During the “Jewish Renaissance” (Martin Buber) at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, Jews in Eastern Europe (re)invent themselves with the aim of creating a modern and secular Jewish culture which is no longer dominated by religion. The Kiev-based Kultur-Lige (Culture League), founded in January 1918, is the most powerful cultural institution of this breath-taking flowering of Jewish culture and Yiddish literature. At the same time, between 1918 and 1921, approximately 1500 pogroms take place on the territory of today’s Western Ukraine.
This peculiar conjunction of violence and aesthetic blossoming is a central topic of the lecture. Its main aim is to trace the cultural, aesthetic and poetic aims and claims of the Kultur-Lige and some of its outstanding representatives in literature and art. How did Jewish artists and Yiddish writers situate themselves within the vibrant developments in European, Russian and Ukrainian modernisms and Avantgard-Isms? How did these experiments turn into a fertile ground for the aesthetic assessment of pogrom violence? What role did Jewish traditions play in the artistic choices? A closer look at artists like Issachar ber Ribak and Sara Shor or authors like Dovid Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish and Dovid Bergelson tries to give some (preliminary) answers.
Prof. Dr. Sabine Koller studied Romance and Slavic philology in Regensburg, Grenoble and Saint Petersburg. She received her PhD from the University of Regensburg in 2002 and was awarded the “e-on Kulturpreis Ostbayern” (e-on culture award) for outstanding achievements in science. Between 2007 and 2012 she was a member of the Young Academy (Junge Akademie an der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina). Her Dilthey Fellowship for her study on Marc Chagall between art and literature, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2005-2012), laid the groundwork for her comparative research on Yiddish authors and Jewish artists. In 2013, she was appointed professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies at the University of Regensburg. It is the only professorship of this kind in German academia.
Sabine Koller is trained in literary and cultural theories with a focus on poetics, narratology, intertextuality, comparative arts, and Slavic-Jewish cultural transfer in art and literature. Her current research focuses on Yiddish literature during the Soviet period and the Stalinist regime.
