., in the Roman and then later in the modern Christian world” (ALA 1:316–17). The bracketed clarifications are by Knox, the English translator. 14. Again, this touches on a huge topic in Hegel—his philosophy of religion and his understanding of monotheism—on which I am not able to expand here. An overview is available in Dickey, “Hegel on Religion and Philosophy.” 15. Hermann Braun makes a different, but associated point about spatial figures in Hegel’s language as they relate to the role of history in his thought. “Hegel’s Diagnose einer weltgeschichtlichen Epochenwende in der ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes’ bringt die architektonische Metaphorik, die zuvor in der Kosmologie zu Hause war, in die Darstellung der geschichtlichen Lebensverhältnisse ein.” Braun, “Welt,” 486. 16. Both divisions are rooted in the recent tradition of thought about art upon which Hegel follows, as noted in Wicks, “Hegel’s Aesthetics: An Overview.”

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Christianity plays an important role in this narrative, as underscored in Nancy, The Muses, 47ff. 17. This recalls Hegel’s great interest in the Dutch exploits of engineering, which he ties directly to his interest in Dutch painting. For an exposition of Hegel’s ideas on architecture, which situates him in relation to twentiethcentury discussions in the philosophy of architecture, see Whiteman, “On Hegel’s Definition of Architecture.” A detailed and inspiring reading of Hegel’s description of the pyramids is presented in Brodsky Lacour, “From the Pyramids to Romantic Poetry: Housing the Spirit of Hegel.” 18. Indeed, he describes the entire system of art forms as a Pantheon, “dessen Bauherr und Werkmeister der sich selbst erfassende Geist des Schönen ist” (VA 1:124). Eva Geulen focuses on the role of the museum rather than the temple to make a related point. In her discussion of the role of the museum in Hegel’s historical description (the end of symbolic art is the transformation of art into the museum), she reminds her reader that while Hegel was writing his lectures on fine arts he could observe the construction of the first state museum in Berlin from his window. Geulen, The End of Art, 39. 19. This passage supplies some of the vocabulary—indeed it supplies the setting—for Heidegger’s famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 143. On Heidegger’s position in relation to Hegel see Geulen, The End of Art. 20. On sign and symbol in the lectures see de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics.” 21. For a description of Hegel’s reading and misreading of Kant’s third Critique, see Brodsky Lacour, “From the Pyramids to Romantic Poetry: Housing the Spirit of Hegel.” 22. For example: Bolter, Remediation. 23. Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence of Prose, 34. 24. Ibid., 35. In adopting these terms—transition from performance to prose— from Godzich and Kittay, I am of, course, not assuming that performance-based discourses disappeared completely from the world (or the Western world) after the thirteenth century, which is where they locate the emergence of prose. Still, literary prose followed a route that precluded performance in the traditional sense and could retrieve elements of it only as an anachronism no longer fully available. 25. Though, as Veronique Fabbri emphasizes, Hegel’s description of poetry as the limit case of art does not make it the paradigmatic, exemplary mode of art, a position reserved for classical sculpture. Fabbri and Vieillard-Baron, Esthétique de Hegel, 166. 26. As is often the case, Knox’s English translation clarifies and reduces the ambiguity, or enigmatic nature of the title by turning “prosaic” into an adjective attached to “work of art.” 27. Veronique Fabbri goes further than I do in assessing the consequences of Hegel’s ambiguity in the context of the distinction of poetry and prose and claims— from a deconstructive point of view—that the two are ultimately conflated. To me this indeed seems to go a little bit too far, since Hegel is expending a lot of

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effort in these passages to supply a clear definition of the distinction between the two. Nonetheless, I agree that the ambiguity here is highly instrumental, that is, it is doing philosophical work for Hegel, and must be considered as more than a rhetorical flaw or weakness. 28. The outbidding is achieved by the “different coinage of the mind,” the modern currency of prose described by Erich Heller. Heller, In the Age of Prose, 4. 29. The second of the two—Prosa der Welt, prose du monde—famously reappears, in two divergent senses, neither of which is coextensive with Hegel’s use of the phrase, in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault. Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 110–11. 30. Roland Greene points out the crucial standing of prose in early modern considerations of the relations between different worlds—fictional and nonfictional: “prose maintains its franchise as a medium tractable enough to stand for ‘the world’ even as the making of worlds is explicitly under consideration, a ‘reality’ that can withstand the interrogation of reality itself. . . . I would argue that prose and worldmaking go together in [the second half of the sixteenth century], the former enabling the latter to show itself in process, the latter treating the former as a privileged site.” Fowler and Greene, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, 180. 31. Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten, 3. See also Braun, “Welt,” 457ff. One of the key figures discussed by Blumenberg as describers of the “world of worlds”—Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle—occupies an important position in the emergence of prose as a legitimate discourse by the eighteenth century (as mentioned in the preface): he was celebrated by contemporaries who sympathized with his modern, anti-classicist position as a writer who achieved the ideal combination between the “fire of poetry and the reflection of prose.” Barck, “Prosaisch-poetisch,” 90. 32. Braun, “Welt,” 486ff. 33. Gumbrecht, “Everyday-World and Life-World as Philosophical Concepts: A Genealogical Approach.” 34. On the fundamental role of this development for the history of literature and the novel, see Moretti, The Modern Epic, 35–56. René Girard constructs a distinction between the “worlds of the novel” and the “novelistic world” in Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; Self and Other in Literary Structure, 212– 13. As discussed in the preface, the association between prose and a multiplicity of worlds is articulated (contrastively) by Bakhtin as well: “The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language, all equal in their ability to conceptualize and to be expressive, is organically denied to poetic style.” Bakhtin, Dialogic, 286. 35. On the exclusion of Jews from Hegel’s world history, see Presner, “Jews on Ships; or, How Heine’s ‘Reisebilder’ Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History.” On the exclusion of Africa, see Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of Ashanti.” And, on the exclusion of India, see Guha, History at the Limit of World-History. 36. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, 7–47.

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Chapter 2 1. On the personal and cultural circumstances of the radio address, see Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno, 22–25, 229–30. Katja Garloff discusses Adorno’s use of the figure of the wound and ties the essay to other facets of Adorno’s thinking in Garloff, Words from Abroad, 28–39. See also Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 108. 2. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” 80. 3. Adorno’s embarrassment, however, is not the same as the discomfort of his German radio audience, presumably reminded by the subject of the broadcast of their own implication in the recent past of Nazi obliteration of Jewish presence in German culture. Instead, his is an embarrassment of the potential identification with Heine, who like him had been a German-Jewish émigré. In fact, it is the embarrassment of an entire generation of German-Jewish readers in the wake of Karl Kraus’s annihilating caricature, “Heine and the Consequences” (1910), an essay that portrayed Heine as the ultimate German-Jewish parvenu and the single-handed destroyer of German literary language. Kraus, Heine und die Folgen. Kraus accuses Heine of commercializing the German language through the French import of the feuilleton. Thus, his argument also rests implicitly on a distinction between Heine’s poetry and his prose, though his preference is the reverse of Adorno’s. Indeed, as Paul Reitter has shown (and I will return to this point below), Kraus elsewhere showed a deep appreciation for Heine the poet. Reitter makes the point that “Arendt famously regarded Heine as the paradigmatic Jewish ‘pariah’ of the nineteenth century, as the embodiment of the Jewish critical spirit. In Kraus’s text he belongs mainly to the opposite category. Kraus’s Heine is a Jewish parvenu.” Reitter, The Anti-Journalist, 105. He further notes the striking fact that Arendt assigns Heine and Kraus to the same category of a “Jewish revolutionary tradition.” Ibid., 224, n. 131. 4. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” 82. 5. Adorno, “Towards a Reappraisal of Heinrich Heine.” 6. Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” 85. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl paraphrases the argument, Heine’s poetry “prevails by making use of its own deficiency, by pointing to its own Bruch (rupture).” Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 10. On the logic of inversion applied in the essay, see also Plass, Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature, 115–52. 7. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” 281. 8. Ibid., 279. 9. The fascinating publication history is presented in detail in Weissberg, “Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and the Writing of (Auto)biography.” 10. My understanding of Arendt’s study of Varnhagen is indebted to Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. 11. The Book of Songs is thus a natural place to begin the investigation of Heine’s relation to the world of prose, as it is often described as the work of a post-romantic, expressing his disillusionment with poetry. As Michael Perraudin describes, the volume measures the distance between poetic imagery and the “real world to which such material is entirely inadequate.” Perraudin, “The Experiential World of Heine’s Buch der Lieder,” 42.

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12. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 89–101. 13. The translation appears, along with extensive information on Halevi’s use of biblical allusions, in Cole, The Dream of the Poem, 164. For more on intertextuality in Halevi’s famous poem, see Brann, “How Can My Heart Be in the East? Intertextual Irony in Judah Ha-Levi.” Andras Hamori writes about intertextuality in one of Halevi’s maritime poems in Hamori, “Lights in the Heart of the Sea: Some Images of Judah Halevi’s.” On Halevi’s figurative deployment of the cardinal directions, see also Saperstein, “Halevi’s West Wind.” 14. Presner, “Jews on Ships; or, How Heine’s ‘Reisebilder’ Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History.” 15. Levin, “Commentary,” 254–56. 16. Pazi, “Die biblischen und jüdischen Einflüsse in Heines ‘NordseeGedichten.’ ” 17. Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi, 250. See also Pazi, “Die biblischen und jüdischen Einflüsse in Heines ‘Nordsee-Gedichten,’ ” 5–7. 18. Another similar example is Heine’s attack on Ludwig Börne, which begins by describing when and where he first saw him, long before he had read him or become his acquaintance, a rhetorical gesture that anchors the invective that follows it within the believable framework of the eyewitness report (SS 4:9). 19. In my account of the details of the polemic I rely on Höhn, HeineHandbuch, 244–45. 20. Hermand, “Heine Contra Platen: Zur Anatomie eines Skandals,” 108–9. 21. The fact that Heine was, in significant respects, wrong about Platen is not insignificant, but also not material to my argument. Hubert Fichte has written eloquently about Heine’s misunderstanding and the homophobia that has marked Platen reception well into the twentieth century. In his biographical note on Platen, Jeffrey Sammons argues that Heine’s perception of Platen’s politics was distorted and based on partial knowledge. Fichte, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Zur Geschichte der Empfindungen des Grafen August von PlatenHallermünde”; Sammons, “August von Platen.” 22. Hermand, “Heine Contra Platen: Zur Anatomie eines Skandals,” 114. Hermand stresses the fact that the Platen controversy should be read in the context of Heine’s comments on a variety of issues, ranging from contemporary classicist architecture to the writings of Goethe. Casting Heine in the role of an engaged writer in the model of Bertold Brecht, he furthermore suggests that Heine delivers an anticipatory critique of later forms of literarily and politically conservative formalism such as the writings of Stefan George or Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach. See also Lukács, “Heinrich Heine as National Poet,” 144. 23. Interestingly, Heine elsewhere (in the same section of the North Sea cycle that got him into trouble with Platen to begin with) compares Byron with Walter Scott and emphatically favors the later. “Wahrlich, in diesem Augenblicke fühle ich sehr lebhaft, dass ich kein Nachbeter, oder besser gesagt Nachfrevler Byrons bin, mein Blut ist nicht so spleenisch Schwarz” (SS 2:237). For a perspective on Heine’s relation to Byron that emphasizes the poetic correspondences, see Winkler, “Weltschmerz, europäisch: Zur Ästhetik der Zerrissenheit bei Heine und Byron.”

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24. Here, Heine not only attacks his opponent at his Achilles’ heel, making slurs about his homosexuality, but also competes with him in revealing and reviling his own Achilles’ heel, devoting a far larger part of the text to an openly antisemitic discourse. In fact, as Hubert Fichte notes, Platen made a similar rhetorical gesture when he initiated the homophobic slurring by insinuating that Heine and Immermann were lovers in Das Romantische Oedipus. Fichte, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Zur Geschichte der Empfindungen des Grafen August von Platen-Hallermünde.” 25. For a much broader discussion of Heine’s relation to Greece and its contemporary admirers, see Holub, Heinrich Heine’s Reception of German Grecophilia. The third chapter deals specifically with the Platen polemic. 26. Shedletzky, “  ‘Niemals von jüdische Verhältnissen sprechen’: Zum jüdischen Subtext in Heines Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand,” 61. For more information about possible references to Heine’s social circle in The Baths of Lucca, see Veit, “Heine’s Polemics in ‘Die Bäder von Lucca.’ ” 27. A striking example of Heine’s exoteric use of the term prosaisch is the first pages of the Journey from Munich to Genoa, which are crowded by Prussian and prosaic objects (Preussisch / prosaisch: I am tempted to believe that the alliteration did not go unnoticed by Heine himself). These are all lightheartedly derided by the speaker, as if he were making a concentrated effort to indicate that the text that follows is not written in the prosaic mode. Heine describes “the arch-prosaic, widow’s-savings-bank countenance” of a fellow traveler from Berlin (JI 7; SS 2:316); this leads him to the Berlin houses “yawning prosaically at each other” and to the “Great Fritz,” “that prosaic, wondrous hero” (JI 9; SS 2:317–18). 28. Seeba, “ ‘Keine Systematie’: Heine in Berlin and the Origin of the Urban Gaze,” 89. 29. Heine’s relations to Hegel, who had been his teacher in Berlin and with whom he had made brief personal acquaintance in the city’s salons, are not a straightforward matter. Scholars such as Georg Lukacs and Karl Löwith were influential in emphatically placing him in the Young Hegelian left and hence emphasized his reception of Hegelian philosophy. Lukács, “Heinrich Heine as National Poet”; Löwith, Der Hegelsche Linke. Others have taken a more philological approach, proposing to map in great detail where Heine agrees and where he disagrees with the philosopher. See, for example, Lefebvre, Der Gute Trommler; and Krüger, Heine und Hegel. More recently, Heine’s reception of Hegel has been fruitfully considered in relation to his Jewish identity, and his involvement in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums. See Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels; and Presner, “Jews on Ships; or, How Heine’s ‘Reisebilder’ Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History.” This has allowed a refocusing of the interest from Heine’s later works written in exile in Paris (a focus that, as Presner shows, was motivated by a wish to establish Heine’s intermediate position between Hegel and Marx) to the earlier literary works, prominent among them the Reisebilder. While in this sense I follow in the footsteps of Briegleb and Presner, my reading differs from theirs in that I am not interested in presenting Heine’s “counterreading” or deconstruction

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of the philosopher, but rather in his adoption of certain elements of Hegel’s aesthetics. Heine’s reception of the lectures on aesthetics is, in itself, a matter of some uncertainty and dispute. Readers are generally divided into those who emphasize the fact that he could not have been present in the lectures, and could not have read them, since they were published after his death (see, for example, Kurz, Künstler, Tribun, Apostel: Heinrich Heines Auffassung vom Beruf des Dichters) and those who postulate that he must have been well versed in the philosopher’s ideas on art, through his acquaintance with him and with close members of his circle, such as Gans, who was to participate in the work of editing the lectures on aesthetics (see Friedländer, “Heinrich Heine und die Ästhetik Hegels”). Jost Hermand’s discussion of the polemic with August Platen, mentioned above, to quote another example, identifies Heine’s position on the irrelevance of classic and medieval forms for contemporary art as thoroughly Hegelian. Hermand, “Heine Contra Platen: Zur Anatomie eines Skandals.” See also Gray, “Free Lancing: Heine’s ‘Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand’ and Literature Between Service and Servitude.” 30. In this same context, Heine takes an emphatically anti-mimetic position about art, and coins the term “supernaturalist,” which would ultimately be translated into the French “surrealist.” Betz, “Commodity and Modernity in Heine and Benjamin.” 31. See also Lukacs’s remarks on these statements and on Heine’s understanding of his place in literary history: Lukács, “Heinrich Heine as National Poet,” 132ff. For further discussion of the dialogue with Hegel in Heine’s ekphrastic writings, both in the 1831 report and in the later Lutetia, see Zantop, Paintings on the Move; Geulen, “Nachkommenschaften: Heine und Hegel zum Ende der Kunstperiode.” 32. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” 33. Heine thus anticipates Lukacs’s reformulation of Hegel’s diagnosis of the current prosaic conditions to recognize a “change in the transcendental points of orientation [under which] art forms become subject to a historicophilosophic dialectic . . . [a] genre-creating principle.” For Lukacs, “the novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness,” whereas Heine hesitates between different modes and media in positioning himself in relation to these conditions. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, 41–42. 34. The image of Heine as a general who commands a fleet of modern cannons when he writes his biting prose was attractive to some of his contemporary admirers as well. The explicit association between warfare and prose was used, for example, by Ludolf Wienbarg in his Aesthetische Feldzüge: Dem jungen Deutschland gewidmet (Aesthetic Campaigns, Dedicated to the Young Germans) a series of lectures published in 1834. Wienbarg’s metaphoric title finds its correlative in his discussion of contemporary prose, an art of war in which, in Wienbarg’s opinion, Heine has achieved the greatest excellence. For Wienbarg, the vulgar quality of Heine’s prose is an indication of its “kriegerischen Charakter, ihren Kampf mit der Wirklichkeit.” He praises Heine for abandoning “den flüchtigen Ruhm, Liederdichter zu sein,” and replacing it with a greater

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honor: “auf dem kolossalen, alle Töne der Welt umfassende Instrument zu spielen, das unsere deutsche Prosa darbietet.” Wienbarg, Aesthetische Feldzüge, 299–300. Wienbarg’s perception of prose in fact resonates with Heine’s not only because of the battle metaphor, but also because of the implication that prose replaces other media in a kind of dialectical Aufhebung that, in subsuming them, makes them irrelevant, when Wienbarg celebrates prose as a musical instrument that can express all the tones of the world. 35. Heine, “Letter to Moses Moser, October 30, 1827.” 36. Benveniste, “The Nature of Pronouns,” 218. 37. Richard Gray discusses the dialogue with earlier literary models—in particular, Petrarchism—in Ideen: Das Buch le Grand. See Gray, “Free Lancing: Heine’s ‘Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand’ and Literature Between Service and Servitude.” 38. Citation itself, on the other hand, is described within Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand as a deictic operation, situated concretely in space. In other words, through its relation with other texts, the text does set up an alternative context, or space, for deixis, if only tentatively and jokingly. Rather than using pronouns to point at bodies, it points at books, authors, and the cultural sphere in which they move, by using citation. Remarking on his digressive tone, the speaker notes in his defense that he has not “yet done any proper quoting—not of prices, but of writers—and yet quoting from old and new books is a young author’s chief pleasure, and a couple of profoundly learned quotations adorn the whole man” (HJ 122; SS 2:284). He proceeds to offer an original form of citation, in which one refers neither to the abstract content of a text, nor to information about its publication, but rather to the concrete, material presence of the book and the space it and its author occupy in the world. “I consider it advisable to quote all obscure authors by the numbers on their front doors . . . these obscure authors will always themselves possess a little copy of their longforgotten slim volumes, and to obtain them, you have to know the numbers on their front doors” (HJ 123; SS 2:284–85). Heine seems to be ridiculing his contemporaries in favor of some earlier, romantic existence where quoting was not necessary; at the same time, in a typically ironic twist, he is also ridiculing the bookishness, or philological thoroughness, that often comes with his contemporaries’ romantic interest in the past. In place of the world of books and independent, disembodied scholarship, he sends his readers into a world of authors that inhabit addresses, who could be tracked down by a curious reader. This is, we should also remember, a reflection of Heine’s own experience of authorship in constant struggle with censorship, in which the responsibility for the written text follows the author home in the form of potential sanctions by authorities. (On this sense of the term author, see Foucault, “What Is an Author?”) 39. In his Heine biography, Max Brod ties it to Heine’s frustrated love for his cousin Amalie and states that “I have never been able to read without emotion this simple epigraph, with its prose rhythm, its queer pseudo-literary attribution, and its repetition that makes it almost a litany.” Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Revolt, 56. Others have suggested alternative interpretations of the

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epigraph and its repetition: Itta Shedletzky suggests that it refers to the unhappy relations between Jews and Gentiles in the German-speaking world. An Altes Stück (old play) with a long history, this relation is likened to a frustrated love affair in which the Jews have decided that their non-Jewish surroundings are liebenswürdig (worthy of love), but are never accepted, a sore point to which Heine repeatedly returns, as if the veiled reference to it were an incantation. Richard Gray, on the other hand, sees the threefold repetition of the motto as an accumulation of senses: the phrase appears three times because it is to be understood within three contexts: the romantic, the political, and the poetic. Shedletzky, “ ‘Niemals von jüdische Verhältnissen sprechen’: Zum jüdischen Subtext in Heines Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand,” 54; Gray, “Free Lancing: Heine’s ‘Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand’ and Literature Between Service and Servitude,” 50. For a philosophic perspective on the trope of the “old story” in Heine, see Pinkard, “Introduction,” xxix. 40. Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels; Presner, “Jews on Ships; or, How Heine’s ‘Reisebilder’ Deconstruct Hegel’s Philosophy of World History.”

Chapter 3 1. Heine reception is a rich field of study in its own right. The key points of reference in this field are Galley and Estermann, Heinrich Heines Werk im Urteil Seiner Zeitgenossen; Goltschnigg and Steinecke, Heine und die Nachwelt; Gelber, The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine; Special issue of Germanic Review 74, no. 4 (1999). 2. Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied; Gesse-Harm, Zwischen Ironie und Sentiment. Peter Shea has assembled an extremely useful database of Heinrich Heine compositions to be found at http://webcgi.oit.umass.edu/~shea/query.html. Another musical adaptation of Heine’s work is Richard Wagner’s “Fliegende Holländer,” which is loosely based on an episode from Heine’s prose work Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski. In this case, we have a multilayered chain of remediations: the theater performance described by Heine’s narrator is transformed into prose and then “retranslated” into the language of performance in Wagner’s libretto, composition, and production of the opera. 3. Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied, xix. 4. Kramer, Music and Poetry, the Nineteenth Century and After; Kurth, “Music and Poetry.” 5. Barthes, “The Romantic Song,” 288. 6. Minor, “National Memory, Public Music.” 7. Barthes, “The Romantic Song,” 287. 8. Ibid., 289. 9. Cone, The Composer’s Voice. 10. Cone, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?” 184–85. 11. The underlying logic of Cone’s revision of his position is that if they were to share the irony, Heine and Schumann would be sharing a context—a world— within which the irony could do its work. As poet and composer, he contends,

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they in fact inhabit two separate worlds and—he seems to imply—could not possibly inhabit a shared space of irony. More recently, scholars have found reason to attribute irony to Schumann and, by implication, to position him in a shared space with Heine. Beate Julia Perrey, Sonja Gesse-Harm, and Bertold Hoeckner all read Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a sophisticated fulfillment of early romantic poetics and as a bold reinterpretation of Heine’s poetry. Hoeckner highlights the productive interplay between unity and disintegration in the cycle to depict Schumann as a conveyor of “his poet’s paradoxical double experience of wholeness and fragmentation” and reads Schumann’s choice and sequencing of the Heine poems in terms closely related to my explication of the dynamics of presence and absence in the Book of Songs in the previous chapter. Thus, he focuses on both “Wenn ich in Deinen Augen seh” and “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,” describing each of the songs as a significant moment of transition in terms of the cycle’s staging of the storytelling situation. Hoeckner, “Paths Through Dichterliebe,” 74, 80. See also Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetry. Sonja Gesse-Harm likewise describes Schumann’s lied compositions as embodying the principles of romantic poetics. Gesse-Harm, Zwischen Ironie und Sentiment, 267–75. 12. Peter Shea’s online catalogue has 140 entries for this poem, among them a handful of English-language versions, a composition of the Russian translation by Rimsky-Korsakov, and a version in Swedish. See my discussion of the poem in the previous chapter. 13. Hoeckner describes this moment in the poem—and in Schumann’s composition—as a “Stimmungsbruch” in the mold of Adorno’s diagnosis of “Heine the Wound.” Hoeckner, “Paths Through Dichterliebe,” 73. 14. The monument debates have been documented extensively by the art historian Dietrich Schubert and Germanists Paul Reitter and Dietmar Goltschnigg; for my purposes, a brief overview of the debates and their stakes will suffice. Goltschnigg, Die Fackel Ins Wunde Herz; Reitter, “Heine in the Bronx”; Schubert, “Jetzt Wohin?” Schubert’s book provides a broad overview of the different phases of the debate and discusses the monuments that were constructed over the years. It also includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary resources on the monument debates. 15. Sammons, “The Restoration of the Heine Monument in the Bronx.” Kaiserin Elisabeth was a great admirer of Heine, in whom she saw an embodiment of the feminine culture that she wished to propagate against the masculinism and antisemitism that was prevalent in her society. This is discussed at length in Schubert, “Jetzt Wohin?” 115–44. 16. As Paul Reitter characterizes it, the Kolbe monument design is “abstract enough to allow almost any Heine fan to find ‘their Heine’ in it.” Reitter, “Heine in the Bronx,” 331. 17. This list appears in Schubert, “Jetzt Wohin?” 197. Schubert surveys the support for the monument by these and many other public figures throughout the book. 18. Bartels, Heinrich Heine: Auch ein Denkmal, 288, 375. 19. Dehmel, “Ein Heine Denkmal” 117.

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20. Neuhuber, “Der kranke Jude und der grosse Künstler: Richard Dehmels Gedicht ‘Ein Heine-Denkmal.’ ” 21. Dehmel, “Ein Heine Denkmal” 118. 22. Kraus, Heine und die Folgen. 23. Reitter, “Heine in the Bronx,” 334. 24. Bialik, Kol kitvei Hayyim Nahman Bialik, 237. 25. Werses, “Ha-sefer ha-ivri,” 117. Hamutal Bar Yoseph describes the reactions to the monument debates in the Hebrew press more broadly in BarYosef, “The Heine Cult in Hebrew Literature of the 1890s and Its Russian Context.” 26. Bialik, Kol kitvei Hayyim Nahman Bialik, 237. 27. Iris Parush describes Frischmann’s unique conception of national cultural revival, a conception that departed dramatically from both the territorial and the spiritual branches of Zionism, in Parush, “‘Melekhet mahshevet-tehiyat haumah’: Ha-zikah bein biqoret ha-sifrut shel Frischmann le-vein ha-idiologiyah be-mifneh ha-me’ah ha-19.” 28. This gesture divides him from the position staked out by Ahad Ha’am, for example in his essay “Tchiyat ha-ruach” See also Bar-Yosef, “Ha-hitqablut shel Heine ba-sifrut ha-ivrit be-shnot ha-tishim be-heqsherah ha-rusi,” 320. 29. Moss, “Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochializa­ tion, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919.” 30. Venuti’s examples of such cases of translation nationalism are China under the late Qing dynasty and Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars. The latter context, in which authors such as A. W. Schlegel and Schleiermacher were active as translators and theoreticians of translation and its nationalist merits, was without a doubt familiar to many of the participants in the field of translation and the discussions on it in Hebrew literature in its early decades. 31. This was S. Allerhand’s “Bat ha-daaga,” which appeared in a publication titled Kochvei Yitzhak in 1853. The reference appears in Lachower, “Heinrich Heine be-ivrit: Me’ah shanim le-moto, bibliyographiya (1853–1956).” This has been a valuable resource for me in what follows. 32. Israel Ish-Berlin, “Shnei Ariel: Be-’ikvot Heine.” 33. Heine, Ketavim nivharim. 34. See the comments on the poem in Shmeruk, “Introduction.” 35. Parush, “‘Melekhet mahshevet-tehiyat ha-umah’: Ha-zikah bein biqoret ha-sifrut shel Frishmann le-vein ha-idiologiyah be-mifneh ha-me’ah ha-19.” 36. Moss, “Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochializa­ tion, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture, 1917–1919,” 206. 37. Katzenelson, “Preface,” xxxvii. 38. This reading of the conversion is very prevalent, but rather than cite a long list of references (which are available in Lachower’s bibliography, mentioned above) I direct the reader’s attention to one interesting example: S. Ben Zion’s commentary on his translation of the poem “Disputation” from Romanzero. S. Ben Zion, “Havikuach.” Ben Zion goes to great length to emphasize Heine’s preferential treatment of the Rabbi over the priest he is debating and to debunk the notion that Heine expresses his own opinion when he gives the queen the

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last word in the poem and has her say that “I don’t know which one is right— / But I’ll tell you what I think / Of the rabbi and the friar / Both of them alike, they stink” (CPH 688). I will say more about Ben Zion as a translator of Heine in the final chapter. Ben Zion, “Havikuach.” 39. Bernfeld, “Ah rahoq,” 218. 40. Ibid., 320. 41. Frischmann, Mikhtavim al dvar ha-sifrut, 91ff. 42. Indeed, in a heated response, Gershom Bader Hacohen accuses Frischmann himself of plagiarism, and lists works that are putatively derivative of Heine and others. Hacohen further argues that Frischmann’s flaunting of his intimate knowledge of Heine’s poetry, a knowledge that allows him to recognize the influence on Peretz, is provincial and petty. Bader Hacohen, “Be-oznei isha.” 43. Frischmann, Mikhtavim al dvar ha-sifrut, 50–51. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. In his comments on the controversy, Chone Shmeruk focuses on Frischmann and Klausner as the main interlocutors, excluding Lilienblum from his account. Interestingly, Shmeruk does not mention Heine as a reference point in the discussion on plagiarism, discussing instead the influence of French symbolism and Polish neo-romanticism and the tensions between a universal perception of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, which allows for liberal borrowing from nonJewish culture, and an anxiety about the limits of both languages. Shmeruk underscores that Frischmann misunderstood Peretz completely, whereas Klausner was on the right track but still did not understand the complexity of Peretz’s position entirely. Shmeruk, Peretses yi’esh-vizye: inṭerpreṭatsie fun Y.L. Peretses Bay nakhṭ oyfn alṭn marḳ un kriṭishe oysgabe fun der drame, 4–8. 46. Lilienblum, “Divrei Zemer,” 20. 47. A matter discussed extensively in Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels. 48. Klausner, “Shirei ahavah,” 55. 49. This reading of the use of the poem by Hebrew critics echoes readings of Heine’s love poetry, in particular the poems of unrequited love, as allegories of his disappointment with assimilation to Christian German culture. Shedletzky, “ ‘Niemals von jüdische Verhältnissen sprechen’: Zum jüdischen Subtext in Heines Ideen: Das Buch Le Grand.” 50. Reitter, “Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question,” 92. 51. Central Zionist Archives, H-3084. All subsequent quotes of this text are from this file. 52. The concept of a “Muckerdenkmal” appealed to other observers of the debate. Karl Henkell composed these rhymes: “Der Stumpfsinn kann den Geist nicht verdauen / Zu Düsseldorf am Rheine / Er wird sich selber ein Denkmal bauen / Anstatt dem Heinrich Heine.” Quoted in Selbmann, Dichterdenkmäler in Deutschland, 175. 53. Critical readers of the novel, from Odessa-based cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am, to Herzl’s fellow Viennese journalist Karl Kraus, to the post-Zionist scholar Daniel Boyarin, have suggested that it simply isn’t. Herzl’s national fantasies, a version of this critique goes, are tailored to Gentile tastes; his plan

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to remove the Jews from Europe is meant to turn them into a nation among others, and in particular to make them more like the Germans. Ironically, this reading implies, Herzl’s Jewish nationalism is the perfect realization of his early fantasies of complete assimilation. Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, Mimicry.” On Ahad Ha’am’s review, see Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 195–99. On Kraus’s critique of Herzl see Reitter, “Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question.” 54. Herzl, ONL 251. 55. Shulamith Volkov has described German antisemitism as a “cultural code,” a discourse adopted to signify alliances and allegiances beyond antiJewish sentiments. Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany.” Paul Reitter has adopted the term to describe Karl Kraus’s use of Heine as a code word in his polemics in Reitter, “Karl Kraus and the Jewish Self-Hatred Question,” 144–45. 56. Gelber, “Heine, Herzl and Nordau: Aspects of the Early Zionist Reception,” 144–45. 57. In this sense, these texts are symptomatic of what Michael Stanislawski describes as a position shared by Herzl and other Zionists early in their careers: “[They] acted as if their Jewishness had no bearing on their lives, their careers, their worldviews, their Kultur. They neither disavowed their Judaism nor proclaimed it publicly, believing (or pretending to believe) that it was essentially irrelevant to their lives.” Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle, 9. 58. Herzl, Prinzen aus Genieland, 22. 59. Letters to Viennese editor, April 17, 1879, and to Heinrich Kana, July 8, 1879. Herzl, Briefe, 1:72–75. 60. Herzl, Das Buch der Narrheit, 196. Of course, the reference to the author and the reader, in itself, is not unique to Heine and Herzl. Nevertheless, I contend that Herzl’s use of this stylistic element refers directly back to Heine. 61. For an engaging account of Herzl’s journeys, and his conscious selffashioning as a travel writer, see Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 110–15. 62. Herzl, Das Buch der Narrheit, 234. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 228.

Chapter 4 1. This is a tradition that—to take two examples—begins with revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s enthusiastic reading of the novel and continues in Shimon Peres’s recent book, in which the former foreign minister takes Herzl on a personal tour of contemporary Israel. In the guise of repeatedly surprising Herzl with both achievements and complications that the early Zionist did not anticipate, Peres makes the point that ultimately the miracle that Herzl foresaw did come true. Shavit, “Utopiyot hevratiyot be-tsiyonut”; Peres, The Imaginary Voyage. Even more recently, Labor Party Minister of Education Yuli Tamir stated in an interview that Herzl’s novel is her model for what the state of Israel should look like. Ushpiz, “Herzl, Altneuland, zo ha-nushah.”

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2. Post-Zionist critics have often pointed out the gaps between the plan and its inception. See, for example, Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, Mimicry”; Gluzman, “Ha-kemihah le-heteroseqsu’aliyut: Tsiyonut u-miniyut be-‘Altneuland.’ ” 3. Wegner, Imaginary Communities, xxix. 4. As Fredric Jameson conjectures, it is difficult to supply a generic definition of the utopia precisely because it is “rather an ad hoc combination of various genres at any given time.” Jameson, “Morus: The Generic Window,” 443. 5. Löwenberg is different from most of Herzl’s earlier literary characters in one crucial sense—Herzl mentions explicitly that he is a Jew and ties his despondency not only to his love troubles, but also to the problematic situation of the Jews in Europe (see especially AN 17ff.). 6. See the introduction and chapter on Thomas More in Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World. As Fredric Jameson notes, More’s Utopia turns into an island in a feat of engineering, “an extraordinary anticipation of the great public works projects of modern or socialist times.” Jameson, “Morus: The Generic Window,” 447. In this sense, More also anticipates the engineering operations that were of interest to Herzl in Old-New Land. 7. The first of these is used by the members of the new society, but explicated only in very general terms, as a stage between collectivism and individualism, between capitalism and socialism. It seems safe to assume that Herzl was using it in conscious reference to Proudhonian anarchism: in 1895 Herzl published excerpts from Proudhon’s posthumously published book about Napoleon I in the Neue freie Presse feuilleton with a short introduction in which he distances himself from the author’s radicalism but expresses sympathy for many of his ideas. (The excerpts are available in CZA H-3051.) For more on Herzl’s political theory as it is presented in the novel and its sources, see Zilbersheid, “The Utopia of Theodor Herzl”; Adar, “Ha-tokhnit ha-kalkalit.” The former specifically discusses the differences between Herzl and Proudhon’s use of the term “mutualism.” 8. For a queer reading of this happy ending, which emphasizes the intimate relations between Kingscourt and Löwenberg, see Gluzman, “Ha-kemihah le-heteroseqsu’aliyut: Tsiyonut u-miniyut be-‘Altneuland.’  ” As Gluzman has shown, the emphatic optimism with which Herzl describes the place of “foreigners”—first among them the native Palestinian population—in the Zionist state can hardly be taken at face value. See also Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, Mimicry.” 9. The New Society is thus a society (Gesellschaft) in the tradition of the Zionist socialism of Moses Hess and Nachman Syrkin, or more accurately, a federation of cooperatives. These cooperative villages and factories vary in the extent of ownership exercised by their members, who in some cases are described as shareholders, and lease the land from the association, or the New Society, which functions as a landlord and regulating body. This is discussed in Zilbersheid, “The Utopia of Theodor Herzl.” 10. AN 134, 218ff. As Joseph Massad shows, Herzl, like other early Jewish nationalists, explicitly described Zionism as a branch of the Western colonial

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project. In his negotiations first and foremost with the British government, but also with representatives of Italy and Portugal, Herzl represented the Jews as emissaries of the enlightened West, whose presence in the colonies would be in Europe’s interest. This, Massad claims, was the dominant rhetoric of the Zionist movement until the 1930s when the attempt started “to rehistoricize the new Zionist era as a postcolonial one.” Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel,” 318. For an opposing view of the relation between Zionism and European colonialism see, for example, Shapira, “Zionism in the Age of Revolution.” Shapira claims that the success of Zionism in the twentieth century depended on the decline of the great colonial powers and hence implicitly makes an essential differentiation between the two phenomena. 11. Avineri, “Theodor Herzl’s Diaries as a Bildungsroman,” 5; Brude-Firnau, “1895: The Author, Feuilletonist, and Renowned Foreign Correspondent Theodor Herzl Turns Toward Zionism and Writes the Manifesto ‘The Jewish State.’ ” 12. Gluzman, “Ha-kemihah le-heteroseqsu’aliyut: Tsiyonut u-miniyut be‘Altneuland.’ ” 13. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 9. 14. On Herzl’s early dramatic work, see Fraenkel, Theodor Herzl: Des Schöpfers Erstes Wollen; Rabinowicz, “Herzl the Playwright.” 15. The manuscript is available in the archive: CZA H-3084. See also Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile. 16. For example, in a letter to a Viennese editor dated shortly after the publication of his first feuilleton (April 17, 1879), Herzl ceremoniously renounces the genre, while explicitly continuing to use its language. He informs the editor that he has been cured of his youthful hopes to write for the newspaper and promises that “you have nothing to worry about from the writer of these lines (to use the language of the feuilletons), not even the smallest ‘contribution to your valued paper.’ ” (I return to Herzl’s consciously stylized “writer of these lines” below.) The subject of the letter is one of Herzl’s first dramatic works, Compagniearbeit, which was published in Vienna a year later. Herzl, Briefe, 1:72. On the other hand, in the countless feuilletons that followed in Herzl’s career, he often found opportunities to ceremoniously renounce the theater. See, for example, Herzl, Das Buch der Narrheit, 150. Leon Kellner, one of Herzl’s earliest biographers, seems to take these statements very seriously, and names an entire chapter “Das Verzicht auf das Theater,” emphasizing that this was a necessary step in Herzl’s political maturation. He does not explain the fact that Herzl continued to pen texts for the theater well into his career as a Zionist leader and almost to the end of his life. Kellner, Theodor Herzls Lehrjahre (1860–1895), 107ff. 17. Herzl, Das Buch der Narrheit, 164. The title of Herzl’s proposed comic novella is a paraphrase of Gottfried Keller’s “Romeo and Julia in the Village” (1872). In an 1882 letter Herzl refers to his frustration with the demands of writing in the longer form of the novel: “I feel like the young man ‘taking his pleasure.’ The first two or three chapters were fun, but now he realizes that

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the all too demanding paramour wants to go on being screwed—all the way to chapter 12. And although the poor if grateful boy feels his strength giving out, he whips and spurs himself on to ever fresh deeds, so as to help his muse reach the convulsive orgasm she lusts for. I’ll tell you one thing—and here I am speaking from personal experience: both a love affair and a novel can drain you.” As Pawel—who quotes and translates this letter in his Herzl biography— remarks, this is a letter “whose metaphors should have delighted the early Freudians.” Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 80. 18. These manuscripts, such as the unfinished novella “Helwig & Comp. (Die Doppelwitwer)” dated April 22, 1883, which describes two business associates (Hellwig and Comp.) who are taking a walk and looking back at their friendship, or notes for a “Wiener Roman” to which I will refer in more detail shortly, are now in the Herzl archive (CZA H-8034, H-3086, H-70). In fact, the archive also holds evidence that Herzl was thinking about the contrast between verse or song and prose and articulating that contrast in terms of an inevitable and painful choice in the following ditty that he penned in 1883: “Aus ist das Lied teure Generosa / Kehren wir wieder zurück zur Prosa / . . . / Lachten Sie nur, oder hat’s ergriffen / Sie Generoes’chen, was ich gepfiffen? / Liebesgesänge wie Gassenhauer / Alles ist abgeschmakt auf die dauer . . . / Aus ist das Lied teure Generosa / kehren wir reuig zurück zur Prosa” (“The song is over, dear Generous / let us return again to prose / Did you just laugh or were you touched / Oh Generous, by what I’ve piped / . . . / Songs of love and street ditties / They all lose their taste in the long run / The song is over dear Generous / let us return sadly to prose”) (CZA H-8034). 19. CZA H-70. 20. CZA H-3086. 21. CZA H-3086. 22. Herzl, Briefe, 1:587–635. 23. This quote—“grausamer Naturalismus”—is from Herzl, Briefe, 1:603. A typical example is Herzl’s reaction to Dostoevsky. He recounts the conversation between Raskolnikov and Porfiry with great appreciation, but closes his short remarks: “Die übrigen Theile des Buchs, der eigentliche Roman ist ekelhaft zu lessen—vielleicht ist die Übersetzung daran schuld.” Ibid., 1:628. 24. The reviews of Zola are dated November 8, 1888 and June 19, 1890, respectively (CZA H-3051). The review of Spielhagen was preserved in manuscript form, tentatively dated 1887 or 1888 (CZA H-3084). 25. Elsewhere Herzl refers to Spielhagen “der doch in Romanen mit seiner schönen, wallenden und ein wenig manierirten Prosa die holden Zauber der Dichtung um uns zu weben wusste.” Herzl, Das Buch der Narrheit, 150. 26. CZA H-3051. 27. As evidenced by the catalogue of Herzl’s personal library in the Herzl archive, CZA H-10.020. 28. Likin, “Rights of Man, Reasons of State: Emile Zola and Theodor Herzl in Historical Perspective.” 29. Zola’s influence is also evident in the mine material in Das neue Ghetto, which was written in 1894, almost a decade after the publication of Germinal.

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The idealistic young protagonist supports a miner’s strike, and he returns from a visit to the mine with grueling descriptions of the suffering caused by a flood in one of the pits: “Ach, die Bilder bring’ ich nicht mehr aus meinen Augen. Alles ist Schwarz. Der Kohlenstaub taucht alles in Trauer.” Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle, 138. 30. Zola moved the fictional events of the novel backward to the 1860s in order to fit them within the historical scope of the cycle, the Rougon-Macquart. 31. Almog, Nationalism, 45. For a detailed account of the events of the Union General bank scandal, and Zola’s use of sources related to them, see Grant, “The Jewish Question in Zola’s L’argent.” 32. Zola, Les Rougon Macquart, 6:44. 33. Ibid., 6:46. 34. More accurately, elements from L’argent end up in both Der Judenstaat and Altneuland: the pamphlet concentrates on the role of finance in the colonization plan, whereas the novel describes mainly the redeeming potential of technology. 35. As Kingscourt describes the island to Löwenberg in their first encounter: “Es ist ein kleines Felsenetschen im Cooks-Archipel. Die habe ich mir gekauft und mir dort von Leuten aus Rarotonga ein komfortables Haus erbauen lassen. Das Gebäude liegt so versteckt hinter den Felsen das man es von keiner Seite bemerkt, wenn man auf dem Meere vorbeifährt. Es sind übrigens auch die Schiffe dort selten. Meine Insel sieht nach wie vor unbewohnt aus. . . . Ich lebe dort mit zwei Dienern, einem stummen Neger, den ich schon in Amerika hatte, und einem Tahitier.” AN 36. While he was working on the novel, Herzl wrote an enthusiastic review titled “Robinson” (published in the Neue freie Presse on December 17, 1899). The review is an interesting counterpoint to Herzl’s remark about preferring to write a “book for men,” rather than a novel. Speaking in an emphatically gendered language, Herzl muses about the educational benefits of Defoe’s novel, which would teach boys to be men in an age in which technological advancement has made the collective stronger and the individual weaker. 36. Muhammad Ali Khalidi remarks that by inserting the twenty-year gap into his narrative, Herzl skips one crucial element, which is the work that goes into building the ideal society that his novel describes (the work, one might add, that constitutes such an important element in the narrative of Crusoe’s life on the Island). The intention of this device, Khalidi suggests, is to make the ideal picture more plausible, to focus on the achievements of the Jewish state, rather than on the hardships of its coming into the world. This locates Herzl in what Khalidi describes as a turn-of-the-century tradition of utopias that renounce the tag of utopia and insist that they are realistic suggestions. Khalidi, “Utopian Zionism or Zionist Proselytism? A Reading of Herzl’s Altneuland.” Herzl’s famous motto to the novel makes this point exactly in suggestive terms: “Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen”—“If you will it, this is no fable.” As Zilbersheid notes, this motto is traditionally misunderstood as referring to the creation of a Jewish state, whereas Herzl is actually referring to the creation of the ideal society described in his novel. Zilbersheid, “The Utopia of Theodor Herzl,” 95.

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37. “1901,” a short story in Das Buch der Narrheit, refers directly to the well-known fairy tale. It is the first-person narrative of a man who, reading a boring novel, falls asleep for fourteen years and takes a surprised tour in the new century. Other stories are more distant variations on the same theme. In his Philosophische Erzählungen Herzl transforms the same basic narrative structure into a story about four friends who part at the end of their university days and decide to meet again at the same place twenty years later. And his late comedy Unser Kätchen (1899) begins with the return of a lost lover who has been in Australia for twenty years. 38. Herzl, Der Judenstaat. 39. The North African Jews—specifically, those of Algeria—are mentioned only in passing, and their integration in the Europeanized society Herzl describes, where everyone seems to be speaking German, is never discussed. 40. CZA H-453. 41. Hence the new society is called “Altneuland”—the old-new land. On the paradoxical proper names that characterize utopia, see Marin, Utopics, 85– 97. A similar kind of tension between a burden of history and a clean slate of “history-lessness” is pervasive in many aspects of early Zionist culture. Hirschfeld, “Locus and Language: Hebrew Culture in Israel 1890–1990.” 42. Herzl, Philosophische Erzählungen, 1–24. The story is dated 1900 and was also worked into a play, apparently in the same year. The play is the only one except the proto-Zionist Das neue Ghetto that was translated into Hebrew. It was performed by the “Ohel” theater in 1949. Hadomi, “He-heqla’ut bein le’umiyut le-vein universaliyut be-yetsirato ha-sifrutit shel Herzl.” 43. Herzl, Philosophische Erzählungen, 19. 44. Ibid., 22. 45. See, for example, Boyarin, “The Colonial Drag: Zionism, Gender, Mimicry”; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Politics and Culture, 160ff. 46. This is an issue that takes center stage in his Zionist play Das neue Ghetto. 47. Herzl’s interest in Solon the Greek lawmaker is not coincidental; he had studied law in the late 1870s and early 1880s with such eminent Viennese professors as Lorenz von Stein, Adolf Exner, Anton Menger, Friedrich Maassen, and the historian Ottokar Lorenz, a circle in which a Hegelian, historical approach to law was the dominant paradigm. Schoeps, Theodor Herzl and the Zionist Dream, 29. Schoeps suggests that this Hegelian schooling laid the ground for Herzl’s political Zionism and his hopes for a Jewish state, which—as he translates Herzl’s program into the language of Hegel’s political philosophy— would fulfill the spirit of the Jewish people (15). For a detailed analysis of von Stein’s use of and divergence from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, see Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 374–88. In a very different tone, Reinhart Koselleck describes von Stein as an embodiment of the nineteenth century’s Janus-faced interest in both historicism and progress. Koselleck, Futures Past, 58–71. Roman law seems to have been the field that made the deepest impression on Herzl the student, a fascination that was incorporated into his Zionist political agenda. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl uses the concept of the Gestor to explain how a small group can act as the representative of an entire people. A legal principle from

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the distant past, then, is called upon to correct the dismal situation of the Jews who have lost their honor. Klaus Dethloff presents a thorough and convincing reading of what he calls “die Konstrukte von Herzls juristischem Sachverstand und juristischer Phantasie.” Dethloff, “Wie Herzl verstanden werden wollte: Die Bedeutung der Jurisprudenz für den politischen Zionismus.” He shows that Herzl’s turn to the past is essentially modern and points out its deep affinities with the political theories of both Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt. Dethloff also presents a thorough and interesting discussion of Herzl’s use of Roman law in Der Judenstaat; see his introduction to Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle. For a discussion of the sources of Herzl’s term Gestor in contemporary French political philosophy, see Bar-Asher, “Te’oriyat ‘ha-amanah ha-medumah’ shel Herzl: ‘Iyun be-reqa’ ha-ra’yoni la-te’oryah hafilosofit shel Benyamin Zev Herzl le-hatsdaqat kinunah shel medinah.” Herzl also refers to Roman law in his discussion of the holy places in Altneuland: “In einer Begriffsbildung, die dem römischen Recht entlehnt war, erschienen all die heiligen Stätten als res sacrae, extra commercium. Das war das sicherste, das einzigste Mittel, sie für immerwährende Zeiten zum Gemeingute aller Gläubigen zu machen.” AN 144. I have dealt with the figure of the Gestor in Rokem, “Zionism Before the Law.” 48. This is also discussed in Rokem, “Zionism Before the Law.” Die Causa Hirschkorn (1882), for example, is a comedy of errors fueled mainly by the inability of two lawyer’s assistants to understand what their client, a beautiful young woman, tells them. The protagonist of Unser Kätchen (1899), also a young lawyer looking for love, is not so much a silly character as one who finds himself in a silly situation, becoming the representative of three different sides in one legal dispute. The laughable lawyers of Herzl’s comedies have more serious but equally troubled colleagues in other texts; Herzl’s novellas and novel manuscripts are often peopled with frustrated young lawyers. 49. For information about the writing and revisions of Das neue Ghetto, see Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle, 64; Fraenkel, Theodor Herzl: Des Schöpfers Erstes Wollen. 50. In fact, Löwenberg has internalized the world of law and the state to such an extent that his café-going has turned into a bureaucratic procedure. The novel opens: “Sunk in deep melancholy, Dr. Friedrich Loeweberg sat at a round marble table in his café on the Alsergrund. It was one of the most charming of Viennese cafés. Ever since his student days he had been coming there, appearing every afternoon at five o’clock with bureaucratic punctuality.” The novel has its own “laughable lawyer” in the character of Dr. Walter, who has only joined the new Zionist society because he had no clients left in Europe (AN 191). 51. The play, like most other productions of Herzl’s theatrical work, was received coldly by the theater directors to which it was sent, and this cold reception continues in later scholarship, where it is mostly mentioned only fleetingly, if at all, as another example of Herzl’s complete failure as a playwright. An exception to that is Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle. Dethloff reprints the play and comments on it extensively, and I will use his volume in what follows. Rather than “translating” the names into English

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I stick to Herzl’s version in reference to the play, as well as its philological background, for the sake of simplicity. 52. Ibid., 93. 53. Bloch, Feudal Society, 109–20. As Bloch explains, the legal scholarship of Bologna also laid the ground for legal codification in the vernacular (117ff.). For the tie between legal writings in the vernacular and the emergence of prose, see Koselleck, Futures Past, 58–79; Stempel, “Die Anfänge der romanischen Prosa im XIII. Jarhundert.” Earlier readers of Die Glosse have also identified the element of change and transformation as central to the text, but they interpret it biographically. Alex Bein describes the play as a turning away from the ideal of masculinity that motivated Herzl in his youth, whereas Klaus Dethloff sees it as an expression of the transformation in Herzl’s self-image from an aspiring author to an aspiring lawyer and politician, the “Theodor Herzl, Doctor der Rechte” who signed Der Judenstaat two years later. As Dethloff puts it: “Die Glosse ist eine aufschlussreiche selbstbiografische und selbstironische Rechtfertigung des neuen Selbstgefühls Herzls als Jurist und erörtet ausserdem eine Frage, die nicht nur für die Glossatorentätigkeit des 13. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch für Herzl von Belang ist: ob die widerentdeckte Jurisprudenz blosse Theorie sei, nur ‘Glossatoren-wahn,’ oder schon ‘das Merkmal einer That.’ ” Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle, 24. Dethloff also underscores that the image of a total transformation in Herzl’s life—from dandy and literary man to political thinker and leader—is erroneous, since Herzl never gave up his role as a German author but simply redefined it in relation to his Zionism. 54. On the complexity of Zionism’s relation to the past, see Almog, Zionism; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots. 55. One might, for example, expect a Jewish thinker who is writing about Roman law and its medieval revival to reflect upon the fact that the Romans had sacked the Temple and sent Jews into exile and that the codex that was being revived was the earliest source of anti-Jewish legislation in Europe. Stern, “Antisemitism in Rome.” Herzl does mention the Jewish troubadour Süsskind von Trimberg in the notes for the play, but does not choose to write about him (CZA H-522). 56. Herzl’s relation to Wagner was anything but neutral. His first public conflict with antisemitism is not in the context of the Dreyfus trial in Paris (as some Israeli schoolbooks would have it), but rather as a student in Vienna when he withdrew his membership from the nationalist student “Burschenschaft” Albia. This followed a ceremony in commemoration of Wagner’s death in 1883 in which Hermann Bahr made a speech with celebratory reference to Wagner’s antisemitic views. Herzl, who had not been at the ceremony, read about it in the papers and sent a letter of withdrawal from the student group. See biographical information in Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 69ff. More detailed information, as well as reproductions of the relevant documents, can be found in Seewann, Theodor Herzl und die Akademische Jugend. At the same time, it is important to remember that Herzl was a self-professed Wagner enthusiast. In an autobiographical sketch published in 1898, Herzl recalls the days of writing

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Der Judenstaat: “I worked at it daily, until I was completely exhausted. My one recreation was on the evenings when I could go to hear Wagner’s music, and particularly Tannhäuser, an opera which I go to hear as often as it is produced. And only on those evenings when there was no opera did I have my doubts as to the truth of my ideas.” Gelber, “Heine, Herzl and Nordau: Aspects of the Early Zionist Reception,” 145. In his early Zionist diary, Herzl remarks about the exodus of the Jews from Europe: “Mosis Auszug verhält sich dazu, wie ein Fastnachtsspiel von Hans Sachs, zu einer Wagner’schen Oper.” Herzl, Briefe, 2:74. 57. To be sure, Philippus, who was fashioned by Herzl when he was already preoccupied with the Jewish question and intent on solving it, is not exactly a national hero: his existence has nothing to do with Zionism. Nevertheless, he represents an important step in Herzl’s development as a writer before he can write literature in the service of the national cause. 58. I reproduce the original German as well, to give the reader a sense of the (poor) rhyming: “Die Glosse ist das Werk: mit neuen Gründen / Den Kern der alten Dinge aufzufinden / Das Römerrecht! Denk Dir versteinten Flieder— / Die Glosse gibt ihm Duft und Leben wieder, / Es weht ein Frühling aus den alten Werken, / Die unsern Geist und unsren Willen stärken. / Die alte Zeit ersteht in neuen Bauten, / In meiner Glosse und im Klang der Lauten. . . / Der Römer schwand, und Hellas ruht im Sarg— / Die Sendung lebt, die Gott in ihmem barg. / So dien’ ich Gott, der in arme Heiden / Geheime Zwecke wusste einzuklei­den.” Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle, 75. 59. CZA H-522 (sic). 60. Herzl’s relation to Savigny should be considered along the lines of the work of Klaus Dethloff quoted above. On the one hand, Herzl seems to adopt the principles of Savigny’s historical approach to the law, in particular his meticulous engagement with the Roman law. On the other hand, his concept of rational legislation and constitution-making seems at odds with Savigny’s romantic sensibility, which maintained that the law cannot be made rationally, but rather develops as part of the Volksgeist. The details that Herzl culls from Savigny are also interesting: his notes mention “proud students” and the loud reading of legal manuscripts by students of the law (a kind of prosaic performance, as it were). 61. Graham, “National Identity and the Politics of Publishing the Troubadours,” 59. 62. Ibid. As Graham explains, Raynouard’s theory, which did not attract the German scholars and was quickly refuted by them, was that the troubadours of the eleventh century all spoke and sang in one language, the “langue romane primitive.” One might speculate that Raynouard’s position was more attractive to Herzl as a kind of antidote to nationalist appropriations of the troubadours, depicting them as members of a pan-European (or, more accurately, pan-southwestern European) group, which, like the Jews, moves around and is not associated with one place or national culture only. See also Gumbrecht, “Un souffle.” Gumbrecht describes Raynouard’s work as an exception in relation to the dominant atmosphere in France at his time:

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“Although he writes in a strictly classical form Raynouard’s concern is— viewed typologically—quite Romantic: he wishes to rehabilitate the French Knights Templar. . . . In an era of revolutionary and post-revolutionary centralization his interest in the cultural past was motivated by a crisis— similar, if not altogether analogous, to the interest out of which German national historiography took shape” (14). 63. CZA H-522. 64. Ramband, like Raynouard, is an interesting choice that further highlights Herzl’s unique, not to say idiosyncratic, view of the troubadours. On this unusual troubadour, see Pattison, The Life and Works of the Troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange. 65. Dethloff, Theodor Herzl, oder, der Moses des fin de siècle, 91. 66. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 44. 67. This quote exemplifies how fundamental one of Herzl’s most tragic mistakes was: not only does he assume that the land will be sold with no resistance from the people who inhabit it, he imagines it to be divided into neat squares, as if in preparation for the transaction. 68. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 134. 69. Herzl refers to him in a personal letter: “Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass ein Christ Jude wird, um an der herrlichen Sache mitarbeiten zu können. Ja ich kenne solche Menschen. Einer heisst Abraham Bourcart, ein Schweizer Christ, der sich sogar beschneiden lies, um wie er meinte, allen Anforderungen zu genügen. Armer Kerl, das Schneiden war überflüsig. Er ist aber nicht wahnsinnig . . . Von ihm rühren die Pläne zu elektromagnetischer Ausnutzung der vorhandenen Wasserkräfte her. Ich will sie in meinem bald vollendeten Programmroman ‘Altneuland’ anbringen und werde sie vielleicht dereinst zwischen Hermon und Totem Meer verwirklichen.” Herzl, Briefe, 6:276. 70. CZA H-460. The brochure, published by the “Société Française de Construction Portative et Transformable,” suggests “Habitations Coloniales” as one of the possible applications of its products. Other letters Herzl used in the preparation of the novel manuscripts are from Otto Warburg. Warburg, a German-Jewish botanist and colonial entrepreneur, had much experience in the administration and planning of large-scale agricultural projects in the German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific. In the late 1890s he developed an interest in both German colonial initiatives in the Middle East and in the Zionist project. Warburg’s technocratic approach to the development of the Zionist settlement of Palestine, inspired by German imperialism, encountered ideological resistance in the Zionist movement; nevertheless, it was highly instrumental to the formation of the settlement project and later the state of Israel. Even before that, Warburg, like Bourcart, supplied Herzl with material and models for the technocratic imagination that formed Altneuland, answering questions about the flora of Palestine and its potential for agricultural development. Warburg, a distant relative of art historian Aby Warburg, merited an entry in a German colonial reference book: Schnee, “Otto Warburg.” See also Penslar, “Zionism, Colonialism and Technocracy”; Reichman and Hasson, “A Cross-Cultural Diffusion of Colonization.”

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Chapter 5 1. Fichmann, Shirat Bialik, 138. See also Barzel, “Shirah u-prozah etsel Bialik: Miqra be-’safiah.’ ” 2. Bialik’s important poem exists in two English translations: A. M. Klein’s translation from the mid-1930s, titled “City of Slaughter,” and Atar Hadari’s “City of the Killings.” The non-Hebrew-reading reader is encouraged to compare the two very different versions in order to form a picture of the poem’s many facets. I have chosen to quote here from the latter, because I feel that it serves my own purposes in reading better. Nevertheless, “City of Slaughter” is the more widely recognized English title for the poem (as will become clear from the titles in the bibliography on it), and I use that title to refer to the poem throughout. Bialik, “The City of Slaughter”; Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 1–9. On the interest and complications that arise from Klein’s translation, see Kaplan, “A More Contemporary Voice: A. M. Klein’s Original and Revised Translations of the Hebrew Poems of H. N. Bialik.” 3. Shamir, “Gavru ’alilot ba-arets: Ha-masah ‘Gilui ve-kisui ba-lashon’ u-meqomah ba-masekhet yetsirato shel Bialik,” 161–62. 4. Ibid., 160. 5. Miron, Ha-pereidah, 96. 6. As Pinkhas Ginosar describes, the essay had a very wide reception and was read in interest and adopted by audiences as different as the orthodox “admirers of the Halakhah” and the Zionist-socialist Berl Katzenelson. Ginosar, “ ‘Halakha ve-aggadah’ le-Bialik ve-teguvato shel Brenner.” Gershom Scholem translated the essay (as well as Y. H. Brenner’s critique, though the latter was never published) for Martin Buber’s Der Jude shortly after it was published in Hebrew. Scholem, Mi-Berlin Li-Yerushalayim, 74–75. The translated essay is mentioned several times in the correspondence between Scholem and Benjamin, in the context of their discussion on Kafka. Benjamin and Scholem, Walter Benjamin/Gershom Scholem Briefwechsel, 1933–1940, 157, 166, 172. On Benjamin’s antinomian radicalization of Bialik’s argument in his essay on Kafka, see Kaufmann, “Beyond Use, Within Reason: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Question of Theology.” The question of what Bialik’s points of reference were in thinking about halakhah and aggadah as two principles is not trivial. Of course, the distinction is foundational to Jewish tradition and would be completely intuitive for someone with Bialik’s traditional schooling. But it is also clear that the rise of a “Wissenschaft des Judentums” in the nineteenth century, epitomized in works like Leopold Zunz’s Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden (1832) is highly significant in the theoretization of the distinction as a generic and philosophical one. Bialik, however, does not refer explicitly to any modern sources for the distinction. 7. Bialik, Revealment and Concealment, 45. 8. I use the terms gilui (revealment) and kisui (concealment) as translated by Jacob Sloan, and republished in Bialik, Revealment and Concealment. Others have translated the terms as “explicit” and “implicit,” or as “explicit” and “allusive.” While this is not inaccurate, I prefer the former translation emphasizing the concreteness of Bialik’s terms. This is the only one of Bialik’s

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essays (indeed, more or less the only one of Bialik’s prose texts) that does not refer to Judaism or Jewish culture explicitly in any way. On this interesting exception see Shamir, “Gavru ’alilot ba-arets: Ha-masah ‘Gilui ve-kisui balashon’ u-meqomah ba-masekhet yetsirato shel Bialik.” 9. Bialik, Revealment and Concealment, 24–26. This essay, too, had a remarkable reception history in Hebrew letters, which deserves a more detailed study. Robert Alter suggests that Bialik’s description of the abyss above which language precariously floats deeply influenced Gershom Scholem’s thought and the image of the abyss in his description of Jewish mysticism. Alter, “Scholem and Modernism.” 10. Bialik’s contrastive use of “poetry” and “prose” in this essay is based on the work of Russian linguist A. A. Potebnya (1835–1891). Fichmann, Shirat Bialik, 140. Rina Lapidus reviews references in Hebrew scholarship to Bialik’s reading of Potebnya, and systematically compares their views on language. Lapidus, “ ’Al masato shel H.N. Bialik ’gilui ve-kisui ba-lashon ve-ziqatah letorato ha-balshanit shel A. Potebnya.” 11. Bialik, Revealment and Concealment, 47. 12. Ibid., 46. 13. Mendes-Flohr, “Cultural Zionism’s Image of the Educated Jew: Reflections on Creating a Secular Jewish Culture,” 234–35. 14. Brenner, Ketavim, 4:1501–10. 15. Ibid. 16. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 563–91. 17. As Bialik explains the term nusakh in a footnote to one of the Mendele essays: “In Volin, this is how they call the tradition of liturgical melodies common to the people, and by extension any trodden path or accepted chablon in one of the occupations.” Bialik, Kol kitvei Hayyim Nahman Bialik, 167. 18. Ibid., 189. 19. On Mendele/Abramovitsch and the nusakh in Hebrew literature, see Alter, Invention; Shaked, Ha-siporet ha-ʻivrit. 20. Sadan, Hayim Nahman Bialik, 132–33. Sadan claims that in the realistic prose of his own short stories Bialik fuses both ways, creating an even newer style that is not a conglomerate of the two earlier styles, but rather an organic melody of his own. On Bialik’s “struggle to write prose” and the influence of Mendele on Bialik’s prose—two important matters that I cannot treat in this chapter—see Fichmann, Shirat Bialik, 141ff.; Barzel, “Shirah u-prozah etsel Bialik: Miqra be-’safiah.’ ” 21. On the Hebrew poema, its genesis and its place in the Hebrew literary system, see Bar-El, Ha-poʾemah ha-ʻivrit. Bar-El discusses Bialik’s poemas in detail in her fifth chapter. 22. The recent centennial of both pogrom and poem brought with it two important collections of studies: a special issue of Prooftexts (Winter/Spring 2005) and the volume Gluzman, Miron, and Hever, Be-ʻir Ha-Haregah. There was also a critical reevaluation following the publication of Bialik’s unpublished notes and interviews, to which I refer extensively below: Bialik, ʻEduyot. See also Shamir and Shavit, Bi-mevoʾei ʻir ha-haregah: Mivhar

Notes to Pages 102–107

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maʾamarim ʻal shiro shel Bi’alik; Mintz, Ḥurban, 129–54; Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, 86–92. 23. Werses, “Bein tokhahah le-apologetiqah”; Gluzman, Miron, and Hever, Be-ʻir Ha-Haregah, 42–43. 24. Dan Miron opens a recent essay on the poem by calling for the poem to be excised from the canon, but the call is arguably the best proof of the poem’s importance. Gluzman, Miron, and Hever, Be-ʻir Ha-Haregah, 71–85. 25. Miron comments about the Yiddish translation: ibid., 145–49. On the Russian translation, see Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle, 183–97. 26. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet, 201ff. 27. This is a practice akin to the Ars Memoriae described by Frances A. Yates. Yates, The Art of Memory, chapter 1. 28. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 3. 29. Kagan, Halakhah ve-aggadah ke-tsofen shel sifrut, 87. 30. Horowitz, “The Rhetoric of Embodied Memory in ‘In the City of Slaughter,’ ” 76. 31. Horowitz too notes the importance of the pronouns in this section, emphasizing the fact that they are less clear in English translation. Ibid., 78. 32. Bahat, “ ‘Be-‘ir ha-haregah’ ve-‘haqomediah ha-elohit’ ”; Shapira, “ ‘In the City of Slaughter’ versus ‘He Told Her.’ ” 33. Mintz, Ḥurban, 147; Tertner, “ ‘Be-’ir ha-haregah ve-ha-zhaner shel hamonolog ha-dramati”; Laor, “Kishinev Revisited: A Place in Jewish Historical Memory.” Dan Miron posits the relation to sensationalist journalism in Gluzman, Miron, and Hever, Be-’ir Ha-Haregah, 109–10. The influence of Tolstoy is demonstrated in Ben Amos, “A Tourist in ’Ir ha-Harega” (A Tourist in the City of Slaughter)—Kishinev 1903.” 34. Miron, H.N. Bialik, 8. 35. Blanchot, The Book to Come, 79. 36. Balfour, Rhetoric, 3. 37. Bialik, ʻEduyot, introduction. 38. Milner, “ ‘In the City of Slaughter,’ ” 68. Both veins that Milner proposes, the ideological and the psychological, have been fruitfully explored. Hanan Hever argues that the roots of the text in the work of collecting the testimonies turn this text into a governmental document, in the vein of Foucault’s analysis of governmentality; he continues his “Ideologiekritik” by exposing the political theology that underlies this text of a supposedly secular Zionist author. Uncovering the echoes between the wordings of a key testimony and an autobiographical text in which Bialik narrates a personal childhood trauma, Michael Gluzman unravels the psychological complexity of Bialik’s encounter with the traumatized women of Kishinev. Dan Miron offers the model of second-order witnessing, as it was described in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, as a context through which to make sense of Bialik’s trauma. Gluzman, Miron, and Hever, Be-’ir Ha-Haregah. Batsheva Ben-Amos describes Bialik’s rewriting of the facts in psychological terms as well, but she casts the poet himself in the role not of a traumatized victim but of a therapist, who addresses the victims of the pogrom as well as a

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wider audience, magnifying and describing their own behavior patterns to them so that they might release themselves from them. Ben Amos, “A Tourist in ‘Ir haHarega’ (A Tourist in the City of Slaughter)—Kishinev 1903.” “In provoking anger in the reader, in us,” she writes, “Bialik pushes us to discover our own feelings and positions, and we start to change against our will.” Ibid., 389. 39. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 4–5. On silence in the poem, see also Iris Milner, “ ‘In the City of Slaughter’: the Hidden Voice of the Pogrom Victims,” 62. 40. Bialik, ʻEduyot, 52. 41. Milner, “ ‘In the City of Slaughter.’ ” 42. Bialik, ʻEduyot, 89. 43. A key work on the dynamics of the relation between Yiddish and Hebrew is Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven. The terms “performance” and “performative” are used to illuminate the status of Yiddish as a “postvernacular” language in America in Shandler, Adventures. 44. Bialik, ʻEduyot, 83. Emphases all mine. 45. Ibid., 82. 46. Ibid., 89. 47. Miron, Ha-pereidah. 48. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 5–6. 49. Barzel, “Shirah u-prozah etsel Bialik: Miqra be-’safiah,’ ” 72. 50. Mintz, Ḥurban, 145–47; Zakim, To Build and Be Built, 38ff. 51. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 2. 52. Ibid., 8. 53. Zakim makes a related point: “Bialik’s literary output in the years immediately following Kishinev does not simply respond to historical crisis, but in its form and mode of aesthetic depiction created a new historical paradigm insofar as it effected a reformulation of territory and Jewish identity.” Zakim, To Build and Be Built, 18. 54. Bialik, Songs from Bialik, 11. 55. Another emphatically performative literary response to the pogrom is discussed by Shmuel Werses; these are the Yiddish-language pamphlets published by Yiddish humorists (badhanim). These songs about the pogrom were published with suggested melodies, which the readers would use to sing the songs (collectively?). Werses does not speculate about the possibility that Bialik was aware of these texts. Werses, “Bein tokhahah le-apologetiqah,” 45ff.

Chapter 6 1. Hever, “Mapah shel hol: Mi-sifrut ’ivrit le-sifrut isra’elit.” 2. This is the basic assumption, for example, behind the recent collection of essays: Feinberg, Rück-Blick Auf Deutschland. 3. In 2005, the poem was composed by Kazea Fern and performed by Peter Shea as part of a concert featuring settings of the entire first cycle of Die Nordsee. 4. Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound, 22–28. 5. The poem itself does not evoke Berlin—explicitly or implicitly—but rather

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the mythical city of Vineta, “a medieval city purportedly engulfed by the sea in the twelfth century and a popular motif in German Romantic literature,” which is described as a Netherlander city. Ibid., 24. 6. Welch, The Third Reich, 41–43. 7. Youens, Heinrich Heine and the Lied, xx. 8. Synofzik, Heinrich Heine—Robert Schumann, 13–26. 9. Extant copies of the first edition of the biography state that it was published by E. P. Tal, but Brod would later (in the preface to the 1956 English translation) state that the biography was published by Allert de Lange in 1934. Margarita Pazi also states this in Pazi, “Max Brod’s Presentation of Heinrich Heine,” 172. 10. Brod, Heinrich Heine, 22; Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Revolt, 12. 11. Brod, Heinrich Heine, 146; Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Re­ volt, 102. 12. Brod, Heinrich Heine, 174; Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Re­ volt, 120. 13. Brod draws extensively on the analysis of Ahad Ha’am in his critique of assimilation; he also highlights Heine’s early journey to Poland and presents Heine’s favorable depiction of eastern European Jews as a precedent to the work of Martin Buber. 14. Brod, Heinrich Heine: The Artist in Revolt, ix. 15. Heine, Erets Ashkenaz, 158. 16. Wexler, “Ashkenazic German.” 17. This designation might seem to exist in tension with the perception of Jews as descendants of Shem, Yeffet’s brother. The assumption that Jews were Semites, descendants of Shem, was shared by Jews as well as by those who expressed anti-Jewish (or, indeed, antisemitic) sentiments and ideas. Nevertheless, the distinction between Ashkenaz and Sepharad (denoting Spain) as different traditions with separate norms within Judaism dates back as early as the fourteenth century. On “Ashkenazim” as a normative term in Israeli public discourse, see for example Cohen, Ha-maroqaʾim: Ha-negativ shel ha-ashkenazim: ʻal ha-hitnagshut bein ha-’maroqaʾiyut’ ha-ishit le-vein haformaliyut ha-’ashkenazit. 18. Heine, Erets Ashkenaz, 6. 19. The significance of Gutman’s choices as an illustrator becomes clearer in comparison to his earlier illustration to a volume of his father’s Heine translations, which are far more abstract and make no reference to any current political issues. Heine, Tselilim mi-shirei Haynrikh Hayneh. 20. Originally published in Ha’aretz, July 17, 1942. The poem is reprinted in Reich, “Comparison of Translations: Five Hebrew Versions of ‘Lorelei’ and Two Adaptations by Natan Alterman,” 166. Like Sadan, Alterman draws on the tradition of writing “Judendeutsch,” that is, of transcribing standard German in Hebrew letters. Alterman’s choice to reproduce Heine’s German words on the pages of a Hebrew daily newspaper in 1942 is fascinating, especially when it is considered in contrast with the change in his attitude towards the language as the war continued and came to an end. 21. Originally published in Davar, September 22, 1944; reprinted in Reich,

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“Comparison of Translations: Five Hebrew Versions of ‘Lorelei’ and Two Adaptations by Natan Alterman,” 167–68. 22. Shamir, ʻAl ʻet Ṿe-ʻal Atar, 44. 23. In 1933, Hameiri had published another book that borrowed its title from Heine, his own Book of Songs which collected his poetry from his early youth and up to that point. 24. See the discussion in chapter 3. 25. Heine, Neʻimot ʻivriyot, ix. 26. Venuti, “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.” 27. Heine, Neʻimot ʻivriyot, ix–x. 28. Though they were on opposite sides of a debate on the merits of translation and its place in the revival of Hebrew as a modern literary language, Bialik and Frischmann were both prolific translators of European literature. As I discuss in the third chapter, both of them also produced Heine translations— Bialik’s “Princess Sabbath” and Frischmann’s “North Sea”—and in both cases the balance between a Jewish and a universal reading and translation of the text is a delicate issue. In any case, both of them most probably consulted previous Russian translations. 29. Heine, Neʻimot ʻivriyot, xii. 30. Yiddish—not to speak of other Jewish languages such as Ladino—in this case remains implicitly absent and irrelevant. 31. Perlman was also a translator of Theodor Herzl, as well as American historian James Harvey Robinson. In 1925 he had collaborated with the revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky on the publication of a world atlas. In his study of the migration of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic ideas to Mandatory Palestine, Eran Rolnik describes a 1940 meeting of the directorship of Mossad Bialik, whose members were Yakov Cohen, Tsvi Wislavsky, and Berl Katzenelson, in which a list of Jewish authors to be translated into Hebrew, including both Heine and Freud, was drawn up. Perlman’s series is evidently a continuation of the same project. As Rolnik notes, this highlights the ideological underpinnings of the project, situating it in the larger context of labor Zionism. Rolnik, ʻOsei ha-nefashot: ʻim Freud le-Erets Yisrael 1918–1948. 32. In the past decade or so, the phrase “thy children shall come again to their own border” has been associated exclusively with the public campaigns for the release of Israeli prisoners of war who are held in Arab countries or in the Palestinian occupied territories. It is used on banners, in popular music, and recently as the slogan of a group on Facebook, all of which aim to influence public opinion in favor of agreements that would bring these soldiers back to Israel. As Perlman’s translation series indicates, however, the phrase has a longer and broader history in Zionist rhetoric. 33. Bin-Gurion, “Gvulo shalom,” 334. 34. Hermand, Streitobjekt Heine, 24. 35. Several journals published longer pieces on Heine’s life, work, and influence, including Keshet, “Pirke Heine”; Zweik, “Heine ba-sifrut ha-’ivrit”; Lachower, “Heinrich Heine be-’ivrit: Me’ah shanim le-moto, bibliyographiya (1853–1956)”; Auerbach, “H. Heine ha-meshorer ha-mesaper ve-hogeh ha-de’ot

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(me’ah shana le-petirato)”; Avi Shaul, “Heinrich Heine-yehudi ve-ezrah ha’olam (me’ah shanah le-moto).” 36. Achimeir, “Ahinu atah.” The spiritual leader of the revisionist movement to which Achimeir belonged, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was evidently an enthusiastic reader of Heine. Heine is one of the “ten books” chosen to enter eternity by a group of young people discussing this question in a famous feuilleton by that title. In an essay written in Jabotinsky’s memory, Y. Bader recalls a conversation in Warsaw in the late 1930s, in which Jabotinsky recited Heine’s poems from memory both in German and in Russian translation. Bader, “Da lecha, edom (siha ’al shirav shel Heine).” 37. Yediot Aharonot, January 13, 1956; Ma’ariv, February 17, 1956. 38. Columns by Yeruham Tolkes, Immanuel Bin-Gurion, and A. Steineman, Davar, February 17, 1956. 39. Moshe Zimmermann and Yotam Hotam discuss the mixture of frustration and apologetics that characterized the German-Jews in Mandatory Palestine and the state of Israel in Zimmermann and Hotam, Bein ha-Moladot: Ha-yeqim bi-mehozoteihem, 13–16. The volume presents an invaluable and broad panorama of perspectives on the “Yekkim,” their place in the Jewish settlement in Palestine and later the state of Israel and on their varying perceptions of the place of German language, literature, and culture in their Israeli identity. One prominent member of that community that comes to mind in this context is the publisher, collector, and philanthropist Salman Schocken, whose collection of Heine manuscripts was on display in Jerusalem during the year 1956. 40. On Werner Kraft’s Heine scholarship, before and after the Holocaust, see Drews, “Heinrich Heine in den Augen Werner Krafts.” 41. Scheuer, “Heinrich Heine ha-mavrik.” 42. Yavin, “Heine ve-ha-tsabarim.” The following quotes are all from this source. “Sabra” is a Hebrew designation for a native-born Israeli. 43. Sadan, “Anshei ruah ‘al pulmus Heinrich Heine.” 44. The letters, some of which were published in Haaretz on March 23, 1956, castigate Yavin for underestimating the importance of Heine’s work and for presuming to judge whether others—Moroccans, Bulgarians—would have knowledge of his greatness. 45. Sadan, “Anshei ruah ’al pulmus Heinrich Heine.” 46. For example: Ish Yehuda, “Ha-pulmus mi-saviv le-yahaduto shel Heinrich Heine.” 47. Weltsch, “Rodanim be-mitsrayim ve-Heinrich Heine.” 48. Hanan Hever discusses Gouri’s living-dead speakers. Hever, Mereshit, 49–51. 49. Gold, “Ha-sefer ke-nahar: ‘Iyun be-’bernhart’ le-Yoel Hoffmann.” Gold surveys Hoffmann’s academic work and the critical response to the novel. See also Albeck-Gidron, “Die Persiflage abendländischer Philosophie im Werk Yoel Hoffmanns.” 50. Albeck-Gidron also underscores the importance of the German language to the novel, going so far as to suggest that “the Jerusalem of the Mandate period

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Notes to Pages 143–150

is here described in a nostalgic German written in Hebrew.” Albeck-Gidron, “Die Persiflage abendländischer Philosophie im Werk Yoel Hoffmanns,” 137. 51. Hoffmann, Bernhard, 135. 52. See also the discussion in the second chapter. 53. Hoffmann, Bernhard, 76. Hoffmann could have encountered the poem either in the edition published by the Ahiasaph publishing house in Jerusalem in 1944, or in Heine, Heinrich Heine: Mivhar tirgumim. In this collection, A. Zimrani reproduces eleven different translations of the poem, including those of S. Ben Zion, I. Katzenelson, A. L. Mintz, Gila Uriel, and others. Ben-Zakkai’s translations are prefaced by the Hebrew author Meir Mohar, who opens his comments by echoing the sentiment shared by many of Heine’s translators: “Once more, a modest attempt to translate the poems of Heine, to spread the wings of Hebrew on a creation that throbs with a Hebrew heart through its foreign garb.” Heine, Mivhar shire Heine, 5. 54. In a further ironic twist, in his final letter to his sister-in-law, Bernhard describes the landscape of Jerusalem and mentions the “pine trees (Pinus halepnesis), which are somewhat different from the kind of pine (Pinus silvestris) found in Germany.” Hoffmann, Bernhard, 174. Heine’s romantic vision of the complete otherness of the East is thus confronted with the reality of the subtle botanical similarities between Europe and Jerusalem. 55. Even Shoshan’s dictionary quotes, for example, Israeli author S. Yizhar’s use of the term. 56. Hoffmann, Bernhard, 97. 57. Ibid., 76. 58. In fact, the journeys of rare books back to where they were printed or purchased is repeatedly described by characters in the novel as a form of pidyon shvuim, a redemption of prisoners much like the proscribed Hebrew translations of Heine advocated by Bialik in his speech in 1913. Beer, Lifne haMakom 172, 257. 59. Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism.” 60. Beer, “Und die Grube war Leer. . .,” 11. 61. Beer, Lifne ha-Makom, 68. 62. Ibid., 103. Rapoport’s use of the archaic term “Ashkenaz” for Germany is ironic, of course. 63. Ibid., 159. 64. Ibid., 290. 65. By the time Beer published Lifnei ha-Makom, the absence of a Heine street in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had been remedied. In 1997, on the occasion of the celebration of his bicentennial, a Heine Street was dedicated in Jerusalem’s Yamin-Moshe neighborhood. In Tel Aviv, Heinrich Heine Street is a broad thoroughfare, occupied mainly by cars, in the south of the city; its main intersection is with “Nes la-goyim” Street, which celebrates the notion that the people of Israel are chosen and a “banner to the nations.” Schoffman, “Ideological Cholent.”

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Index

Abramovitsch, S. Y. (Mendele), 62, 95, 100–101, 186n17 absence, 71; of context, xii, 138; and presence, 25, 27; of space, 42, 153 abstraction, 8, 12, 13, 18, 154–55 Achimeir, Aba, 136 Adorno, Theodor: “Heine the Wound,” 21–22, 27, 28–29, 166n3 Aesop, 8, 83–84 Ahad Ha’am, 95, 99, 103, 174n53, 189n13 Albeck-Gidron, Rachel, 191–92n50 Alman, Samuel, 49–50 Alterman, Natan, 128–31, 189n20; “Liberation of the Lorelei,” 128–30; “The Silver Platter,” 130–31 antisemitism, 78; and attacks on Heine, 31, 53, 54, 61, 95, 124, 168n24; in France, 80; Herzl response to, 69, 72, 80; Wagner and, 182n56 architecture, xviii, 9–11, 164n17 Arendt, Hannah, 123, 166n3; “The Jew as Pariah,” 21, 22–23 Aristotle, 33, 147 art, 3, 34, 48–49, 164n18; Hegel definition of, 9; Heine on, 35–36; history of, 4; poetical element in, 13; and prose, 3, 5, 13–14, 15, 154, 164–65n27; and remediation, 5, 12–13; and rhetoric, 15; role of, 12; and space, xix, 9–12, 13; symbolic, 7, 8, 164n18 Ashkenaz, 126, 189n17

assimilation, 67, 69; Heine and, 22–23, 122; Herzl and, 67–69 Avineri, Shlomo, 76 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xv–xvi, 165n34 Balfour, Ian, 106 Barck, Karlheinz, 160n12 Bartels, Adolf: Heinrich Heine—Another Monument, 53 Barthes, Roland, 48–49 Beer, Haim, xxi, 120; Upon a Certain Place, 147–51 Bein, Alex, 182n53 Bellamy, Edward, 82–83 Ben-Amos, Batsheva, 187–88n38 Ben-Gurion, David, 73, 130 Benveniste, Emile, 40 Ben Zion, Simcha, 124–26, 173–74n38 Berlin, 44, 142, 149; Heine and, 121, 122– 23; Heine memorials in, xi–xii, 52 Bernfeld, Shimon, 61, 136 Bernhard (Hoffmann), 142–47, 191– 92nn49–54; Heine cited in, 144–45; multilingualism in, 143–44, 145–46 Bialik, Hayyim Nahman, xx–xxi, 95–118, 185–88; agnosticism of, 99; on Hebrew literature, 56–57, 132–34; on Heine, 55–57, 64, 99–100, 133; on poetry-prose dichotomy, 95, 96–97, 98; prose as medium for, 95–96, 102, 119, 156–57; style of, 186n20; as translator, 57, 58, 190n28; works: “City of Slaughter,”

214

Index

xxi, 64, 96, 102–18, 130–31, 157, 185n2, 187n38; “Halakhah and Aggadah,” 96, 97–99, 185n6; “The Hebrew Book,” 55–57, 95; “On the Slaughter,” 116–18; “Revealment and Concealment in Language,” 96, 98, 186n9; “Sea Songs,” 58 Bin-Gorion, Immanuel, 135 Blanchot, Maurice, 106 Bologna, 86, 182n53 Börne, Ludwig, 167n18 Bourcart, Abraham, 92, 184n69 Boyarin, Daniel, 174n53 Brenner, Y. H., 99, 100 Brod, Max, 122–23, 136, 170n39, 189n13 Broda, Benjamin Wolf, 122 Brodes, Reuven, 101 Bronx, New York, 52, 53 Buoncompagno da Siena, xv Byron, Lord, 32, 167n23

Cone, Robert, 49, 171–72n11 copresence, xii, xvii, 48, 144; in Heine poems, 26–27, 47, 51 Cromwell, Oliver, 36 dance, xix, 40 Davar, 123–24, 136 Defoe, Daniel, 82 Dehmel, Richard, 53–54, 123–24 deixis, xvii, 170n38; in Bialik, 112–14, 115, 118; in Heine, 40–42, 43, 69–70, 156; and prose-performance transition, 104–5, 118, 153–54 Derrida, Jacques, 160n11 Dethloff, Klaus, 181n47, 182n53 Dinur, Yehiel, 148 Dreyfus Affair, 80 Drumont, Edouard: Jewish France, 80 Dubnov, Simon, 103, 109, 110 Dühring, Ernst: The Jewish Question, 78 Düsseldorf, 52, 53

capitalism, 17, 176n7 censorship, 21, 170n38 Certeau, Michel de, 92 Charles I, 36, 37 citation, 43, 170n38 “City of Slaughter” (Bialik), xxi, 64, 96, 102–18, 157; Alterman’s poetry compared to, 130–31; cast as prophecy, 103, 105–8, 117, 130; deixis in, 112–14, 115, 118; and genre, 105, 114; performance in, xxi, 95–96, 113, 115, 116, 118, 157; and spatial conditions, 110, 115, 118, 130; translations of, 102, 185n2; victim testimonies in, 103, 106–7, 110, 111–13, 187n38; written in poetry not prose, 107, 109, 114 clothes, 87 Cohen, Margaret, 161n20 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, xv, 160n12

Emerson, Caryl, 160n8, 161n20 engineering, xviii, 164n17 Ezekiel, 105–6, 107 Fabbri, Veronique, 164n25, 164n27 Fauriel, Claude Charles: History of Provencal Poetry, 87 Fefferman, Tsvi Yoseph, 58 Felice, Fortune Barthelemy de: Encyclopedie d’Yverdon, xiv Fichmann, Yakov, 95 Fichte, Hubert, 167n21, 168n24 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 165n31 Fowler, Elizabeth, 161n14 France, 52, 80 Frankfurt am Main, 52, 53, 172n16 French Revolution, 36 Frischmann, David, 64, 173n27; debate with Bialik, 56, 132–34; on

Index plagiarism, 62–63, 174n42, 174n45; as translator, 59, 190n28 Frye, Northrop, 159n7, 161n15 German language: and Hebrew, 125, 128, 144, 146–47, 149–50, 154; Heine as writer in, 47, 57, 61, 124–25, 155–56; Hoffmann novel and, 143, 144, 191–92n50; rejection of, 128–30 Germany: debate over Heine monuments in, 61, 65, 174n52; Heine as Jew in, 21, 22–23, 25, 53–54, 155–56; Nazi, 121–22, 126–27, 128; public sphere in, 21, 30, 52, 121; reception of Heine in, 21, 120–21, 136, 166n3 Gesse-Harm, Sonja, 172n11 Geulen, Eva, 164n18 Gilfillan, Daniel, 121 Ginosar, Pinkhas, 185n6 Ginsburg, Michael Peled, xiv Girard, René, 165n34 Gluzman, Michael, 76, 176n8, 187n38 Godzich, Wlad, 13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 31, 44 Goldberg, Leah, 124, 137 Goren, Jacob, 112 Gouri, Haim: “Here Lie Our Bodies,” 141–42 Gray, Richard, 171n39 Greene, Roland, 161n14, 165n30 Grice, Paul, xvii Grünberg, Uri Tsvi, 139 Guha, Ranajit, 17–18 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 183–84n62 Gutman, Nahum, 124, 126–28, 189n19 Ha’aretz, 136–37 Hacohen, Gershom Bader, 174n42 Haifa, 139 Halevi, Yeuda, 24–25, 58, 145

215 Hamburg, 52 Hameiri, Avigdor, 131–33, 190n23 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 53 Hebrew, xxi, 62, 102; Bialik on, 55, 56–57, 100–101, 132–34; debate on future of literature in, 56, 132–33; and European literature, 62, 64, 133; and German language, 125, 128, 144, 146–47, 149–50, 154; and German-Jewish identity, 145; Heine relation to, 58, 60, 67, 133, 135; Heine translations into, xxi, 56, 57–59, 62, 123–26, 128, 131–35, 137, 146, 192n53; Herzl translated into, 73; Holocaust and, 130; Israel and, 119, 132, 148–49, 150, 151; poetry in, 61–62, 63, 97, 141; prose in, 95, 97, 100–101, 141, 148, 157; revival of, 56, 95, 100, 110, 114; translating into, 110, 132–33, 146–47; and Yiddish, 101, 110; and Zionism, xviii, 19, 119, 132 Hebrew Melodies, 131–32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3–19, 154–55, 162–65; on architecture, 9–10, 164n17; on art and prose, 3, 5, 14, 154, 164–65n27; on art’s role and development, 4, 7, 9, 12, 34; on “current prosaic conditions,” 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 29; on emergence of prose, 7–8, 154; Heine and, 19, 25, 35, 45, 155, 168–69n29; on monarchs, xix, 4–5, 162n6; philosophy of history, 7, 35, 163n11; The Philosophy of Right, 6, 30; on poetry, 5, 11, 13, 14–16, 164n25; political philosophy of, 6, 163n10; on prosaic consciousness, 7, 163n13; on space, xix, 8, 9–12, 13; on world of prose, xix, 5–6, 9, 16–18, 45; Zionist literature and, 19, 155

216 Heine, Heinrich, xix–xx, 20–46, 166–71; Adorno and Arendt on, 21–23; antisemitic attacks on, 31, 53, 54, 61, 95, 124, 168n24; on art, 35–36; and assimilation, 22–23, 122; Beer on, 149–50, 151; and Berlin, 121, 122–23; Bialik on, 55–57, 64, 99– 100, 133; Brod biography of, 122– 23, 140, 170n39; and censorship, 21, 170n38; as code word, 67, 68, 69, 146–47; conversion to Christianity, 61, 138, 139; on copresence, 26–27, 47, 51; debates in Israel over, 136– 40; and deixis, 40–42, 43, 69–70, 156; feuilletons by, 166n3; on French theater, 38–39; as German Jewish author, xix, 20, 21, 22–23, 25, 47, 53–54, 133, 137, 138, 155–56; as German-language writer, 47, 57, 61, 124–25, 155–56; and Hegel, 19, 25, 35, 45, 155, 168–69n29; Herzl on, 65–72; Hoffmann on, 120, 144–45, 151, 192n53; as homeless figure, 22, 27–28; imitation of, 62, 64, 68; Jewish identity of, 22, 28–29, 58, 120, 132, 133, 136, 142; as mediating figure, 47–48, 123, 155; moves between poetry and prose, 28–29, 34, 142; as paradoxical figure, 124, 137; Paris exile of, 21, 22; performance privileged by, 39–40, 48; poetics of space by, xii, 24, 28–29, 47, 69; poetry of, 20, 21–22, 30, 34, 48–51, 63–64, 166n6; polemic with Platen, 29, 30–34, 68, 167–68nn21–24; political and social views, 21, 31; prose of, xix, 20, 21, 30–34, 37–38, 41–42, 43, 155–56; putative return to Judaism by, 61, 173–74n38; in song, 48–51, 156; translated into Hebrew, xxi, 56, 57– 59, 62, 123–26, 128, 131–35, 137,

Index 146, 192n53; use of irony by, 23–24, 28, 34, 49, 66; use of pronouns by, 40–42, 43, 69–70, 114, 156 Heine, Heinrich — monuments: in Bronx, 52, 53; in German cities, xi–xii, 52–53, 122; German debates over, xx, 51–54, 61, 65, 172n14, 174n52; Herzl essay on, 65–67; Israeli debates over, xxi, 139, 150, 192n65 Heine, Heinrich — reception, xx, 21, 47– 72, 171–75; Hebrew literary debate over, 61–65; and Heine conversion to Christianity, 54, 61, 138, 139; in Israel, xxi, 123–24, 131–40, 150, 192n65; by musical composers, 48–50; by Nazis, 122; in post– World War II Germany, 136; and remediation, 47–48, 49–50, 52, 156; by Zionist authors, xx, 55, 156–57 Heine, Heinrich — works: The Baths of Lucca, 29–34, 39–40; Book of Songs, xix, 20, 23–29, 37, 60, 128, 166n11; Germany a Winter’s Tale, 124–26; The Harz Journey, 43; “Hebrew Melodies,” 24, 58, 67, 131; “The Homecoming,” 24, 27–28; Ideas: The Book of Le Grand, 41– 43, 62, 70, 170–71nn38–39; Lyrical Intermezzo, 24, 26–27, 63; North Sea cycle, xx, 25, 59; “Princess Sabbath,” 58; Romanzero, 24–25, 67, 68, 131–32, 173–74n38; “Sea Apparition,” 120–21, 188–89n5; Travel Pictures, xix–xx, 20, 37, 40–41, 43–45, 69, 70–71; “Yehuda Ben Halevi,” 58, 99; “A Young Man Loves a Maiden,” 26–27, 49, 63–64 Heller, Erich, 5 Henkell, Karl, 174n52 Herder, Johann Gottfried, xv, 160n12 Hermand, Jost, 167n22, 169n30 Herter, Ernst, 53

Index Herzl, Theodor, xx, 73–94, 175–84; as feuilleton writer, 65–66, 70, 77, 177n16; gendered language of, 76, 179n35; on Heine, 65–72; and law, 180–81n47; and naturalism, 78, 79; and novel writing, 77, 177–78n17; political Zionism of, 71–72, 76, 77, 80, 84, 85, 157, 176–77n10, 180n47, 182n53; and prose, xx, 74, 85, 89–90, 119, 141, 156–57; reading by, 78–79; unfinished novels and novellas, 78, 178n18; utopian vision of, 57, 67, 73–75, 81, 82–83, 90, 176n9, 179n36, 180n41 Herzl, Theodor — works: The Book of Folly, 77–78, 180n37; The Glossary, 84, 85–87, 89–90, 181–82nn51–53, 183nn57–58; The Jewish State, 76, 82; The New Ghetto, 84–85; OldNew Land, xx, 67, 73–76, 77, 81, 82, 90–94, 174–75n53, 179n36, 181n50; The Palais Bourbon, 77; Philosophical Tales, 77, 83–84, 180n37, 180n42; Princes of Geniusland, 68–69; Youth Diary, 78 Hess, Moses, 136 Hever, Hanan, 187n38 history, xiii, 36; and art, 15; Hegalian conception of, 7, 35, 163n11 Hoeckner, Bertold, 172n11 Hoffmann, Yoel, xxi; Bernhard, 142–47, 191–92nn49–54; and Heine, 120, 142, 144–45 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 53 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 166n6 Holocaust, xi, 102, 128, 130 homosexuality, 31, 68, 167n21, 176n8 Hotam, Yotam, 191n39 Immermann, Karl Leberecht, 30 irony, 23–24, 28, 34, 49, 66 Ish-Berlin, Israel, 58

217 Israel: borders of, 134, 135, 190n32; debates over Heine in, 136–40; formation of state, 73, 123, 130–31; German refugees in, 137, 191n39; and Hebrew, 119, 132, 148–49, 150, 151; and Heine street naming, xxi, 139, 192n65; and Palestinians, xviii, 184n67 Jabotinsky, Vladimir Ze’ev, 102, 175n1, 190n31, 191n36 Jameson, Fredric, 176n4 Jerusalem, 139, 143, 149, 192n54 Jourdain, Monsieur, xv, xvi, 161n15 Judendeutsch, 125, 189n20 Kagan, Zipporah, 104 Kaiserin Elisabeth, 52, 172n15 Katzenelson, Itshak, 60 Kaufmann, David, 122 Kaufmann, Walter, 163n11 Khalidi, Muhammad Ali, 179n36 Kishinev pogrom (1903), xxxi, 102–4, 115–16, 188n55; testimony of victims, 103, 106–7, 110, 111–13, 187n38 Kittay, Jeffrey, 13 Kittler, Friedrich, 90 Klausner, Yoseph, 63, 64, 174n45 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, xv, 160n12 Kolbe, Georg, 53, 172n16 Kollwitz, Käthe, 53 Kosselleck, Reinhart, 180n47 Kraft, Werner, 137 Kraus, Karl, 54, 65, 166n3, 174n53 Krauss, Werner, 159n7 language, xiii, xvii, 104–5; compensation by, xii, 155; deictic use of, xvii, 40, 110, 112, 113–14, 153; many worlds of, xvi; and prose, xiii, xiv–xvi, 9; and space, 9, 12, 154

218 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 53, 148 law, 86, 99, 104, 182n53; in Jewish tradition, 97, 99, 100, 185n6; Roman, 86, 87, 100, 181n47, 182n55 Liebermann, Max, 53 Lilienblum, Moshe Leib, 63 Liszt, Franz, 48 location, xii, 23, 25, 41, 44–45, 47 Lorelei, 53, 128–29 Louis XVI, 36, 37 love poems, 50–51, 62–63, 64 Löwith, Karl, 168n29 Lukacs, Georg, 168n29; The Theory of the Novel, 34, 161n20, 169n33 Luria, Shlomo Zalman, 58 Ma’ariv, 136 Mapu, Abraham, 101 Marengo, battle of, 44–45 Marx, Karl, 36 Massad, Joseph, 176–77n10 Mendele. See Abramovitsch, S. Y. Mendelssohn, Moses, 125 metonymy, 115, 116 Milner, Iris, 106–7, 108–9, 187n38 Miron, Dan, 106, 114, 187n24, 187n38 Molière, xv monarchs, xix, 4–5, 162n6 monotheism, 7 Moretti, Franco, 159n4 Morson, Gary Saul, 159–60n8, 161n20 Moss, Kenneth, 57, 59 Mossad Bialik, 134, 190n31 Munich, 44 music, 10, 39, 48 mutualism, 75, 176n7 Nandrea, Lorri G., xiv Napoleon Bonaparte, 36 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 140 nationalism, xviii, 57, 140, 173n30

Index naturalism, 78, 79, 81 Novalis, xiii novel, xiii, 5; Herzl and, 74, 77, 78, 91, 177–78nn17–18; Lukacs on, 34, 161n20, 169n33 Old-New Land (Altneuland, Herzl), xx, 67, 73–76, 90–94, 132; influence of, 73–74; as novelistic prose, 74, 77, 91; protagonists in, 74, 82, 85, 176n5, 179n35, 181n50; reception of, 73, 175n1; utopianism of, 73–74, 81, 82, 179n36, 180n41; and Zionist project, 74, 76, 157, 174–75n53 painting, 11–12, 40 Palestinians, xviii, 184n67 Paris, 52 Parush, Iris, 173n27 passing, 68–69, 146–47 past: as different from present, xiii, 4, 6, 7, 16, 84, 86; as model for understanding present, 36–37; prose and, xiv, 7; and transition to present, 83–84, 86 Peres, Shimon, 175n1 Peretz, Y. L., 102, 174n42; The Organ, 61–62 performance: art songs and, 48–49; Bialik poem as, 116, 118; and context, xvii, 141; deixis and, 104–5, 118, 153–54; Heine privileging of, 39–40, 48; pragmatic conditions of, 113; prosaic, 93; prose as different from, xvi–xvii, xviii, xix, 39–40, 70, 71, 93, 142, 153, 156; space of, 39, 42, 70, 71, 141, 153; and speech, xvii, 93–94, 95–96, 113, 115; testimony as, 111; theatrical, 38–39; transition to prose of, 13, 104–5, 153–54, 164n24 Perl, Yoseph, 101

Index Perlman, Shmuel, 134–35, 190n31 Perraudin, Michael, 166n11 philosophy, 9, 18 plagiarism, 62–63, 174n42 Platen, August von: Heine polemic with, 29, 30–34, 68, 167–68nn21– 24; homophobic attacks on, 32, 68, 168n24; Romantic Oedipus, 30 plurality, 16, 17 poetry: architecture and, 10–11; Bakhtin view of, xvi, 161n18; of Bialik, 95, 96–97, 98, 107, 109, 114; Hebrew, 61–62, 63, 97, 141; Hegel on, 5, 11, 13, 14–16, 164n25; of Heine, 20, 21–22, 30, 34, 48–51, 63–64, 166n6; and history, xiii; as linguistic mode of art, 14, 164n25; and literary language, xvi; love, 62–63, 64; of Platen, 32, 33–34; pragmatics of, 114; and presence, xii; and prophecy, 106; and prose, xvi, 14–16, 20, 30, 34, 95, 96–97, 98, 118; romantic, 20, 89; spirituality of, 11; troubadour, 88, 183n62; as vehicle for music, 48–51 Potebnya, A. A., 186n10 pragmatics, 47; as field of linguistics, xvii; of poetry, 114; of prose text, xxi, 43, 70, 118, 156 presence, xvii, 48, 144; and absence, 25, 27; in Heine poems, 26–27, 47, 51; poetry and, xii pronouns, 114, 153–54, 156; Heine use of, 40–42, 43, 69–70, 114, 156 prophecy, 103, 105–8, 117, 130 prose: and absence, xii, 71; abstraction and, xvi, 7, 153, 154–55; and art, 3, 5, 13–14, 15, 154, 164–65n27; Bialik and, 95–101, 99, 118, 119, 156–57; cosmological dimension of, xiii, xvi, 16, 161n20; and “current

219 prosaic conditions,” 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 29; and deixis, xvii, 104–5, 118, 153–54; economic conditions of writing, 42; emergence of, 7–8, 153, 154; of Heine, xix, 20, 21, 30–34, 37–38, 41–42, 43, 155–56; and history, xiv, 7, 17–18, 19; and language, xiii, xiv–xvi, 9; as medium, xii, xviii, xix, 95, 119, 153; mythological roots of, xiv–xv; and nineteenth century spirit, xiii, 159n4; performance as different from, xvi–xvii, 39–40, 70–71, 93, 142, 153, 156; and poetry, xvi, 14–16, 20, 30, 34, 95, 96–97, 98, 118; pragmatic conditions of, xvii–xviii, xix, xx; primacy of, xv, 160n12; progressive nature of, xiv, 159n7; and prosaic, 3–4, 7–8, 34–35, 154, 159–60n8, 161n20, 168n27; and remediation, 35–38, 170n34; and rhythm, xv, 159n7; scholarship on, xv, 161n14, 161n16; as signifying practice, xvi, 13, 14, 153, 155; and space, 8, 18, 43, 70, 71, 143, 157; theater and, 38; and time, xiv, xvi, 6, 7, 153; transition from performance to, 13, 164n24; and warfare, 37, 169–70n34; world of, 5–6, 9, 16–18, 34, 45, 165n30, 165n34 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 176n7 Quicherat, Jules Etienne: History of French Dress, 87 radio, 93–94, 120–22 Ramband d’Orange, 88–89, 184n64 Raynouard, Just-Marie: Selection of Troubadour Poetry in the Original, 87, 88, 183–84n62 Reitter, Paul, 54, 65, 166n3

220 religion, 9, 100 remediation: art and, 12–13; and Heine reception, 47–48, 49–50, 52, 156; and prose, 5, 35–38, 39–40, 153, 157, 170n34; and translation, xxi, 20, 49–50, 157 rhetoric, 15, 19 rhythm, xv, 159n7 Rolnik, Eran, 190n31 romantic fiction, 5 Rosenzweig, Franz, 25 Sadan, Dov, 101, 124–26, 138–39, 186n20 Salishman, Israel, 112 Sammons, Jeffrey, 167n21 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 183n60; History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, 87 Scheuer, Miriam, 137 Schlegel, A. W., 88, 173n30 Schlegel, Friedrich, xiii, xv, 160n12 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 173n30 Schmitt, Carl, 181n47 Schocken, Salman, 136, 191n39 Schoeps, Julius, 180n47 Scholem, Gershom, 185n6 Schubert, Franz, 48 Schumann, Robert, 48, 49, 50–51, 122, 171–72n11 science, 3, 99 Scott, Walter, 167n23 sculpture, 8, 10, 11, 164n25 Seeba, Hinrich, 34 Shalev, Yitshak, 139 Shamir, Ziva, 96, 129 Shapira, Anita, 177n10 Shea, Peter, 48 Shedletzky, Itta, 171n39 Shetel, Shmuel, 137 Shklovskii, Viktor, 159n7 Shmeruk, Chone, 174n45

Index Sieyès, Emmanuel, 181n47 Silcher, Friedrich, 122 silence, 107–10, 113–14, 115 Simon, Ernst, 137 Smolenskin, Peretz, 101 Solon, 84, 85, 180n47 songs, 48–50 space: absence of, 42, 153; and art, xix, 9–12, 13; Bialik and, 110, 115, 156– 57; deixis and, 118; Hegel on, xix, 8, 9–12, 13; Heine’s poetics of, 24, 28– 29, 47, 69; and language, 9, 12, 154; and medium, 47; of performance, 39, 42, 70, 71, 141, 153; prose and, 8, 18, 43, 70, 71, 74, 157; and territory, 75–76; and text, xii, 74, 160n8; Zionism and, xviii–xix, 64, 91, 92, 136, 184n67 speculative thinking, 15 speech: despatialized, 118; performed, xxii, 94, 95–96, 113, 115; prophetic, 106, 117; silence and, 108–9 Spielhagen, Friedrich, 79 Stanislawski, Michael, 175n57 Stybel, Yosef, 59–60 synecdoche, 115 syntax, 162–63n9 technology, 91, 141 Tel Aviv, 139, 150, 192n65 theater, 38–39 Trachtenbroit, Joseph, 111 tragedy, 36, 38 translation: into Hebrew, 56–58, 110, 128, 131–35, 137, 146–47; of Heine, xxi, 56, 57–59, 128, 131–35, 137; and nationalism, 57, 173n30; as remediation, xxi, 20, 49–50, 157; as restoration, 57 troubadours, 85, 86, 87, 88, 183–84n62 Tushiya publishers, 58

Index Ullman, Micha, xi, xii, 149 utopianism, 81, 82–83, 176n6; Herzl and, 57, 67, 73–75, 81, 82–83, 90, 176n9, 179n36, 180n41 Varnhagen, Rahel, 23, 123 Venuti, Lawrence, 57, 173n30 Vico, Giambattista, xv, 160n12 Wagner, Richard, 182–83n56; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 86–87 Warburg, Otto, 184n70 warfare, 37, 169–70n34 Wegner, Philip, 74 Weizmann, Chaim, 130 Weltsch, Felix, 123 Weltsch, Robert, 139–40 Werses, Shmuel, 55, 188n55 Wienbarg, Ludolf, 169–70n34 Woolf, Virginia, 162–63n9 Wormann, Curt, 137

221 Yavin, Osnat, 138–39, 191n44 Yediot, 136 Yiddish, 57, 58, 101, 110, 125 Zakim, Eric S., 188n54 Zilbersheid, Uri, 179n36 Zimmermann, Moshe, 191n39 Zionism, 67, 73, 95, 173n27; and colonialism, 176–77n10; and Hebrew, xviii, 19, 119, 132; and Heine reception, xx, 55, 156–57; Herzl and, 71–72, 76, 77, 80, 84, 85, 157, 176–77n10, 180n47, 182n53; messianic rhetoric of, 134, 190n32; spatial ambitions of, xviii–xix, 64, 91, 92, 136, 184n67; and urban planning, 92, 184n70; as utopian vision, 57, 67, 73–75, 81, 174–75n53, 176n9 Zola, Émile, 79–81, 178–79n29; The Human Beast, 79; Money, 81, 179n30