Tracking modernity, nationalizing mobility: German/Jewish travel literature as a history of possibility

My dissertation argues that modernity can be tracked, as it were, by examining the “history of the possible” in travel literature, discourses on mobility, and the conceptualization and construction of new means of transportation. Through this tracking, the dreams, fantasies, and fears of mobility disclose certain epistemological and political histories that bear witness to the ways in which a given present imagined the openness or possibility of the future. I focus on German/Jewish travel literature and German/Jewish discourses on mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to examine the consequences of modernity vis-a-vis the changing concept of (German) nationality. The project fits within the genre of what can be called cultural criticism: It examines travel literature side-by-side with constitutive political and economic discourses, and both of the foregoing side-by-side with the emergence of a new technology of mobility, namely railways.; The first part focuses on the end and deconstruction of a paradigm of mobility, what I term “the meta-epistemology of the ship,” and its relationship to the political emplotment of a concept of “national” space and “national” time in early nineteenth century travel narratives by Goethe, Hegel, and Heine. In the second part of my dissertation, I examine the relationship between railways and nationality. Here, I try to elucidate the epistemological and political consequences of Heine's famous observation that railways have “killed” space and time. I first look to the multiple ways—technological, cultural, and economic—in which the concept of German nationality emerges as a function of new, “global” possibilities for mobility before the construction of the railway system but after the fantasies of a nation totally unified by rail. My analysis of works of travel literature by Herzl, Kafka, and Sholem Aleichem demonstrates that mobility is always an embodied political possibility or impossibility, and thus the impression of history and nationality conveyed in these travel narratives is never free from certain ideological desires. My study concludes by examining the dialectical underside of mobility, namely the modernity of deportations and the narration of two ‘journeys of memory’—one by Heidegger and one by Celan—after the Holocaust.