Eric Kligerman is an associate professor of German studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
AM: You teach Kafka and the Kafkaesque. How do you deal with the superficial fetishization of Kafka?
EK: Looking at these creatures that he has, whether it’s Gregor Samsa, Gracchus, or his hybrid lamb-kitten and the story of Kafka himself, there’s something very quantum-like.
Is Kafka a German, is he a Czech, is he a Jew, is he a not-Jew? Fifteen years prior to Schrödinger’s dead cat paradox, Kafka was already writing such paradoxes. If a fetish is reified, solidified and grasped, I show just how discursive and difficult Kafka is. As one critic remarked, you enter as a nomad into a text of Kafka. One never knows where one will end up.
AM: Why do you teach discussion style?
EK: To get up and say, "This is what the story is about," goes against the very material that I’m teaching.
Hannah Arendt discusses how thinking is discursive: We’re always running from one part of the world to another. Last Spring, my friend in mathematics, Kevin Knudson, and I team-taught (math and literature).
There was something insanely poetic about Knudson’s description of concepts. Thinking about Kafka in relation to Zeno’s paradox or questions of the infinite or Borges in relationship to fractals gave me a new perspective on texts that had become frozen or stagnant for me.
AM: Did your STEM students act the same as literature students?
EK: Many STEM students have had a particular sensitivity and epistemic drive to understand blind spots in the literature.
I taught (Refracting Literature through Science) through concepts from Einstein’s relativity theory to quantum thought’s uncertainty principle.
Arendt talks about thinking without banisters. She means not to be hemmed in by one methodology, but to show that there’s something porous between these boundaries of thought.
AM: Your degree is in comparative literature. What are your main literatures?
EK: I had gone to grad school to study German, American, English and French lyric poetry, and continental philosophy.
I ended up focusing on German-Jewish intellectuals, writers and the Holocaust. My classes are always interdisciplinary.
Law and Literature is transnational and spans 2,500 years. The questions of justice raised by Sophocles permeate our contemporary world. Although these events are not the same, you recall the specter of National Socialism within the images of Czech officials writing numbers on the arms of Syrian refugees, or the Hungarians transporting them on trains to displacement centers.
In turn, when the German chancellor remarks that it would do justice to its responsibility to help refugees, she is acknowledging her country’s historical responsibility in wake of the Holocaust.
AM: On the flip side, Marine Le Pen compared Muslims praying in public to Nazis occupying France.
EK: You hear a French right-wing politician saying about the Germans, ‘You took away our Jews, and you’re bringing us Arabs.’
One doubles over with historical awareness at the obscenity as well as blindness as to one’s own complicity in the destruction of European Jewry.
AM: How present is the Holocaust in Germany?
EK: One of the last times I was there, they had just constructed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the center of Berlin. Everyone always hears, it’s Schluss!: It’s over with, here’s the memorial, we can move on. But then something brings it back.
We find out that Günter Grass, the moral compass of Germany, when he was 17 was in the SS, and concealed his history. Germany has Stolperstein, stumbling blocks. Where a family was deported to the camps and murdered, there are raised, golden memorial stones that say, "Hier wohnte," here lived, the name and birthdate of the individual, and the date and place of their death.
You might see the stone or not. But you might trip over it to get you to think about these absences. I went on that post-college, grand journey through Europe to the places of the poets I loved. You go to Weimar to see Goethe’s home and you’re 10 minutes down the street from Buchenwald. You visit where Hegel wrote "Phenomenology of Spirit," and see nearby a sign that says, "This is where Bamberg’s Jews were deported."
Around the corner from where Rilke lived in Paris, there’s another memorial to the deportation of France’s Jews. Where Kafka lived in Prague, you’re constantly running into memorials. The past is always creeping in, whether in its traces or its very absence.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
