Writing the European Metropolis: Vienna in David Fogel’s modernist Hebrew novels

• In Event: Lightning session in Literature {Jewish Yiddish, Hebrew) and Jewish Politics

Abstract

Fin de siècle Vienna was a hybrid located at the crossroads between east and west that attracted many writers from all over Central Europe. Most of them chose German as the language of their literary creations, but others kept their minority language and thus contributed to the idea of polycentricism, not only from a geographical or political point of view, but as a means to characterise Vienna and its culture.
In my paper I aim to discuss the perception of Vienna as the European city in David Fogel’s (1891-1944) novels "Married Life" and "Viennese Romance". The young Fogel arrived in the city he dreamed of in 1912 with the goal to become a modernist Hebrew writer. Although, “the city of Vienna is the main realm of writing [and] Fogel’s sheet of paper” (Lilach Nethanel), the novelist does not idealize or romanticize the city in his literary texts. He rather depicts this metropolis of European culture in its decadence and on the brink to its disappearance.
It is the purpose of my presentation to elaborate on the portrayal of Vienna as a city that represents an “idea of Europe” and in order to do so I aim to discuss literary “figures of Europe” (Daniel Weidner) that can be found in the texts. These figures can be characters that undergo a cultural Europeanization through the city and thus join the “culture in the singular” (Wolfgang Schmale) on the one hand, but also spaces of border-crossings and transitions within the cityscape that represent the Central European credo “maximum diversity in minimum space” (Milan Kundera) on the other hand.
As has been widely discussed among critics, David Fogel rather chose both concepts: Stylistically he joined European modernism while at the same time writing in a minority language and thus contributing to the diversity of Central European literature. However, it remains to be examined # to what extend this is reflected in the literary content itself

Author

• Judith Müller, Ben Gurion University of the Negev