Language and National Identity in Theodor Adorno and WG Sebald

249 Pages·2017·1.59 MB·English

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
6-2017
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Agata Szczodrak
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
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THE SPACE OF ALTERITY: LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THEODOR
ADORNO AND W.G. SEBALD

by

AGATA SZCZODRAK

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York
2017
ii

©2017
AGATA SZCZODRAK
All Rights Reserved
iii
The Space of Alterity: Language and National Identity in Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald
by
Agata Szczodrak

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature
in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.

______________ _____________________________________________________
Date RICHARD WOLIN
Chair of Examining Committee

______________ _____________________________________________________
Date GIANCARLO LOMBARDI
Executive Officer

Supervisory Committee:
Professor Richard Wolin
Professor Vincent Crapanzano
Professor Caroline Rupprecht

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
iv
ABSTRACT
The Space of Alterity: Language and National Identity in Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald
by
Agata Szczodrak
Advisor: Distinguished Professor Richard Wolin
The German Romantic monolingual paradigm of national identity emerged in the late
eighteenth century to establish a mother tongue as a national backbone. This paradigm portrayed
multilingualism as destabilizing, impoverishing, and unsuitable for aesthetics. Radicalized by the
Nazis and overlooked in postwar debates over German national identity, this paradigm persists in
contemporary societies and continues to conceal, belittle, and discredit multilingualism. To
oppose that paradigm, this dissertation unveils the enriching and nourishing qualities of foreign
languages, presents translingualism as a viable alternative to monolingualism, and reveals how
translingual literature creates transnational connectedness. The limitations of the paradigm are
traced from the late eighteenth century to contemporary German literature to show how the
German Romantics sacralized the concept of the mother tongue through religious and ethical
qualities, and to expose how the exaltation of linguistic purity spreads hostility to foreign
languages and fuels violence. Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald secularize the notion of the
mother tongue and rehabilitate multilingualism. Adorno advocates a philosophical and an
aesthetic framework with one language open to foreign expressions, whereas Sebald promotes
translingual literature that mixes languages to create transnational bridges. This exploration of
foreign tongues in Adorno and Sebald adds an ideological and an aesthetic dimension to the
scholarship on their multilingualism and refutes the invocations of linguistic purity.
v
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance and support from
several individuals. I am immensely grateful to my advisor, Richard Wolin, for his mentorship,
criticism, patience, and encouragement. Throughout years, he has directed me to invaluable
sources and has patiently and thoroughly evaluated numerous papers and drafts of this project.
He gave me priceless suggestions, kept encouraging me to trust my intuition, and always took
the time to respond to my questions and concerns with courtesy and professionalism.
It has been an honor to work with my reader, Vincent Crapanzano. I thank him for his
judicious feedback on my project, for directing me to the field of language ideology, and for his
unwavering support and generosity with his time. I would like to thank my other reader, Caroline
Rupprecht, for serving on my committee and critiquing my work. I am also grateful to Charity
Scribner for her feedback on my research. I thank my department for the Doctoral Student
Research Grant, and both Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach and Akademie der Künste in
Berlin for access to their archival materials.
I would like to thank my parents, siblings, and in-laws for their encouragement. I would
not have completed this dissertation without my husband. As a token of gratitude for his
unswerving support, love, patience, and humor, I dedicate this dissertation to him.
vi
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………… 1
2. Chapter 1: The “Sacred” Mother Tongue: Herder and Fichte on Language, Ethics,
and Religion ……………………………………………………………………………. 17
3. Chapter 2: Adorno on Linguistic Purity and the Manufacturing of Homogeneity……... 47
Excursus 1: Adorno on Religious Language in Fascist Propaganda ………....………... 81
Excursus 2: Martin Luther and Religious Stigmatization ……………......…………...... 92
4. Chapter 3: Creating Difference: Adorno on Language, Redemption,
and Dissonance ................................................................................................................ 97
5. Chapter 4: Spectral Identities and Translingual Subjects in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz ..124
6. Chapter 5: Panta Rhei: Translingual Aesthetics in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz ............... 167
7. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 211
8. Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 221
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 1. Pegida Banners in Dresden on January 12, 2015. 7
Fig. 2. Pegida Demonstration in Dresden on January 25, 2015. 91
1
Introduction
Nationalism today is at once both obsolete and up-to-date.
Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”
Statement of the Dissertation Problem
Contemporary societies invoke the late eighteenth century German Romantic
monolingual paradigm of national identity. This paradigm presents a mother tongue as a quasi-
sacred foundation of national identity and rejects multilingualism as politically destabilizing,
culturally impoverishing, and unsuitable for aesthetics.1 Although radicalized by the Nazis, this
paradigm has been neglected in postwar debates over national identity in Germany. As a result,
the paradigm continues to conceal, discredit, and misrepresent the value of multilingualism,
thereby making our understanding of multilingual cultures inadequate.
This dissertation explores how Theodor Adorno and W.G. Sebald, eminent German
writers of the twentieth century, oppose the German Romantic monolingual model of national
identity. This study shows how they use multilingualism to secularize the notion of the mother
tongue sacralized by the German Romantics. The scholarship on Adorno and Sebald has
examined their multilingual texts biographically and psychoanalytically, but the relevance of
multilingualism to national identity in Adorno and Sebald remains unexplored.
This scholarly gap is paradoxical because both writers often contributed to discussions
over national identity in postwar Germany. Adorno, a Holocaust survivor who returned to
Germany after World War II, sought to debunk Nazi linguistic myths and to foster openness

1 In this dissertation, multilingualism is an umbrella term for the use of Fremdwörter (foreign derivations or
borrowings), speaking foreign languages, and translingualism (the mixing of tongues). Fremdwörter are non-
Germanic words that have partially assimilated to German but remain recognizable to native speakers as foreign
(Yildiz 68). This study employs the term das Fremdwort because the expression “a foreign word” can designate a
derivation, a loanword (das Lehnwort), or code switching (inserting a word from another language). A loanword is a
borrowing that has fully integrated into German and no longer sounds foreign to native speakers (78).
2
toward foreign languages. His famous statement that Auschwitz had rendered all subsequent
writing of poetry barbaric expressed his belief that German required decontamination and
revitalization. Sebald, a son of a Nazi soldier, frequently depicted the implications of the
Holocaust for postwar generations, portrayed the Nazi linguistic legacy as haunting German, and
strove to invigorate German with his literary translingualism that mixes tongues. This
dissertation fills the scholarly gap and argues that Adorno and Sebald defy the German Romantic
monolingual paradigm of national identity. Adorno endorses a philosophical and an aesthetic
framework with one mother tongue open to foreign languages. Sebald, by contrast, promotes
translingual literature that mixes tongues to create transnational linguistic and literary bridges.
Background
The German Romantic monolingual paradigm of national identity glorifies language as a
quasi-sacred foundation of a nation, expresses hostility toward multilingualism, and originates in
Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder celebrates language as a fundament of a nation (Volk) and as the
element that demarcates the nation’s linguistic, cultural, and political territory.2 He describes
language as a national treasure and an archive that stores the nation’s history, customs, morals,
and culture.3 For Herder, a nation is linguistically and culturally uniform. He advocates linguistic
homogeneity as mandatory to ensure the nation’s stability and strength. Herder argues for one
national character and rejects multilingual and multicultural nations by describing them as
“fragile machines” that are “wholly devoid of inner life” and doomed to collapse.4 In this way,
Herder delegitimizes multilingualism within the nation.

2 For a detailed discussion of Herder’s concept of a nation, see Chapter One.
3 See Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (Ü). Similarly, Humboldt defines language as “the outer appearance of the
spirit of a people,” thereby underscoring that language emanates the spiritual essence of a nation (On Language 46).
4 See Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit 368-69.