The conference`s theme "Challenging the Concept of the `Other`: Jewish and German Literature and Culture in Weimar Germany" proceeds from the historical fact that several outstanding canonical writers of Modern Hebrew literature – Berdyczewski, Tchernichowski, Bialik, Agnon, and Shne’or, to mention a few – lived for some duration (between one year and nearly a lifetime) in Weimar Germany. But, as the young poet Uri Zvi Greenberg stated in an article written at the end of 1923, just before he left Berlin for Palestine/Eretz Israel, the Germans bluntly ignored the rich literary life that was developing amongst their Jewish neighbors. On the other hand, many works of the abovementioned Jewish authors bear characteristics of German literature and culture. Yet, the relationship to the "German" as construed in the works of Modern Hebrew Literature is highly ambivalent. The minor "Jewish" "ego" engaging with its major "German" "other" nevertheless seeks to assert its identity as distinct from the "German," thus presumably attempting to subvert it, as for example Kafka did in his writings (according to Deleuze and Guattari, "Kafka. Pour une literature mineure"). By examining readings in German, German-Jewish, Yiddish and Hebrew literary works, this international workshop will consider the dynamics between the "ego" and the "other" in these works. The following questions will stand at the center of the investigation: To what extent does the "ego" represent its "other" in its fictional world? What strategies are used to represent the "other" or to display its absence? How does it subvert its existence? Where the "other" is represented either as an absent entity or as an element to be undermined, what narrative strategies are applied to conceal or to sanction the "ego`s" effacement of its "other"? Moreover, if, in the literature written by Germans and Jews during the Weimar Republic, the "other" is somehow instantiated as an entity that must be destabilized or even eliminated, can we still adhere to the concept of the "other"? And if the notion of the "other" is untenable, must we then conclude that the (post-)modern (multi-)cultural concept of "identity," which is based on the relation between "ego" and "others," is no more than a "fantasy" concealing an "ontological void" (i.e., that it merely continues the discourse of modern lyrics, as characterized by David E. Wellbery in his book on Goethe`s early poetry (1996).
