Language of War.
Interpretations of the First World War in Zionist Journalism and Literature (1914-​18)

Dissertation project by Eva Edelmann-Ohler

This dissertation analyses interpretations of the First World War in Zionist journalism and literature during the war years 1914-1918. It determines which language is used to negotiate the war, to put it into perspective and to connect it with Zionist goals. To this end, Zionism uses a language that implicitly and explicitly echoes, connects, negotiates and transforms the most diverse cultural concepts and fields of discourse. The language of Zionism thus opens up a view of cultural processes of interpretation that are far more than aesthetic form games. In the sense of the image of surface and depth, one can speak of a 'depth of the surface', of a circulation of language and culture.
It becomes apparent that the Zionist interpretations of the war refer to discursive argumentation and a language that emerged before the war. The paper traces the development of a language of Zionism in the pre-war period through three linguistic grids: 'religion', 'growth' and 'disease'. Starting from this, it shows how these linguistic assignments of meaning become effective in a language of war on three different fields of discourse - in the discourse of a language of exaltation, of patho-logies (From Symptom to Trauma) and by means of topologies of transgression. The literary resonances of these discourses of war are examined in texts by Franz Kafka and Arnold Zweig, as well as in lesser-known texts such as Felix Theilhaber's Schlichten Kriegserlebnissen (1916).
The monograph is external page published by De Gruyter Verlag.