Echoes of Yiddish on the Streets of Berlin: The Melancholy Picaresques of Alfred Döblin and Sh. Y. Agnon

• In Event: Yiddish and German in Modern Jewish Culture(s): Ideological and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

Alfred Döblin's urban panorama BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1929) opens with its Lumpenproletariat protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, released from prison and falling into the company of a group of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews. Although such Jews were a novel feature of the Berlin cityscape in the Weimar period, their presence in the novel suggests a fugitive, displaced status for these Jews comparable to Biberkopf's own status as a newly paroled prisoner. Biberkopf's encounter with these Jews proves fleeting; they do not reappear in the novel and therefore register only as a station on the protagonist's longer journey through the unfamiliar and menacing metropolis. Döblin's placement of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the urban itinerary of his epic resonates with a later picaresque tale of pre-Holocaust Berlin, Sh. Y. Agnon's 1951 novella AD HENA ("To This Day"). There, Agnon depicts a similarly displaced East European Jew--a fugitive from military service in World War I as well as his own Zionist commitments in Palestine, and a refugee in the besieged German capital itself--making his way through a series of misadventures between Berlin and Leipzig, only to find himself at story's end to be a victim of coincidences that deprive him of a fixed address in his city of refuge. The novella's linguistic predicament signifies the multiple levels of homelessness afflicting its protagonist: written in Hebrew, it nevertheless evokes both the German-speaking milieu of its setting as well as the Yiddish-speaking memories, dreams, and reveries of the protagonist's past. The narrative's pathos is constituted in the main character's inability to find a language through which to communicate with anyone, even himself. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theories of melancholy and its significance to Baroque aesthetics, this discussion will identify the ghostly echoes of Yiddish, either in Döblin's German or Agnon's Hebrew, as a predicament that accounts for the poignance of both works. Through this juxtaposition, a connection can be recognized between these two figures in the development of literary modernism, and through this spectrality of Yiddish, a larger connection can be understood between the picaresque and melancholy in the development of the novel as a literary form.

Author

• Marc Caplan, Dartmouth College