Jewish Warsaw – Jewish Berlin

Getting to know cities involves deciphering their
depictions, narrated just like that, as if in a dream.

S. Kracauer⁶

Since the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries urban space has been a particularly important place and an object of literary narrations. A constant element of representations of this space is, on the one hand, fascination with the city, and, on the other hand, the fears, concerns, and terror caused by this deformation of the existing world. Although for many twentieth-century literary characters the city is the most natural environment, a phantasmic place attractive through both its diversity and universality, its evaluations are often ambivalent. With the appropriation of the urban space by literary texts come attempts at its metaphorization; visions of fascination with the urban space begin to coincide with its apocalyptic record.

In reference to the conception of the city as cultural space formulated by Aleksander Wallis, Ewa Rewers notices two possible perspectives of reading this research proposal:⁷

Wallis’ approach can be called culturalist, which puts him alongside Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Siegfried Kracauer, Lewis Mumford, Richard Sennett, Peter Hall, Edward Soja, and Michael Deer, to list just a few scholars important for research on the twentieth-century city. But one can also say that it is connected with cultural studies as defined by the British and Americans.⁸

According to Wallis, particularly vital areas are generated in places where the cultural practices of the urban community are centered, including the spaces which he considers the most vital, such as, the city center, the home, and the temple. But the scholar points out that nowadays areas situated outside culture (markets, railway stations, airports, and hotels)⁹ play a tremendous role and strive ←13 | 14→for recognition as cultural areas. Thus, the modern city should be seen more like a work of art (Hans Jonas’ conception) than through the prism of division into various areas saturated with symbolic values to a varied degree (Wallis).¹⁰

It seems, however, that in reference to literary texts produced in the first half of the twentieth century Wallis’ conceptions provide more appropriate analytic tools. One has to bear in mind that in his definition of the city Wallis used the classification of space defined according to criteria such as function/purpose, ownership, shape, characteristic features, etc.¹¹ For the notion of the cultural area defined by Wallis can regard not only the city center or the temple/sacred realm, but also parts of the city such as quarters.¹² Describing the space of a quarter would inherently involve not only noticing its information layers (origin history, architecture, ownership relations, urban planning structure), but also formulation of a repertoire of cultural roles played by such a clearly marked place. In a metropolitan system a quarter is seen as a “mainstay of hominess.”¹³ The space delineated by the street network remains under the rule of the community, at least on the symbolic level (even if not legally). Sometimes – and this is the case with the Jewish quarters in Warsaw and Berlin in the early twentieth century – the symbolic sphere too has an ambiguous status. Take, for instance, the bi- and sometimes tri-lingual (in Warsaw under the Russian partition) street signs, shop signs, and advertising slogans.

Transformations of perception of the urban space are nothing new. The city is sometimes seen as an awe- or repulsion-inspiring area of ambivalence, with its diversity based on opposites and contrasts (Max Weber). At other times it is viewed critically as a sphere subordinate to commercial values, an area dominated by the pursuit of financial gain and the universal experience of alienation (Georg Simmel).¹⁴ Emphasizing the durability of Weber’s conception, Dobiesław Jędrzejczyk points out that it supplements the gravity of the issue of ←14 | 15→community, of the bond tying the entire city.¹⁵ In the individual urban centers, this community’s awareness is conditioned by, for instance, their size and cultural type.¹⁶ The precursor of such an outlook on the urban space was Florian Znaniecki, who believed that “urban dwellers are not only bodies, but also active experiencing ‘subjects’, in which character they are not in the city but the city is in the sphere of their shared experience and actions; they create it as a most complex social structure. This experience is precisely ‘experiencing space’ […].”¹⁷ It is noteworthy that this ‘experiencing of space’ accompanies not only those who remain in the sphere of its immediate influence, but it also often becomes a constructed experience, attributed to the existence of subjects present in art (literature).

Znaniecki also stressed that “no man can individually stay anywhere permanently or temporarily without entering the range of the spatial values of some system simply by means of his very presence. […] Presence […] within the scope of the given system’s spatial value is experienced socially as a kind of participation in this property.”¹⁸ As a result of thus perceived mutuality of relations – of the interrelations between the subject and space – even in the case of the object’s constructed or reported experiences (literary fiction and reportage respectively) it is possible to say that the space acquires a somewhat special status, it is co-shaped by various actors. Putting predominantly specific inhabitants, subjects of urban life, at the center of attention makes their relations closely connected with the given area become instruments of identification and isolation.

In sociology the city is defined as a social place where strangers meet. It is not so much a meeting place as more like a very important sphere of moving between what is familiar to what is not, between the known and the unknown, between what is one’s own and what is alien. This synthesis of many reflections ←15 | 16→on the urban space (formulated by scholars as different as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Richard Sennett, and others) was proposed by Markus Schroer.¹⁹

Elżbieta Rybicka very shrewdly remarks that “the city is not only a cultural space in the strictest meaning of this term, that is, an object of research and reflection of cultural studies (as well as many other disciplines: history of art and architecture, sociology, and philosophy of culture), but also a laboratory of transformations in culture.”²⁰ Due to such an interdisciplinary approach to geopoetics we obtain a lot of analytic tools in the areas with which deal scholars who are advocates of the ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies, particularly history of literature. Owing to the approach proposed, in the case of urban spaces we also gain a broader understanding of the city. Thus, “both the object of research (the place experienced by man, the cultural landscape) and the new hermeneutic methods (emphasis laid on comprehension as opposed to explanation) have brought humanistic geography closer to literary studies.”²¹ The scholar presents the ways of approaching the category of space after the cultural turn – the attention is focused predominantly on relations between space and language, and culture and literature. Scholars are increasingly often interested in space understood in a transitive, dynamic way. The object of relations is hybrid areas, heterotopies. Yet again there returns the category of place, but this time in the perspective of reflections on ethnicity, class divisions, gender, and, last but not least, in the context of the pragmatism of authority over space, along with sometimes highly peculiar ways of its ideologization, which occasionally assumes the form of symbolic violence. These reflections are accompanied with the “conviction that literature performatively establishes, creates, and gives meanings to space.”²²

Relating how the understanding of the category of ethnicity has changed in contemporary research, Eugenia Prokop-Janiec emphasizes the polemic character of present-day diagnoses. Scholars such as Appadurai or Modood associate ethnic identity not so much with origin or socialization and internalization of specific cultural practices, as they consider this category (in its traditional definition) as historic, stating that nowadays “ethnic identity proves to be […] increasingly weakly connected with participation in specific cultural practices such as language, religion, or attire […].”²³ Evoking Fredrik Barth’s and Stuart Hall’s conception, the scholar discusses the chronologically variable and the diversely conditioned way of the functioning of the subject, which undergoes processes of (self-)attachment and exclusion and which in a multicultural society chooses to belong to a culturally diverse group. One can wonder to what degree Jews living in the European diaspora – whose identity since the nineteenth century had undergone various modifications as a result of their community’s acculturation, assimilation, and modernization – are a model example of these two processes. Curiously enough, ethnic threads appearing in contemporary conceptions of culture, both those concerning deterritorialization of culture (Gupta, Ferguson, and Appadurai) and those which describe processes of hybridity (Welsch, Hannerz), can be used with regard to the cultural functioning of the Jewish diaspora before the twenty-first century, now when the realization that ethnic and national groups function as constructs, as imagined communities (Anderson) seems to be increasingly common.

Assuming that the ethnic problem with respect to literature can be treated as a “cultural issue, with literature deemed one of the practices which constitute the cultural field,” we can try to read texts in such a way so as to bring out not only the meaning-generating practices (Culler),²⁴ but also to facilitate a comparison between experiences of various ethnic groups recorded in various forms (in the form of fiction or otherwise). In consequence, reading literary texts produced in the first half of the twentieth century, for this is what I want to devote my attention to, is going to facilitate, to some degree, a portrayal of the cultural identity of the specific group.