"The Jewess Pallas Athena"--a line from a poem by Paul Celan. It
is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions.
But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been
destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the
twentieth century?
This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first
Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred
years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a
country from which they had been expelled and to which they would
never want to return. Among the many prominent female intellectuals
and literary figures Barbara Hahn discusses are Hannah Arendt,
Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Else Lasker-Schuler, Margarete
Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. In examining their writing, she
reflects upon the question of how German culture was
constructed--with its inherent patterns of exclusion. This is a
book about hope and despair, possibilities and preventions. We see
attempts at dialogue between Christians and Jews, men and women,
"Germans" and "Jews," attempts initiated by these women that, for
the most part, remained unanswered. Finally, the book reconstructs
the changing notions of the "Jewess," a key word in modern German
history with its connotations of "salons," "beauty," and "esprit."
And yet a word that is also disastrous, in which there culminated
everything the dominant culture condemned as dangerous."
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