The motif of “beginning anew” not only pervades Avant-Garde literature from the Fin de Siècle through the post-WWII period but goes to the heart of its self-understanding. The very term “new beginnings” captures a fruitful figure of speech inherent in the notion of Avant-Garde: it appears as a pleonasm, a linguistic redundancy. Isn’t a beginning inherently new? Closer reflection shows, however, that a new beginning carries a distinctive emphasis that sets it apart from a mere beginning. While all beginnings imply newness, a new beginning suggest the rupture of a continuity that does not obliterate the past. The implications of the term “new beginnings” thus lie in their inherent dependence on the very traditions they seek to rupture. If the notion of a “fresh start”—and the lip service paid to a tabula rasa in some Avant-Garde discourses—suggests a complete departure from the past, “new beginnings” respond to and part from existing traditions that remain inscribed in the new order of aesthetic and literary discourse. The concept of “new beginnings” signals not a creation ex nihilo but a transformative shift, a bold leap into uncharted territories that acknowledges the enduring influence of the very tradition which it leaves behind. Without a context to rebel against and depart from, the notion of a new beginning loses its significance.
To see the Avant-Garde in light of new beginnings highlights the dynamic interlacing between two forces that suffused the artistic and intellectual atmosphere of the early twentieth century: a Nietzschean sense of history and tradition as an overbearing burden that stultifies creativity; and, simultaneously, an urgent call for the new in the face of the radically changed conditions of life in modernity. While this dynamic drives Modernist artistic and cultural developments in general, it proved particularly fruitful for the Jewish Avant-Garde.
This special issue addresses the early 20th-century Avant-Garde and its manifestations in the Yiddish- and German-speaking Jewish context, particularly the new beginnings in Jewish thought, literature, and experience of the early twentieth century. By taking “new beginnings” as a key concept of the Avant-Garde in the German-Jewish and Yiddish context, the essays describe how Jewish creativity in modernity interacts with its own traditions and with the emerging aesthetics of its environment.
In the realm of aesthetic production, the adjective “Jewish” encompasses far more than the biographical background of individual artists. It becomes truly significant only when it integrates formal, conceptual, or motivic references to Jewish traditions, texts, and rituals, and to the millennial history of Jews and Judaism. A Jewish Avant-Garde thus confronts a paradox: it must draw on an ancient past and nevertheless risk being on the forefront in creating the new. As the examples in this special issue show, Avant-Garde works of literature and the arts that have recourse to Jewish tradition echo Nietzsche’s critique of those who take an antiquarian approach to history, who are bent on preserving it as symbolic capital gained from grand moments and figures of the past. The “new beginnings” articulated in this special issue instead enact Nietzsche’s view of history as an archive to be both used and questioned, both subverted and radically revived.
The early twentieth century was a time of unprecedented German-Jewish participation in the world of culture, literature, and the arts. The very term “Jewish Renaissance,” coined by Martin Buber, suggests the notion of a new beginning. This extraordinary renewal of Jewish culture was inspired by transformations in the Jewish Lebenswelt and an unprecedented confrontation of the Jewish tradition with modernity, but also by revisiting older streams of Judaism (Hassidism, Kabbalah) that had been ignored by the largely assimilated Jewish establishment. By delving into the reservoir of their own heritage, many artists of the Jewish Avant-Garde drew hitherto undiscovered artistic possibilities from a profound understanding of historical Jewish roots. Through this interplay of tradition and innovation, the Jewish Avant-Garde could both invoke and challenge Jewish culture and at the same time participate in the more general German and European contexts.
In the early and mid-twentieth century, those contexts witnessed hitherto unthinkable endings. The terrifying endings announced early in the century, with their predictions of impending doom, informed the artistic, literary, and intellectual imagination: the end of the West, the last days of mankind, the great storm, the end of the world. The most famous expressionist poem in the German language, Weltende (End of the World), by Jakob van Hoddis, originally called Hans Davidson, is paradigmatic for this apocalyptic sense of an ending. (The author died in Sobibor concentration camp in 1942.)
Some new beginnings, however, proved even more frightful than the invocation of looming endings. In many cases the exhilaration of a “new awakening” ended in the trenches; the deadly imperatives of creating a “new man” subtended the horrors of the Third Reich. After Auschwitz, we must think new beginnings anew in light of their promising possibilities as well as their destructive dangers. Whether the violent provocations voiced in the context of the artistic Avant-Garde—as in André Breton’s definition of the ultimate Surrealist act as a blind firing into the crowd—express these dangers or their sublimation must be reconsidered in each case anew. To understand the Avant-Garde in terms of new beginnings is perhaps to ward off the total rejection of the old and to insist rather on its revitalizing transformation, thereby circumventing the destructive dimension inherent in the Avant-Garde’s rhetorical violence.
There are additional affinities between the Avant-Garde and Judaism/the Jews: both cherish the idea of an ideal community, not only in the particular sense of belonging to a group or movement, but also as a yet-to-be-realized universal aspiration. This fueled a sort of opposition to modernity’s individualism as well as to rising nationalisms. Loyal to a certain idea of cosmopolitism, both Judaism and Expressionism regard the principles behind their thinking as something larger to be discovered among people and societies all around the world. This also explains why Jews so often found themselves in the situation of new beginnings, and why Jewish pariahdom found parallels in the sense of marginalization of the avant-gardist poète maudit.
The articles in this special issue address these and other affinities in various guises. Marc Caplan invites us into the symbolist world of the Yiddish author Der Nister. Under Soviet control, “the hidden one” was forced to camouflage himself as a Social-Realist author who used the interplay between Symbolism and Realism to pose the question of a possible enchantment of the world through art, and to consider the transformation of the everyday through literature as an act of resistance. Der Nister’s writing is replete with Jewish motives that open up visions for new beginnings to emerge.
Lisa Marie Anderson portrays the Expressionist poet and playwright Ernst Toller not only as an artist but also as a protagonist on the scene of politics and history. Anderson explores Toller’s work in light of the violent destruction of the traditional order and the creation of a modern utopia. This perspective highlights the intertwinement of tradition and renewal as well as the risks of appealing to new beginnings. As a Jew and a member of the Expressionist Avant-Garde, Toller constantly found himself on the highways and byways of new beginnings, even though many of them turned out to be impasses and dead-end streets. Anderson shows how Toller took Jewish tradition—both religious and secular—as a major source of his revolutionary inspiration.
In a similar but more theoretical vein, Chiara Caradonna considers Avant-Garde aesthetics as a driving force in developing and conveying revolutionary ideas. Paying close attention to the modes of thinking in the writings on revolution by Gustav Landauer and Hannah Arendt, Caradonna links memory as a source of new beginnings with the Jewish imperative to remember.
Like Caradonna, who points to the Avant-Garde’s entanglement of diverse discursive and artistic forms of art, thought, and life, Adi Molad finds a paradigmatic enmeshment of various mediums in the motif of the circus in German Expressionism. In her reading, this motif evokes youth, playfulness, and artistic freedom, but also an uncanny and grotesque vision of human existence underlying a hopeful, utopian foreshadowing of a possible better world. Where Jews faced discrimination and the threat of annihilation, they were forced repeatedly to start anew, to reinvent ways of surviving and of existing in the world. Molad reads images of the circus, clowns, and masks in the work of Lasker-Schüler as exuberant celebrations of life in excess, as dreams of mankind united in childlike play. Just as the new beginning relies on a tradition that is to be overcome, a regress to childhood marks the birth of the possibility of something truly novel. In Molad’s interpretation, the Jewish prohibition of violence against all human beings can serve as a utopian splinter, evoking the possibility of a new beginning in the midst of despair.
What Lasker-Schüler explores mostly—though by no means only—through poetry, the painter, printer, and architect Tischler undertook in the visual sphere. Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia shows that the Jewish influences on Tischler have been largely neglected. She finds references to the Jewish tradition in Tischler’s allusions to prayer, his depictions of religious figures, and his visions of new beginnings that involve both haunting warnings and sparks of hope.
Given the Expressionist desire to look into the inner workings of things, it will come as no surprise that esoteric and anthroposophical ideas influenced the movement significantly. Amir Engel interprets Carl Einstein’s Bebuquin as a work of magic, thereby challenging our traditional understanding of literature and its relation to the world. Engel draws on the magical practices that can be found within all religions. Just as the Jewish mystics and kabbalists believed in the transformative power of the letter and the word, so Engel reinterprets literature as a practice of transforming the world by opening up new beginnings.
The idea for this special issue derives from a panel called “New Beginnings in German Modernist Literature and Thought” held at the Annual Israeli Conference on German Studies in July 2021. The talks on Carl Einstein, Gustav Landauer, Hannah Arendt, and others proved particularly fruitful for a reflection on the concept of “new beginnings” in the early twentieth century and encouraged us to invite additional papers on the topic relating to Yiddish and German-Jewish authors and artists. This collection of essays elaborates on questions addressed in Jewish Aspects in the Avant-Garde, a volume edited by Mark Gelber and Sami Sjöberg (De Gruyter 2017). We thank the editors of the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies for offering to publish these essays and for their encouraging feedback throughout.