I think there are as many ways of surviving survival as there have been to survive.
--Philip K., quoted in Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies
For centuries it was in large part through the common telling of its stories and the imaginative loyalties they fostered that Jewish survival was ensured. But the two enormous and linked transformations of Jewish existence in this century--on the one hand, the Zionist move-ment and the establishment of the state of Israel, and, on the other, the previously unimaginable horror of the Shoah--profoundly altered the patterns discovered in--or, as I will argue, imputed to--the nar-ratives that are now constructed to articulate the meaning of Jewish history. 1
Because the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and one another are a central portion, perhaps even the core of who we are, and, more technically, because the ways we narrate and order those stories are as significant in their effect as is their thematic content, the impli-cations of literary techniques go far beyond what strictly formalist considerations suggest. Especially when the story is one of a com-munal historical catastrophe, there is an urge to make sense of it by relying upon one of the most basic of all narrative techniques: foreshadowing. Yet, implicit in foreshadowing is the image of a closed universe in which all choices have already been made, in which human free will can exist only in the paradoxical sense of choosing to accept or wilfully--and vainly--rebelling against what is inevitable. This is the case whether the foreshadowing takes place at the theological, historical, or psychological level.
Christian apologetics, Marxist teleology, and psychological determinism are striking instances of how powerful our impulse toward foreshadowing can be, and illustrate how it is bound to seem arbitrarily colonizing of, and condescending to, any moments that threaten to exceed its interpretive grasp. Thus, the Christian Church Fathers' reduction of the Hebrew Bible to a cycle of prefigurations of and preparations for the Gospel story is, for all its intellectual dexterity and inventiveness (especially the elaboration of figural allegory), rightly viewed by Jews as a brutal impoverishment of the original texts. "Supersessionist" theology necessarily reduces the predecessor text to an "Old Testament," whose independent signi-ficance is annulled once it is construed as only the first stage of a process culminating in the annunciation of a "new" and more complete truth. Think for a moment of the Pauline Epistle in which the wandering of the Jews in the desert is read as a figura of the challenges facing the first Christian communities, or the ways in which the Christian exegetical tradition interpreted the story of Jonah as a prefiguration of the Savior's Passion, with the three days in the belly of the whale foreshadowing the three days when Christ harrowed Hell. In its encounters with the Hebrew Bible, Christian hermeneutics read the central events of Jewish tradition as "witnessing," in the sense of foreshadowing, the authority of its own stories. Hence, for example, the pressure to rename a narrative like the Hebrew Bible's Akedah or "Binding" of Isaac as the "Sacrifice" of Isaac, in order to make the Jewish story interpretable as an anticipation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. 2 Indeed, there is a strong sense in which the very idea of history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward light, and from ignorance toward truth is rooted neither in Jewish nor in classical thinking, but, as Jonathan Boyarin has argued, entirely in "the early church fathers' idea of the progression from Judaism to Christianity." 3 And, much as the Jewish and pagan world found the claims of the first Christian missionaries incomprehensible, to someone not already persuaded of the truth of their secular revelations, the conventional Marxist explanations of why the working class stayed so loyal to their national governments at the outbreak of the First World War, or of why large sections of the German proletariat adhered to Nazism, often against their own economic interest, can seem astonishingly dismissive of the peculiarities of each specific circumstance.
Against foreshadowing, and as its formal and theoretical antithesis, I want to propose a concept for which Gary Saul Morson has coined the term "sideshadowing." 4 Sideshadowing champions the incommensurability of the concrete and refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master schemes; it rejects the conviction that a particular code, law, or pattern exists, waiting to be uncovered beneath the heterogeneity of human existence. Instead of the global regularities that so many intellectual and spiritual movements claim to reveal, sideshadowing stresses the significance of random, haphazard, and inassimilable contingencies, and instead of the power of a system to uncover an otherwise unfathomable truth, it expresses the ever-changing nature of that truth and the absence of any predictive certainties in human affairs. Or, in Robert Musil's more subtly ironic formulation, what we need to recognize is the reality of underdetermination: "The Principle of the Insufficient Cause." As Ulrich, Musil's Man without Qualities, explains, "you know of course what the principle of the sufficient cause is. Only, people make an exception where they themselves are concerned.  5
To concentrate upon the sideshadowed ideas and events, upon what did not take place, does not cast doubt upon the historicity of what occurred, but is to view it as one among a range of possibilities, a number of which might, with equal plausibility, have taken place instead. The one that actually happened, though, exists from then on with all the weight afforded by the singularity of what we might call its event-ness. Only the brightness of an actual event can cast sufficient shadow for sideshadowing to matter, and only the felt force of a life can give impetus to the counterlives that seize the imagination. Counterlives count because they are a constituent element of the lives we have, just as it is often by the shadows the sun casts, not by its direct light, that we can best calibrate where we stand. To keep the claims of both the event and its unrealized alternatives in mind may be more perplexing as a theoretical formulation than as an ongoing act, and problems that critical habit and grammar often urge us to see cleanly divided are in practice usually vitally, and even messily, intertwined. Accordingly, to show just how crucial is the conjunction of life and counterlife, event and its sideshadow, requires not so much a global schema as a sequence of careful acts of local scrutiny focusing upon the ways particular problems are figured in our narratives today.

--Zbigniew Herbert, "Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision"
And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected...If...only one version ...has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.
--Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Our instinctive gratitude to what frees us from the too-strictly plotted, the too-seamlessly inevitable story, undoubtedly accounts for much of our pleasure in experimental fiction. But this responsiveness to the improvisatory is changed decisively at those moments when con-temporary history and literature intersect, when the issue becomes one of representing an event with whose occurrence we are still attempting to come to terms.
The more devastating the event, the greater the compensatory pressure to comprehend it according to the strictest teleological model as the climax of a grim trajectory whose inevit-able outcome it must be. This sense of wrenching inevitability, like a tragic hero's vain efforts to avoid his fate, is the cornerstone not only of Aristotelian tragedy, but of its most powerful literary descendants across genres and epochs. Yet a historical cataclysm, no matter how ter-rible, is not a tragedy, and to interpret it as one would denature the character of what I earlier called its event-ness. Undeniably, when an occurrence is so destructive for a whole people as was the Shoah, it is difficult not to respond to it as one would to a pre-scripted tragedy, that is, to interpret it as the simultaneously inconceivable and yet foreordained culmination of the entire brutal history of European anti-Semitism. But tragedy is an arranged genre and it is essential to bear in mind that no historical event, no paradigm of struggle, resistance, and loss, can transform the death of countless human beings into a tragedy, if only because real events never happen as part of an already narrated form.
It is important to specify that nothing I have said so far argues for historical skepticism or questions the moral claims upon us of events from the past. Rather than casting doubt upon the event-ness of history, sideshadowing helps us to reckon the human cost of an occurrence by reminding us of all that its coming-into-existence made impossible. The nonlives of the sideshadowed events that never happened are a part of the emotional/intellectual legacy and aura of each actually occurring event, 6 inflecting it in distinct ways, as, for example, the extinction of the culture that sustained Yiddish as a spoken and literary language has pro-foundly changed the way in which Jewish life has been represented since 1945. As Berel Lang rightly insists, "the immediate horror of the death camps has made it difficult to conjure the lives that might have been in lieu of the deaths that were--but this, too, obvi-ously constitutes the actual and continuing loss." 7 I think that some conception of side-shadowing is already intuitively present whenever we talk about the extent of the horror inflicted by the Nazis; indeed without such a concept, part of the devastation wrought by the Shoah would be permanently blocked from consciousness. Yet, while there is nothing con-troversial about formally describing the workings of sideshadowing in this context, entailed in that account are a number of further implications that directly contest many of the most common narrative practices and theoretical premises flourishing today.
To have chosen to contest the claims of foreshadowing even in narratives of the Shoah is to confront a seemingly intractable counterinstance, on the principle that if the validity of sideshadowing can be discerned here, where it seems so difficult to recognize, then its pertinence in cases that are not as morally and theoretically arduous will be more readily apparent. If the Shoah is so critical a test case it is precisely because it is also the one in which so much is at stake, humanly as well as epistemologically, in the simultaneously impossible and unavoidable debate about its meaning. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that the enormity of the Shoah makes the consideration of more quotidian historical events superfluous. But narratives about the Shoah can serve as exemplary test cases for my position both because of the importance of the Shoah for modern consciousness and because it has so often been represented through a plot governed by a logic of historical inevitability. Such emplotment either explicitly or implicitly rejects the relevance of sideshadowing, and hence provides the kind of totalizing master narrative against which the counterhistory proposed here can be heard most effectively.
A: What is the great world-historical event of 1875?
B: Vladimir Ilych Lenin turned 5!
--a characteristic Russian joke during the Brezhnev era
The realization that we ourselves are often still deeply implicated in historical conflicts and debates whose terms we have not so much shaped as inherited leads to the most pervasive, but also the most pernicious, variant of foreshadowing, the variant that I think can be best understood as "backshadowing." In backshadowing, the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come. Thus, our knowledge of the Shoah is used to condemn the "blindness" and "self-deception" of Austro-German Jewry for their unwillingness to save themselves from a doom that supposedly was clear to see. Backshadowing of this kind, and the presumptions it nourishes, run unchecked, and often uncriticized, throughout histories, biographies, and novels focusing on the life of Austro-German Jewry, until, in Michael Ignatieff's powerful description, "just as the cultural achievement of the empire is overshadowed by the empire's collapse, so the achievement of Jewish emancipation within the empire is overshadowed by its infamous finale...In no field of historical study does one wish more fervently that historians could write history blind to the future." 8
But the dilemma cannot be solved by consciously "blinding" ourselves to the future in our histories, if only because it is not at all clear how we either can or should try to bracket all knowledge of the Shoah when we write about the community that perished in it. The discretion required, a discretion that sideshadowing is particularly concerned to teach us, is not to see the future as preordained; and, as a direct corollary, not to use our know-ledge of the future as a means of judging the decisions of those living before that (still only possible) future has become actual event. The issue here has nothing to do with an aporia of undecidability and everything to do with the demands of decorum in its full classical sense: the difficult attempt to work out which modes and techniques of representation are appropriately responsive to the exigencies of different human experiences. The two linked forms of discretion I have specified seem, as is so often the case with questions of side-shadowing, uncontroversial enough as general principles, yet in practice they have scarcely ever been heeded in narratives about the Shoah. Thus, to return to Ignatieff's critique of histories of Austro-German Jewry, "because we know that the path for Vienna's Jews led to Mauthausen and Theresienstadt concentration camps, it is easy to be ironic at the expense of those Jews who believed in assimilation into a milieu that was to expel them so brutally... [But to do so is to] evaluate the victims by the degree of prescience with which they antic-ipate their victimhood...and add to the heavy burden of Jewish messianic destiny, the absurd requirement that they be more prescient than other peoples." 9 Such a requirement is precisely what marks numerous accounts about the victims of the Shoah, without their authors seeing that it drains all meaningful reality (that is, a reality made up of specific choices and decisions) from the lives of the people being described. In place of this reality, such accounts substitute an often intolerable, even if unintended, superiority shared by author and reader over the heads, as it were, of the book's subjects.
As a concentrated instance of what I have thus far defined in more general terms, consider the following sentences from a recent and much-praised biography of Franz Kafka. After mentioning the birth of Kafka's sister Elli, on 15 September 1889, the biographer, Ernst Pawel, writes: "Earlier that year, in the not too distant Austrian town of Braunau, one Clara née Plözl, wife of the customs inspector Aloïs Hitler, had given birth to another of the emperor's subjects, a sickly infant whose survival seemed doubtful. He survived." 10 Mentioning the son born to a Braunau customs inspector called Hitler can only elicit the kind of tawdry frisson Pawel is trying to achieve if we let ourselves be susceptible to an egregiously blatant act of backshadowing. In 1889 no connection existed yet between the Kafka and Hitler families, and to gesture backward from the terrible years when such a connection, in the form of murderer and victim, did come to occur, is so shamelessly manipulative that it would be easy to laugh away, except that one finds it as a crucial topos in innumerable other texts on the same theme. Pawel's biography is dense with similarly embarrassing moments. Toward the end of the book, for example, as Kafka is approaching his early death, Pawel writes, "the family doctor urgently advised another extended rest, and Kafka, faute de mieux, settled on a boardinghouse in the Bohemian mountain village of Schelesen, now Zelizy, not far from what was to become the infamous Terezin concentration camp, through which all three of his sisters passed on their way to the gas chambers." 11
These descents into what one may call a kind of Hitler-kitsch 12 are especially alarming because reviewers of the book proved themselves so responsive to exactly this strain in Pawel's writing. 13 More unsettling still, many of his tropes surface elsewhere in different hands and genres. Thus, in a study by political scientist George S. Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, it is startling to come across the following sentence right after a mention of the famous suicide/murder of Crown Prince Rudolph and Mary Vetsera at Mayerling in January 1889: "The other event of special significance to the Vienna Jews which occurred in 1889 passed unremarked by almost everyone, Jew and Gentile alike. Three months after Rudolph's death, in the border village of Braunau, a son was born to Aloïs and Klara Hitler." 14 It is worth lingering for a moment on the astonishing phrase "unremarked by almost everyone," with its surely unintended and risible hint that someone actually did notice the event--perhaps three wise men mysteriously alerted to the demonic nativity in Braunau by a kind of negative illumination--but the coincidence of imagination and phrasing in the Pawel and Berkeley books requires more than merely being noticed and dismissed. Of course the similarity is not due to plagiarism of any sort; rather, it is the result of a fascination with Hitler that strongly mobilizes both writers' fantasies. Arthur C. Danto, in a wonderfully apposite jest against predestination and foreshadowing, once quipped, "No one came to Madame Diderot and said, 'Unto you an encyclopædiste is born.'" 15 Danto's irony works so economically because the notion it reduces to absurdity is one to which almost no one would subscribe in the first place. But it is just as true that no one came to Frau Hitler in Braunau and said: "Unto you a Reichsführer is born." Both the quotations by Pawel and Berkeley rely for their force on just such a premise.
If we laugh at the example of Madame Diderot and yet are capable of responding with a shudder to the portentous news of Hitler's birth without seeing its absurdity, it can only be that in the face of evil on as great a scale as Hitler embodies, there is a general freezing up of normal intellectual discriminations. Yet exactly these moments of confrontation with the monstrous require more, not less, clarity, and demand a greater measure, rather than an abdication, of the ability to stay focused on fundamental distinctions. One of the disturbing "pleasures" apparent in numerous recent fictional representations of Hitler (works as dif-ferent in their structure and rhetoric as, for example, a film like Hans Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland, or a prose fantasy like George Steiner's The Portage to St. Cristobal of A.H.) is the way their narratives derive their energy from--and hence transport their audience to--an emotional register whose intensity supposedly places it beyond moral discriminations. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky anatomized the feverish excitement that arises when abandoning oneself to the contemplation of horror is confused with authentic imaginative freedom, and a kind of lumpen Raskolnikovism is discernible in what has become a flourishing "Hitler industry." As Alan Mintz has warned, "the fascination with evil is a highly appetitive faculty," 16 and there is a demoralizing sense in which rhetoric like Pawel's and Berkeley's feeds exactly this most dubious of urges.
The difference between, on the one hand, a perspective dominated by backshadowing, and on the other, one that respects the variety in how people understood their own positions and the contradictory expectations with which communities debated important decisions, turns on what Frederic Maitland defined as the first rule for comprehending history: an awareness that events now far in the past were once in the future.
Part of the reason why Maitland's formulation is so important to a theory of sideshadowing is that it helps bring into focus the differences between my position here and that of works like Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History. Although I have gratefully seized upon Danto's jest about Madame Diderot, it is important to acknowledge that unlike Ignatieff, Danto is not arguing that historians should "write history blind to the future." On the contrary, he stresses that while an account of Diderot's subsequent career would make no sense if uttered by Madame Diderot or by a hypothetical angel attending his birth, such a judgment is un-avoidable for later historians. Danto further implies that without a knowledge of later events, any historical account may be seriously inadequate and incomplete. But he is equally at pains to warn against histories that include "descriptions of events...which make an essential reference to later events--events future to the time at which the description is given. In effect [such works] are trying to write the history of what happens before it has happened, and to give accounts of the past based upon accounts of the future." 17 Phrased in this way, it becomes clear that the issue is in part determined precisely by the intended chronological scope and ideological /moral assumption of a specific historical account. In terms of my argument here, I believe that only when narratives about pre-Shoah European Jewry are able to incorporate the different ways individuals evaluated their circumstances at the time, and can do so without flaunting a foreknowledge of the impending catastrophe, is it possible for a genuine sense of grief, unadulterated by anger or condescension at the "inevitable" truth that went unnoticed, to be heard clearly.
A history of European Jewry that continues into the Nazi period obviously must include a detailed discussion of the Shoah, but if the story were to stop earlier, for example at the end of World War I, it need not allow, and indeed may only be deflected by allowing, the knowledge of the coming genocide to structure its account of the prior epoch; and even when the narrative makes the Shoah central to its description, it should not use the author's and reader's knowledge of that catastrophe to impose the terms within which earlier events are analyzed.
Jürgen Habermas, in an argument directly indebted to Danto, but still more committed to a theoretical horizon that appears to legitimize backshadowing, insists that
Historical accounts make use of narrative statements. They are called narrative because they present events as elements of stories [Geschichten]. Stories have a beginning and an end; they are held together by an action. Historical events are reconstructed within the reference system of a story. They cannot be presented without relation to other, later events...The sentence, 'the Thirty Years War began in 1618,' presupposes that at least those events have elapsed which are relevant for the history of the war up to the Peace of Westphalia, events that could not have been narrated by any observer at the outbreak of the war...The predicates with which an event is narratively presented require the appearance of later events in the light of which the event in question appears as an historical event. 18
One way to highlight the issue at stake here is to confront Habermas's account with a contrary formulation in which we imagine a German burgher running through town shouting, "the Thirty Years War has just begun!" The distinction, in other words, is not only one of foreshadowing and backshadowing, but also of the horizon of consciousness and knowledge that one is seeking to describe. There is nothing wrong with a historian narrating events from a perspective of a time future to his subject matter and knowing more about that subject than its contemporaries could have--e.g., the length of a given war--but such knowledge should not delude the historian into thinking that the future was inevitable simply because it happened, nor should he use it to judge the way contemporaries, existing without such information, viewed their own circumstances and decided upon particular courses of action. Moreover, and crucial to the larger question of narrative techniques, both Habermas and Danto assume a curiously restrictive notion of what constitutes a "story." Both archaic and postmodern narratives make clear that stories need not have a single beginning and a single end; indeed, they need not even have a single, chronologically-ordered series of actions. As soon as the paradigmatic structure for an extended narrative is not limited to the well-wrought novel developed over the past two hundred years, it becomes clear that some of the fundamental storytelling conventions of our culture have never fallen under the sway of a single story unfolding along an irreversible temporal continuum. History can be understood as readily by these earlier (mythic) and later (postmodern) categories of narrative organization as by the linear, determined trajectory of a story that Habermas and Danto posit as the sole available model. We could rephrase Habermas by saying, "stories need have no beginning or end; they are held together by actions and their sideshadows." But Habermas pushes his case still further by insisting both that the historian necessarily use his greater knowledge precisely to create a "coherent story":
A series of events acquires the unity of a story only from a point of view that cannot be taken from those events themselves. The actors are caught in their histories; even for them--if they tell their own stories--the point of view from which the events can take on the coherence of a story arises only subsequently. 19
But we should notice here again the assumption that a story has "coherence," by which Habermas means specifically the coherence of a classically shaped and closed narrative. The crux of the matter is that a certain view of history is, in reality, determined not so much by principles of historiography but by a prior and naïve view of what constitutes a story tout court. If we reconceive our understanding of the possibilities of storytelling and entertain more flexibility in our possible models, if we do not insist upon closure and the retrospective judgment that closure is allowed to dictate, then the point of view of any single moment in the trajectory of an ongoing story has a significance that is never annulled or transcended by the shape and meaning of the narrative as a (supposed) whole.
The problem is that the particular flourishing of historical consciousness that began in the nineteenth century ended up by making the historian, or at least the thinker as historical system builder, whether in the form of a pure philosopher like Hegel, a philosophically trained revolutionary thinker and polemicist like Marx, or a conservative vulgarizer like Spengler, seem the one best equipped to interpret the world. But these kinds of historical analyses, especially when they are part of a larger philosophical vision, tend to legislate the future, as well as to explain the present and past, in terms of a single, coherent system whose laws the philosopher-historian has uncovered. The inevitability of these laws not only renders individual human creativity and freedom irrelevant, it also removes any significance from imagining alternative paths. Within such a logic, alternatives are "mere daydreams." The task for sideshadowing is to restore the legitimacy of reflecting upon what might have taken place instead. Sideshadowing's attention to the unfulfilled or unrealized possibilities of the past is a way of disrupting the affirmations of a triumphalist, unidirectional view of history in which whatever has perished is condemned because it has been found wanting by some irresistible historico-logical dynamic.
What sideshadowing explicitly rejects is a certain view of how events assume meaning for us, a view perhaps most powerfully put by Wilhelm Dilthey:
We grasp the significance of a moment of the past. It is significant insofar as a linkage to the future was achieved in it...The individual moment [has] significance through its connection with the whole, through the relation of past and future...But what constitutes the peculiar nature of this relation of part to whole within life? It is a relation that is never entirely completed. One would have to await the end of one's life and could only in the hour of death survey the whole from which the relation of the parts could be determined. One would have to await the end of history to possess all the material needed for determining its significance. 20
It is worth asking why it should be exclusively the end of the story that determines how one interprets everything that went before? How much of a specifically Christian theological perspective has been unwittingly imported into a historiographic context by this privileging of what sounds remarkably like a secular Last Judgment? To place such heavy weight upon "the end of one's life and...the hour of death" reveals this metamorphosis of a Christian topos with particular vividness. Both on the personal biographical level, and on the historical one, there is no reason to accept the retrospective authority of the last days. Dilthey's attitude here exactly parallels those who say that the Shoah, as the death of the Austro-German Jewish community, must be understood as a judgment upon that community, as the event by which everything earlier acquires its final sense. It is not the smallest irony of such arguments that, while speaking from a perspective supposedly consonant with Jewish traditions and values, they actually rely upon the deepest strands of a Christian metaphysics.
But intimately linked, as it clearly is, to a sense of the importance of sideshadowing, the rejection of the sense-making authority of the future to determine how we interpret past events still leaves unspecified a way to clarify the difference between prediction and fore-shadowing. A constituent part of our sense of the present moment is an imaginative invest-ment in some of the futures that might come out of it. Because presentness already includes anticipation, prediction does not in itself violate the integrity of presentness. Some form of prediction is an inherent aspect of how we organize our world, affecting both greater and smaller plans, whether moment by moment or at decisive turning points. In prediction one makes the best guess possible about an unknown future, a guess limited by all the partiality of one's knowledge, temperament, and desire. But in both foreshadowing and backshadow-ing the writer continuously passes judgment on each of the projects and predictions of his characters by drawing on the plenitude of his greater information about the end of the story. Since he knows which events "really mattered," which plans will bring disaster and which success, the existence of his subjects as human beings engaged in an ongoing effort to shape their own futures is denied any substantive meaning. In texts based upon historical events known to both the author and reader, the narrative may seem concerned with registering the predictions of the characters. But the intrusion of foreshadowing, the network of portentous signs that signal the future of the characters and their world, is particularly deceptive because it is based upon the shared familiarity of a known outcome. In historical novels, unless the horizon is kept strictly within the consciousness of the characters themselves, any surplus of knowledge or interpretation is an instance of pure backshadowing from an already established future, even if, technically, it presents itself in the rhetorical modes of either prediction or foreshadowing.
...grief disappears, seriousness remains.
--Yitzhak Katzenelson, Dos Lid Fun Oysgehargeten Yiddishen Folk
Although everyone's list will surely differ, it is all too easy to think of representations of the Shoah whose lapses into tastelessness and exploitation are deeply offensive and which, in their vulgarity, risk coarsening the collective memory. But rare though they are, there is a handful of works that have been painfully and movingly illuminating, whether texts by sur-vivors as different from one another as Primo Levi's meditations on his concentration-camp experiences and Dan Pagis's poems Transformations, or entirely imagined narratives like David Grossman's remarkable novel See Under: Love, semi-fictionalizations like Heinz Schirk's film of The Wannsee Conference, or many of Alain Kleinmann's paintings. The best of these, moreover, testify convincingly against an excessive insistence that only the gathering of facts has ethical validity--a kind of fetishization that is all the more insidious because, as the Czernovitz-born Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld cautions, "the numbers and the facts were the murderer's own well-proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors of dehumanization." 21
It is true that of the few authentically moving fictionalizations of the Shoah, even fewer are actually set inside the death camps, as though a kind of imaginative closure in the face of the horror made such scenes unrepresentable. The urge to erect a kind of ethical taboo prohibiting the fictional representation of the concentration camps is in part justified--and no doubt in part also motivated--by an awareness of how many recent works contain scenes set in the death factories in order to mobilize the emotions that such extreme situations elicit. The kind of frisson for which Pawel grasps by linking the births of Kafka's sister and Hitler bears a family resemblance to the way William Styron uses the Auschwitz scenes in Sophie's Choice to give his novel an intensity it would otherwise lack. And both of these in turn are not as far removed as their authors might think from the use of concentration-camp settings as a staple of sado-masochistic pornography. But there is also another, and perhaps even more prevalent danger that haunts many readers of literature on the Shoah: that of becoming so caught up in the material that, compared with its intensities, other themes, ideas, and emotions seem insignificant. This seems to me an extraordinarily misplaced and even pernicious response, but it is nonetheless sufficiently seductive and widespread to require conscious resistance. Norma Rosen's article, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery," for example, is characteristic of this tendency. Rosen, who is not herself a camp survivor, insists that "for a mind engraved with the Holocaust, gas is always that gas. Shower means their shower. Ovens are those ovens. A train is a freight train crammed with suffocating children." 22 Although she qualifies this grisly description with the scarcely less overwrought acknowledgment that "of course this does not always happen. Some days the sky is simply blue and we do not wonder how a blue sky looked to those on their way to the crematoria," 23 it is difficult to read the texture and rhetoric of the whole passage except as symptomatic of an almost clinically obsessive identification with the suffering of others. One of the more enduring of the many horrors of the Shoah is that it seems to give such identifications the justification of a highly developed historical/moral imagination about the agony inflicted upon one's people.
No writer on the Shoah has been more aware of the risks of representing the ultimate viciousness of the Shoah, or more careful to avoid feeding an appetitive fascination with evil, than Aharon Appelfeld. A child of wealthy, thoroughly assimilated Bukovina Jews who were murdered in the Shoah, the nine-year-old Appelfeld survived by escaping alone from the Transnistria Camp. Thereafter, he stayed alive by hiding in the forests, and occasionally working for local peasants until the Russian army took him along as an assistant cook and helper in their sweep westward. Finally, he ended up in a refugee camp on the Italian coast, from which he was taken to Palestine by the Zionist youth rescue movement. Appelfeld, beyond any other prose writer, is credited in Israel with having made the Shoah into a legitimate theme for novelists. Writers like A.B. Yehoshua acknowledge that "Appelfeld... opened up new possibilities for treating the Holocaust in literature," and he reminds us how much resistance Appelfeld's novels initially encountered among an Israeli public that, before the Eichmann trial, wanted to hear as little as possible about the world inhabited by the murdered Jews of Europe. 24 Central to the success of Appelfeld's writings has been the care he exercises in not allowing the violence of the killers to be directly represented in his novels. In fact, there are hardly any Nazis in Appelfeld's books at all. His narratives of the Shoah take place among the secularized Jews of Austria and its eastern border states, and when the world of the surrounding Aryan majority is directly visualized, it is always in the form of peasants, minor officials, and morally compromised, but not openly sadistic fellow townsmen, rather than through the typical bludgeon-wielding SS guards of Shoah exploitations. By avoid-ing explicit reference to the Shoah, and more particularly, by refusing to allow the archetypal scenarios of concentration-camp savagery to orchestrate the emotional force of his stories, Appelfeld succeeds in short-circuiting any possibility of the sado-masochistic identification that haunts literature on the genocide.
But what Robert Alter has praised as Appelfeld's "art of intimation," his "habitual strategy as a writer haunted by the Holocaust to concentrate on its historical margins, either prelude or aftermath," 25 is purchased at the price of a psychological reductiveness and a historical flattening that ultimately may not be much preferable to the lurid repertoire of horror scenes it was intended to replace. The best way to illustrate the cost of Appelfeld's technique is to look closely at Badenheim 1939, the first and most critically acclaimed of his novels to have appeared in English. 26 Badenheim is a typical Austrian spa town, where prosperous, thoroughly secularized Jews spend their vacations enjoying the restorative mineral baths, the rich hotel food, and the cultural life of an annual musical and theatrical summer festival. In the novel, the town becomes a microcosm of the world of Austro-German Jewry with its cultural pretensions, its rejection of any overt signs of Jewishness, especially as embodied by the "vulgar Ostjuden" (Jews from Eastern Europe whose style of dress, language and religious observance exacerbated the unease of westernized Jews), 27 and its hallucinatory refusal to confront the danger that was literally enclosing it from every side. 28 Already a modern, if unacknowledged, ghetto, Badenheim, in the course of the novel, is turned into a Third Reich transit camp by a series of ever-tightening legal restrictions imposed by the governing "Sanitation Department," until eventually, the final directive for a compulsory "resettlement" to the East orders the entire population to the railway station where "an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars" emerges to take them to their destination. Even at the end, although the Jews of Badenheim have been deprived of their freedom, their jobs, and their contact with the outside world, and have been ordered about like so much chattel (although without any overt physical coercion that would violate the book's fable-like tone), they retain their by now clearly absurd optimism. Dr. Pappenheim, a renowned impresario, and the most fully described character in the book, ends Badenheim 1939 with the cheerfully encouraging comment, "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go" .
But every reader of the novel knows the names of the stations where the train will dis-gorge its passengers, and if Appelfeld can avoid mentioning Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, or Mauthausen it is only because of his certainty that the reader will do so in his place. The reader hears the desperate will to lie to oneself in Pappenheim's final words and understands how soon and how savagely that Panglossian confidence will be silenced. And what is of crucial importance, the reader understands this precisely from a deep familiarity with the kinds of Shoah texts and images Appelfeld is applauded for having excluded, so that in a sense everything that Appelfeld formally bars from his fictional world he invites back in by virtually compelling his readers to stage the horrific set pieces in their own imaginations. Ultimately, there is less difference than either Appelfeld or his admirers would like to claim between a concluding sentence like "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go" and Pawel's "in the...Austrian town of Braunau, one Clara née Plözl, wife of the customs inspector Aloïs Hitler, had given birth to...a sickly infant whose survival seemed doubtful. He survived." Badenheim 1939 is so confident of its reader's familiarity with descriptions of Nazi bestialities that it never needs to mention them at all in order to have their specter loom in the interstices of every scene and dialogue. Thus, when Gabriel Josipovici interprets Appelfeld's "silence" about the Camps as an implicit "condemnation" of writers who "mythologize" the Shoah and whose texts feed our horrified fascination with the details of the extermination process, he pinpoints the finest impulse in the novels but ignores the extent to which their power is only made possible by the success of all the narratives Appelfeld's restraint is supposed to rebuke. 29 It is primarily with these texts and images that Badenheim 1939 is in dialogue, and what is lost thereby is the reality of Austro-German Jewish life, as well as an acknowledgment of the individual complexity on which genuine understanding depends.
One way to crystallize the general implications of Appelfeld's practice in terms of my earlier discussion is to see how it completely forecloses any chance at sideshadowing. Since the relentless glare of the Shoah is ever present, not merely at the book's end but throughout its unfolding, it floods the various scenes with its overpowering significance so that none of them can have a consequence independent of that all-dominant one. Appelfeld himself clearly recognized the aesthetic and moral problem raised by backshadowing: his determination to avoid directly representing the Shoah by ending the novel before the killings actually began is part of this recognition. But since he never tries to voice a more flexible vision of history, his novel incorporates none of the openness of sideshadowing, and his decision to exclude the actual violence of the genocide remains an isolated scruple unrelated to achieving an authentic understanding of the world of the victims.
To acknowledge the validity of sideshadowing is not merely to reject historical inevitability as a theoretical model. More importantly, it means learning to value the contingencies and multiple paths leading from each concrete moment of lived experience, and recognizing the importance of those moments not for their place in an already determined larger pattern but as significant in their own right. This is what I think of as a "prosaics of the quotidian," and it is fundamentally linked to the historical logic of sideshadowing. At a crucial point in Badenheim 1939, the narrator tells us: "But the people were still preoccupied with their own affairs--the guests with their pleasures and the townspeople with their troubles" . 30 This "preoccupation with their own affairs," as much as the denial of their Jewishness, is what the novel regards as the unpardonable sin of everyone in Badenheim, and in Appelfeld's narrative it leads to consequences like the characters' general refusal even to discuss the fact that overnight "a barrier was placed at the entrance to the town. No one came in or went out" . Concern with the immediate and local, the familial and private, is judged inherently unworthy, an act of betrayal of others and of blindness to one's own deeper interests. Measured against the Shoah, as everything in Badenheim 1939 is, Appelfeld's charge carries an intuitive plausibility, but it only makes sense if we agree to that standard of measurement; his scale loses its meaning if we consider, for example, that concern with one's ethnic identity, with the welfare of others in one's community, or with the nature of the political dispensation under which one lives, are themselves also local and personal matters, as much a part of prosaics as our "daily pleasures and troubles." In his contempt for prosaics, or, more accurately, in his linking of prosaics with pure selfishness, Appelfeld invokes a standard that he had explicitly rejected when it was forced upon him as a survivor-immigrant in the early years of Israeli statehood. To his teachers in the Zionist youth movement, Appelfeld himself later complained, "personal experience was simply not worthy of recall. Only if you had been a pioneer...a partisan. Suffering by itself did not merit attention--unless it served a collective purpose." 31 What prosaics argues, though, is that a genuinely democratic, rather than a tyrannical, collective purpose can arise only out of the shared aims and hopes of the individuals who make up the larger group; such a purpose is the meeting-point, not the liquidation, of the innumerable separate preoccupations and motives of everyone who agrees to work for the realization of the collective purpose.
Beneath the melancholy of its coolly satiric tone, the deeper irony of a work like Badenheim 1939 is that while it finds a new idiom in which to narrate the margins of catastrophe, it also finds itself entrapped in the very explanations it deems unacceptable as soon as they are spelled out more clearly. Appelfeld himself has spoken with passion and sorrow about "this anti-Semitism directed at oneself...Even after the Holocaust Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes. On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims for not protecting themselves and fighting back." 32 (Appelfeld is presumably referring to Hannah Arendt, among others.) Although it is their assimilationism and lack of Jewish pride, not their inability to fight, that is satirized, Appelfeld's characters collaborate so fully in their destruction that among those "prominent Jews" who make "harsh comments" about the victims of the Shoah, it is difficult not to include the author of Badenheim 1939 as well.
What may seem like only formal decisions about how much knowledge of the future to include in a narrative set in an earlier epoch, or about how much to let the narrative glance sideways and project forwards to events that never happened, is already thematically charged and thereby morally significant. If it is absurd to see the "great world-historical event" of 1875 as Lenin's fifth birthday, and if we can smile at the idea of a secular angel arriving in Langres in 1713 to tell Madame Diderot that she would soon give birth to a great encyclo-pædiste, then we also have to learn to absolve from any blame those Jews who attended the summer festivals of Salzburg or Badenheim and went about dressed in Trachten rather than in the paramilitary gear of the Haganah or the tephillin of the orthodox. There is ample reason to find preposterous the argument that it is now time to forgive the murderers; but enough time has passed for us to realize that it was always partially the shame of not having been there to help them survive that made blaming the victims of the Shoah so much a part of how the history of European Jewry has been figured since 1945. Sideshadowing eliminates neither historical responsibility nor moral judgment, but it insists we assign them prosaically: to individuals and individual actions where such judgments properly belong. It is these specific actions and choices made by individual people that constitute the history we inherit and with which our own actions and choices must ultimately come to terms.
One might...speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.
--Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"
To summarize and then extend my argument thus far as succinctly and polemically as possible: I think that in the ways the history of European Jewry has usually been narrated, its annihilation in the camps is granted a kind of negative teleology that then retroactively provides the terms by which its entire experience prior to the Third Reich is judged. And as we have seen, backshadowing of this sort, whether in the melodramatic formulations of a Pawel or Berkeley, or in the elegiac ironies of an Appelfeld, inevitably denatures the very different possibilities facing Jews living at different historical moments, under radically incommensurate and often rapidly changing conditions. It has also made the Shoah the foundation for a certain kind of modern Judaism in which the claims of victimhood as constitutive of Jewish experience throughout history are asserted either for their potent political charge or as cultural talismans to be celebrated or chafed against depending on the particular spokesman's temperament and intentions. Beyond the immediate political consequences of such a position, consequences that include, but are not limited to, an emotional/rhetorical climate in which successive Israeli administrations seek to mobilize Jewish loyalty through a calculated appeal to the same tragic story (i.e., "Eretz Israel as the last refuge of the [inevitably persecuted] Jews"), there is a more insidious corollary to privileging the Shoah in such a way. Whether unwittingly, or as part of an explicitly accepted belief, each time the Shoah is evoked in the terms I have described, it relies upon the logically prior assumption that the real "proof" of the worth of an individual, a doctrine, or a political/ethical system, is how it holds up under the harshest testing imaginable--a kind of in extremis veritas interpretation of an entire culture and all of its specific practices.
Clearly nothing of what I have written should be taken as an attempt to disparage the ongoing studies of the historical roots, political context and (if this is the right phrase) bur-eaucratic "institutionalization" of the Shoah. But analysts are right to underline the fact that Menachem Begin was the first Israeli Prime Minister regularly to invoke the Shoah in his major addresses, and anyone fascinated by the evocative power of narrative and rhetorical patterns will register how fraught with risks such a backward glance can be when it encourages, implicitly or by design, apocalyptic fears through the medium of its evocations. As we can see today both in Israel and in the American political and academic body, once victimhood is understood to endow one with special claims and rights, the scramble to attain that desig-nation for one's own interest group is as heated as any other race for legitimacy and power. Victimhood, one needs to remember, is scarcely a fixed term and there is something truly depressing in the clamor of competing voices to prove whose distress has been more per-sistent and devastating, and whose claims to compensatory rectification are therefore more worthy. For a particularly demoralizing example of this tendency one need look no further than the August 1991 Crown Heights turmoil between the Lubavitcher and the black communities and the ways in which it was immediately inscribed within competing nar-ratives of victimization.  In the three days of riots that ensued, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian Jewish scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was murdered and two more Hasidic men were stabbed. The assaults were accompanied by intense anti-Semitic harassment in which Jews were directly compared to slave owners, and the death of Cato was seen as a direct continuation of the callous disregard for black lives on the slave ships and plantations. In an article revealingly entitled "Invisible Man: The Lynching of Yankel Rosenbaum," David Evanier recounts how "the media at best treated the accidental death of Gavin Cato and the murder of Rosenbaum as morally equivalent. The worst ignored Rosenbaum entirely. The conflict between blacks and Jews was seen as being in balance, with the 'social justice' edge going to the blacks... Anti-Semitism was not mentioned in any editorial about Crown Heights in New York newspapers until August 29 [nine days after the killing] in the New York Post." 33 But even though Evanier's accusation of moral obtuseness on the part of the New York media seems to me in the main justified, his own narrative is itself decidedly problematic. The reason the media tended to see "the 'social justice' edge going to the blacks" was primarily because in the United States, Jews are not regarded as a vulnerable minority, while African-Americans are perceived, both rhetorically and legally, in such terms. But instead of contesting the whole ideology of justification by degree of historical victimization, Evanier, as the title of his piece clearly announces, wants only to reassign the status of principal victim first by casting Yankel Rosenbaum as the 1991 equivalent of the unnamed black narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and then by claiming that the Lubavitchers today run as great a risk of public lynchings as did Southern blacks during the Jim Crow era. The Lubavitcher community itself, in the form of the "Crown Heights Emergency Fund," placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on 20 September 1991 under the heading "This Year Kristallnacht Took Place on August 19th Right Here in Crown Heights." Their version of what Leo Strauss had called a reductio ad Hitlerum was rightly perceived by those who had been in Germany on Kristallnacht (9 November 1938) as an outrageous comparison. The brutal beatings and mass arrests of thousands of Jews, the looting of Jewish homes and stores throughout the country, and the burning of Jewish synagogues, libraries, and community centers, all organized and planned by the state itself, simply bears no relationship to the events in Brooklyn. 34 However, I am not concerned here to re-examine the circumstances leading to the death of Gavin Cato and the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, but rather to question the entire urge to establish one's credentials as an eternal victim in order to claim an unassailable moral high ground. Such a claim can only be substantiated by interpreting each unhappy event as a repetition/continuation of the worst experiences in the communal memory, with the result that it almost seemed to both sides to have been Nazis and slaveholders who confronted one another, rather than citizens of Brooklyn in 1991. 35 Were the consequences of such distortions not so pernicious, they might almost be comic: the image of a Southern plantation owner with peyas (sidelocks), dressed in a Hasidic black coat and wearing his tallit (prayer shawl) and tephillin (phylacteries), confronting a black dressed in the SS regalia of the Aryan master race has an undeniably macabre absurdity to it.
Moreover, as my examples make clear, in spite of current assumptions in this country, to criticize the rhetoric of victimhood does not mean aligning oneself with any particular political party or direction. Throughout much of this century in Europe, the primary political expression of the sense of being injured, of anger at having been reduced to the role of a marginalized victim, has been the province of the far right. Fascism and Nazism both capitalized on and fueled the ressentiment of people who were convinced that they had been unfairly mistreated, while others (usually the Jews, but also intellectuals, homosexuals, members of Masonic Lodges, etc.) received unmerited privileges. Hitler, in particular, regularly appealed to the Germans to see themselves as innocent victims of a host of interlocked evils ranging from the Versailles treaty to parliamentary corruption, all secretly orchestrated by an international Jewish conspiracy intent on world rule. Insofar as the increasingly problematic categories of "left"- and "right"-wing positions still retain any useful meaning today, it is instructive to see that the position of justification by one's historical affliction is invoked in Israel largely by the political and cultural right, while in North America and the United Kingdom this is done primarily by the left. Yet people who are quite willing to resist the Likud Party's invocation of the Shoah to legitimize its policies are swayed by analogous arguments derived from the horrors of slavery, or the history of gender-, race-, and sexual-inclination-based discrimination and violence, in order to justify the creation of a newly ennobled victim-group whose refrains of oppression are manipulated for legislative and political ends. 36
It took considerable courage for the Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua to remind a predom-inantly Jewish readership that "we must bear in mind that our having been victims does not accord us any special moral standing. The victim does not become virtuous for having been a victim. Although the Holocaust inflicted a horrible injustice upon us, it did not grant us a certificate of everlasting righteousness. The murderers were amoral; the victims were not made moral. To be moral you must behave ethically. The test of that is daily and constant." 37 This same distinction holds true, unpopular though such a view is, for victims of AIDS, racism, rape, or cancer, or any of the numerous brutalities and inequities that continue to flourish in our society. Indeed, it seems to me an indecency to assume that victims are somehow "ennobled" by their (usually involuntarily undergone) suffering, since such an assumption necessarily endows the cause of the suffering with the capacity to bring out a previously hidden worthiness. If anything, as the experience of recent history has shown, too sharp a sense of one's own victimization can easily lead to a compensatory urge to tyrannize over others, and those convinced of their unique victimhood are quite likely to prove tyrants both to themselves and to others if given the chance, whether their frustration is confined to a protest against the curriculum in a modern university, expressed in the mob violence of an urban riot, or vented in political rallies like those cheering Ariel Sharon in the most recent Gush Emunim settlement in the West Bank. 38
For Jewish thought, what is most troubling in the conjunction of foreshadowing and the sense of victimization in narratives like Appelfeld's or Pawel's is its complicity with the dispiriting cliché that sees in the entirety of Jewish existence nothing more than a wrenching from horror to horror. It is exactly against what Salò Baron called this "lachrymose view of Jewish history" as only a Jammergeschichte, an endless tale of woe, that the best volumes of modern Jewish historical and cultural studies have been written. In a crucial essay on the "Deformations of the Holocaust," Robert Alter urged that "it is as important to study how the Jews lived as how they died." 39 In many ways, I believe that it is Alter's formulation, with its principled refusal to interpret the Shoah as the single grounding event of Diaspora Jewish history, that offers a genuinely productive relationship to the achievements, as well as to the pain, of the past two centuries of Jewish experience.
But just as important, I want to insist that any sense of identity as constituted primarily by victimization is an extraordinarily problematic basis for either an individual or a group to build upon, and the sad truth is that, in contrast to the celebrated opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, it is "unhappy" consciousnesses that so much resemble one another in their misery, while happiness is always singular and hard-won. More challengingly, though, and, against much of the writing done today on the Shoah from both religious and philosophical perspectives, I believe that very little about human nature or values can be learned from an in extremis situation except the virtual tautology that extreme pressure brings out extreme and extremely diverse behavior. Beliefs, ideas, values, and people are tested best in the daily, routine actions and habits of normal life, not in moments of extraordinary crisis, and because foreshadowing can only point to a single, inherently dramatic, rather than typical and quotidian resolution, it must privilege the uniquely climactic over the normative and repeatable. To reject the validating force of extreme crises involves both formal and ethical decisions precisely because such a rejection, based as it is on a moral stance, will necessitate the search for a new form of writing in order to articulate its new understanding. Only a prosaics of sideshadowing can, I think, do justice, both humanly and philosophically, to the richness, of the claims of the ordinary, because it recognizes how various the strands of that ordinariness really are, and how shrilly thin by comparison are the dramas we usually take as revelatory. More specifically, because the Shoah has been appropriated so often during the past four decades as an all too-available archetype of both personal and collective suffering, its meaning has been assimilated to the most conventional données of our epoch. Despite the ritual insistence on the singularity of the genocide, the "final solution" has itself become one of the most often adduced instantiations of an unexamined and deeply false commonplace--the belief that the real worth of our culture can only be authoritatively tested at the extreme limit of human behavior.
For someone who has been through the blackness of the concentration camps, the conviction that the experiences undergone there have revealed a fundamental truth about the world often seems irresistible. In Lawrence Langer's extraordinary analysis of taped interviews made with survivors of the Shoah, Irene W. explains that the "extreme pessimism" that haunts her is part of a "total world view" in which she feels that she has learned the real "truth about people, human nature, about death...[I emerged] knowing the truth in a way that other people don't." 40 We need to be extraordinarily careful neither to condemn sur-vivors for the bitterness that they insist is only the "truth" the rest of us are too sheltered or afraid to acknowledge, nor to share their judgment in our own thinking. For many, but by no means all survivors, their time in the camps is the central truth of their lives, and stays with them, in Langer's phrase, like "a communal wound that cannot heal." 41 We need to respect their "total world view," but it is not, nor should we try to make it, the truth of ours. It is the singularity of the concentration camps, not their representative or emblematic character that we need to keep clearly in focus, especially now that the Shoah is invoked so often to sub-stantiate and lend emotional force to a diffuse range of arguments about modern society, fundamental human nature, and the character of Western culture as a whole.
In spite of the impassioned self-identification with and search for an absolute (even though absolutely negative) meaning in the experience of the Shoah, no one becomes a survivor either by virtue of being a Jew or by the intensity of their absorption in the history and literature of the Shoah (e.g., Sylvia Plath's notorious lines from "Daddy": "An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. / I began to talk like a Jew. / I think I may well be a Jew"). 42 This fact needs to be emphasized because it can serve as a corrective to an unconscious, but therefore all the more insidious, "idealizing" (in the sense of "taking as a globally instructive model") of the Shoah. Because so much of our culture is still strongly bound to the belief that the truth lies in the extreme moments which "ordinary bourgeois life" covers over, and that it is only at the (appropriately named) "cutting edge" of the unthinkable that the most valuable insights lay hidden, it has become possible, by a truly grotesque inversion, to interpret the ruthlessness of the Shoah as offering the most authentic--because most horrendous--image of the underlying reality of our world. Although the extent, brutality, and single-mindedness of the Nazi genocide are unprecedented, its narrative incorporation into what one can call an ideology of the extreme has the paradoxical, and entirely unintended effect of assimilating it to a cultural tradition that itself encouraged a turn to the excessive and the apocalyptic. (Notice here, as well, how this paradox, in which the genocide is simultaneously regarded as utterly unique and yet emblematic of the modern world, perfectly recapitulates the contradiction between interpreting the Shoah as at once unimaginable and inevitable.)
The fascination with the brutal and the dangerous holds a compelling place in our culture's imagination. In Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, for example, the narrator, Marlow, tells his listeners that "the truth can be wrung out of us only by some cruel...catastrophe," and Jim himself is advised that the only way to test himself is by seeking out the most extreme and trying circumstances possible: "to the destructive element submit yourself...In the destructive element immerse." 43 But as Dostoevsky had already predicted at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not that far from the celebration of authenticity, risk, and spon-taneity to envisaging murder as the final and potentially purifying confrontation with "the destructive element" in humankind. Moreover, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi points out, it is Jewish culture that regularly has been "decimated by the apocalyptic fantasies of others," 44 and in the refiguring of the extermination of European Jewry it is especially important not to allow an internalized version of that same imaginative legacy to dictate the terms within which the Shoah is interpreted.
There is a subtle but clear link between the view that the truth stands out most clearly in an extreme situation and the conviction that a hidden system or pattern exists waiting to be uncovered beneath the diversity of normal human existence. Both attitudes long for global revelations and are contemptuous of random, haphazard, and inassimilable contingencies. Both are in quest of a revelatory moment that will disclose the one truth that matters. Against this notion of truth being found at the utmost hazard of life, the prosaics of sideshadowing wants to locate it in the ordinary and quotidian actions of our communal existence. To grasp just how provocative this proposition really is, it is worth emphasizing that sideshadowing encourages the same skepticism towards Hegelian or Marxist teleological readings of history as it does towards earlier master tropes like chiliastic numerology. Sideshadowing is defined by its attention to the pressures of randomness and contingency, to a view of the self as an aggregate of ever-changing habits, memories, and experiences, shaped in part by unforeseen and unforeseeable circumstances, and to a notion of truth as precisely what is not a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be authenticated in a uniquely climactic struggle. Hence, too, prosaics insists upon an understanding of time as a succession of content-rich differences, rather than as an endless repetition of identically meaningless units suddenly punctuated and redeemed by the thunderclap of the significant cataclysm.
In Jewish thought, the privileging of the claims of victimhood has created what Michael R. Marrus calls "the triumphalism of pain," 45 but versions of that triumphalism flourish through-out Western society, operating simultaneously at the level of high art, mass culture, and political rhetoric. The British writer Michael Frayn shrewdly asks why the paradigm of literature should so closely resemble a kind of Consumer's Report description of a new product: "Like electric toasters, the characters of fiction are tested, by stress and crisis, until they break down. And the convention is that what emerges at this point is their 'real' nature, which has up till then remained hidden from others and even from the owners of the nature themselves." 46 The strength of this paradigm is evident throughout our culture, not merely in literature, and its persistence testifies to the interpenetration of tropes from one register to another. If the narration of Jewish history has any generalizable lesson, it is surely to illustrate the dangers of such a convention. The fact that Jews, as often as anyone else, lay claim in their own self-interest to a special access to truth derived from their unprecedented suffering only shows the persistence of a cultural topos even among those who, in other ways, have sought strenuously to shed the victim's role.
For a prosaics of sideshadowing, the question of how to live one's ethnic, racial, or sexual heritage is a subset of the more general issue of finding a proper relationship to temporality and communal identity. Against current ideologies that compete about which one of these aspects, most commonly either the ethnic or the sexual, should be seen as somehow foundational for the entirety of one's being, prosaics regards each one as an equally valid ground base upon which one learns to play out the infinitely complex variations that constitute our freedom. Mikhail Bakhtin would argue that counterlives are imaginatively enriching because, to adapt Caryl Emerson's apt phrase, they remind us of the primacy of the differences we make over those with which we are born. 47 As a corollary to this theme one can add Michael Frayn's insistence that "we don't choose a moral response [from a pre-established set of options]; we construct one." 48 The step-by-step, never identical construc-tion of a life, a history, and an ethic is the core of a prosaic practice and the principal imaginative lesson of sideshadowing.
Michael André Bernstein teaches English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Tale of the Tribe, Prima della Rivoluzione, and, most recently, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero. The essay published here forms part of a new book, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, which will be published in 1994 by the University of California Press.
1. Because the word "holocaust" carries with it a penumbra of unwelcome Christological echoes and still more unwelcome implications of a divinely sanctioned sacrifice, I have preferred to use the Hebrew word "Shoah" throughout this essay in referring to the Nazi genocide. "Holocaust" is derived from the Greek holokauston used in the Septuagint in the sense of "totally consumed by fire." In the Septuagint it refers specifically to sacrifice by fire, assonant with the Hebrew term for sacrificial offering, olah, which, as Berel Lang explains,
designates the type of ritual sacrifice that was to be completely burnt (as in Leviticus 1:3). The English usage of holocaust in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries elaborated this literal sense of a religious burnt offering; later, the term began to appear as a metaphor for sacrifice more generally ...Both the Hebrew designation shoah ('wasteland' or 'destruction,' as in Isaiah 10:3 and Proverbs 3:25) and the Yiddish variation of the Hebrew churban ('destruction')--the latter traditionally applied to the destruction of the Temples and then reapplied metonymically to other destructions--are more accurately descriptive than 'Holocaust,' because they imply a breach or turning point in history (and because they reject the connotation of 'sacrifice').
(Berel Lang, Act and and Idea in the Nazi Genocide [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], xxi.) James Young points out that "holocaust in the present sense didn't become the preferred term until between 1957-59," and gives the history of some of the other ways the language tried to define (and thereby implicitly interpret) the unprecedented Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews. (James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences of Interpretation [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 85-86.)
2. In 1 Corinthians 10:6 Paul writes of the Jews in the desert "haec autem in figura facta sunt nostri..." (These events happened as symbols to warn us...). The original Greek verses, in which the Jews are called "typoi hemon" (figures of ourselves), make the scope of the appropriation still clearer. For a discussion of the history and literary force of Christian figural typology, see Erich Auerbach, "Figura," in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11-76. On the way that the Hebrew Scriptures were consistently transformed within the Christian hermeneutical tradition, see Rowan A. Greer, "The Christian Bible and Its Interpretation," in Early Biblical Interpretation, ed. James L. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 107-208.
3. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xv.
4. The concept of sideshadowing is central to Morson's book entitled Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
5. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966) 1:181. The original German is:
Das Prinzip des unzureichenden Grundes!...Sie...wissen was man unter dem Prinzip des zureichenden Grundes versteht. Nur bei sich selbst macht der Mensch davon eine Ausnahme; in unserem wirklichen, ich meine damit unserem persönlichen Leben und in unserem öffentliche-geschichtlichen geschiet immer das, was eigentlich keinen rechten Grund hat.
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frisé (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 134.
6. My argument here is in no way metaphorical. On the contrary, similar demographic calculations were among the ways in which it first became known how many millions of Russians had been killed during Stalin's years in power. See Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York: Macmillan, 1970); idem, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and, idem, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Estimating what the population would have been without the mass killings requires "counting" the descendants not born to the murdered, and this is true for all historical catastrophes, not merely for the Nazi or Stalinist brutalities.
7. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, 214.
8. Michael Ignatieff, "The Rise and Fall of Vienna's Jews," New York Review of Books, 29 June 1989, 21.
9. Ignatieff, "Rise and Fall," 22-24.
10. Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1984), 25.
11. Pawel, Nightmare, 367.
12. For a different, although related perspective on the link between Nazi imagery and kitsch, see Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
13. See, for example, Ruth Wisse's review, "The Jew from Prague," Commentary 78 (November 1984): 62-64. Theodore Ziolkowski even calls the book "likely to be the definitive biography for some time to come in any language." (Review of The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, by Enst Pawel, World Literature Today [Winter 1985]: 86.) John Updike, not surprisingly, is the least persuaded of Pawel's numerous reviewers. He records his discomfort with the way the biographer's "insistent references to the coming Holocaust shadow his narrative of Kafka's life" until "there is a danger of making Hitler the hidden hero of that story and the Holocaust its culminating event." (John Updike, "The Process and the Lock," The New Yorker, 18 June 1984, 108, 111.)
14. George S. Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success (Cambridge, Mass.: Madison Books/Abt Books, 1989), 87.
15. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 12.
16. Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 226.
17. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, 13.
18. Jürgen Habermas, "A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method," in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallymayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 346. I owe the suggestion to look into Habermas's review of Gadamer, a review that is also full of references to Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History, to Lawrence S. Rainey of Yale University. My argument throughout these pages was significantly sharpened by Rainey's comments upon an early draft of this essay.
19. Habermas, "A Review," 348-49.
20. Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 3:233. Quoted in Habermas, "A Review," 350-51.
21. Aharon Appelfeld, "After the Holocaust," trans. Jeffrey M. Green, in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 83.
22. Norma Rosen, "The Second Life of Holocaust Imagery," Midstream (April 1987): 58.
23. Rosen, "The Second Life," 58.
24. See the interview with Yehoshua in Voices of Israel: Essays on and Interviews with Yehuda Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, T. Carmi, Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz, ed. Joseph Cohen (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990), 74, 77. See also Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's analyses of this pattern in "Considering the Apocalypse: Is the Writing on the Wall only Graffiti?" in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Lang, 137-53; and in "Revisioning the Past: The Changing Legacy of the Holocaust in Hebrew Literature," Salmagundi (Fall 1985-Winter 1986): 245-70.
25. Robert Alter, "Mother and Son, Lost in a Continent," New York Times Book Review, 2 November 1986, 1, 34-35.
26. Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980). All references will be acknowledged in the body of the text by giving the page number from this edition. It should be noted as well that the Hebrew title, Badenhaym 'Ir Nofesh (Badenheim, Holiday Resort) does not contain the inappropriate specificity of the year, which was added for the American translation.
27. On this theme see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
28. Austrian Jews had long been in the habit of vacationing at resorts that were hospitable to them, less out of any particular "clannishness" or desire to remain exclusively among their own kind than as a consequence of being barred from numerous other spas. George Berkeley quotes a proclamation by the mayor of one of these spa towns, Maria Tafel, issued in July 1920: "It has been repeatedly observed that Jews are finding lodgings and meals in Maria Tafel. Owners of hotels, coffee houses, and inns are requested not to cater to Jews...Maria Tafel is the most famous health resort in Lower Austria and not a Jewish temple." Berkeley adds that "another resort community, Erfinding, decreed that no Jew could stay in the town for more than twenty-four hours." (Berkeley, Vienna and Its Jews, 158.) In 1922, in order to be allowed to stay overnight in the resort town of Mattsee, near Salzburg, Arnold Schoenberg was asked to produce a certificate of baptism to counter charges that he was a Jew. Although Schoenberg had converted to Lutheranism in 1898, the incident at Mattsee, along with others of a similar character, acted as a catalyst for the composer's return to Judaism. (Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 630-32.) Thus, no matter how assimilationist, or how eager to deny their identities, long before the date of the novel's actions, vacationers in a place like Badenheim would have been sufficiently conscious of being Jews to have chosen (or been indirectly forced) to go to a resort that was ready to accept them. Moreover, Appelfeld is fully aware of these details, and freely uses them in his other novels. The Age of Wonders, for example, opens with the twelve-year-old narrator's memory of when he and his mother were suddenly expelled from the vacation resort where they were spending the summer of 1938.
29. Gabriel Josipovici, "Silently Mending," The Times Literary Supplement, 19 November 1982, 1269.
30. This motif is so central to Appelfeld's vision of Austro-German Jewry that it figures in almost every one of his novels on the theme. As an example, consider the similarity between the passage from Badenheim 1939 quoted in the text, and the following formulation from The Age of Wonders (trans. Dalya Bilu [Boston: David R. Godine, 1981], 163-64): "Since nobody knew that these were the last days in this house, on this street, and behind the grid of this lattice...since nobody knew, everyone buried himself in his own affairs as if there were no end to this life...even when everything teetered on the edge of the abyss."
31. Freema Gottlieb, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, 23 November 1980, 42.
32. Philip Roth, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," New York Times Book Review, 28 February 1988, 30.
33. David Evanier, "Invisible Man: The Lynching of Yankel Rosenbaum," The New Republic, 14 October 1991, 21-22.
34. Kristallnacht was ably defined by one letter writer to the New York Times who had witnessed it directly himself as the beginning of "the physical and institutional destruction of the Jewish community by the political power of the state." The writer goes on to say that "however ugly were the anti-Semitic slogans and the assaultive behavior of people in the streets [during the Crown Heights riots]...one thing that clearly did not take place was a Kristallnacht." Letter by Henry Schwarzschild, New York Times, 5 October 1991, A18.
35. Similarly, on 29 October 1992, when seventeen-year-old Lemrick Nelson, Jr. was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Rosenbaum, the black and Hasidic communities were united in the conviction that the whole trial was determined by racist motives. But for the first group, Nelson's initial arrest and trial was the result of collusion between a corrupt police force and a suborned city medical examiner's office eager to find a "black sacrificial lamb"; for the second group, the teenager's release was seen as due largely to the jury's anti-Semitism and fear of mob violence. An official report of the entire Crown Heights episode, commissioned by New York Governor Mario Cuomo and overseen by Richard Girgenti, the state's Director of Criminal Justice, concluded that the entire city administration, including the Mayor David Dinkins, the Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown, and top police commanders, were all at fault for not preventing the escalation of violence. The report also blamed inept police procedure in handling the evidence against Lemrick Nelson, and prejudicial "statements and demeanor" by the presiding judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Rappaport, for Nelson's complete acquittal. Racism, the report concluded, was not a major issue in the jury's verdict. (New York Times, 21 July 1993, A1, B10.)
36. For a history and internal logic of the theme of the victim turned oppressor, see Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
37. A.B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, trans. A. Schwartz (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), 17.
38. Gush Emunim (The Block of the Faithful) is among the most powerful of the militant orthodox movements dedicated to expanding Israeli settlements throughout the greater territory of Biblical Israel.
39. Robert Alter, "Deformations of the Holocaust," Commentary (February 1981): 49. Emphasis mine.
40. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 59.
41. Langer, Testimonies, 204.
42. "Daddy" in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 223. No doubt a different reading of the poem would emphasize its rhetoric as the recreation of a child's distorted vision--the language of a child who grew up in America during the war and internalized American propaganda images. But such a reading, defended to me most forcefully by my colleague Alex Zwerdling, still seems to me ultimately unpersuasive.
43. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Thomas C. Moser, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1968), 197, 130-31.
44. Ezrahi, "Considering the Apocalypse," 149.
45. Michael R. Marrus, "The Use and Misuse of the Holocaust" in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 116.
46. Michael Frayn, Constructions (London: Wildwood House, 1974), [section no.] 26.
47. Caryl Emerson, "Bakhtin and Women: A Non-Topic with Immense Publications," an unpublished paper the author generously showed me in manuscript.
48. Frayn, Constructions, [section no.] 205.
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Music fills the streets of the New Germany. 1 Straßenmusik, or "street music," is everywhere to be heard. On a given day in virtually any German city with a population greater than one hundred thousand, one can encounter an array of performance sites separated from each other by, perhaps, one hundred feet, a distance sufficient to prevent the performances of one group from interfering with those of another. On this same day, the musicians performing would surely represent various mixtures of Andean pan-pipe music, a Slavic folk-music troupe, a youthful chamber trio from the local music academy, Roma or Sinti musicians assuming various guises, an American with a guitar and minimal stock of songs from the 1950s and 1960s folk-music revival, and a desperate-looking German in a wheelchair, playing a cassette recorder as a musical instrument. After one has spent some time in German cities, it may well seem that music is a permanent fixture; the Andean pan-pipe ensembles are everywhere; so too is Irish folk music in one form or another. Street musicians, nevertheless, are mobile, and many travel from city to city so that they might find new audiences, ready for new sounds and new entertainment.
Passersby respond to this street music in different ways. Some listen intently, particularly to the most foreign and exotic music, or to the youthful prodigies from the music academy. If the musical performance is not particularly accomplished or the musicians present a rather ragged-looking front, pedestrians march quickly by, looking with an intense nervousness in another direction, but usually still dropping some coins in the hat or guitar case on the sidewalk. For the most part, street musicians earn well from their performances. They are sensitive to the flow of pedestrian traffic and rarely situate themselves in such a way that they intrude upon the coming and going along the street. To intrude physically with pedestrian traffic would also bring them into conflict both with the merchants, whose shops are the eventual goal of the pedestrians, and with the police, whose responsibility it is to maintain orderliness. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that street music has come to provide one of the ways with which German cities represent and disseminate their own public images. Street music makes the city a pleasant place to visit and to shop, to enjoy and to be entertained.
Other musical traditions frequently inflect this soundscape, and the exact mixture of tra-ditions usually indicates shifting public attitudes toward the ways in which the city represents the past and present. In the New Germany, these shifting public attitudes are evident in the growing presence of foreignness, not just the Slavic troupes from Eastern Europe, which have increased markedly in number during the past four years, but in the repertories drawn from Jewish and Turkish traditions. These repertories transform the streets because they are musics to be listened to, not just heard. 2 They direct the flow of pedestrian traffic and the pace with which foreignness can be released from the narratives of the past and integrated into the struggle to build a multicultural present.
Street music is no single musical style or repertory, but rather a sound mix from the past and present, which also cuts across national, ethnic, and racial borders. Street music is also not simply an international phenomenon. If the mix of repertories suggests a sort of world music, a global potpourri played and played out for a society capable of connecting itself to cultures throughout the world, closer observation and listening fix instead on the German-ness of the conditions that make this modern street music possible. Political themes in many German songs are local; others refer directly to the problems inherent in Germany's growing political presence in a Europe struggling with union on one hand and resurgent nationalism on the other. The local is evident also in the songs of those who sing in dialect or in foreign-language repertories from across the borders. In these ways, street music marks and remarks upon many of the conditions that have made the New Germany possible and that establish the historical connections between the New Germany and its past.
The modernity that Straßenmusik represents is unavoidable. The modern German city is not a complex of simply streets, but of streets converted to Fußgängerzonen, or "pedestrian zones." It is as if the twentieth-century German equivalent of Walter Benjamin's Parisian arcades is the pedestrian zone. 3 The twentieth century, in fact, has necessitated the German pedestrian zone, which replaced many of the streets of the inner city destroyed during World War II; it is as if the pedestrian zone is a monument to the past, at once given meaning by and establishing routine with the rhythm of pedestrians going about their business. 4 In the German pedestrian zone, the aural replaces the visual, mapping the urban German land-scape with sound. 5 The pedestrian must negotiate this landscape not as the flâneur, choosing the route according to whim or fancy, but rather as the good Bürger, following those paths that map out the route, that routinize the everyday.
If the soundscape possesses the qualities of everyday experience, its individual com-ponents, nevertheless, are highly differentiated in the New Germany. The musicians whose aural domains continually reconfigure the street and the historical stage it creates for the everyday represent vastly different musical traditions. The street is not the only stage on which these new forms of foreignness have emerged to contest the modern German cultural landscape. A Yiddish folk-song revival and the mass production of Turkish music have increasingly benefited from an expanded market and media interest in the past decade. The bins in German record stores overflow with Yiddish CDs and cassettes, most of them made by young Germans, but many of them productions of "historical recordings," remastered artifacts and rare recordings recuperated as documents of pre-Holocaust Europe. 6 For many Germans this music memorializes "their" Jewish past. This past, however, never existed, at least in Germany, where Yiddish was never a modern vernacular and Jewish klezmer music was never more than an exotic import from Eastern Europe. 7 These attempts do serve as modern versions of previous music histories, for example those that yielded earlier Yiddish folk-song revivals (e.g., at the turn of the century and during the 1920s). 8 The revival of Yiddish folk song sustains itself as another form of memorializing the past.
The growing presence of Turkish music in Germany depends on a different transform-ation of the cultural landscape, an implosion from within that has necessarily spilled over to the public sphere. Turkish music initially entered German intellectual history together with orientalist passions, the poetry of Goethe, notably West-östlicher Divan, 9 as well as music historical writings, the best-known of which was Raphael Georg Kiesewetter's Die Musik der Araber, which despite its name was based largely on Turkish sources. 10 The music of new Turkish musicians, however, is not the same as that imagined by the orientalist, but rather a modern popular music, which chronicles the experiences of Gastarbeiter (guest workers), who keep Germany's industrial machinery running but remain suspended between the cultures of two worlds. The Turkish music that fills Turkish-German television and appears in new published and recorded anthologies is by no means a revival; like its earlier incarnation, it depends on a modernity born of the expansion of industry in a country whose own population is unable to provide a sufficient work-force to keep the assembly lines moving. Denied German citizenship, Turkish guest workers have become an irreplaceable cog in Germany modernity.
Modernity and foreignness are therefore inseparable from the street music of the New Germany. The conditions that undergird street music are the same as those that conflate modernity and foreignness, while rendering their relationship uneasy: their cohabitation in the music of the city is an unsettling reminder of the past. Modernity, as I wish to examine it in this essay, arises because of the particular ways in which past and present are connected. Through musical performance, a composition from the past or a song that signifies an event of the past enters the present. In addition to connecting past and present, music also exhibits the capacity to embody difference, hence the foreignness that penetrates German modern-ity. I should also wish to argue in this essay that German modernity, like German street music, is not simply an international phenomenon or another version of globalization. German modernity depends, so I shall argue, on the specific ways in which the present can index the past; music--especially street music--renders these ways specific.
Street music creates venues in which the past is contested and challenges traditionalized notions of music's ability to convey identity--particularly the intractable presence of Germanness, the will to rediscover the nationalism that has reproduced tragedy so effectively throughout the past two centuries. It is precisely in street music, moreover, that the constructed distinctions between folk, popular, and élite music come undone, for it is a music that singles out no one audience, but rather invites all to listen. This, too, is a condition of modernity in the New Germany. Modernity has historically undergirded the arts in Germany. "New music," that is, "musical modernism," receives considerable financial support from public coffers, and the production of modern music in centers such as Darmstadt and at festivals such as Donaueschingen thrives in unparalleled fashion. During the past decade new musical practices have proliferated in Germany, reestablishing connections to more troubling moments in the German past and undergirding modernity in its generation of German history. The places in which one finds these new musical practices assume many forms and create diverse publics. In fact, these new musical practices would seem to mirror many different Germanies.
The insistent presence of modernity in public musical practices not only makes the proliferation of Germanies possible, but also reifies them through forms of performance that connect past and present. Music played out before the public may narrate that past as if it were the present. It therefore is of only secondary importance whether the history narrated by music recreates a moment of Reformation history, the wedding dances played by a Jewish klezmer ensemble, or the songs of Peruvian migrant workers. Such musics are performed on many different stages in Germany and attract diverse audiences. These audiences may well be an élite, concert-going public; they may well be shoppers negotiating the pedestrian zone. I should like to argue here, in fact, that it is characteristic of German modernity that music challenges many different publics to confront the presence of foreignness in Germany in the past and present.
The Straßenmusik of the New Germany embodies what initially seems like the ineluctable contradictions of modernity, the juxtaposition of tradition and contemporaneity, of folk music and the technologies of modern music. Music itself--as a performative art--makes these contradictions possible, for it so effectively uses the present to index the past. It is impossible to shake the burden of the past from music, and yet each performance reflects the conditions that made it possible. The Straßenmusik of the New Germany is therefore no more separable from the revivals of invented traditions or the steady production of German automobiles than from the busy traffic of pedestrians, whose affluence and engagement with music are necessary for the financial support of musical performance of all kinds, in the concert hall or on the street. If indeed sharp political differences separate the German from the street musician, the performance of music unites them. 11 German street music, moreover, has historically been at base political, and hence transforms the pedestrian zone into a site for the contestation of contemporary problems. That resulting sense of expectation, nevertheless, is not at base political but rather apolitical, ameliorated by the long history of Straßenmusik in Central Europe. 12
The contradictions of modernity embodied by street music are at once immediately apparent and immediately displaced from the moment of its production. The resurgence of Jewish, Turkish, and other musics representing foreignness during the past decade conveys the immediacy of a persistent problem confronting Germany throughout the twentieth century: namely the presence of non-Germans on its soil. At various historical moments, these non-Germans have borne the designations of different "races" (Rassen) or the somewhat more neutral designations of different "peoples" (Völker). Their differences, nevertheless, demanded that they occupy special places in German society and history. These places, when properly maintained, can mask and hide the conflicts of race, yet history has dictated a repetition of the same acts of displacement, necessitating repeated forms of deracination, that is, of excluding foreignness from notions of Germanness. Contemporary Straßenmusik is one of the most recent, most public, and most modern of such forms.
The entangled interrelations of music, modernity, and foreignness not only symbolize but have become a simulacrum for the presence of the modern pedestrian zone in Germany. In this essay I wish to interrogate this entanglement, adopting a rhetorical strategy that reflects the contradictory ways in which one negotiates the pedestrian zone itself. We shall move, therefore, from site to site, from performance to performance, not so much to prove that we can unravel the fabric of modernity or that we have solutions for the troubling responses to racism and foreignness in German history. Instead, the musical performances we shall encounter here will represent the conditions of modernity that make this entanglement possible. We shall confront modernity, then, as we would in the New Germany, as an every-day experience, whose components, nonetheless, are anything but everyday.
Our lecture halls were the streets, the coffee houses, and also on occasion the Reichstag.
--Heinrich Hart, Literarische Erinnerungen, 1907 13
German artists and intellectuals consciously began to cultivate the concept of modernity (die Moderne) at the end of the nineteenth century. Imbuing the concept with revolutionary potential, these artists and intellectuals, such as Heinrich Hart, one of the ideologues of the so-called Berliner Moderne, moved modernity to the streets of the city. Formed first from a sense of rejecting the past, the new aesthetic of modernity encountered foreignness on the streets, a foreignness formed out of the migration from rural areas to the city, and out of immigration to the city, largely of Eastern European ethnic groups. The city, in turn, became a context for modernity, but this context mixed in various forms of foreign culture represented by new residents and new communities. Modernity, therefore, assumed no single form in Berlin, Munich, or Hamburg, but instead reflected the flux and complex bricolage that an expanding urban population fostered. 14 Berlin guidebooks even took pains to publicize the city's modernity as multicultural, publishing statistics that listed the different national origins of its new residents, proclaiming at the end of one such set of statistics that "the main railway terminals were situated in such ways that the foreigner [der Fremde] will find himself immediately caught up in the swirl of the gigantic city." 15 Modernity thus assumed local forms, which encouraged Jewish and Eastern European intellectuals to regard Berlin as the site for establishing new forms of artistic production, even those with political ends. 16
The new modernity also signaled a liberation of the many places in which the arts were produced and displayed or performed, were made public. On one hand, these places were physical, the lecture halls of the universities that Heinrich Hart and his colleagues avoided, or the institutions that canonized the artistic production of late romanticism. On the other hand, these places were temporal, for it was a liberation from history--the oppressive spaces carved out by Hegel and Heinrich von Treitschke, occupied by "historical peoples" (Geschichtsvölker)--that provided the essential literary impulse for aesthetic modernity. The processes of liberation, however differently they were construed, nevertheless ran head-on into the contradictions of modernity. Munich poets, such as Ludwig Thoma, adapted modernity to dialect and to the forms of folk literature (e.g., "D'Marie," the eponymous poetic narrative of a waitress), and criticized the foreignness that increasingly characterized Munich. 17 In contrast, non-Germans played an important role in staking out new aesthetic turf, for example, Vassily Kandinsky, through his seminal position in the Blaue Reiter movement, and Arnold Schoenberg, through his break with tonality in music and his position as aesthetician for the so-called New Viennese School. Both Kandinsky and Schoenberg, moreover, tempered their modernism with folk and popular traditions, Kandinsky with folk Catholicism and Schoenberg with cabaret.
The contradictions in turn-of-the-century modernity were by no means isolated phenom-ena in German intellectual history. German science, too, concerned itself, at times obses-sively, with the definition of progress, one of several conditions giving way to modernity, through its dialectical relation to Rasse and Volk. 18 By the beginning of the twentieth century, these terms were essential to the understanding of difference. Rasse might mean "species," used for example to describe different animal species. When describing humans, Rasse referred at one level to biological differences, but at another to the distinctive ways in which peoples created culture. Such terminology was totally scientistic in its capacity to parse the world into meaningful differences.
Progress and modernity in music, too, relied on this scientism. Central European music-ologists conflated racial difference and teleological history, "heredity and development" as Richard Wallaschek referred to them, demonstrating unequivocally that the greatness of modern German music was an inevitable component of the culmination of world history. 19 Central Europeans epitomized what German folk song scholars such as Werner Danckert called Geschichtsvölker, or "people with history," whereas other Europeans represented the Randvölker, the "people at the edges," that is, "marginal people." 20 By the turn of the century, however, the borders between edges and history were collapsing, confronting peoples with or without history with the conditions of musical modernity.
The measurement of racial and ethnic differences in music continued during the course of the twentieth century. 21 The exact balance between biological and cultural explanations of these musical differences shifted and continues to shift, sometimes politically correct, at other times not. Quantification relies on observable phenomena in the music itself--harmony, as the supreme achievement of a people with history--but also on the proximity of musical to language structure. Seemingly neutral classificatory judgments connect music to place, privileging those repertories and genres that are bodenständig, "rooted in the soil." The pedestrian zone, in contrast, offers little chance of rooting musical traditions in soil; its musicians are clearly without history, perpetually in need of seeking out new places in which to perform modern musics, whose timelessness confuses its relation to history.
[Of all the street songs and hits in Goldfaden's operettas his] "The Orphan" from the Witch particularly stands out for me. When I was a child, this song could be heard issuing from every window and gate. These songs, performed by the beggars who went around to every courtyard in Warsaw and Lódz and sang into the windows, tear your heart apart, and not just if you are a child.
--Chemjo Winawer, 1936 22
In 1933, the new National Socialist government of Germany conceived of a cultural ghetto, in which all Jews in the major cities of Germany would be forced to live: the Jüdischer Kulturbund. 23 The Kulturbund presented Jews with a new dilemma, for its aim was to prevent them from interacting with Germans in the cultural life of urban Germany; Jewish artistic life was to be isolated. That these new laws arose for racial reasons is obvious, but they also resulted from a German response to modernism in the arts, with which Jews were explicitly connected (or for which they were blamed). Jewish students would be blocked from attending German universities, and Jewish orchestral musicians would no longer be able to play with non-Jewish colleagues in symphony or opera orchestras. There was an alternative, however, namely the possibility of building up an entirely Jewish cultural life; indeed, this was the only alternative. In the early years of the Kulturbund, the alternative, even though greeted with skepticism and bitterness, unleashed a flurry of cultural activity and organization. Jewish orchestras and Jewish theater flourished; Jewish publishers (e.g., Schocken in Berlin) expanded their lists; evidence of a modern Jewish aesthetic in the arts began to take shape.
The landscape of the Kulturbund, soon synonymous with the cityscape of Jewish Berlin, quickly acquired the contradictions of modernity. The means of artistic production depended on the city, literally on the possibilities of negotiating the streets of Berlin in order to reach a concert or theatrical performance. The alternative of creating Jewishness in music or in the other arts unsettled the urbane culture of the German-Jewish community. At one level, it was an alternative that Jewish intellectuals and artists had rejected, for example when polemically voiced by the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner. At another level, there was little consensus what a Jewish music was, what its fundamental melodic and formal structure were, and where its modern institutional venues were. The efforts to create a Jewish culture in the German city were ironically successful, with sold-out concert seasons and ambitious artistic experiments of all kinds documenting the transformed Jewish neighborhoods in the German city. By Kristallnacht in November 1938, the boundaries of these neighborhoods again collapsed, ultimately during the Holocaust destroying those who failed to escape. The destruction of this German-Jewish cultural space was paradoxical, for in fact a history of Jewish aesthetic modernity had formed and had subverted the possibility of a German modernity without Jewishness in music. 24
In 1992, the Kulturbund again made an appearance in Berlin, historicized and memorialized by exhibits at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. 25 A half-century later, the experiments that transformed the public spaces of Jewish Berlin had been reduced to the semipublic spaces of the exhibit, fixed in history because of their overt foreignness. Even within contemporary German historicism, it is difficult to know what to do with the artistic activities of the Kulturbund, for the theaters and concert halls in which they took place--often, but not exclusively synagogues--no longer exist, nor can they be revivified by new performances. New histories--modern histories--have accrued in the streets that once connected the performances of the Kulturbund orchestra to the synagogues and libraries of the 1930s. Defined at that time by those who passed along them, these streets have different meanings today. It is only through different cultural routes that musicians in the 1990s can represent the modern Jewish music of the 1930s.
Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall
In Stadt und Land, ja überall:
In München hat "Der Grobian"
Bereits den ersten Schritt getan!
Ist auf der Welt ein Lumpenhund,
Peitscht "Grobian" ihn weich und wund;
Er prügelt ihn zu jeder Frist,
Auch wenn's ein--Liberaler ist!
In unserm Lande--welche Schmach!
Da herrscht der Jude nach und nach.
Und hält's der "Grobian" als Pflicht,
Daß er in diese Wespen sticht.
Drum, ihr Christen all im Land,
Nehmt den "Grobian" zur Hand!
Sein Wahlspruch ist: "Dem Christ zum Schutz,
Dem Jud und Judenfreund zum Trutz!"
--"Die Wacht an der Isar" ("The Watch on the Isar"), anonymous song
from oral tradition, between 1904 and 1912, sung to the melody of
"Wacht
am Rhein"
26
German folk song demonstrates a seemingly obsessive concern with place. Images of place yield entire genres, notably the Heimatlied, the "song of the homeland." Folk song differ-entiates regions through their specific histories and dialects. The song of the alpine meadow is no less characteristic of the folk-song canon than the urban broadside ballad, sung from printed leaflets on the street and purchased by passersby for their own entertainment at home. The musical connection between language and place is central to that canon, so it is hardly surprising that folk song does far more than describe the places and regions of the German cultural landscape.  The well-known "Wacht am Rhein" ("Watch on the Rhine") and its many variants provide one of the clearest calls to action, should the enemies of Germany challenge its western border, which the Rhine forms, at least for a few hundred miles in southwestern Germany. The Rhine, as a signifier of Germany, is the subject of countless other folk songs, as well as composed musical works, ranging from the Heine-Silcher "Die Lorelei" to Wagner's Das Rheingold. Its musical monumentality derives in no small measure from the danger that its loss would mean for Germany.
The Rhine River, in effect, maps diverse conditions of Germanness. Folk songs and operas alike fetishize the river's history, representing it through performance as a means of mem-orializing the past. In "Wacht am Rhein," it is the confrontation with France over Alsace-Lorraine that enters popular history. The physical monuments that line its shores--inscribed in the experiences of thousands of tourists each year, usually with the mnemonic assistance of loudspeakers blaring "Die Lorelei" or "Wacht am Rhein"--undergird what the river repre-sents in the German historical imagination. Again, the performative quality of music represents, and even monumentalizes, the past in remarkably flexible ways. The historically controversial "Deutschlandlied," still the national anthem of Germany, utilizes a melody, itself perhaps a Croatian folk melody, that was adapted by an Austrian composer (Franz Joseph Haydn) in the service of the Hungarian court (Esterházy). Its monumentality, never-theless, is obvious, for countless historical experiences have become interwoven into the song through its performances in string quartets, Protestant hymns, Olympic games, concentra-tion camps, and films about World War II.
Music and monuments often function together in the reproduction of the past as present in Germany. 27 Busts of great composers line concert halls, and musical auditoriums of all kinds occupy a central position of particular social and political importance. The late nine-teenth-century obsession with massive form in German romantic music coincides precisely with the mass production of physical monuments in Germany. 28 This parallel between monuments and music results from indirect associations, for the two refer to the past in quite different ways. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argue that the history-making potential of monuments resides on their surfaces, whereas in fact at a deeper level in the monument history has only an impoverished representation. 29 Song, in contrast, possesses an internal capacity to reproduce history through performance, whereas its surface qualities (e.g., the melody of the "Deutschlandlied," which covers and allows very different texts) can only incompletely represent history because the meaning of the surface depends entirely on the experience of the listener. Music and monuments therefore complement each other.
One of the modern sites in the New Germany where music and monuments function most effectively in this respect is the street. On its surface, the pedestrian zone is itself a monument, often memorializing the past that was destroyed by bombing in World War II. Other monuments punctuate the surface of the pedestrian zone, however, memorializing city founders or reporting the former residence of a cultural or political figure once occupying a building on this site. The Holocaust monument, too, has become an omnipresent historical trope in the German city, 30 ironically conflicting with other monuments to the fallen soldiers of past wars, also ubiquitous in German cities. Street music, in quite different ways, erects temporary monuments. Passersby pause to listen, but also to gaze upon a performance fixed against the backdrop of the street. The street musician provides a fluid monumentality, moving from day to day to different spots along his or her routes (figs. 4 and 5); those who fail to move also fail to maximize their potential earnings and to curry the favors of shop owners who alternatively benefit from and tire of musicians near the doors of their shops. 31 Street music may acquire a radical potential to reconfigure the public sphere, to alter its meanings as different groups occupy and aim to use it as a space in which to demonstrate their different social and political agendas. The modernity of the music itself opens the public sphere to precisely such reconfiguration.
Song has provided German workers with one of the most powerful forms of resistance. At once organizing laborers into action and voicing their discontent with the machines of modernity, the workers' song (Arbeiterlied) has become a genre unto itself in modern Germany. 32 As such, the workers' song embodies and conveys German history, particularly the history of resistance against authority, which since the 1930s has often been so con-structed as paralleling and undergirding "democratic" and "revolutionary" history. Implicit in these historical streams, channeled by the working class, is an empowerment of the worker to take charge of history. Not surprisingly, then, the major folk-music anthology of the German Democratic Republic, Wolfgang Steinitz's Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten, cast the history of the German people as one of struggle chronicled by song. 33
The historicizing potential of folk song was by no means a trope found only in the former East Germany. At the local level, workers' choruses emerged in the early nineteenth century as the standard bearers for a sweeping folk-song movement, and by the twentieth century these local organizations often shaped their repertories to chronicle the struggle between modernity and the individual at the local level. Labor movements had the power to organize the local at a global level, and to this end they employed songbooks as means of fostering an aesthetic and political lingua franca. The songs of these labor movements migrated from songbook to songbook and from chorus to chorus, yielding an aesthetic solidarity. Songs such as the "Moorlied" quickly came to unite the local and the international. Composed in 1933 by Rudi Goguel and set to texts by a miner named Esser 34 and Wolfgang Langhoff in Papenburg, one of the first concentration camps, primarily for members of the Communist Party, by 1935 the "Moorlied" had become an international symbol of revolution. As concentration camps multiplied, both in number and in their capacity to imprison diverse groups of individuals posing an imagined threat to the German nation, so too did the "Moorlied" return to the local level, where it circulated in the oral traditions of virtually every camp. After the Holocaust, the "Moorlied" became a specifically national symbol for the struggle against fascism, for the most part losing, however, its local and international currencies.
The political nature of the workers' song serves it well as part of a musical repertory for the street. Individual songs may be topical--that is, local and specific to the political moment--but they may also rely on the public's knowledge of standard repertories. 36 Analyses of the repertories of individual street singers, at least those who fashion themselves as Liedermacher (singer-songwriters), reveal these repertories to signify diverse forms of resistance. 37 On one hand, the street seems to be an unlikely site for songs from workers' movements or political protest, which, after all, reflect little of the spirit that shoppers and tourists invest in their walks. On the other hand, the street has been the primary site of resistance--aesthetic and political--throughout much of modern German history. 38
The struggle of workers against modernity has not disappeared from the New Germany, if indeed a new worker, the Gastarbeiter, is carrying it forth. The nature of that struggle has changed, or rather the foreignness that symbolizes it has changed. The music of neither singer-songwriter nor street musician has abandoned this struggle. Wolf Biermann, the most famous German contemporary singer-songwriter, utilizes Turkish musicians and musical styles in some songs, while elsewhere adapting Yiddish songs to his personal style. 39 The expectations of listeners accustomed to his aesthetic of resistance, therefore, conflate Arbeiter and Gastarbeiter in Biermann's songs, as well as in the rock music accompanying the public demonstrations protesting the violence against Turkish guest workers and their families. Resistance--historical and modern--enters the songs of the street, making them sites for the contestation that inevitably takes place on the street.
Verse:
'Ss is baim getto hel und lichtik
baim toier poliziantn zwei,
un fun Savalne bisn geto
yidelech a ganze rei.
Refrain:
un du main libsster gelber schain.
Du libsster main,
du gelber schain,
on dir--is in Ponar arain.
A schanss hot haint geschapt a yidl,
opgenart di polizei.
A poliziant schlogt dort a meidl
un do glitscht sich durch di rei.
Un di yidn ongepakte,
glikliche arain in schtaig,
izt faifn sei schoin oif di vladse
un schteln sei aroiss a faig.
Du getto main,
du heimland main,
men lost in getto haint arain,
oib hosstu nor gelt --
abissl glik,
dan macht men sich nit seendik.
--"Du getto main" ("You, My Ghetto"), sung in the Jewish ghetto of
Vilna,
Lithuania, early 1940s
40
No single leitmotif pervades German folk song as extensively and as malleably as Heimat, in the strictest sense, "home," but in the folk imagination and usage, "homeland." Heimatlieder, "songs of the homeland," evoke conflicting senses of the homeland to which one is bound and the homeland for which one longs. Regional and nationalistic songs remain at base Heimatlieder, and they usually fill volumes designated as such. German emigrant folk-song repertories generally privilege Heimatlieder, which refer not to a New World, but to the Old World, the homeland left behind. For German-speaking communities of Eastern Europe, forced to return to Germany after the defeat in World War II, Heimatlieder historicize the homeland left behind--villages in Romania, Poland, or Russia--not the homeland, Germany, to which they are bound by German bloodline. 41 The song of the homeland represents a place perennially German, at once recuperating that place and rendering it an historical presentness.
It is not by coincidence that Heimatlieder are folk songs, for the pair Volk and Heimat provides one of the most cloying tropes in popular German historiography. 42 The folk are inseparable from their homeland; one defines the other. Other conceptual pairs often take up and then modify the trope of folk and homeland, perhaps the best-known of which is Blut und Boden, "blood and land," one of the slogans justifying German expansion during World War II. These conceptual pairs inevitably anchor race to place; that is, they equate Germany with the land occupied by Germans. The Banat region of Romania or Silesia in Poland becomes German because Germans lived there, transforming place through their presence. Heimatlieder make history portable, reinventing the connection between race and place with each performance, regardless of its venue. Songs of the homeland are, moreover, geographically specific, for they catalogue local events and places, the local landscape and local customs. This historical mapping is deeply encoded in the song itself; a melody, for example, may index the homeland, even if texts sometime change. 43
Songs of the homeland are by no means limited to dialect regions, emigrant Germans, or resettled Eastern European Germans. "Du getto main," a Yiddish folk song from the Vilna ghetto, possesses all the traits necessary for a Heimatlied, not only because of its direct use of typical themes and vocabulary, but also because it localizes the history and events of a specific Heimat. That it parodies the story of ghetto residents who must steal food is possible only because German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews during the early twentieth century had transformed the ghetto into a central symbol for the place occupied by Jewish communities confronting modernity. 44 The ghetto song was at first not a folk song, for it did not derive from oral tradition in the shtetl, but rather from the migration to the city, where Jews became laborers in a rapidly industrializing society. The ghetto was a modern space, defined by the streets of the city and the life on those streets. 45 The ghetto song was therefore about accommodating the dilemma of foreignness fostered by modern society. The homeland of the ghetto song represented this dilemma, situating race again in the repertories of German folk and popular music and in German modernity.
The German city has less willingly yielded itself to the formation of other homelands since World War II. Resettlement problems have taken precedence over the remapping of urban spaces to accommodate a multicultural society. Historical memory seems, instead, to be afflicted by amnesia, forgetting about Jewish quarters in the German cities, such as the Scheunenviertel in Berlin, or about the various ghetto-like juxtapositions of race and place during the Third Reich, whether these were putatively cultural, as in the Jüdischer Kulturbund, or political, as in the concentration camp. The Kreuzberg district in Berlin, nevertheless, contains one of the largest Turkish communities in the world, and refugees seeking asylum occupy barracks abandoned since 1989 by the American, French, English, Canadian, and Soviet occupation forces. The new Randvölker, "marginal people," inhabit new margins, namely those of the city, reconfiguring also the urban modernity built previously by the Geschichtsvölker, by those "people with history." The irony persists that Volk and Heimat remain coupled, but that songs now contest the homeland available or not available for foreigners in the New Germany.
Elaborate circus posters bedeck the walls, bus stops, and billboards of all German cities throughout the summer. Circuses take place during other parts of the year, but it is in the summer that they are most mobile and can move quickly from city to city, from village festival to urban extravaganza. Whether or not the circus possesses specifically German qualities is moot, though many would claim this to be the case; 46 circuses consciously represent themselves as international, even as stages on which the world's diversity is put on display. The German circus--or the circus in Germany--does, in fact, put rather particular German passions on display. Not least among these is the modern version of the "Wild West Show," much beloved at the end of the nineteenth century, when Wild Bill Cody brought his to Germany, staging it even before the gaze of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Wild West, particu-larly with its "cowboys and Indians," became a greater fascination in the German popular imagination through the stories of Karl May, whose novels--in department-store editions or multitudinous movies--are well known to all German readers. The modern German circus has transformed the literary theme of the Wild West to a grand form of spectatorship and located it in the center ring.
The German circus poster on the street announces that a circus is in town, using the head of an Indian chief stylized according to the popular imagination. The same poster announces that other forms of foreignness will be placed on display, contributing to a seductive international flavor. Visiting the German circus, one is not disappointed: the sights and sounds of the world and of multiculturalism, in its most fantastic guise, are redolent in the atmosphere of the big top. 47