Jakob Hessing

Scientific Biography

From the beginning of my research, the Jewish contribution to German culture and literature evolved as my central field of interest. Towards the end of the 1970s I began to work on my doctoral dissertation, and the fact that the National Library in Jerusalem houses the Else Lasker-Schüler archive made it possible for me to study the way in which the Jewish poetess was re-integrated into West Germany's literary canon after World War Two.

            As a Jewess, she had left Germany in 1933 and died in Jerusalem before the end of the war. Under Hitler her books had been burned, but in the post war era her works were published again, and her poetry was praised. My dissertation examines the German, Christian and Jewish persons and groups involved in this revival; the political and cultural interests governing their activities; and Else Lasker-Schüler's distorted image as it emerged in the process. All statements about her were based on a massive repression of the historical facts underlying her life and her poetry.

As a result of these findings my first independent book was Else Lasker-Schüler, Biographie einer deutsch-jüdischen Dichterin, published in 1985. I tried to redress the distortions by reconstructing her life and her writings from a Jewish perspective, at that time a rather unusual approach to a major poetess of the German language. The biography is often quoted and has become a standard work of its kind; its paperback edition was reprinted several times.

            Expanding my research, the complicated interaction between Jewish identity and German culture became the central issue around which it developed. My next book – Der Fluch des Propheten. Drei Abhandlungen zu Sigmund Freud - was a study of the man who had invented psychoanalysis.

It puts Freud's theory within the context of Jewish-German literature. As an assemblage of writings, psychoanalysis is a system of hermeneutics; Freud offers a text to us which we do not understand, and then he gives us the rules by which we are to decipher the unintelligible. It does not come as a surprise, then, that in the end his hermeneutics is put to the ultimate test - to the Bible itself: Hitler was already in power when he wrote his last book, Moses and Monotheism. In the process of adopting a foreign culture, German Jews had tried to emancipate themselves from the texts of their tradition, and now, as they were being expelled from this culture, things were coming full circle. The Jewish writers of German literature, and Sigmund Freud among them, had to come to grips with their lost tradition.

            The book, published in 1989, was reprinted in paperback and translated into Italian. Shortly afterwards I was invited to join the staff of the Hebrew University, and my courses frequently deal with the border line of Jew and German. I try to look at the process of secularization from both sides of this line: Long before Jews became active in German culture, Martin Luther's reformation was one of its formative events. His translation of the Bible created the modern German language, and there are profound connections between the two cultures. As in the case of Freud, they often hinge upon the trauma of a lost tradition.

            My studies have an impact beyond the university, as well. By presenting a Jewish perspective to the German public, I work as a cultural mediator between Israel and the German speaking world. In the 1970s I was the German editor of Ariel, a cultural magazine published by Israel's Foreign Ministry. During the 1980s and early 1990s, I translated novels by A.B. Yehoshua and Yehoshua Kenaz into German. For a number of years during the 1990s, I created and edited the Jüdische Almanach published by Suhrkamp Publishing House in Germany. From the early 1990s onwards, I work as a literary critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, discussing Israeli and Jewish literature. And in a long list of lectures - both academic and public, in Israel and abroad - I regularly present the results of my studies to a wide audience.

            My most recent book, Der Traum und der Tod. Heinrich Heines Poetik des Scheiterns, was published in 2005. It is my third monography on a major figure of Jewish-German literature, and it is divided into two parts; at first I depict Heine as a writer within the autobiographical tradition of German literature arising in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then I discuss him as a modern Jew. The two motifs of dream and death, ubiquitous in his work, give ample evidence of his ambivalent situation at the crossroads between emancipation and restriction.

            The book is intended for both German and Israeli readers, and a Hebrew translation is now being prepared. It is my conviction that Germans have to be reminded of the role played by Jews within their culture; and that, at the same time, Israelis should be made aware of the importance of German culture in the history of the Jewish people. Without the meeting of the two cultures, it is doubtful whether political Zionism would have been possible; and Heinrich Heine, I believe, is one major poet of both cultures who should be part of our national heritage.

            Since my appointment at the Hebrew University I have published a large number of scientific articles, and in the years until my retirement I hope to complete one more project. Under the title Der Preis der Säkularisierung, I plan to write a collection of studies, chapters of a  Jewish-German literature as a tradition constantly lost and found again.