While Moses Mendelssohn’s reputation as a modern Socrates is well-known to scholars of eighteenth-century intellectual history, the opposite tendency to orientalise him has received less attention ...than it deserves. The paper discusses some examples, highlighting the interdependence of Greek and Oriental attributions. In their critical reactions to Mendelssohn’s
(1767), a modern version of Socrates’ dialogues on the immortality of the soul, radical Pietist Johann Daniel Müller and Lutheran orthodox theologian Gottfried Joachim Wichmann sought to invalidate the Jewish Enlightener’s case for reason by orientalising him. At the end of the century, the religious tensions inherent in the uses of Greek and Oriental models for different Jewish and Christian denominational positions became visible in Johann Gottfried Schadow’s drawing
(1800), a work commissioned by David Friedländer, whose
(1799) had just caused a stir with its bold statements in the spirit of Deism.
Ilse Aichingers Roman Die größere Hoffnung erscheint im Frühjahr 1948 im Verlag Bermann Fischer, der zu diesem Zeitpunkt seinen Hauptsitz in Amsterdam hat.1 Es ist der erste Roman der damals ...sechsundzwanzigjährigen Autorin und bleibt ihr einziger.
Inhaltlich und stilistisch ist er geprägt von seinen schwierigen materiellen und seelischen Entstehungsbedingungen. Die ersten Entwürfe gehen auf die Kriegsjahre zurück, die Ausarbeitung ist in der Unsicherheit und Not der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit erfolgt. Aichinger verarbeitet
im Schreiben ihre eigene Erfahrung von Verfolgung und Zwangsarbeit im Wien der NS-Zeit. In einem Brief vom 14. September 1946 an ihre Schwester Helga, die 1938 nach England hatte flüchten können, erzählt Aichinger, das Buch handle
Since the Romantic era, the lyrical poem has epitomized the idea of poetic loneliness. While the alleged loneliness epidemic, considered a pervasive mental health problem in Western societies, brings ...to the fore solitude’s dangerous potential, poems such as Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong” and Cummings’s “l(a” attest to solitude’s aesthetic potential. Ambiguously based on the myth of the solitary genius standing out from the lonely crowd of alienated, other-directed persons, poems may give meaning to the state of psychosocial isolation. Reflecting solitude as a privation, poetic loneliness has the power to create virtual communities.
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6.
An den Wassern Babels Wittler, Kathrin
Yearbook for European Jewish literature studies,
11/2020, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
While the antisemitic impact of Sessa’s popular farce
(1813) is well-known to historians of nineteenth-century literature and theatre, a careful contextualization of the notorious name of one of its ...characters – Isidorus Morgenländer – within the orientalist discourses of the time reveals that this play has not only anti-Jewish, but also anti-romantic tendencies. The reactions to Sessa’s play confirm this bidirectionality and the enhancing effects it had.
In the nazi concentration and extermination camps, especially in Auschwitz, prisoners marked by utter physical and psychological exhaustion were called Muselmänner ("Mussulmen"). In recent years, ...based on a passing remark by Giorgio Agamben, many have taken this linguistic phenomenon to mean that Jews died as Muslims in the Holocaust. Quickly absorbed into current political theory, intellectual discourses, and discussion forums on the internet, this idea has become as widespread as widely misunderstood, all but turning Muselmann into a buzzword which may be (mis)used for anything from Jewish Islamophobia to US-American torture practices. The paper retraces the historical semantics of the German word Muselmann and discusses the possible reasons for its introduction into the language of the concentration camps. Based on the finding that the word's Orientalist implications do not sufficiently explain its use in the concentration camps and that neither guards nor prisoners employed it with the intention of turning Jews into Muslims, the paper cautions against the transfer of this word's historically specific use, developed under extreme conditions, into the heated political debates of the present.
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In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the transformation of the German Jews' appearance was often defined in terms of Europeanization and modernization, whereas the so-called Polish ...Jews were reproached for clinging to their outdated 'Oriental' caftans, beards, and head coverings. Inner-Jewish differences were moulded in the terms of a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, as Polish Jews were stylized into anachronistic, semi-Oriental figures by their German peers. The paper retraces the genesis of this pattern of thought and analyses its functions. Bringing together a disparate range of textual and pictorial evidence, it asks how and why the spatial-temporal divide of West/Present and East/Past came to be established in late-eighteenth-century debates about Jewish Emancipation and in what ways it helped Christians and Jews alike to stylize the European Enlightenment into a civilizing mission which had to be enforced by means of a 'Western' body regime. In sum, it argues that the body politics which helped organize the sociocultural changes of Jewish life around 1800 were premised on modern Orientalism and on modern concepts of history, including emphatic notions of progress and perfectibility.
