An Interview with Todd Presner

nnThough the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, In Mobile Modernity Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany’s Jews.nnQ: Can you explain the use of the term “German/Jewish”?nnTodd Presner: Sure. The central argument in the book is that the very categories German and Jewish are entangled in and indissociable from one another. I don’t see them as oppositional but rather as dialectical. The slash between the two terms at once separates and binds them together. I stage the book as a series of “stops” on a railway itinerary through German-Jewish intellectual history, beginning in Berlin and Delos with the poet Paul Celan and the philosopher Martin Heidegger reflecting on places of memory after the Holocaust. Each subsequent chapter represents a station, in which “modernity” is examined as a problem of mobility. Along the way, we come to literary luminaries such as Goethe and Kafka, the philosopher Hegel and the poet Heinrich Heine, Friedrich List (the early German railway advocate, who has, sadly, been nearly forgotten) and Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism), Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and, finally, Sigmund Freud and the recently deceased German expatriate author W. G. Sebald. German-Jewish intellectual history is essentially mapped onto the history of the railway system, thereby producing a new cultural genealogy of modernity itself.nnQ: But you not only deal with railway transportation: You also have a fair amount about seafaring and travel by ship. How does this relate?nnTP: Yes, there are essentially two paradigms of mobility under investigation in the book: travel by train and travel by ship. Maybe there is a future book about “Germans, Jews, and ships,” but I’m not working on it at the moment! My book is about modernity as a history of mobility: the birth of the age of the railway in England in 1825 (the first railway opened in a German state a decade later, in 1835) did not spell the end of seafaring—an antique paradigm extending back to Odysseus and, at least in my book, right up to Herzl’s famous voyage of discovery to Palestine in 1898 to meet the German Kaiser—but it did bring about new forms of mass movement, transmigration, and interconnectedness. I was very much inspired by Paul Gilroy’s famous book, The Black Atlantic, in which he examined a non-national, nautical space of encounter for radically reconceiving British cultural studies. Of course, the space of the “black Atlantic”—like the space of the railway system—is always dialectical: voyages of discovery, enlightenment, and progress also meant voyages of conquest, enslavement, and barbarism. Indeed, the railway is a fundamentally dialectical construction; everything runs in both directions at once. New technologies of networking not only meant global connection and exchange but also brought about the conditions of possibility for deportations.nnQ: Tell me about the extraordinary cover photograph.nnTP: This is a picture that I took in Berlin about a decade ago, before I had even written a word of the book. It shows birch trees growing in between the abandoned railway tracks leading away from Berlin’s Anhalter train station. As I describe in the book, the Anhalter was once Germany’s largest, most opulent, and most important railway station. In the late nineteenth century it became a kind of symbol of the hopes of modernity: progress, speed, interconnectedness, and emancipation, among other things. The station was bombed at the end of the war, and these tracks were last used in 1952. What we see in the photograph is nearly a half century’s worth of growth, as nature begins to reclaim this industrialized landscape. The photograph is a temporal snapshot, arresting the flow of time. Interestingly, it matches up almost exactly with the first photograph in the book, which shows the south side of the Anhalter train station during its glory days and the tracks leading out of Berlin.nnQ. What about the subtitle of the book, Germans, Jews, Trains, with “Jews” placed at the vanishing point of the train tracks? When I see the photograph and think about this triangulation, I almost see the railway lines leading to Auschwitz.nnTP: Yes, this is probably an inescapable association—at least from our standpoint of the post-Holocaust present. But it only tells part of the story: German and German-Jewish modernity did not lead in some kind of inevitable way to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust is not the culmination of or the last word on German-Jewish history. To be sure, we “see through” the Holocaust, so to speak, and I certainly do not and cannot bracket off my knowledge about what happened. At the same time, German-Jewish intellectual history is much more complicated than a single narrative leading to the Holocaust. The point of the book is to produce a complex, multilayered historical and geographic narrative about German/Jewish modernity. It binds the three terms (Germans, Jews, trains) together and opens up the relationship back to the early nineteenth century and extends it right up through the present. What emerges is a kind of mapping or “cultural geography,” a layered historical and imaginary space of encounter between German and Jewish thinkers.nnQ: Do you see your work as part of an emerging field called mobility studies?nnTP: To a certain extent, yes. The term mobility studies was coined, I believe, by Stephen Greenblatt to describe a critical trend already afoot in literary and cultural studies to refocus on questions of diaspora, migration, transnationality, and global interaction. Greenblatt was referring to what he called the restless and unpredictable movements of languages and literatures. We might see mobility studies dovetailing, for example, with the work of postcolonial scholars, the emphasis on geography in the analysis of cultures in transit (such as the work of James Clifford, Franco Moretti, or Emily Apter), or the recent interest in non-national spaces of encounter such as the sea or the railway system. For me, modernity is fundamentally a problem of mobility, of enabling and checking movement—whether movement across borders in the form of human transport, the movement of capital, the mobility of languages, or even the ruination of history. As for the latter, the book owes a significant debt to Walter Benjamin’s antidevelopmental, materialist approach to thinking about historical processes. This is no triumphal history: After all, it begins and ends with ruins, emblematically embodied by the Anhalter train station. These ruins are barely recognizable and legible today, but it is out of them that we can compose a cultural geography of German/Jewish modernity. The Jew on a train emerges as the exemplary figure of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity.nn