A01=Scott Spector
adaptation
Author_Scott Spector
bourgeois jews
Category=DSBH
Category=GTM
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSR
Category=NHD
Category=QRJ
collaboration
cultural history
czech
egon erwin kisch
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
expressionism
franz werfel
german jews
german writers
germanness
germany
hapsburg empire
jewish artists
jewish identity
jewish intellectuals
jewish literature
jewish state
journalism
judaica
judaism
kafka
literary criticism
max brod
mediation
middle europe
modernity
national movement
nationalism
nonfiction
political theory
prague
prague circle
religion
revolution
translation
universalism
zionism
Product details
- ISBN 9780520236929
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the 'territories' carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called 'Prague circle' and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the 'postliberal' Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers.
Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of 'territory'. Spector's investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, "Prague Territories" illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.
Scott Spector is Associate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
