Birgit Erdle, Research Associate project
This project investigated how Jewish authors addressed the problem of historical transmission (Tradierung) from the early 19th century onwards. It analysed selected texts by Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Erwin Straus, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, covering a period from 1826 to 1944. The project sought to reconstruct how these writings revealed the process of historical transmission and which concepts, figures, and images were created by the authors to represent it. The question of how to conceptualise historical transmission was combined with a *Theorie des Ereignisses* (theory of incidence), which focused on the concept of trauma and thus on the connections between shock, repetition, language, and narrative.
In order to reconstruct the connection between trauma and historical transmission and place it in the context of German-Jewish history, this study investigated a series of exemplary textual constellations. In Heine's work, these were three prose texts dealing with correspondences between the past and the present, where Heine's specific authorial position—drawing on traditional Jewish texts (e.g., the Bible and the Haggada), Hegel's philosophy of history, and sources of Jewish historiography—became evident. The texts selected from Kafka's work dealt with the experience of being unable—in Kafka's sense—*historisch zu werden* ("to become historical"). Among these were various figures of historical transmission, such as messengers and couriers in Kafka's texts. Messages that either never arrived or became meaningless by the time they did were significant in this context.
Trauma and historical transmission were also discussed in relation to Freud's work but in a different manner. The project reconstructed the dislocated textual history of the concept of trauma in Freud's writings and explored related concepts such as *archaische Erbschaft* ("archaic inheritance") and *Latenz* ("latency"). Additionally, it demonstrated how Freudian concepts and those used by psychiatrist Erwin Straus could be interpreted in comparison with a model of historical transmission implicit in early 20th-century genetics theory, which centred on biological heredity.
Situated at the intersection of literature, science, and philosophy, this study demonstrated how the connection between historical transmission and trauma linked various discourses and how this connection was discussed across disparate fields of knowledge. This approach also clarified nuances of a Jewish intellectual position in modernity. The project was guided by questions about whether the texts under investigation represented a counter-discourse to prevailing views of history in the modern age and whether they expressed an attempt to analyse and come to terms with the dominant gentile culture surrounding them.
