Tagung: Cultural Encounters between Israel and Germany: Literary Cross-Cultural Relations 1918-2022
The Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, 31 May – 2 June, 2022
Organized by Judith Müller (Basel) and Tom Kellner (Halle)
This upcoming conference sets to examine the cultural encounters between modern and contemporary German and Israeli literature, with a specific focus on representation, reception and translation. The conference is intended for senior and junior faculty; we also welcome German-Hebrew translators.
While the conference focuses on a relatively wide corpus, we find special interest in the period following Germany’s reunification, in which hundreds of literary works have been translated from Hebrew to German. This suggested time frame is based on the changes that Germany has undergone after its reunification, both politically and culturally, following the “memory boom” in German historiography – first in academic discourse and later in the general public sphere – which had shaped Germany’s renewed national identity, and from a motivation to cope with the past (“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”) rather than hiding or denying it. Germany’s reckoning with its past affected, in turn, its cultural arena, and specifically its field of publishing, in which the number of publications of Israeli literature began to increase dramatically following Germany’s reunification and throughout the 1990’s, and reached an average of 27 titles per year by the end of that decade, a rate maintained to date. This upsurge in Israeli-German translations could be viewed as a prefiguration of the current restoration and flourishing of the close cultural and artistic links between Germany and the Jewish/Israeli culture – a process that has materialized in the past decade, and which Amir Eshel and Na’ama Rokem term “a productive horizon of creativity” in Israeli literature.
Israeli society and culture have also undergone frequent and dramatic changes during this time, with the dominant ideological shift following Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination in the mid-1990’s and the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, which has subsequently impacted Israeli literature. This literary shift is represented in form (from romantic or “escapist” short prose to longer, more realist novels) and in changes in themes and attitudes. It has also affected the traditional role of the Israeli author as prophet or critic. Moreover, already from the mid-1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, Israeli literature underwent a process of pluralization, which introduced more voices that transcend the long-dominating white, male and Ashkenazi Zionist narrative.
Equally noteworthy is the facilitation and support that literary exchanges between Germany and Israel receive through institutional means, with instruments such as the “Deutsch-Hebräischer Übersetzerpreis”, and forums like the “Deutsch-israelische Literaturtage” that aim at direct encounters between contemporary writers from both countries as well as their readers. The “Literaturtage” are co-organized by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the Goethe Institute, which plays a major role when it comes to Hebrew translations of German literature which are published in Israel today. A closer look at these contexts, reveals a continued interest in non-fiction writings about the Second World War and the Holocaust, and German texts by Jewish writers and intellectuals who lived in Europe in the interwar years and before the Second World War, and contemporary German writing that cannot be considered as Jewish literature; it is particularly the latter that ignites our inquiry on the extent to which young Jewish writers from Germany are nevertheless read and discussed in Israel.
Taking into consideration these characteristics and developments in both societies, it is all the more interesting to ask to what extent do the German and Israeli literary polysystems interrelate through translation and critical discourse. Correspondingly, we find much interest in analyzing the literary representation of the intricate relations between Germany and its Jews, and the evolution of these relations after the establishment of the state of Israel and throughout the second half of the 20th century, to this day.
Program
May 31, 2022
17.00 Greetings Introduction with Literary Readings
18.30 Apéro riche
June 1, 2022
9.00 Inquiries into Translation
Chair: Hans-Joachim Hahn
Yarden Ben-Zur (Tel Aviv): Dr. Abraham, Mr. Sonne: Abraham Ben Yizhak's German Poetry and its Translation to Hebrew
Federico Dal Bo (Heidelberg): The Sorrows of Young Celan. Paul Celan's Early German Translations of Yehudah ha-Levi's Hebrew Poems
Dekel Shay Schory (Beer Sheva): Stefan Zweig in Hebrew (1928-2022)
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Translation and World Literature
Chair: Lisa Ketges
Jan Kühne (Jerusalem): German-Hebrew Homophonic Translation
Na’ama Rokem (Chicago): Hortulus 37
Tom Kellner (Halle): Yoram Kaniuk’s German Fiction: On World Literature’s Intended Reader(s)
12.30 Lunch Break
14.00 The double image of Germany in Hebrew and Israeli Literature
Chair: Esther Maria Meyer
Noam Krohn (Beer Sheva): Berlin of Dreams and Nightmares: The City as Represented in Hebrew Novels
Adia Mendelson-Maoz (Ra’anana): Kaniuk and Germany – Two Unpublished Works
Dorit Lemberger (Ramat Gan): Multi-dimensional Representation of the Holocaust: Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician” and David Grossman's “See Under: Love”
15.30 Coffee Break
16.00 Navigating Hebrew and German Traditions
Chair: Sven Kraus
Judith Müller (Basel/Beer Sheva): Between Sprachwelten: Writing in German and Hebrew
Yaara Keren (Rehovot): The Tradition of German Hermeneutics and Lea Goldberg's Recovered Novel
Michal Ben-Horin (Ramat Gan): Entwined Stories: A Comparative Reading of Ruth Almog and Jenny Erpenbeck
18.30 Conference Dinner
June 2, 2022
9.30 The (Im)Possibility of Cultural Crossings
Chair: Delphine Conzelmann
Anna Rosa Schlechter (Vienna/Jerusalem): Untranslatable? The Notion of Translatability in the Bilingual Work of Elazar Benyoëtz
Dmitry V. Shlapentokh (South Bend): Russian Jews in Israel and Approach to Germany: The Case of Efraim Savela
10.30 Coffee Break
11.00 Cultural Migrations between Hebrew and German
Chair: Michaele Frey
Dani Kranz (Beer Sheva): Cultural Knowledge Infrastructures and Migrating Knowledge: Genres, Themes, Experiences
Kathrin Schwarz (Berlin): A Metalinguistic Landscape. Visible Encounters of Israeli Literature in Germany
Nishant K Narayana (New Delhi/Hyderabad): German as a Foreign Language: Between Polarisation and Recognition
12.30 Lunch Break
13.30 Final Discussion
15.00 Optional Tour: Jewish/Hebrew Basel