Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains

by Todd Presner

Overview

Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews.

Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers.

Turning to philosophy, literature, and the history of technology, and drawing on transnational cultural and diaspora studies, Presner charts the influence of increased mobility on interactions between Germans and Jews. He considers such major figures as Kafka, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Sebald, Hegel, and Heine, reading poetry next to philosophy, architecture next to literature, and railway maps next to cultural history.

Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231140126
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2007
Series:	Cultures of History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Todd Samuel Presner is an associate professor of Germanic languages and Jewish studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Criticism, and he has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Dialectics at a Standstill
2. Berlin and Delos
Celan's No-Places and Heidegger's Homecomings: Philosophy and Poetry Out of Material History
3.Sicily, New York City, and the Baranovich Station
German/Jewish Subject Without a Nation: On the Meta-epistemology of Mobility and Mass Migration
4.The North Sea
Jews on Ships; or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History
5.Nuremburg-Fürth-Palestine
Some Assembly Required: Global Anxieties and Corporeal Fantasies of German/Jewish Nationality
6.Auschwitz
"The Fabrication of Corpses": Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death
7.Vienna-Rome-Prague-Antwerp-Paris
The Railway Ruins of Modernity: Freud and Sebald on the Narration of German/Jewish Remains
Concluding Remarks
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Hess

Todd Presner's Mobile Modernity is outstanding, impeccably organized, strikingly original, and beautifully written. The book achieves the perfect balance between theoretical sophistication and readability.

— Jonathan Hess, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Scott Spector

This book belongs to the next wave of German cultural studies in that it is radically interdisciplinary just as it effortlessly crosses national and linguistic, and even temporal, boundaries.

— Scott Spector, University of Michigan

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Reading the texts of a culture that could only achieve its Germanness by being so utterly Jewish, along the lines of the 20th-century's terminal mass migrations, Todd Presner's book opens our 21st-century eyes to a new way to narrate—and to be obsessed with—the Holocaust, i.e. that which will never be arrested in concepts because it forever exceeds our conventional thought and imagination.

— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

Editorial Reviews

highly successful, oftentimes brilliant, reconstruction of... German/Jewish historical dialectic.

Journal of Modern History

Beautifully crafted... [Presner's] superbly grounded work engages its texts and its readers so well.

German Studies Review - Kevin S. Amidon

Beautifully crafted... [Presner's] superbly grounded work engages its texts and its readers so well.

— Kevin S. Amidon

German Studies Review