Comments on: Playwright David Zellnik on that ‘huge figure,’ Theodor Herzl

By: LeaNder22

LeaNder22 — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:34:51 +0000

You could meet people that called Brand: traitor of the fatherland (Vaterlandsverräter).

By: LeaNder22

LeaNder22 — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:25:59 +0000

Laurie, for whatever reason, I never had big problems concerning the presence of the allied groups. To be quite honest, I enjoyed speaking French (Southern parts) or English or learn about Vietnam from both deserters and returning people. Strictly I would have preferred no rearmament, and a purely defensive army. And yes I didn't like the idea of nuclear warheads on German ground, Pershing and Cruise Missles. As I didn't like the "Cold War" and its hysterias, it buried matters I considered more important. But taken together American influence is a mixed package. I can see positive influences too, the closer I look. That Brand could rise to power here from major of Berlin to chancellor is one such influence. The de-Nazification (Entnazifizierung) process was no doubt complicated with the occasional help networks and influence on lawyers and the more lenient treatment of scientists like von Braun (most people killed in Buchenwald died as forced laborers in Dora, were he was activen, under his leadership) or other networks the US initially considered helpful for their own intelligence. As they surely knew about the continuity between Nazi police networks that established the Federal Police (BKA). Economic control? I have no idea what basis the more exiting narratives e.g. alleged economic espionage have in reality. But I think we see more cooperation in rather dubious patterns, like Cross Border Leasing. And this cooperation across the Atlantic didn't start at Zero, it had existed before on a minor level.

By: nemesissy

nemesissy — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:30:40 +0000

Well, there's the continuity between Zionism and other varieties of European secular nationalism circulating around the same time or prior- as a couple of comments above point out, Zionism was part of the same intellectual tradition as German nationalism, and Herzl himself was a product of the warrior-male-oriented student dueling clubs of Austro-Hungary, which had their own discursive relationship with said ideas and with National Socialist ideology later (probable points of disjunction aside, I'm thinking of the proliferation of nationalist ideologies within the empire and also of Theleweit). Ze'ev Sternhell did a good job of unpacking the line of continuity between even Labor Zionism and European nationalism, to mention just one writer on the subject; which makes sense: most of the early Zionists were products of a broad intellectual climate in which these ideas were being formed and subject to a good deal of debate, and, even if this general tendency weren't the inspiration, it was an obvious and natural source of material to build the project of the new Jewish nation upon. Aside from that, you *could* trace it back to the old loathing of 'Ostjuden' that formed such a part of German (-speaking- naturally Austro-Hungary, and the yekke communities throughout the non-German-speaking world, included here) Jewish culture from after emancipation and the Haskalah, for one thing. Read Sholem Asch's East River or Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky for mild but pretty clear tastes of the lingering antagonism; or just go talk to someone of yekke ancestry, particularly if old, very consciously German, and set at odds with an Eastern-European branch of the family, about the way their family saw other Jews; or compare the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side. I'll leave it to a more astute scholar of sociology to link this historical game of Jew vs Jew to more contemporary versions; suffice to say, for some sectors of assimilated German Jewish society, the coarse, unmasculine, 'Oriental' perception of Eastern Ashkenazi society was a useful tool in defining the limits of the community and cementing a sense of worth and belonging within the Christian dominant culture that had long excluded Jews and used lack of fluency in high culture and dominant language as grounds for that exclusion. Not particularly surprising how the stereotype got picked up and expanded by Jews attempting to negotiate modernity/a place within German society on equal terms with gentiles, nor really surprising that the folks who couldn't see much of a distinction between one sort of Jew and any other were quite happy to make use of the tactic for their own evil ends. 'Mauscheln' is a verb in Yiddish -and, if the above posts and Hannah Arendt's introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations serve me right, German that refers to a way of speaking German that's heavily larded with Yiddishisms, or vice versa. In either case, it carries a sense of crassness and outsider status with it- being on the outside of Yiddish(ist?) culture and speaking an uppity form of zhargon, or being too much a shtetl-dweller at base, too blatantly and offensively Jewish in an alien manner, to be a real German; the 'au' is pronounced as 'oy' in Standard High German, setting the Moisheles apart from the Siegfrieds and Wilhelms who constituted decent Jewish society. This is particularly relevant to Herzl's conception of healthy Jewishness cured of the ills of diaspora: if your context is Hungary and then Vienna- a region in which Jews with full mastery of German and all the trappings of Western modernity, and a significant role in producing high dominant culture and modernity itself, were fairly prone to running into uncanny and unwelcome members of the same social category from the East carrying all kinds of derided cultural baggage with them- and your ideal is Germanic warrior heroes with sword in hand, it's particularly useful to separate oneself from the country cousins whose presence is a reminder of the unshakeable stigma one suffers under in a society in which membership is defined on terms which are, and yet emphatically are not, one's own.

By: nemesissy

nemesissy — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:06:36 +0000

re: 'bronze age texts'- syvanen, do you think The Iliad is a waste of grey matter? How about the traditional diet of other works predating the Talmud that formed the basis of Western classical education for the entire period in which Europe could have been conceivably called culturally and intellectually ascendant, and which gave the Islamic world a considerable edge over the Christian competitors for much of the same period and several centuries prior to it? I'm not trying to reify the Greek vs Jew debate here- I think Daniel Boyarin, for one, did a good job of showing up the meaninglessness of that particular binary, as much as I like the way Joyce used it as a literary conceit- and my handle shows that frum I'm not, but I do think that, for all the wonder that was Rome et cetera, the classical Greco-Roman canon contains a lot that contains far less intellectual nourishment than the body of Mishnah, Gemarah, Talmud, and- point of overlap here- the Torah proper; even Herodotus might have profited from a little more 'Talmud reasoning' when viewed as a historian proper and not, say, a folklorist. As someone who does value systems of knowledge for their own sake and sees no reason why their inherent value should be placed lower for being attached to a subaltern group, though, the massive body of engagement with those old texts that forms that golden thread up to the present is a pretty impressive accomplishment on its own merits, even if, by nature of standing apart from what's defined as the stuff of legitimate cultural literacy, it can be hard to relate to or make use of from outside the tradition. And, might I point out, one of the things that marked the very Jews Herzl derided as ghetto scum to be set apart from the more legitimately European and therefore civilised body of assimilated, acculturated, modernised Ashkenazim of Western and Central Europe, was their very use of time and intellectual energy on those Bronze-Age texts instead of the dominant Western secular canon. You may consider said texts full of ideas incompatible with 21st Century humanism, and I won't argue with you; but to put them down as a waste of intellectual capacities just because they're old and full of outdated knowledge and cultural chauvinism, and then claim the mantle of humanism, which is a concept derived from a particularly classically-oriented group of Europeans, is just, well, chauvinistic. Particularly if you have any familiarity at all with those classical texts, which are quite full of primitive notions and nastiness themselves. And who's to say that the material is what makes the study intellectually unproductive? The tradition of argument and rhetoric that's tied to that study was unbelievably intellectually productive in the 19th Century- when married to concepts and ideas that were of interest outside the yeshivas, and to language (in all senses) comprehensible outside the community of religiously-educated Jewish men. The problem with the khareydim is that the fruit of the study (even assuming that Torah study is pleasing to a hypothetical all-powerful entity) is mostly of interest to other khareydim and not to outsiders; it's a culture that's oriented towards itself, at least when those who constitute it don't turn the energies onto other enterprises that are targeted outside the community- which happens often enough, and fruitfully (whether in a positive or negative sense) enough, that it shouldn't be discounted. The existence of stupendously esoteric disciplines within academia, and the fact that, for all their apparent irrelevance, they often produce texts and ideas that have considerable impact outside the obvious sphere of influence (queer theory, for a very obvious-to-me example- there's a fabulous essay on Herzl and Eliot's Daniel Deronda and gendered Jewish nationalisms in the anthology Novel Gazing that talks about Herzl's rather queer adoration of Wagnerian-Teutonic warrior-males and his fantasies of being overpowered by them; if you like, substitute subaltern studies, say, or neurolinguistics, or even classicism), makes the idea that the object of study is what determines the worth of the work seem a little ludicrous; what matters is what you do with it. If what you do with years of study of Jewish jurisprudence is go out and make a wild success out of ventures that end in grotesque violence against the prior settlers of the land you now claim as your own, well, that's another story… Magnificent post, by the way- really looking forward to seeing the follow-up…

By: Todd

Todd — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:53:39 +0000

Am I to believe that if the enlightened intelligentsia had only been able to build their own houses, grow their own food, lay their own infrastructure and do all the other things that a functioning society needs, then Zionism would have been successful in building a new Jewish society? Who is John Galtsteen?

By: david Zellnik

david Zellnik — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:49:43 +0000

good point. "open letter" is totally off and I should correct that.

By: Laurie

Laurie — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:22:53 +0000

Amen

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:33:33 +0000

Pre warning people about my blunt style, Laurie ;) Dismantling the founding myths of the Jewish state would be just another wall that needs to be demolished..

By: Laurie

Laurie — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:14:37 +0000

Never be sorry for honesty.

By: Laurie

Laurie — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:08:13 +0000

My point is that Germany is not a sovereign state. The U.S. military presence there was obviously not only to keep the Soviets out of Europe but also to keep Germany under control (not to forget the economic control), if not why didn't we leave when the U.S.S.R. dissolved? We did the same to Japan. Interesting that Brand was able to flee to Sweden where he was safe and then to come back and rise to power all this from a lad who was born out of wed lock, so obviously no social connects that would help.