At Home in My Room: Jewish Spaces of Longing and Belonging in World War I Through Weimar Berlin

During and following the First World War, Berlin was a major metropolitan center that absorbed tens of thousands of Jews seeking new homes. The city’s pervasive housing shortage meant that many locals and nearly all newcomers—Jewish or not—found themselves unable to secure personalized dwelling space in the form of an individual house or private apartment. They thus took up residence in transitional living spaces such as Pensions and rented rooms in record numbers. This dissertation examines the ways in which Jews experienced these dwellings, as well as the representation of these spaces in Jewish literary imagination and cultural life. Using the methodologies of social and cultural history, as well as literary analysis and literary criticism, the dissertation investigates the often-neglected axes of Jewish migration, domesticity, and belonging in World War I through Weimar Berlin. In doing so, it elucidates the instrumental role of dwelling space in the creation and formation of Jewish communities and identities in this urban center. The dissertation challenges the paradigm of Berlin as a threshold, transit space, or place of non-belonging for a diverse group of Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals, many of whom simultaneously longed for other places and spaces—especially for the space of Palestine—while living in Berlin. The dissertation offers a new critical framework for understanding Jewish belonging and at-homeness through the lens of dwelling and domesticity. In particular, it contends that the Pension, as a form of dwelling, is important in understanding the modern German-Jewish experience, specifically in the densely populated urban center of Berlin in the years leading up to World War I through the Weimar Republic. The dissertation argues that Jews could and did feel ‘at home’ in their inherently temporary homes in World War I through Weimar Berlin, and thereby demonstrates that longing and belonging were interconnected processes. Authors whose works that are examined in depth in the dissertation include S.Y. Agnon, David Bergelson, David Shimoni, Martin Beradt, and Fischl Schneersohn