Abstract

The fascination with Eastern European Jewish culture evident in Franz Kafka's personal (if not literary) writings is often seen in the context of his own assimilated existence in “Western” Jewry. The presumed radical contrast of Eastern and Western European Jewish life rarely takes into account the particular geography and diversity of cultures within the Danube Monarchy in which Kafka was born, home to many different forms of Jewishness. What happens to the much-discussed problem of Kafka's relationship to Judaism when put in the context of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states? What can the variegated worlds of central European Jewry tell us about the author's complex engagement with identity, and what can Kafka’s writing tell us about the monarchy?

Bio

Scott Spector (PhD, the Johns Hopkins University, 1994) is the Rudolf Mrázek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan.  He is a historian of modern Central Europe, specializing in Habsburg and Jewish culture, sexual science and sensationalism, fin-de-siècle studies, and the broad cultures of modernism. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (2000); Violent Sensations: Sexuality, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 (2016), and Modernism without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (2017) and has co-edited After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault (2012).  He is currently working on a book on the layers of belonging in cities of the Habsburg Empire.

Event Details

Lunch provided. Co-sponsored by UVA Jewish Studies, European Studies, the History Department, and the German Department.