The research group examined the literary canon of "Jewish homosexual modernity" that emerged in the German cultural area between 1890 and 1945. It showed that modern Hebrew literature, which was greatly influenced by the German modernist canon, was instrumental in the construction and dissemination of the Jewish homosexual canon. The literary corpus defined, reconstructed, and studied for the first time in the project allowed for new readings of the connections between German and Hebrew literatures, between center and periphery, and between territory and deterritorialization across the boundaries of time and space. The project approached its question from three different angles.
First, it subjected literary works by well-known writers to a new reading. One example is Leah Goldberg, who has become a popular queer icon in contemporary Hebrew culture. Her novel Lasses, written in the late 1930s but not published until 2010, allowed us to see her critical reflection on the intertwining of antisemitism and homophobia in 1930s Berlin.
Thomas Mann's novel Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943) can also be categorized as Jewish homosexual modernism. Mann, who had been exposed to antisemitic attacks since the beginning of his literary work and whose homosexuality became known through the posthumous publication of his diaries, seized the biblical material with a double interest: on the one hand, to create a literary monument to an identity-forming chapter of Jewish tradition; on the other hand, to shape in the androgynous figure of Joseph new ideas of gender and desire that were being developed in the Weimar Republic.
A third example is Shmuel Yosef Agnon whose stories revealed a poetics of fantasy that enabled him to experiment with Jewish homosexual modernity. A fourth example of the revision of the literary canon is Yosef Aricha's short story Confession (1938), one of the first Hebrew stories to have a lesbian plot line woven into it. The relationship between the languages German, Yiddish, and Hebrew in the context of homosexual modernity was examined in the case of the works of two writers: David Vogel's novel Married Life (1927/28) and the poetry of the major Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg.
The second focus of the project was to research and examine previously unknown short stories and poems that appeared in Jewish and homosexual periodicals of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Using the example of the topos of the ''beautiful Jewess'' and the figure of Ahasver, it was possible to show crossovers of Jewish and homosexual figures of thought. Alfred Lichtenstein's poems and short stories about the fictional character Kuno Kahn also belang in this context. The rediscovered texts will soon be published for the first time in an annotated anthology. A look at Albatros, a Yiddish ''journal for new poetry and graphic art'' in which Uri Zvi Greenberg was involved as editor, also brought new insights.
A third, flanking focus was the intertwining of homophobia and antisemitism under National Socialism, as expressed not only in medical, anthropoloqical, and racial-theoretical writinqs, but also in völkisch articles and speeches.