Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Developing a Nomadic Ethics
- 1 Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing
- 2 Creature Comforts: Economadism in the Work of Dorothea Grünzweig
- 3 Disorientations: Queer, East German Nomadism in the Work of Antje Rávic Strubel
- 4 Uncanny Returns: Anna Mitgutsch's Austrian Nomadic Postmemory
- 5 Facing the Other: Barbara Honigmann and Jewish Nomadic Ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Facing the Other: Barbara Honigmann and Jewish Nomadic Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Developing a Nomadic Ethics
- 1 Seeing Strangely: Birgit Vanderbeke's Ways of Knowing
- 2 Creature Comforts: Economadism in the Work of Dorothea Grünzweig
- 3 Disorientations: Queer, East German Nomadism in the Work of Antje Rávic Strubel
- 4 Uncanny Returns: Anna Mitgutsch's Austrian Nomadic Postmemory
- 5 Facing the Other: Barbara Honigmann and Jewish Nomadic Ethics
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Communication is an adventure of a subjectivity.
— Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution”Subjectivity is being hostage.
— Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution”Barbara Honigmann and “Jewish Writing”
Upon receipt of the 2006 Jeanette Schocken Prize, Barbara Honigmann discussed the fearful encounter with the other, or:
die Angst vor dem Blick des anderen, der einen entlarven könnte, weil man ja meistens eine Maske trägt, die verbergen soll, was wir auch im Gesicht des anderen nicht wahrnehmen wollen: Verletzlichkeit und Vergänglichkeit.
[the fear of the other's gaze, with its potential to unmask you, because you normally wear a mask, after all, one meant to hide what you don't want to see in the face of the other, either: vulnerability and mortality.]
This reflection on self and other merges the two terms and highlights the fragility and difficulty of connections with others. It is reminiscent of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, to whom Honigmann directly alludes at the end of her talk. In this chapter, I first introduce Honigmann before returning to her conception of the face of the “other,” especially as glimpsed through literature, and outlining the Jewish nomadic ethics I read her work as practicing and exploring.
Honigmann was born in 1949 in the GDR. Her mother, Litzi Friedmann, was a Hungarian-born Viennese communist of Jewish origin, and her father, Georg Honigmann, was a German Jew. The couple met in London, where they were living as refugees, and settled in the GDR in 1947. They parted shortly after Honigmann's birth. Honigmann studied Theater Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, completing her degree in 1972.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women's Writing in GermanStrange Subjects, pp. 165 - 198Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012