Negotiating the German-Jewish: The uncomfortable writing of Karl Emil Franzos.

This dissertation uses published and unpublished texts by the Austrian Jewish writer, Karl Emil Franzos (1848--1904), as a springboard for investigating a host of questions concerning Jewish assimilation, acculturation, and identity in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. Expanding on Jost Hermand's notion that Franzos's writing is "uncomfortable" because it abjures the ideological extremes with which Franzos was confronted, I seek out the negotiatory aspects of his work, identifying slippages that result in a fundamental disruption of the identity categories of the Jewish and the German.In Franzos's "cultural portraits" of the ethnic groups in the East of the Austrian Empire, particularly in his "ghetto fiction," he positions himself vis-a-vis these groups as a comfortably German author, conveying to his Western readers a supposedly objective picture of the Eastern crown lands he also called home. Rather than re-inscribe Franzos within a clear West/East, German/Jewish dichotomy of his own making, as does most of the existing literature on Franzos, I argue that by their very certitude, Franzos's texts betray the liminality of his identity positions. Franzos's texts are rife with what Homi Bhabha calls "interstitial" moments, revealing him as an "in-between" figure, but this "in-between" is not located neatly in the middle of the German and the Jewish, the Western and the Eastern, as Franzos would have us believe. This middle ground is itself discomfortingly flexible, expressing a range of positions.I argue in Chapter One that Franzos's view of himself is primarily that of writer, not German or Jew, and that his writing defies simple inscription into traditional literary categories such as "Ghettoliteratur." In Chapter Two, I situate Franzos historically in the context of Bildung, a concept that played a critical role in the development of German-Jewish relations in the nineteenth century. In Chapter Three, I draw on post-colonial literary theory to investigate the ambiguous fluctuation between liberatory and colonialist rhetoric in Franzos's texts. This vacillation---which, Bhabha argues, emerges in the very act of writing---undermines the authority of the colonialist author and his text by pointing to the "partiality" of identity.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2005.School code: 0130