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Words, as we know, have their own histories. The history of words, concepts, or metaphors, and the way in which they change over time and gain new meanings, also reveal complexities, contradictions, differences, and paradoxes in social, cultural, and political processes. This is the case with the German term Luftmensch, whose history shows the complexities and bitter ironies of German and German-Jewish cultural and political discourses around 1900. Luftmensch is the name for a rootless, nomadic subject, one that lacks belongingness, is detached, and embodies a "weak" connection to earth and reality. Luftmensch is a metaphor, and possibly every metaphor is a Luftmensch--a dynamic, changeable, de-territorial figure.
In his book, Nicolas Berg discusses the history of Luftmensch and its literary emergence and ideological decline. Berg reconstructs the Jewish origins of the metaphor in the literary circles of eastern European Jewry in the nineteen century, and deals with its reinterpretations and ambiguous implications in the discourses of Zionism and of modernist literature. His book shows how the metaphor that was originally charged with literary wit, irony, and self-criticism collapsed in anti-Semitic theory into a negative stereotype and a collective image of Judaism. In the anti-Semitic context, Luftmensch has been seen as a code for the degenerate, abstract, and foreign existence of the Jews, which manifests itself in intellectualism, urban...