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Overview
This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country from which they had been expelled and to which they would never want to return. Among the many prominent female intellectuals and literary figures Barbara Hahn discusses are Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Else Lasker-Schüler, Margarete Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. In examining their writing, she reflects upon the question of how German culture was constructed—with its inherent patterns of exclusion. This is a book about hope and despair, possibilities and preventions. We see attempts at dialogue between Christians and Jews, men and women, "Germans" and "Jews," attempts initiated by these women that, for the most part, remained unanswered. Finally, the book reconstructs the changing notions of the "Jewess," a key word in modern German history with its connotations of "salons," "beauty," and "esprit." And yet a word that is also disastrous, in which there culminated everything the dominant culture condemned as dangerous.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691171470 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Jewess Pallas Athena
This Too a Theory of ModernityBy Barbara Hahn
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11614-3
Chapter One
After all had been destroyed, demolished, and obliterated, a voice arises: "Mutter Rahel / weint nicht mehr. Rübergetragen / alles Geweinte" ["Mother Rahel / weeps no longer. Hauled over / all the weeped things"]-a poem by Paul Celan from the cycle Fadensonnen [Thread-suns] of 1968. Rahel weeps no longer; no one is there who could mourn as Rahel mourned her children. "No longer"-a temporal posture that governs Celan's poetry, sets it in an uncanny time, without relation to the Now. It is past, unalterable, and related to a position that also no longer exists. "Hauled over / all the weeped things"-to another place, a space the Now cannot reach. "Rübergetragen," in the original, recalling "über-tragen," to translate. Paul Celan-a translator, from German into German, from a German that was exterminated along with the people who spoke it, into the German of those responsible for this extermination. A translator, who recollects in Hebrew names a history that has disappeared into this "no longer": Rahel and Esther, Sulamith with her ashen hair, and finally a figure who has no name. A figure in whom languages, cultures, traditions clash:WENN ICH NICHT WEISS, NICHTWEISS, ohne dich, ohne dich, ohne Du,
kommen sie alle, die Freigeköpften, die Zeitlebens hirnlos den Stamm der Du-losen besangen: Aschrej, ein Wort ohne Sinn, transtibetanisch, der Jüdin Pallas Athene In die behelmten Ovarien gespritzt, und wenn er, er,
foetal, karpatisches Nichtnicht beharft, dann spitzenklöppelt die Allemande Das sich übergebende un-Sterbliche Lied.
[iF I KNOW NOT, KNOW NOT without you, without you, without a You, they all come, the freebeheaded, who lifelong brainlessly sang of the tribe of the You-less Aschrej, a word without sense, transtibetan, into the Jewess Pallas Athena into her helmeted ovaries squirted, and when he, he, fetal, harps carpathian nono then the Allemande made lacework for the nauseous inherited immortal song.]
A song in three languages, a song in dialogue with a You, overlaid with a He, a nameless instance that destroys the dialogue. Thus two triangles, one formed from I, You, and He, and the other from three languages: German, the basic language of the poem, Hebrew, and French, present in a word that in itself recalls another language and another land: Allemande-a German dance. Just as the start of the poem dances and twirlingly repeats itself: "If I know not, know not, without you, without you." But the song that begins here is soon broken off. It collides with a "word without sense," "Aschrej"-a word like a cry, a word from the Hebrew. Luther translates it with "blessed be they" or ["wohl denen"]. One can also translate it with a single German word: "Heil." For it is a "word without sense." The murderers took it up, Heil Hitler, and transformed it into a death sentence. A word from the language of the You-less, who sang a different song, a song without translations and therefore past. You-less, monolingual, constructed from senseless words.
The tribe of the You-less injects its words, rather than giving them to a You, rather than making room with its calling for a You. It injects them into the helmeted ovaries of "the Jewess Pallas Athena." In Greek mythology, Pallas Athena with her double name wears a helmet upon her head and a shield across her breast. Ovaries, however, she does not have. She was neither born of a mother nor can become one. She is the daughter of her father, Zeus, from whose head she sprang, and which, in some traditions, split asunder, so that in thunder and lightning she could come into the world. When her mother is mentioned, it is only as someone who has been killed. Athena's mother had been swallowed by Father Zeus, who thus robbed her of the power to give birth. Athena, this daughter without a mother, interrupts all female genealogies and founds no traditions. Pallas Athena, the warrior, the thinking woman, whose symbol is the owl, is a unique occurrence. A point without history, with no before and no after.
The "Jewess" is something quite different. Since the end of the eighteenth century an erotically charged word with a meaning that depends on exclusion. It signaled a danger for the German man and threatened a "corruption of German culture"; it stood for the foreign, the ominous, the other. Celan's poem shatters this context. Ovaries have no erotic connotation. Ovaries designate the fecundity of women, and women were targeted by the National Socialist genocide because they could be mothers. They were sterilized-squirted in the ovaries-so that they could no longer hand on life. And they were murdered, so that never again would a Mother Rahel weep for her children.
The "Jewess Pallas Athena." This shocking phrase demolishes an anchor of National Socialist ideology: the supposed contradiction between "Semitic" and "Indo-European"-what German philology calls "Indo-germanic." Beyond this opposition, something in common is asserted that encompasses both the culture of ancient Greece and the Jewish tradition. What appear to be entirely contrary meanings can suddenly be thought together, meanings that had been lost in the clichéd images of the "Jewess." Two traditions interweave, and to monotheistic Judaism is joined a culture that understood Wisdom, Knowledge, Art, and Memory as feminine nouns. Sophia and Mnemosyne, the Muses and Theoria. A culture in which feminine words and female figures bear memories just as Rahel, Esther, and Sulamith recall the Jewish people for Celan.
This history of a commonality is destroyed by the tribe of the You-less, and with that a culture disappeared that had been constructed as much from Judaism as from Greek antiquity. It becomes a dead, a vanished culture, that can no longer hand anything down. Yet Celan's poem, published in 1968, hands down a song, renders a mortal song immortal. An immortal song that also bears the memory of two writing women whose names are not mentioned. It can be read as a Kaddish, as a prayer of mourning for one who also wrote her transtibeten songs and embroidered or spun Tibetan carpets with a carpeted Tibet: Else Lasker-Schüler, who died in 1945 in Jerusalem. A Kaddish as well for one who wrote as if the Jewess Pallas Athena were a writer: Margarete Susman, who died in 1966 in Zurich. She developed a theory of "the Occident," composed of three elements: Greek antiquity, Judaism, and Christianity, a theory of "European culture," which she called an "extremely masculine culture," because it was riven by the battle of the sexes, torn between man and woman.
Pallas Athena: Figure or Concept?
Auch dich erkenn ich, Pallas Athene! Mit Schild und Weisheit konntest du nicht Abwehren das Götterverderben?
You too I see there, Pallas Athena! Even your shield and your wisdom could not Ward off the fall of the gods? -Heinrich Heine, "Die Götter Griechenlands"
A transfer of power. In Heine's poem "The Gods of Greece" (1826), new gods have dethroned the old; now "The virgin a god made fruitful / And the miracle-working divine Son" rule, and Juno, the former queen of the gods, must give way. Pallas Athena, introduced directly following this transfer of power, was unable to prevent the victory of Christendom. Despite her "shield and wisdom" she could not oppose it. In Heine's poem the transit between antiquity and Christendom is what she marks. In a strange way. For there are discrepancies in the poem's world of images that make the status of Pallas Athena ever more complex. The poem begins with a first-person figure who studies a "light-blue" evening or night sky, across which clouds drift. In cloud shapes, these ephemeral images, the figure discerns the gods: Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Pallas Athena, Aphrodite/Venus, Apollo/Helios. Gods with changing names at home in Greek and Roman antiquity. Their images flow into each other the way their names do; they are as unstable as the drifting clouds. But not Pallas Athena.
In the poem, her name is not translated from Greek into Latin, and she is the only god to whom the first-person figure addresses a question: "Auch dich erkenn ich, Pallas Athene! / Mit Schild und Weisheit konntest du nicht / Abwehren das Götterverderben?" ["You too I see there, Pallas Athene! / Even your shield and your wisdom could not / Ward off the fall of the gods?"] She alone, the untranslatable one, she alone with her double name is introduced as a figure who might have prevented the triumph of the new gods. She alone is given definite attributes. All the others change just as their names and cloudy images change. She is equipped with "shield and wisdom." An "and" linking heterogeneous elements. The shield stands for defense, while wisdom by contrast is not metaphorical. Nor is the shield unambiguously coordinated with wisdom, so that the connection between the two poles remains vague. As vague as the introduction of the figure of Pallas Athena. She is the goddess who does not make the transition into Roman antiquity, into Latin. And therefore she is spared something essential: "Ich hab euch niemals geliebt, ihr Götter! / Denn widerwártig sind mir die Griechen, / Und gar die Römer sind mir verhast." ["I have never loved you, you ancient gods! / For the Greeks are repulsive to me, / And how I hate the Romans."] Under the Romans, the occupiers of the Mediterranean, the rebellion of Bar Kochba was suppressed. Under the Romans the triumph of Christendom began. Pallas Athena, however, the untranslated goddess did not accompany this transition. In Heine's poem she remains in ancient Greece; she was not involved in the conflicts between the Roman Empire and the Jews. And something more supports her unique position. The heavens of polytheistic antiquity are not supplanted in Heine by the monotheism of Christendom. Rather, the new religion is present in two or even three divine figures-in the divinely fertilized Virgin and the godly son. The genealogy of the ancient world is thus continued and Christendom integrated into the changing names and shapes of antiquity. Only Pallas Athena resists this integration. Her virginity is unmarred by any impregnating god. She was born from a god, but not fertilized by one. A strange figure, entirely at home in neither of the different pantheons. Strange, too, in the question that the "I" directs to her. An addressable instance. An instance that arises in the question posed to her? As does God in the monotheistic religions? As does the Jewish God?
Only at the very end of Heine's poem do unchangeable, eternal instances appear, removed from the mutability of the gods: "Und siegreich traten hervor am Himmel / Die ewige Sterne" ["And triumphant on the field of heaven emerged / The eternal stars"]. The "eternal stars," images that, unlike the clouds in the poem, cannot be read. Constellations that render no image. That are no image. Like the God in monotheistic religions? Like the Jewish God? Read in this way, the figure of Pallas Athena forms a bridge to the religion that Heine does not mention. And so a bridge as well to Paul Celan's poem. The unique and paradoxical figure of the "Jewess Pallas Athena" can produce new contexts. Not only in Heine's poem. She seems to establish a hidden continuity that links historical persons to mythical figures. Two of the women writers that will be read in what follows were called by friends and readers "Pallas Athena": Rahel Levin and Hannah Arendt. A third, Else Lasker-Schüler, called her friends by this name. A fourth, Bertha Badt-Strauss, wrote in her autobiographical notes that she had grown up with "Aunt Athena" in a house on whose living room wall hung a picture of the Athenian Acropolis, directly across from a tapestry showing Jerusalem. All four women were Jews.
The German Pallas Athena
On 31 July 1834 there appeared in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt a double text: two printed pages with the title "Rahel," and a review, also two pages long, of Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde [Rahel: A Book of Reminiscences for Her Friends], the three-volume collection of Rahel Levin's letters that had just been published. The Germans are a nation, one reads here, that can boast of few great writers. Few men and even fewer women, particularly in comparison with France and England. But suddenly there was "an event in German cultural history" to celebrate, "Rahel, a marvelous gift from heaven, the German Pallas Athena": "She was a Jewess and so blessed by this birth with all that a higher education could grant such a being. The natural sensitivity of her fellow tribesmen and unprejudiced skeptical nature multiplied her intellectual gifts to infinity. She stands there as the veritable child of the north, as Protestant in the highest sense, as a true German woman with a German heart and every German characteristic."
A series of almost synonymous qualities: Jewess and German are here not in opposition; the one appears to strengthen the other. And both find their culmination in the "gift from heaven," a harmony from Greek antiquity, a Jewish name and the attributes of a German. If a Jewish woman can be the German Pallas Athena, contraries have been united. This new figure of a secularized mythology is modeled to the smallest detail on its antique precedent: She is "a child of the north," just as Pallas Athena is a child of Zeus. And though she does not, as Athena did, lend a city her name, she is nonetheless the "daughter" of a city, of Berlin. She is a "virgin" who founds an intellectual tradition but no familial genealogy. In the fourfold determination "Rahel, the German Pallas Athena," a concept of history and tradition culminates: "She is the epitome of the whole sweep of German history, the German woman from the recent past in her most developed form and highest potential."
Here, Heinrich Heine's poem finds a clear echo. But more than that. Heine is introduced in the review as the only explicit addressee of Rahel Levin's letters. Rahel-so the Book of Reminiscences is called here-will lie on a table in the "Hotel d'Espagne in Paris" and there it will find a reader. A reader because Heine has already made his admiration for the writer of these letters public. His texts contain a place for her. He had dedicated his collection of poems Die Heimkehr [The Homecoming] from 1826 to "Frau Privy Counselor Friederike Varnhagen v. Ense." But in the preface to the Buch der Lieder [Book of Songs] of 1837 he translates this dedication into a different sort of naming: "The book arrived at the right time to give comfort. It is as if Rahel knew what sort of posthumous mission was hers. She believed that things would improve, and waited; but as the waiting knew no end, she shook her head impatiently, glanced at Varnhagen, and quickly died-in order all the more quickly to rise again. She reminds me of the legend of that Rahel who climbed from the grave and stood crying in the road as her children were carried off into bondage."
The poems were dedicated to Rahel, then, and no longer to Friederike Varnhagen von Ense. By establishing the author "Rahel," and her "posthumous mission," the bourgeois person "Friederike Varnhagen von Ense" has moved into another history. The Jewish tradition, obscured by the latter name, can reappear in the mission for which "Rahel" stands. A mission that links the time of ancient Judaism with the future. And thus she now emerges from the only tradition that had been without negative connotations in Heine's poem "The Gods of Greece."
"Pallas" and the Jews as "Enemies"
In the autumn of 1943 Gottfried Benn was working on an essay that bore the title "Pallas"-without Athena. It begins in the following way: "Athena, who leapt fully armed and shining from Zeus's brow-blue-eyed, the motherless god. Pallas-delighting in battles and destruction, Medusa's head on her breastplate, the somber, joyless bird of night upon her helmet ... Pallas, beyond Sappho and Mary, once almost overpowered in the darkness of a cavern, always helmeted, never impregnated, childless goddess, cold and alone."
A curious text. The first of its two parts is dominated by the distancing and mocking paraphrase of a book whose title and author are never named. The second develops a theory of begetting that extends to intellectual productivity. This dual movement of acceptance and rejection is indicated as early as the first sentence. "Pallas" the title runs, that name alone, but the text itself begins: Athena, apostrophized as a masculine "god." Through an intermediary step that is introduced, like all the others, with a dash, the passage swerves through Venus back to Pallas, who stands between Sappho, the writing woman, and Mary, the mother of Christ. Pallas, "cold and alone," an intermediary instance. "Cold and alone" she enters the text, "again armed and alone" she leaves it. But in the interim, embedded in a long reflection, she appears once more. This time neither cold nor alone:
(Continues...)
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What People are Saying About This
A remarkable scholarly and literary achievement, and a major work of cultural history. This is a deeply moving and sad book that reconstructs the cultural and literary history of German-Jewish women writers, poets, and philosophers from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. One often has the sense that one is reading scholarship produced by a distinctly literary imagination, indeed that Hahn's book could almost be part of the history it is telling.
— Eric L. Santner, University of Chicago, author of "On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig"
This important book is a highly intelligent and subtle analysis of the role of female intellectuals, largely Jewish, in shaping German cultural sensibilities in recent centuries. Hahn's moral concern—passion—is palpable on every page of her erudite volume. Her work is also a testimony of an earnest attempt, utterly free of sentimentalism, to claim a legacy that unfettered nationalism and bigotry sought to eradicate. Intellectually and spiritually compelling, and marked by graceful and eminently lucid prose, it should meet with enthusiastic interest not only among scholars but also among interested general readers.
— Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago, and Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"A remarkable scholarly and literary achievement, and a major work of cultural history. This is a deeply moving and sad book that reconstructs the cultural and literary history of German-Jewish women writers, poets, and philosophers from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. One often has the sense that one is reading scholarship produced by a distinctly literary imagination, indeed that Hahn's book could almost be part of the history it is telling."—Eric L. Santner, University of Chicago, author of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig"This important book is a highly intelligent and subtle analysis of the role of female intellectuals, largely Jewish, in shaping German cultural sensibilities in recent centuries. Hahn's moral concern—passion—is palpable on every page of her erudite volume. Her work is also a testimony of an earnest attempt, utterly free of sentimentalism, to claim a legacy that unfettered nationalism and bigotry sought to eradicate. Intellectually and spiritually compelling, and marked by graceful and eminently lucid prose, it should meet with enthusiastic interest not only among scholars but also among interested general readers."—Paul Mendes-Flohr, University of Chicago, and Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem