For the last issue of the year, before the release of new articles in the first week of January, K. is republishing three articles on three major authors of European modernity. It is perhaps Kafka who best encapsulates, in an intimate letter to a beloved woman, the tension that Proust and Améry also felt in their creative process: “Could you tell me who I really am? In the last issue of Die Neue Rundschau, The Metamorphosis is discussed. It is rejected for sensible reasons and says something like: ´There is something fundamentally German about K.’s art as a storyteller.’ On the other hand, in Max [Brod]’s article: ´K.’s stories are among the most Jewish documents of our time.’”A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two horses? Unfortunately, I am nothing of a circus horseman, I am lying on the ground.” (Correspondence with Felice Bauer, October 7, 1916)
For all three of these figures, Jewishness is both a fact they recognize and a far from obvious fact. Something of this experience of the modern European Jew is refracted in these three authors and contributes to their reception. In “Kafka’s Sirens,” Bruno Karsenti explores the significance of the work of the author of The Castle for the younger generation of German Jews who took it up with fervor in the 1910s and 1920s. In “Proust, Talmud and Kabbalah,” David Haziza discusses a generation of writers and critics who, after Proust’s death, immediately saw him as a fully Jewish writer. This was well before all the studies that made Proust’s ambiguity a case study of the ambivalence of a part of the French Jewish population with regard to their identity at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, Maxime Decout returns to At the Mind’s Limits, the collection of essays in which Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, expresses his melancholy at the state of the European spirit that he saw disappear, with all that it contained of possible ways forward for the Jews of Europe.
