Beyond the Mother Tongue

The Postmonolingual Condition

Yasemin Yildiz

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823255764
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire allemande

Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).

Chapter One

The Uncanny Mother Tongue

Monolingualism and Jewishness in Franz Kafka

Producing Monolingualism in a Multilingual Context

With the current revalorization of multilingualism, the Austro-Hungarian empire has gained importance as a reference point.1 In contrast to the German Kaiserreich, which was conceived as a monolingual nation-state, the Habsburg empire acknowledged its broad multilingual makeup in its political structure. Yet the multilingualism of the empire does not offer a positive model to be emulated in the present. In fact it cautions us against facile celebration of what appears to be a state of multilingualism without closer scrutiny of its configuration of—and its underlying premises regarding—language, culture, and ethnicity. For the multilingualism of the empire increasingly shifted from being constituted by subjects with diverse multilingual competences to a multilingualism constituted by the side-by-side existence of a series of monolingual communities. Through educational and cultural policies, such as the opening of separate schools, the multilingual empire increasingly produced monolingual subjects and participated in what Hanna Burger calls the “expulsion of multilingualism” (“Vertreibung der Mehrsprachigkeit”). Thus, what looks like a multilingual context can indeed be governed by a monolingual paradigm.2

This insight puts a prominent “multilingual” site such as early twentieth-century Prague in a new light. A city in which German and Czech were historically anchored and widely spoken, Prague became one of the frontlines in the language wars of the Austro-Hungarian empire.3 By the turn of the twentieth century, a primarily Czech-speaking majority with national aspirations was fighting against the dominance of a small, primarily German-speaking middle and upper class whose power was gradually eroding. Because nationalist movements—be they Czech or German—treated a person’s native language as a solid indicator of his or her nationality, they were invested in asserting that the people they represented had only one language. In this manner, an increasingly combative nationalism propelled the turn to monolingualism and sought to discourage existing practices and attitudes that crisscrossed between languages.4 The city’s linguistic situation was thus “multilingual” insofar as multiple languages were spoken, but increasingly “monolingual” in the manner in which individuals were forced to conceive of themselves as members of one language community only.

Early twentieth-century Prague was then not just a site of tensions between specific languages and language communities who fought for hegemony, as has been so well documented already. Rather, as my framework suggests, it was also a site of tensions between different linguistic paradigms: a multilingual paradigm, in which linguistic practices did not necessarily follow exclusive identitarian logics, and an emergent monolingual one, for which the connection between language and identity was paramount. Even as multilingual practices persisted to differing degrees, however, it was the monolingual paradigm’s conception of subjects, communities, and modes of belonging that carried the day. In this conception, the “mother tongue” was the medium through which one was tied organically to one’s nation as well as the only basis of access to proper subjectivity and legitimacy.

This ascendant monolingual paradigm, in which mother tongue putatively equaled nationality, persisted even in the face of its own inconsistency, as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-speaking Jews experienced firsthand. In Prague, as in many parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Jewish minority had predominantly embraced German as their language by the nineteenth century. In fact, more than half of German-speakers in the city were Jewish (Spector 4). This attachment arose from the particular emancipatory promise of German-language culture in the late eighteenth century and was encouraged by leading Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn. Austrian emperor Joseph II’s 1782 Edict of Toleration, which allowed Central European Jews entry into the gentile world for the first time, seemed to manifest this promise in political terms, while the writings of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe offered a cultural vision of belonging to which their Jewish readers responded strongly. Yet most Christian Germans did not accept German-speaking Jews as part of their community or view them as fellow Germans, just as most Christian Czechs did not accept Czech-speaking Jews as Czechs. As the assimilated Jewish communities experienced, the link between mother tongue and identity, solid and unbreachable according to the monolingual paradigm, was in fact highly tenuous.

How does one relate to languages and write in such a context? This complex political and cultural conjunction proved fertile ground for literature.5 Prague was home to a large number of significant German-language writers, many of them Jewish.6 Yet while writers such as Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Hugo Bergmann shared a linguistic predicament, their aesthetic production sharply differed from each other and from that of their most famous peer, Franz Kafka, whose writing constitutes the focus of this chapter.7 More so than his fellow writers, Kafka explored from within the impossibility of the linguistic situation in which he found himself, a situation brought about by the monolingual paradigm.

The combination of Kafka’s distinct writing style and his complex linguistic situation has given rise to numerous claims about the status of his language. To this day, Kafka’s language continues to be a controversial site at which competing models of linguistic affiliation are formulated. Already in the 1960s, critics debated whether the peculiarity of Kafka’s literary language could be related to a linguistic entity other than standard High German—namely, the distinct Prague dialect.8 This debate occurred at a time when Prague German was almost extinct as a spoken community language due to the Holocaust and large-scale population movements after the war. When scholars considered Kafka’s language as Prague German at that point, it appeared as a dead language belonging to a specific time and place. Given that many German speakers in Prague were Jewish, this reference also gestured to what some critics implicitly presumed to be a specifically Jewish form of local German.

More recently, scholars have attempted to relate Kafka’s writing explicitly to languages considered Jewish. On the one hand, David Suchoff, citing Yoram Ben-David, speaks of Kafka’s writings as “exercises in ‘how to write Hebrew in German words’” (255). Pascale Casanova, in a short section of her book The World Republic of Letters, on the other hand, situates Kafka with other “translated men,” primarily Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial writers, and asserts that Kafka’s work “can be considered as entirely translated from a language that he could not write, Yiddish” (269). These scholarly evaluations move in different directions. Suchoff attempts to bring out a more Jewish Kafka. In his account, the assertion of a positive Jewish identification rests on a linguistic claim of proximity to Hebrew. For Casanova, in contrast, Kafka’s Jewishness is secondary to the fact of his “translated” nature, which gives him a more recognizable, even “contemporary” place in world literature.

Even when scholars highlight Kafka’s relation to the German language, their view of this relationship varies. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue in their influential study, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Kafka’s writing amounts to an intensification and subversion of the German language from within. They do not relate Kafka’s literary language back either to a dialect, or to other languages, but rather to an aesthetic form in which he is said to bring out the “polylingualism” of language in general. On this basis, they define “minor” literature as a form of writing in a major, well-established language, such as German, in a way that destabilizes it.9 Against such attempts to account for Kafka’s literary language through recourse to other languages, local dialects, or even anticanonical aesthetics, other critics, such as the eminent Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold, emphasize Kafka’s affinity to canonical German literary traditions and his indebtedness to Goethe.

These contradictory assessments arise, I suggest, because Kafka’s writing itself explores the modern problem of a putative homology between native language and ethno-cultural identity—that is, the monolingual paradigm—in a concentrated manner as part of his very aesthetics. Although raised in an environment in which multiple languages were spoken, and personally fluent in a number of languages, Kafka wrote his literary texts indeed entirely in German.10 Neither the context, in which he confronted social challenges to his claim on his primary language, nor his own multilingual competence led him to consider writing in another language, or even to incorporate other languages in any immediately visible way into his texts.11 He thus fashioned himself as a monolingual writer. Yet the context necessarily left a mark on his writing as it continuously forced him to reflect on his relationship to language. Ultimately, Kafka embraced a paradigm that fundamentally excluded him and from this impossible situation developed his characteristic high modernist aesthetics of negativity.

What Kafka helps to reveal, then, is the force of the monolingual paradigm even for those excluded from it. The postmonolingual condition cannot be understood without a proper grasp of this force as well as its disjunctures. This chapter illuminates the postmonolingual condition by pursuing the tensions inherent in the monolingual paradigm and the mother tongue. Because the paradigm structures much of modern life and the subject’s intelligibility within it, it cannot simply be disregarded or willfully changed, but must be worked through. Kafka undertakes such a working-through from within the paradigm itself.

Kafka explores the tension within the monolingual paradigm and his position towards it most incisively in his writings on Yiddish. That language entered his life in a transformative manner through a Yiddish theater group in 1911, when he was 28 years old.12 It was thus not a native or familiar language for him. Yet as a language defined as distinctly Jewish, it offered a glimpse of what it might mean to be within the homology posited by the monolingual paradigm as a Jew, a glimpse of an alleged sense of continuity between language and identity. While Kafka’s engagement with Yiddish did not result in his using or explicitly thematizing the language in any of his fictional texts, he reflected on Yiddish extensively in other sites of his writing, particularly in his diaries, letters, and, most publicly, in a speech he delivered in February 1912. Neither the speech nor his diaries and letters can easily be separated from his more explicitly fictional writings, however. As many scholars agree, Kafka’s diaries and letters are not simply sites of biographical information, but rather form an important part of his textual production.13

Writing on Yiddish but in German in these varied genres, Kafka addresses the problem of having a mother tongue that is socially unsanctioned within a larger structure increasingly governed by the monolingual paradigm. In the process, he rearticulates the mother tongue itself as inescapably uncanny (unheimlich) rather than familiar, as the paradigm would have it. At the same time, the fact that writing on another language is key to (re)articulating his relationship to this mother tongue underscores that a much more “multilingual” practice is at work than appears at first sight. Kafka’s inquiry into and repositioning of the monolingual paradigm as an uncanny one takes place in relation to other languages that are decidedly not “native.” As the following discussion will show, nonnative languages such as Yiddish and French play a crucial identity- and affect-producing role, even if they never enter the texts themselves. Thus, what looks like a monolingual text may, in fact, suggest the contours of a multilingual paradigm.

Monolingualism and Jewishness

In order to grasp the specificity of Kafka’s relationship to the monolingual paradigm, it is necessary to understand the broader discourses on Jewishness and language that he was inevitably forced to confront, as well as to consider contemporary scholarly attempts to redescribe those discourses. The notion that Jews could not possibly be legitimate speakers of German or any other European language, even if they spoke it flawlessly, was most infamously and influentially advanced by composer Richard Wagner. In his essay “Judaism in Music” (1850, revised and expanded 1869), Wagner not only denies Jews’ aesthetic sense and musical creativity, but goes further to claim that Jews are inherently unable to master any so-called non-Jewish languages:

The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien. [ . . . ] In the first place, then, the general circumstance that the Jew talks the modern European languages merely as learnt, and not as mother tongues, must necessarily debar him from all capability of therein expressing himself idiomatically, independently, and conformably to his nature. A language, with its expression and its evolution, is not the work of scattered units, but of an historical community: only he who has unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community, takes also any share in its creations. [ . . . ] Now, to make poetry in a foreign tongue has hitherto been impossible, even to geniuses of highest rank. Our whole European art and civilisation, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other; but at most the homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings. (149–50; trans. 84–85)14

While Wagner’s central point is the denial of aesthetic creativity to Jews—the immediate occasion for the essay is a polemical attack against the success of the German-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer—he extends this denial to language.15 He obsessively repeats the assertion that Jews, or rather his figure of “the Jew,” cannot possibly be native speakers of German or other European languages. His denial, of course, is necessitated by the very existence of such native speakers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of German Jews had been native speakers of German for at least two generations, and poets such as Heinrich Heine had been leaving their mark on German literature. Based on the notion that the mother tongue ties the individual organically to a community, Wagner would thus need to acknowledge German Jews as fellow Germans. By denying that German could ever be a mother tongue to Jewish speakers, Wagner not only excludes Jews but also attempts to maintain the fantasy of the natural link between mother tongue and identity.

Wagner links aesthetics and language in his discourse because he sees both of them as depending on authenticity and groundedness. True creativity and the ability to express oneself, in his view, are only possible with a deep, innate connection to the mother tongue. With that, Wagner builds and expands on the Romantic notion of the link between mother tongue and creativity. As discussed in this book’s introduction, Friedrich Schleiermacher had already stated in 1813 that “every writer can produce original work only in his mother tongue, and therefore the question cannot even be raised how he would have written his works in another language” (“From On the Different Methods of Translating” 50). The composer offers a specifically antisemitic reading of this premise by denying the possibility that Jews could be native speakers of European languages and therefore creative and original in them.16

Wagner participates in what Sander Gilman has identified as the key element of German discourses on Jewishness and language: the trope of the “hidden language of Jews.” Gilman argues for the existence of a discourse ranging from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in which linguistic difference is ascribed to Jews, though the content of that projected difference changes over time. According to this trope, Jews are set apart from their Christian neighbors through their language, be it because they are said to speak another language (Hebrew, Yiddish) or to speak German with a “Jewish” accent. As Gilman elaborates, the (real or supposed) presence of this other language ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beyond the Mother Tongue? Multilingual Practices and the Monolingual Paradigm
• 1. The Uncanny Mother Tongue: Monolingualism and Jewishness in Franz Kafka
• 2. The Foreign in the Mother Tongue: Words of Foreign Derivation and Utopia in Theodor W. Adorno
• 3. Detaching from the Mother Tongue: Bilingualism and Liberation in Yoko Tawada
• 4. Surviving the Mother Tongue: Literal Translation and Trauma in Emine Sevgi Özdamar
• 5. Inventing a Motherless Tongue: Mixed Language and Masculinity in Feridun Zaimoğlu
• Conclusion: Toward a Multilingual Paradigm? The Disaggregated Mother Tongue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index