Ahasver's Heirs. The "Wandering Jew" in German 19th Century Literature

• Applicant: Dr. Florian Schneider
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 298581842

From the last third of the 18th to the first third of the 20th century the character of Ahasuerus, the "Wandering Jew", has attracted considerable attention in European but particularly in German literature. However, it has never arrived at a canonical form. Ever since the mid-19th century, there have been philological attempts to clearly define the Ahasuerus literary figure not only in its identity as a prototypical "stranger" and "other" but also in an adequate poetic form. Compared to earlier research, this project corrects the perspective on the character and narrative of the "Wandering Jew" in three respects. Firstly, the focus shifts from an always already constituted figure to the historical genesis and transformation of the character Ahasuerus, to the poetic processing and modeling of an identity that only permits a confrontation between the "stranger" and "one's own". What results is not only the expected interdependence of self and other but also Ahasuerus' distinct family resemblance to some characters traditionally regarded as "German", such as Faust or the Romantic wanderer. Secondly, these similarities do not just derive from content or motivic coincidences but also concern the literary forms that Ahasuerus has passed through on his wanderings in 19th-century German literature. Particular attention is thereby given to the much-discussed question of the poetic genre that would make it possible to give the Jewish wanderer at least a literary place to stay. In contrast to older studies, this project does not aim to outline a set of favorite genres. Instead, it analyzes the criteria for the structural and narrative exclusions that have thwarted Ahasuerus' literary career, for instance, in epic or tragedy. Thirdly, one must distinguish between the subject of the wanderer and the wandering of the subject. On the one hand, Ahasuerus appears increasingly in 19th-century theoretical discourses beyond literature (e.g. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Simmel). On the other hand, besides the anti-Semitic insinuations so well served by the character and their rejection by Jews and others, one can also identify surprising identificational effects, both in German nationalism - which had not yet found its territorial homeland - and in the self-reflection of Jewish modernity as an irrevocable Diaspora. Thus the overall objective of this project is to explore the literary character Ahasuerus as an object of identity construction, formal integration and identificatory adaptation in 19th-century German literature, the discursive dynamics of which clearly cannot be adequately described using common differential distinctions such as that of the "stranger" versus "one's own".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants