Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which the figure of Ahasver, the so-called “Wandering Jew,” was utilized by the early German queer magazine culture (1896–1933), with particular attention to literary texts that explore homosocial and homosexual desire between men. Ahasver is an ambivalent figure, with cultural connotations shaped and reshaped over centuries. Coined a “thoroughly un-Jewish figure” by Hans Mayer, he has been employed as an antisemitic projection figure and a personification of the Jewish people, as well as a symbol for resilience, rebellion, or particularity. Against the backdrop of the key topics in the queer magazines’ literary texts—conceptualizing nonheteronormative sexuality, affirming male homosocial and homosexual desire, imagining communities and gay genealogies—the figure of Ahasver is employed in a variety of ways that draw from but cannot be subsumed under any of the aforementioned configurations. While he is an overdetermined figure, Ahasver is defined by three main characteristics: immortality, boundless mobility, and solitude. Drawing on queer kinship theory and analyzing three literary texts from one of the leading queer magazines of the Weimar Republic, this article examines Ahasver as a figuration of kinship rupture and social isolation and traces how the figure challenges the imagined union of community, nationality, and statehood.
Liesa Hellmann (Wed,) studied this question.