Research activity on German-language literature by Jewish authors has intensified, especially since the 1970s. However, until now there has been no single work to compile and evaluate this body of literary work. This Handbook successfully fulfills this need. A historical section addresses the course of German-Jewish literature since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and a systematic section is devoted to the presentation of specific genres.

The Jewish experience of expulsion from a familiar cultural, linguistic, and social milieu during the period of the Third Reich and Jewish attempts to deal with the circumstances of exile can be regarded as paradigmatic in many ways for the experiences of refugees and migrants during our times. This volume is based on a conference presented by the German Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in April 2011.

The articles in this volume derive from a German Research Council-funded project devoted to the study of discourses in German Jewish journals and the tensions they reflect between acculturation, anti-Semitism, and the quest for Jewish identity. The undertaking was initially inspired by the conviction that an analysis of Jewish periodicals is an especially promising way of reconstructing essential and existential issues concerning Jewish minorities in German-speaking countries on all important political and cultural fronts, without evening out the immediacy of the debates in favour of abstract theories. Central to the project are the debates on the First Zionist Conference in Basle and the issue of the 'Eastern Jews' in the First World War.

A considerable portion of the literature of exile and emigration in the 20th century has come from Jewish authors. Yet it appears to be the case that specifically Jewish features are subordinated to those experience common to all exiles (acculturation problems, antifascist commitment) or at least do not leave any major imprint on the literary works themselves. Little attention has been given to this point in the discussion of exile literature so far. The essays assembled in this volume represent an initial approach to the problem. They stem from a symposium organised by the Department of German Language and Literature of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 1989.

One of the most striking developments in recent literary studies is the growing awareness of the one-sidedness inherent in contemplating literatures in terms of national rather than cultural traditions. Unlike the English- and French-speaking countries, where postcolonial movements, transnational migration, and globalization processes have long since sparked an intensive debate on the culture-topographical and geopolitical/territorial aspects of literatures, there has hitherto been little reflection in the German-speaking world on the study of its literatures in terms of cultural, rather than geographical or national areas. The present volume stems from a joint German-Austrian-Swiss research project and represents an initial attempt to remedy the situation in this respect.

The articles in this volume originated from an international and interdisciplinary symposium organized in October 1994 by the BibliothA]que Nationale Luxembourg in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute (London), the Division of German-Jewish Literary History at the RWTH Technical University in Aachen and the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature of Haifa University. Common to all of them is the question of the various available modes of individual and collective Jewish self-awareness and self-definition existing in Central Europe in the period between 1870 and the Third Reich/Second World War.

This collection of new studies on Jewish authors from Austria (among them Franzos, Beer-Hofmann, Schnitzler, Broch, Roth, Kisch, Brod, Canetti, Celan, AuslAnder) is dedicated to the Tel-Aviv literary historian Margarita Pazi. Common to the articles is the endeavour to offset a certain tendency towards de-historicization in the assessment of their works, given that all these writers bear the imprint, to a greater or lesser degree, of Austria under the Habsburgs, with its broad variety of literary landscapes. The effects of this specific constellation continued to make themselves felt up to the Second World War and beyond, as is reflected in the works of many of the authors dealt with here.

The life and work of the writer and literary scholar Ludwig Strauss (b. 1892 in Aachen, d. 1953 in Jerusalem) represent the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture to a degree otherwise rarely encountered. This collection of articles on his life and work, edited by the first holder of the newly-established Ludwig Strauss Chair of German-Jewish Literary History at the German Department of the Technical University (-RWTH-) of Aachen, assembles essays marking the 90th and 100th anniversaries of his birth. Thus the opportunity for a new or more profound acquaintance with the personality of Strauss the creative author and literary scholar in all its various facets has never been more favourable."

The third and final part of this interdisciplinary symposium deals with the period from the first World War to the ascendancy of the National Socialists, and concerns itself largely with the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic and in Austria and the way this is reflected in various areas of politics and culture (literature, ethnography, music). These developments are shown as having an influence on the debate between Jewish authors, artists and politicians themselves and on their attempts to formulate a specifically Jewish standpoint. A look beyond the year 1945 illustrates how stubbornly stereotyped images of what is 'Jewish' persist in literary works, despite the changes in attitude.

In this interdisciplinary symposium the thematic complex of Jewry and Judaism, anti-Semitism and German literature is presented and discussed from many different complementary aspects. The volume includes studies of direct statements on the subject by Jewish and non-Jewish authors as well as the indirect expression of 'Jewish' themes in entire genres (popular drama and popular novel, popular religious literature) and periods of literary history (Pietism, the Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism, Romanticism, the Vormarz). In each case the individual aspects are seen in reference to the overall context of the emancipation debate - including the discussion within the Jewish community as well as the diametrically opposed anti-Jewish discussion."

The contributions of this second interdisciplinary symposium concentrate on the period between 1848/49 and 1914/18. The disappointment about the failed civil revolution and increasing unease about developments in home and foreign policy gave rise to a growing politically instrumentalised anti-Semitism which began to spread in the kaiserreich and the Habsburg monarchie since the middle of the 1870s.