TRANSIT

I aim to analyze the space of the ghetto alley in the play Der Schrei, den niemand hört! by Else Feldmann. In the play, urban and identity barriers are combined within spatial speech and their violent boundaries are not only constituted from the outside, but from within the ghetto itself: the alley-grave.

'Alley' and 'ghetto' exist within a conceptual entity where different spatial ideas meet: their semantics not only derive from their signifieds or physical construction, but also from their creation in discourses which are crucially contributed by literary texts. Literature not only describes topographies, but is indeed a topography of its own. This concept allows one to open up analogous readings between acts of speech and acts of walking. Michel de Certeau established a structural concept (pratiques d'espace) with which I will analyze the functional connection between space and the narration of urban boundaries within the ghetto.