Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism

by Noah Isenberg

Between Redemption and Doom is a revelatory exploration of the evolution of German-Jewish modernism. Through an examination of selected works in literature, theory, and film, Noah Isenberg investigates the ways in which Jewish identity was represented in German culture from the eve of the First World War through the rise of National Socialism. He argues that various responses to modernity—particularly to its social, cultural, and aesthetic currents—converge around the discourse on its renaissance, its crisis, and its dissolution.

 

Isenberg opens with a general discussion of German modernism—its primary forms, movements, and manifestations. Subsequent chapters on Franz Kafka and Arnold Zweig deal with particular instances of the modern, and often ambivalent, search for forms of German-Jewish identity based on cultural and ethnic community. Discussions of Paul Wegener’s film Der Golem and Walter Benjamin’s childhood memoirs explore the culmination of German modernism and the modes through which Jews were identified in mass society. Throughout, Isenberg shows how Jewish authors and figures confronted the dilemma of self-understanding—the exigencies of community in the modern world—in language, culture, memory, and representation.

Genres: Germany

234 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Noah Isenberg is director of screen studies and professor of culture and media at The New School, the author of We'll Always Have Casablanca, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, and editor of Weimar Cinema, and the recipient of an NEH Public Scholar Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting and, I believe, important book. Though to some, the crises of identity experienced by bourgeois, intellectual Jews during the first decades of the 20th-Century, in Germany and Germany-Speaking Central Europe, may seem impossibly distant in time and place, and, so, irrelevant to our post-post modern world, nothing could be further from the truth.

Isenberg deftly explains the dynamics involved in Jewish assimilation and accommodation----behaviors that played so over-sized role in the advent of German modernism. The struggle with the meaning, the implications of the loss of Jewish identity--the crises of identities---drove Isenberg's Kafka, Zweig, Wegener (a gentile) and Benjamin and other Jewish writers, philosophers and intellectuals to states of mind that ran from alienation from the dominant culture, to, in the case of the Zionists, a determined repudiation of it. Theirs was a struggle played out across the spectrum of media, and so influenced all media created during its time. What more, these issues, with slight variation, continue to be confronted today.

The tension between community and society, between the dominant culture and the "other" is not a relic of less enlightened times. The distance between belonging and feeling at home were profound and punishing to Isenberg's subjects. Which is why the book transcends Jewish Studies, or the macabre dance between German and Jewish peoples and cultures.
We see today, in countries all over the world, how members of ethnic, or other minorities---the incompatible "other"---struggle to define him/herself within his/her newly adopted community. The same questions are confronted: How much can one retain of one's original culture before it begins to dissipate? What is lost, if one cannot assimilate? What is gained by assimilation--even as the notion of dominant culture is itself in a battle to understand its ongoing relevance and purpose?

This is not only a book for modern Jews trying to define manageable or acceptable limits to the roles demanded by the religion or practices of their parents. It addresses issues faced by the Black Man/Woman accused of not being Black enough, or the Muslim trying to understand the term "moderate," or the lapsed Catholic or Episcopalian, or, in fact, anyone seeking to find his/her authentic self in a world where the authentic has been commoditized to the point of meaninglessness.

Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism is a disciplined and focused book. One that leaves its reader well acquainted with the various consequences of being caught between two seemingly irreconcilable communities. But it also introduces a fresh and necessary discourse on identity, one that's relevant to our increasingly angry and sad multicultural world.