German-Jewish Literature in the Context of WWI

The project would like to raise a general awareness of the forgotten German-Jewish literature and journalism in the sign of the WWI period, and its significance for German Studies, Jewish Studies, science of history, and media studies. The specific focus of the project is the situation of Austrian Jewry shortly before, during, and right after WWI, and how this is negotiated and discussed in literature, journalism, and ego-documents. A relevant aim concerns the constitutive connex between literature/culture, everyday practice of life, and war. On the one hand this connex should be made apparent by comparing the specific (esthetical) characteristics of the media and the different genres as well as the respective transformation processes in the perception of war which is mirrored in the texts. On the other hand, by analysing the motifs, topoi, images, narrative strategies, and discourses in the texts the project will explore the changing conceptions of Jewish identities, ideological orientations, political views, and cultural values that affected Jewish groups in the Habsburg monarchy and in Austria right after the war, as well as the changing relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish population. The researchers will explore an extensive corpus of literary works and journalistic texts in order to contextualise the different and complex living situations of the (differentiated) Austrian Jewish groups in this period. At the same time it will be demonstrated, how literature itself interacts with those discourses which it describes. The research questions will refer a. o. to aspects of religion, (regional) background, origin, nation, gender, generation, and class. The project will also examine the different discursive premises and narratives in order to capture both the experiences and the (intended) symbolic meanings of war. The studies will combine research in literature and (social) history, and draw on theoretical approaches from these fields. The notions of expectation, experience, memory and space will provide the leading heuristic concept. The former will also guide the selection of source material. The category of space will be helpful in dealing with phenomena like "Kriegslandschaft" (Kurt Lewin), displacement, exile, homeland, expulsion etc. In contrast with a dominant scholarly view, it is the initial finding that Austrian Jews did not share a single expectation, or a single war experience or the same memories after the war. Nonetheless and despite this diversity of individual and group-specific expectations, experiences, and memories, that literature described, commented on, and filled with meaning, several dominant images and themes emerged (i.e. the Jew as warrior, the insistence on Biblical providence, stories of raped Jewish women, the `Ostjude`). A first, preliminary overview of texts suggests a key hypothesis, namely that the end of WWI was also the end of a "great narrative", a cultural narrative that had been predominant for more than a century. Many Austrian Jews had attached great hopes to that narrative, which promised a steady path to assimilation. For a large section of Austrian Jewry this narrative lost ground in the period of WWI and "older", Bible-oriented narratives of exile and longing for Zion, as well as the hope for redemption through leftwing politics gained new ground.