Bischoff, Doerte
Senior Fellow: April–August 2023
Research Project: Sceptical about Jesus: The Emergence of German-Jewish Literature in the Renegotiation of a Founding Figure of Christianity
This project focuses on German literary texts from the Enlightenment to the present day that appropriate the Christian figure of Jesus and related motifs, symbols, and narratives, thereby exploring the limits of universalist promises and asserting Jewish voices and spaces in a literary field predominated by a Christian majority society. Especially by reviewing anti-Semitic notions of Jewish guilt as well as the Christian concept of vicarious sacrifice, exclusion and violence are rewritten into a shared history which is shown to be characterised by heterogeneity and ongoing dispute. The central hypothesis is that in view of the abundance of figurations of Jesus in German-Jewish literature (which has not yet been comprehensively researched), the sceptical adaptation and analysis of this complex can be seen as a constitutive site of what can be called German-Jewish literature as such. Following up on prior research (on Kompert, Franzos, Perutz, Lasker-Schüler, Stefan Zweig, and Doron Rabinovici), this project will concentrate on Enlightenment constellations, ghetto literature, and selected texts by Franz Werfel and Alfred Döblin as well as poems by Nelly Sachs, Karl Wolfskehl, and Paul Celan that allude to Christian symbols in their reflection of the Shoah and will ask whether scepticism about Jesus not only constitutes a tradition, but also marks its collapse.
Doerte Bischoff is a professor of German studies at Universität Hamburg.