The Destruction of Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century German Culture

Zionism, the German Empire, and Africa explores the impact on the self-perception and culture of early Zionism of contemporary constructions of racial difference and of the experience of colonialism in imperial Germany. More specifically, interrogating in a comparative analysis material ranging from mainstream satirical magazines and cartoons to literary, aesthetic, and journalistic texts, advertisements, postcards and photographs, monuments and campaign medals, ethnographic exhibitions and publications, popular entertainment, political speeches, and parliamentary reports, the book situates the short-lived but influential Zionist satirical magazine Schlemiel (1903-07) in an extensive network of nodal clusters of varying and shifting significance and with differently developed strains of cohesion or juncture that roughly encompasses the three decades from 1890 to 1920.

This book explores in a comparative approach the astounding medial variety and intermedial interleaving of cultural engagements with the subject of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple by the Romans in nineteenth-century Germany. Its main argument is that the pervasive discursive presence of the historical occurrence constitutes a significant but so far largely neglected arena for the negotiation of shifting German and Jewish imaginaries in which both German and Jewish creative minds engaged. Interpreted as pivotal not only for the progression of the history of salvation but also of universal history and responding to such decisive socio-cultural and political developments as the Kulturkampf and the rise of nationalism and antisemitism, the profusion of cultural engagements with the subject reveals its frequently contradictory polyvalence in the tense atmosphere of national unification, the negotiation of religious and national identities, and the positioning of the Jewish other; but also as a vehicle of Jewish self-definition and self-assertion in a period of proliferating antisemitism. The book addresses a broad readership of scholars of the culture of the nineteenth century, of intermediality, and of antisemitism.