Between center and periphery: Transnational Jewish literature in Weimar Berlin

Whether associated with assimilation into the dominant culture or rebellion against it, the German Jew is often portrayed as the paragon of Weimar culture. Yet accounts of Weimar Jewish culture tend to overlook the heterogeneity of Germany's Jewish population, paying short shrift to the significant cultural contributions of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, who made up a quarter of Germany's urban Jewish population between the wars. Recent efforts intended to address this gap presents new limitations: scholars have either portrayed East European Jewish culture as an object of romantic fascination for German Jews, or addressed Jewish migrant culture from the perspective of exile. Neither approach acknowledges productive encounters and cross-cultural exchange, both vertical (between Germans and Jews) and horizontal (among Jewish minorities).;These lacunae serve as a point of departure for the present study. Bringing together the work of German, Hebrew and Yiddish writers who coexisted in a transitional time and place, it acknowledges the shared exclusion of Jewish minorities from the dominant German culture while drawing attention to diversity within the Jewish population and cultural "border-crossings." Berlin plays the lead role in this study as the site and symbol of transition, transfer and transformation. For natives and migrants alike, the German metropolis was a space where languages, cultures and traditions converged along colliding paths toward national and artistic self-realization. It therefore serves as the historical and theoretical linchpin of a distinctly transnational approach to Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic, an approach that challenges literary studies predicated either on predetermined national borderlines or on hierarchical structures of hegemony and resistance. As the paradoxical nexus of center and periphery, Weimar Berlin exemplifies what Homi Bhabha describes as the "in-between spaces" where collective and individual identities are formed.