PERSONAS MAYORES EN EL MARCO DEL DESPLAZAMIENTO FORZADO

Franzos’ final piece, Der Pojaz, is written in the spirit of this particular German “colonialist attitude” when tethering the issue of Jewish emancipation to the discourse of development and

92 Kristin Kopp, in Germany’s Wild East (2012), examines the motif of “inner colonization”

in these works and discursive aspects of the Germanization of Poland through the use of the language of the colonial encounter.

“elevation.” Although the book was already completed in 1893, it was not published until after the author’s death in 1905, during the heyday of the German colonial movement. Der Pojaz tells the story of the young Chassidic-Jewish boy Sender Glatteis, from a Galician shtetl called Barnow, whose curious mind is inspired to imagine an escape from the confines of Orthodoxy after he secretly, and against all rules, watches the performance of one of Friedrich Schiller’s plays by a troupe of itinerant actors in a neighboring town. As Sender decides to pursue an acting career himself in order to stage and live his dream of becoming “ein Deutsch” (a German), he faces the threat of excommunication from his close-knit home community. After years of struggle and scheming to break the lock that binds him to his mother and his Orthodox community, Sender ultimately turns his dream into a nightmarish fight against rigid social conventions and expectations. Unable to overcome his difficulties, Sender is defeated, and the story ends with his premature death.

Without a doubt, the thematic focus of the text holds true to the genre of the ghetto story, whereas its structure corresponds to that of the German Bildungsroman. Commonly, a Bildungsroman features the coming-of-age story of a young hero in conflict with society who, over several years of growth and personal development, comes to terms with the social realities of life and integrates himself into the existing order. Der Pojaz follows this very basic structure of the Bildungsroman, but rather than ending his story in the resolution of the conflict, with the hero becoming a productive and accepted member of society, Franzos changes the narrative trajectory of the genre.⁹³ His protagonist’s struggle to self-cultivate fails in the face of society’s

93 Schwarz and Berman in their discussion of Der Pojaz point out that Franzos deviates from the model of the Bildungsroman, because “der Held mit dem unheroischen, wenn auch symbolischen Namen Sender Glatteis ein armer Judenjunge ist und das Milieu [...] ein ostjüdisches, eingepferchtes Judenstädtel in Podolien mit allen seine Kümmernissen und

iron grip on his maturation process. The text’s closing suggests a more skeptical, even fatalistic interpretation of the possibility to reconcile personal growth with the societal norms and values prescribed by Jewish Orthodoxy – a conclusion which, in my analysis, sparks and justifies Franzos’ idea of external intervention.

Franzos approaches this idea in several steps. First, he lays the groundwork for creating the supposed need for intervention from the outside by focusing on pessimistic depictions of ghetto life and the presumably faulty cultural dispositions of his ghetto Jews. What begins with the sympathetic introduction of the story’s “Held” (hero) Sender Glatteis and his family’s history quickly advances to a disparaging portrait of Jewishness. As the reader learns, Sender’s life begins with the tragic loss of both his “Schnorrer” parents when he is only an infant. Left behind without a home or family, he finds a loving mother in the widow Rosel Kurländer. She is determined to raise the fragile and sensitive child to become a steadfast Jew firmly integrated in the local shtetl community and resistant to the lures of the kind of vagabond lifestyle his parents had lived. The reader quickly realizes a growing conflict between mother and son when Sender’s aspirations clash with hers and those of the community. The antithetical characteristics Franzos uses to describe the different factions each of the two characters stands for condense in a nutshell their personal conflict and the dualism between societal norms and individual desires.

Sender, the innately intelligent and curious Jewish boy with the vision and heart to strive “mit Aufgebot aller Kraft leidvoll nach einem hohen Ziele”⁹⁴ (Pojaz 6), stands in lone contrast to the

“Kotstädtchen des Ostens,” the “filthy towns of the East,” his home town said to be “ein

Niedrigkeiten.” (“the hero with the unheroic name of Sender Glatteis is a poor Jewish boy and the milieu [...] is an Eastern Jewish shtetl in Podolia with all its troubles and sordidness”).

94 “painfully raising all my strength to reach the high goals”

erbärmliches galizisches Judennest”⁹⁵ (Pojaz 44) – none of which have anything to offer other than uncompromising parochialism. In a further move, Franzos extends the conflict between individual and community to the conflict between Eastern and Western Jewry. This requires Franzos to demonstrate to the Western reader their own estrangement. Careful not to be identified with the world he depicts, the narrator achieves his distancing by using the language of an objective observer with the expertise of the Orientalist: he talks about “der Jude Halbasiens” (the Jew of Half-Asia), and uses terms such as “dies Volk” (this people), “der Jude” (the Jew), and “der Jude des Ostens” (the Jew of the East; Pojaz, 13-14) to categorize and explain his subject matter. Third person pronouns further accentuate narratorial detachment:

pronouns such as “er” (he) and “sein” (his) refer to the Eastern Jew to underscore his strangeness, whereas the phrase “bei uns in Deutschland” (in our Germany) suggests a bond and intimacy with the reader.

As the narrator thus aligns himself with his German audience, he galvanizes its cultural sensibilities. Already within the first pages, Germany and its culture is the implied yardstick against which the Eastern ghetto can only be measured unfavorably. To understand what this yardstick means, it is useful to recall Germany’s place in the world during Franzos’ day: in the 1870s and 1880s, the still young German state boasted not only a vibrant industrial sector and an expansive infrastructure, but also a secularized education system with thriving institutions of higher learning, and an increasingly dynamic social order characterized by a growing and powerful middle-class. These tangible signs of progress and development, I contend, validate the less tangible notions of German superiority. The vocabularies mobilized to construct the difference between Germany as a civilized space versus the East as its outlandish and

95 “a pitiful Galician nest of Jews”

uncivilized counterpart are a good example of how Germans understood themselves.⁹⁶ Under Bismarck, Germany’s backward neighbor Poland became the target of such polarized notions of difference. But even before Bismarck, Gustav Freytag in Soll und Haben cast the Poles in thoroughly inferior terms, turning them into an “Oriental” and savage people, as Kontje points out. Similarly, Kristen Kopp (86) in her discussion of the Ostmarkenroman genre argues that the genre juxtaposes a “rationally, hierarchically, and morally ordered” German space versus the irrationally ordered Polish space.

Franzos, too, translates notions of German progress into fictions of German superiority and relies on oppositional values to draw up his picture of the ghetto. Germany can be assumed to be all that which the ghetto is not. Measured against the tacit German yardstick, the Jewish ghetto towns are primarily marked by lack: the lack of writings other than the Talmud; the lack of knowledge and progress; the people’s inability to read local newspapers and therefore to communicate with the surrounding world. “Im Ghetto,” Franzos writes, “gibt es keinen gedruckten Anekdotenschatz, kein Konzert, kein Theater”⁹⁷ (Pojaz 14). In fact, it is the diverse body of civilizational treasures and achievements that nurture German cultural conceit in 1890 that Franzos identifies as absent, since “von der modernen Bildung hält ihn ja ebenso der Wille der Machthaber, wie der eigene fromme Wahn fern”⁹⁸ (Poaz 14). In the absence of educational tools, the Eastern Jewish ghetto remains an underdeveloped space, yet one full of potential. Its inhabitants are capable of learning, since “der Talmud [...] seinen Verstand bis zur

96 Todd Kontje (205), for example, finds textual evidence in Freytag’s Soll und Haben to argue that this author fashions Poland into Germany’s antithesis and advocates “the German conquest of Poland.”

97 “in the ghetto there are no treasures of printed anecdotes, no concert, no theater.”

98 “The will of those in power and his own religious zeal keep him away from modern education”

Spitzfindigkeit geschärft, in ihm einen heissen Wissensdurst erweckt [hat]”⁹⁹ (Pojaz 14).

Franzos recognizes a great promise in the ghetto Jew and his intellectual abilities, yet considers the ghetto’s isolation and “den starren Panzer [... der] dogmatischen Orhtodoxie,”¹⁰⁰ as Schwarz and Berman (386) claim, an obstacle to the individual’s growth and the source of all backwardness.

As Franzos highlights the pitfalls of Sender’s community, he accentuates the effects of barbaric educational practices and savagery: traditional Jewish institutions of learning, the

“cheders,” fail to educate, and are places where “langsam ist da sicherlich manches junge Leben erdrosselt worden: durch die abscheulichen Misshandlungen roher Fanatiker”¹⁰¹ (Franzos 40).

Here “wuchern diese Marterhöhlen für Körper und Geist noch immer fort,” Franzos (40) complains.¹⁰² With such descriptions, Franzos tackles what Schwarz and Berman (386) call the complex of traditions, customs, and clerical hierarchies. Addressing the physical and emotional crippling of the young would be particularly objectionable to the German reader and his bourgeois sensibilities, especially since the formation of the individual through Bildung (education) constitutes the centerpiece of the bourgeois ethos, and any practice to the contrary would necessarily seem unsavory. If secular learning is believed to be the path to reach a dignified and emancipated state of being, then its disregard by the shtetl community affiliates these Jews with the ignorant and primitive peoples of foreign places the German reader would

99 “the Talmud has sharpened his reasoning skills to the extreme, which has stirred in him a strong thirst for knowledge”

100 “the inflexible armor of Orthodoxy’s dogmaticism”

101 “Slowly, many a young life has been choked to death: by way of the terrible torture of brute fanatics”

102 “continue to this day these dens of torture for body and spirit”

have already met in public and literary discourse, either in the shape of the so-called

“Naturvölker” (natural people) in Africa, or of the Slavs and Poles on the continent.¹⁰³

Moreover, Franzos’ suggested comparison between modern German and traditional Jewish culture infers a problematic value judgment. Ranking different cultures on the civilizational ladder comes with consequences and is, according to Jürgen Osterhammel, a basic colonialist tenet. In his discussion Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (1997), Osterhammel points out that hierarchical structures of ordering the world epitomize the colonialist worldview and produce prejudiced and arrested forms of knowledge. Reviews by Franzos’ contemporaries attest to this problematic production of knowledge in Der Pojaz. Eduard Engel, in a review from 1906, accepts Franzos’ text as a reliable cultural and historical document he calls a

“kulturgeschichtliche Urkunde” about a world he considers exotic, foreign, and primitive: “eine unheimliche Welt voll Aberglauben, Unwissenheit, sittlicher Blindheit tut sich vor uns auf,” he writes, “eine Welt, so seltsam, als läsen wir von wildfremden Völkerschaften, von den Ainos in Japan, von den Feuerländern oder den Papuas”¹⁰⁴ (Glasenapp 496). In a similar vein, the Jewish literary critic Ludwig Philippson comments already in 1876 on the level of culture of Franzos’

Jews in an earlier story entitled Schiller in Barnow: “es interressirte uns daher sehr, in diesen Tagen wahrnehmen zu können, dass ein Gleiches wohl schon seit längerer Zeit, besonders aber gegenwärtig bei den galizischen Juden stattfindet, die sich zur Cultur ungefähr auf der Stufe

103 Freytag’s novel operated on an oppositional relationship between Poles and Germans, best expressed in Kontje’s reading of the protagonist Anton Wohlfahrt’s sense of self, i.e. “the Poles are both that which he [Anton] is not and that which he fears he might become.”

104 “a scary world full of superstition, ignorance, moral blindness opens up in front of us, so strange a world as if we were reading about alien peoples, from the Ainos in Japan, from the people of Fireland or those from Papua.”

befinden, wie unsre Vorfahren im letzten Viertel des vorigen Jahrhunderts”¹⁰⁵ (Glasenapp 458).

Such reviews bespeak the distanced perspective and sense of superiority of Franzos’ Western readership. When painting the backwardness of shtetl life with all its repressive consequences for the individual, the message is clear: the ghetto Jew is deficient and needs help to recognize and reach his potential as human. The urgency of the narrator’s request would easily appeal to the Western reader’s paternalistic impulses: he can facilitate the individual’s growth and remedy society’s backwardness.