After the Law: The Residue of Religion in German-Jewish Modernism

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s appraisal of Franz Kafka’s work famously, if cryptically, characterizes the Jewishness of the author’s writing as providing the Haggadah to a Halacha that has either disappeared or does not yet exist. Though claiming in this context a distinctive, counterintuitive religiosity for Kafka’s writing, the remark illustrates the extent to which religious reference in German-Jewish writing generally functions—for a thinker such as Benjamin as much as a belletristic writer like Kafka—both as remnants of a lost revelation and the foreshadowing of a future imagined as either utopia or apocalypse. As Theodor Adorno writes of Jewishness in Gustav Mahler’s music, “One can no more put one’s finger on this element than in any other work of art: it shrinks from identification yet to the whole remains indispensable.”

This panel considers the Jewishness of three distinct and relatively under-appreciated instances of interwar German modernism: Clementine Krämer’s ESTHER/DIE TÄNZERIN (1920), a serialized novel of German cabaret culture loosely adapted from the Biblical Book of Esther; Arnold Schoenberg’s operatic fragment MOSES UND ARON (abandoned in 1932), based on the Book of Exodus; and Soma Morgenstern’s bizarrely idyllic trilogy depicting a Viennese Jew’s reclamation of traditional Galician religiosity, FUNKEN IM ABGRUND (translated as "Sparks in the Abyss," written 1930-1943). Broadly speaking, these three works represent three distinct moments in the interwar era—the chaotic first years of the Weimar Republic (Krämer), the crisis of the Republic’s collapse (Schoenberg), and the arrival of cataclysm (Morgenstern)—while also signifying, respectively, three cultural registers (the serialized fiction of the popular press, the esoteric experiments of the avant-garde, and the weighty seriousness of a novelistic form as atavistic as its subject matter) and three aesthetic strategies (a forerunner of NEUE SACHLICHKEIT, High Modernism at its most mandarin, and neo-Romanticism, respectively). Nonetheless, they each focus within their respective locations and approaches on a reappraisal of religious reference systems as modes of critique on modern life, the moral obligations of art, and the fate of a Jewish collectivity constituted as much by inscrutable remnants of faith as the historical circumstances of its dissolution.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Chair

• Naama Rokem, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Cabaret for the German-Jewish Masses: The Modern Megillah of Clementine Krämer’s ESTHER - Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

• Arnold Schoenberg’s Jewish TRAUERSPIEL: The Status of Language, Law, and Symbol in MOSES UND ARON - Marc Caplan, Center for Jewish History

• A Suspended ALTNEULAND: Tradition, Modernity, and Violence in Soma Morgenstern’s SPARKS IN THE ABYSS - Kata Gellen, Duke University

Respondent

• Jonathan S. Skolnik, University of Massachusetts-Amherst