Engendering ethnicity: a comparison of German-Jewish travel writing

Heinrich Heine, Alfred Doblin, Else Lasker-Schuler and Elias Canetti are major German writers of Jewish heritage who each wrote travel books. Although their genesis differs markedly, the texts share discursive commonalities. The authors confront the ethnocultural deficits arising from assimilation within contexts of persecution (Heine being the sole agent). Three recurrent aspects of their compensatory journeys are space, hygiene and ethnicity. Through these, the authors focus on issues of limit and difference in order to interpret, affirm or recreate elements of ethnic identity. In this process, gender becomes a cognitive medium through which the writers equip themselves to discuss other dimensions of difference. Regrettably, ethnocultural experience is documented by resorting to now questionable stereotypes of gender and ethnicity. Such stereotypes enable the authors to overcome their individual limitations in the face of the largely alien post-assimilation culture of heritage. This makes problematic the (over)compensation motivating literary expressions of symbolic ethnicity. The intentional and discursive processes constitute a salutary lesson for assimilationist Australia, for local ethnic revivals may exploit similar displacements and negative exaggerations in order to overcome ethnocultural deficits in literary expressions of largely symbolic ethnicity. Herein lies a danger: the permeation of high culture by structural racism.