10 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES (CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8) thinkers—Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan—and analyzes how their ideas about time have shaped various fields, such as religion, politics, art, and culture. “German Jewish thinkers think about these things because they are a minority,” Lebovic argues. They’re a minority living in a German-speaking society, and their status, identity, and understanding of the world reflect their sense of discrimination but also hope for change. Lebovic traces how the notion of time evolves chronologically from Buber to Celan. Martin Buber, the father of modern-day religious studies, considers time as it relates to reforming Jewish life. For critical theorist Walter Benjamin, time is linked to critical thought and how it shapes life. Hannah Arendt, a political thinker, discusses time as the core of equality and the sanctity of life. Paul Celan’s thoughts on time are expressed in his poetry, reflecting the language of life, especially in the context of post-Holocaust existence. Unlike the other scholarly work on Jewish time, Lebovic emphasizes that “these Jewish thinkers think about time the way they do because they are Jewish,” but not to reaffirm their Jewishness. On the contrary, “they use it as a critical tool.” “It may be a sign of their openness that all four were highly skeptical about Zionist ideology and imagined either a bi-national state, as Buber did, a These are quickly rendered, but they carry a lot of the traditional techniques of drawing, such as shading and modeling and line. “Then we also have a whole range of drawings also focusing on people where he zooms out and takes in the whole of the body. In those drawings, we start to lose detail. In place of detail, we see Kafka really elaborating on the gesture and the movements and comportment of the body and sometimes exaggerating those movements in ways that amplify them. The movement of the body, the way people carried themselves was very interesting to him.” history The Wheel of Temporality: German Jewish Thinkers on Time Intellectual history explores the development of ideas and concepts over time. Historian Nitzan Lebovic is examining how the concept of time itself has evolved by studying the thoughts and writings of influential 20th-century German Jewish thinkers. Lebovic, professor of history, explains that there are layers to thinking about time. At its most fundamental, “we are creatures of time, and what we understand, especially as historians, is that everything we do is connected to time,” he says. Identity is always transforming and changing. “Identity is never static,” he says. “Identity is formed and re-formed during our lifetime.” Our engagement with the world—through society, language, and culture, for example—plays a role in shaping our sense of self, he further explains. At the core of his research, Lebovic is exploring Jewish time, and more specifically, German Jewish time. His latest monograph Homo Temporalis focuses on four key German Jewish received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka is the first book to comprehensively examine his connection with visual art and culture across a range of media, and to address his connections to the artistic scene in Prague in the early 20th century. There was a particular interest for Sawicki, whose major research area is early-20th-century central and eastern European modernism. His research focuses on overlooked histories of modernism, to expand and in some cases challenge conventional scholarly narratives in the subject area. “In the drawings that were rediscovered in Zurich we see a large majority focused on people,” he says. “Some of them are relatively naturalistic, where Kafka focuses in tightly on the face or some aspect of the body and really develops it in a fairly conventional way. Nitzan Lebovic Two seated figures, Franz Kafka Courtesy of Nicholas Sawicki, Christine Kreschollek
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==