This book-series, initiated in 1992, has an interdisciplinary orientation; it is published in English and German and comprises research monographs, collections of essays and editions of source texts dealing with German-Jewish literary and cultural history, in particular from the period covering the 18th to 20th centuries.
The closer definition of the term German-Jewish applied to literature and culture is an integral part of its historical development. Primarily, the decisive factor is that from the middle of the 18th century German gradually became the language of choice for Jews, and Jewish authors started writing in German, rather than Yiddish or Hebrew, even when they were articulating Jewish themes. This process is directly connected an historical change in mentality and social factors which led to a gradual opening towards a non-Jewish environment, which in its turn was becoming more open. In the Enlightenment, German society becomes the standard of reference - initially for an intellectual elite. Against this background, the term German-Jewish literature refers to the literary work of Jewish authors writing in German to the extent that explicit or implicit Jewish themes, motifs, modes of thought or models can be identified in them.
From the beginning of the 19th century at the latest, however, the image of Jews in the work of non-Jewish writers, determined mainly by anti-Semitism, becomes a factor in German-Jewish literature. There is a tension between Jewish writers' authentic reference to Jewish traditions or existence and the anti-Semitic marking and discrimination against everything Jewish which determines the overall development of the history of German-Jewish literature and culture. This series provides an appropriate forum for research into the whole problematic area.
This study proposes new readings of the works of Rose Ausländer designed to achieve a finer appreciation of the nature both of her poetry and of the matters addressed in it. Her verses are subjected to a process of refraction by reading them against the background of the linguistic, artistic, and ontological philosophies of Theodor W. Adorno (and Jean-François Lyotard), Peter Szondi, and Jacques Derrida, all of which took on sharper contours in the confrontation with Paul Celan. Ausländer's poetry thus stands revealed in its critical, deconstructivist stance and its refusal to succumb to the "authenticity" (Eigentlichkeit) of being or the temptations of facility: "Perplexed / we go on / in set phrases".
