Too much Presence of the Past – the Dispersal of Émigré Book Collections in Israel

• In Event: Portable Homeland? German-Jewish Book Collections in Israel

Abstract

In spite of adverse conditions many German-Jewish emigrants and refugees held on to their book collections when they left Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power. Book collections were part of their furniture and family history; they were cultural capital, reservoirs of knowledge and aesthetic pleasure – and even books without any dedications or inscriptions were often tied to memories many emigrants did not want to leave behind. While most Zionist intellectuals and the political establishment in Mandate Palestine perceived the German émigré book collections as symbols of a value system that had become suspect after the apparent collapse of the ideals of Jewish acculturation, only few immigrants abandoned their libraries.
These book collections attest to the relevance of a shared canon of German literature – and the values it represented – for readers after their emigration. Canonical literature is referred to and cherished in fictional, autobiographic, and scholarly texts that try to provide insight into the »inner history« of immigration to Mandate Palestine. In many accounts, the BILDUNGS-canon of the 1920s and 1930s constitutes a monument sealed off from additions or revisions.

The émigré canon’s salient memorial function finds an anchor in the memorial function of material book collections. This liaison of the respective functions of both material collection and incorporeal canon turned literature into a strong medium of cultural memory. Nevertheless, many German émigré book collections have meanwhile been abandoned or are about to be cast out from private homes as well as public institutions. While many Israelis and Germans mourn the fading-away of the material and immaterial traces of a German-Jewish book culture in Israel, these processes of public mourning rarely find a counterpart in the handling of concrete émigré collections. This paradoxical situation marks eminent tensions between the symbolical and the material qualities of book collections. In my paper, I will outline these tensions as conflicts between remembrance and forgetting. I will show how the fate of émigré book collections in Israel forces individuals as well as institutions to come to terms with the question, how much presence the past should have.

author

• Caroline Jessen, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach