Welcome to the website of the Department for German Language and Literature. This is the only department in Israel where you can engage in German studies. I want to introduce our department to you which is undergoing a process of renewal and change both in its program and its basic orientation. Here you will find a short description of the study program and the different stages of the study program and possible fellowships.
1. German Literature is in many ways unique, since it is not only a mirror of German culture, society, history and politics, but also a constant reflection on these issues. This reflection has not only aesthetical and philosophical implications, but it also deeply affects German Jewish Literature. In the German case, it is practically impossible to detach the engagement in its literature from the big questions that accompany this culture, which starts with an image of an enlightened utopia of freedom and justice in the 18th century and collapses at the catastrophe of the Third Reich. At the aftermath of WWII, Germany searched for reconciliation with its past and has been striving ever since for a new cultural identity following the division between West and East Germany during the cold war and the unification between these two Germanies within the new framework of Europe.
2. German literature is at the crossroads of deep tensions between utopia and ideology, between universalism and nationalism, between religion and secularity, between a radical modernism and a romantic yearning for the medieval past, between ideal and catastrophe. These tensions are not only reflected in German literature on all its levels of content, form and genre, in drama, novel and poetry, but in aesthetic theory and even more so in philosophy, which plays a unique role in the self-definition of most German authors. There is practically no writer or poet from Goethe and Lessing to Heine, from Schiller to Thomas Mann, from Kafka to Paul Celan who would not engage in a philosophical reflection on the very foundations of German culture and history from an artistic and aesthetic point of view. Similarly, German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche, from Hegel to Freud, Rosenzweig and Adorno has been engaged in an intensive dialogue with the arts, with literature and with the theater.
3. The unique situation of German literature finds its special expression in the context of German Jewish literature. Since the Enlightenment and throughout the age of emancipation and assimilation until the Holocaust, and also after World War Two, Jewish authors engaged in a permanent reflection on their very place within German culture and its catastrophic potentials. Often Jewish authors were functioning as intercultural transmitters and representatives of this culture outside Germany. From Heinrich Heine to Franz Kafka, from Walter Benjamin to Else Lasker Schüler, Jewish writers do reflect on culture from a unique, sensitive and critical point of view as a minority, as outsiders or as a supposed enemy owing to the special Jewish perspective on their status as German citizens in the midst of the dichotomies of acculturation and emancipation, exile and Messianic hope.
4. Therefore, German Jewish literature can serve today as a paradigm for basic issues concerning inter-culturality, cultural dialogue and conflict between majority and minority cultures. These issues have become especially relevant again in German culture since the 60’s of the previous century with the different waves of Turkish, East-European and today of Arabic immigration which created new challenges of cultural integration and communication as well as possible tensions between religious Islamic culture and secular democracy. From both perspectives, the German Jewish experience and the present drama of cultural integration, German literature and culture are once again at the forefront of cultural relevance, in large part due to Lessing's and Goethe's vision of a cultural dialogue between West and East among Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures and a world literature which transcends established norms, religious borders and life forms. Cannot Jerusalem itself, with its unique fabric of cultures, languages, religions and their inherent tensions, conflicts and immanent potentials for peace be the ideal place for this adventure of a cultural and literary experience in German studies?
