Jewish-Marxist (re)presentations: A study of German and Russian Jewish writers during the interwar years

This dissertation focuses on six German and Russian Jewish authors during the 1920s and 1930s and the relationship between Jewish and Marxist identities in their work. My study examines selected texts by the German writers Walter Benjamin, Alfred Doblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Toller, and Russian writers Isaac Babel and Ilya Ehrenburg and analyzes how the writers present themselves as Jews and Marxists, the arising conflicts, and possible resolutions, and represent the Jewish and Marxist worlds in their writing.;I begin my dissertation with a focus on travel and autobiographical writings. The travel narratives are by the German Jewish writers who travel east in an attempt to resolve their ambivalence about their identities as Jews and Marxists (Doblin travels to Poland in his search for authentic Jews; Toller, Benjamin, and Feuchtwanger visit the Soviet Union). In each case, however, these journeys only reinforce their fellow traveler status in relation to both Judaism and Marxism. I continue by examining this ambivalence of identity in the autobiographical texts they wrote during the interwar decades. I analyze how these writers chose to structure their narratives of identity and how they consciously (re)presented themselves as Jews and socialists to their readers.;I then analyze the representation of Jewish and Marxist characters, ideas, and language in the fictional works of these writers. I concentrate on selected texts that deal with specific aspects of Jewish identity and Marxist ideology, particularly on those texts that reveal conflict or ambivalence as the two issues interact. What emerges from my study is that certain rhetorical strategies are indeed shared by both Russian and German Jewish writers: a dependence on stereotypically East European Jewish speech patterns and a reliance on the art of storytelling as a specifically Jewish feature. A significant difference between the two national groups lies in their treatment of Jewish and Marxist themes; the German writers compartmentalize these two spheres in their work, whereas the Russians create a unique Soviet-Jewish rhetoric which satirizes both Marxism and Judaism.