ABIGAIL GILLMAN (BOSTON UNIVERSITY): Willi Goetschel’s paper has touched upon many, enormously important and difficult questions at the core of our enterprise here. And I wanted to just mention a few especially provocative points. First of all the notion of reclaiming Jewish historiography on its own terms, of trying to understand Jewish history in Jewish terms, what a challenge that is. Second, the notion of, to quote Willi, the German-Jewish what: “question?” “symbiosis?” “dialogue?” — the terms are not adequate and we could spend several hours talking about this. Third, the notion that the Holocaust calls Jewish identity into question in an existential way. Is this true? Is this the case? What are the implications of this? Fourth, the notion that the essence of Judaism is a call for universal liberation, is the messianic essence above all? And lastly, the challenge, I think, of Goldschmidt, the publication of Goldschmidt — and you remember that the first thing he did was to open the Jüdisches Lehrhaus — is a commitment to Jewish learning and a return to Jewish sources and Jewish texts in our quest for the answers to these questions. That seems to me the unspoken premise of Goldschmidt’s whole project. Are we going to take it seriously, and what are the implications of that?

Now I wish to step back from Goldschmidt for a moment to talk a little bit more about the enterprise of the colloquium, and particularly about the question of what it means to be a Jewish critic of German literature. Or alternatively, I think a better question is: what is the legacy of the generations of German refugees, these generations that we have been talking about, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, for those of us working in Jewish-German studies today? For those of us putting together syllabi on literature, for those of us trying to create German Studies curricula, German Cultural Studies curricula, for those of us struggling for our own methodology, and in our scholarship wrestling with various discourses of identity.

And this question was running through my mind during Professor Seeba’s talk. There is no question that the legacy of these scholars he discussed and that have been discussed, as Germanists, as comparatists, as teachers and critics of literature has been tremendous. Thetrickier question is, I think, what was Jewish about their work? And in what way were they Jewish critics?