German-Jewish Literature:Approaches to Research in Paradigms

The project GJL is intended as a seminal and systematic presentation of German-language Jewish literature since the Enlightenment in its entire dissemination area, based on a cultural sciences appreciation of texts, and expanded by approaches from the areas of reception aesthetics, space and media theory, as well as the history of science. It aims to produce six handbooks supported by an online platform including additional documents and controversial debates as typically in such a broad and complex field as GJL throughout the last 250 years. Such an ambitious project necessitates international cooperation, which can integrate a broad range of individual expert contributions and count on a highly engaged advisory board. This will be achieved through the cooperation of three (in reality: four) renowned centres of academic research regarding German-language Jewish literature in Central Europe: The RWTH Aachen is home to the only chair for European Jewish Literary and Cultural History in Germany; the University of Basel is the only place in Switzerland where German-language Jewish literature is taught; between 1998 and 2003 the University of Klagenfurt (Lead institution) hosted a research centre for Austrian and Middle European Jewish literature and established a network of cooperations with other Austrian Centres of Jewish Studies like Salzburg, and in the past few years with Graz, where the Centre for Jewish Studies in the meantime has become one of the most important and productive in Austria. Furthermore the named institutions have established additional national and international cooperations which can provide valuable impulses for the project at hand. The starting point lies in the assumption that Jewish thinking and German-language Jewish literature has always given important contributions to artistic-literary and scientific developments in the German-speaking area, by providing dialogues and impulses. Traditional criteria such as nation, identity, culture, and religion are thus deferred, as are attempts at unity, canonization, and binary distinctiveness of Jewish and non-Jewish culture and literature, all in favour of more open approaches in paradigms. These paradigms also correspond to the research expertise at the participating universities and their respective project leaders: Tradition and Faith as well as Thinking History (main focus University of Basel), Cultures of Language as well as Knowledge and Learning (main focus University of Aachen), Spaces and Landscapes, and Interrelationships (main focus University of Klagenfurt / Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Graz). The design of this project promotes the networking with other disciplines and enables an innovative dialogue with the interested research community.

An important research experience, also a specific result of the project 'Deutschsprachig-jüdische Literatur seit der Aufklärung. New Research Approaches in Paradigms', was the creation and deepening of a research network in which, in addition to the applicants, over 120 colleagues gradually participated in various roles (authors of individual or main contributions, informal experts, participants in online workshops). The finalization of the six handbooks, which have now been largely completed in typescript, was thus made possible and critically monitored. The first volume (Sprachkulturen) will be published by Metzler in fall 2024, followed by three more volumes in 2025. For the two Austrian univ. locations (Klagenfurt and Graz), the participation of around 60 internal and external authors and experts also meant a substantial enrichment of perspectives (both in terms of thematic and methodological aspects, but also with regard to future cooperation and possible follow-up initiatives). The participation of colleagues from Anglo-American, Israeli and Francophone countries proved to be particularly stimulating. The coordination challenge (in the wake of the 2020-21 pandemic experience) was enormous; the time limit for such an international and interdisciplinary research project (four years) pushed the limits of what was (still)possible and the funding sums turned out to be not sufficient. The fact that, against this backdrop and with the most economical use of resources, the establishment of an online research platform was also successful, even still showing a work of progress status, but aiming to break innovative ground with the successive publication of the handbooks and their open-access formats, can be noted as another important interim result. On the one hand, the handbooks themselves attempt to continue the usual standards (authoritative mapping of a research field or subject, basic orientations, thematization of canonizations), but on the other hand, they are designed to be as open as possible in accordance with current research trends and the consideration that 'Jewish Studies', due to their polyphonic approaches and transcultural orientations, continuously put them up for discussion: traditional categories such as nation as a homogeneous cultural space with more or less fixed cultural canonizations are often eluded due to Jewish multilingualism, their plural textual and traditional references, their divergent ideas of inclusion and suffered experiences of exclusion, from which in turn diverse and productive strategies of acculturation and modernization, laid down in (also medial or (also intermedial) texts, can contrast conventional rubrics. Numerous individual contributions reflect partial aspects of these often dichotomizations (Jewish-non-Jewish, German-speaking-multilingual, national-cultural-transcultural, religious-non religious/secular). They show or are aiming to demonstrate that the text production of (German speaking)Jewish authors of the last 200 years mostly explores more complex cultural references, levels of text-designs and cultural perspectives.