When the Hegelian Other recognizes itself as an established Other, the dialectic is both actualized and upended. In this, I study the Jewish recognition of the self as politically Othered in interwar Europe and how this is refracted into a ruptured aesthetic forms by Franz Kafka, Marc Chagall, and Bruno Schulz. When these Jewish authors recognized their Otherness and represented their self-recognition in their aesthetic productions, they characterized the Jewish individual as nonhuman. The authors use these nonhuman representations subversively, leaning into the dehumanization by the political world, so as to protect the greater Jewish populations in the nations and cities represented in each of their texts. This thesis is composed of the introduction and first chapter of this project, which focus on setting up the argument and detailing the seven chapters, and the urban contextualization of Jews in each author’s hometown. The urban context is validated as necessary by analyzing a diary entry, a memoir fragment, and a letter, respectively, by each author. These analyses illustrate the authors’ identity as urbanized and acculturated and show that the ensuing analyses of fictive representations of Jewish characters as nonhuman is a subversive reaction to the urban political climates.

This dissertation analyzes the centrality of the concept Bildung in the portrayal of the development of class consciousness in novels and autobiographical texts written by socialist and communist authors in France and Germany from 1890 to 1938. These texts follow Lukàcs’ typology for the Bildungsroman laid out in The Theory of the Novel, but significantly modify the reconciliation Lukàcs imagines for the problematic individual by deferring it to a post-revolutionary future. Class consciousness emerges out of these developmental paths, which include a negation of initial Bildung and a second-order, political Bildung that discloses the identity of the individual and the class through a recognition of shared material determinants. The first chapter examines the relationship between Bildung, associative life, and the early literary politics of the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD) and shows the importance attributed to Bildung by the German workers’ movement in an effort to reconsider the merits of these workers’ mediations and their relationship to the reproduction of capital at this particular historical moment. The second chapter reads the autobiographical life-writings of the Adelheid Popp, Wenzel Holek, Franz Rehbein, Theodore William Bromme, and Otto Krille as Arbeiterbildungsromane and argues that these texts show class consciousness to be inextricable from high levels of industrial employment. The third and fourth chapters examine the work of the French communist novelist, journalist, and philosopher Paul Nizan. Chapter three argues that Nizan’s concept of alienation as alienation from l’homme informs his portrayal of the development of political consciousness by allowing him to see the alienation of intellectuals as analogous to the alienation experienced by workers in capitalist production. Chapter four argues that Nizan’s Antoine Bloyé and La conspiration suggest that political consciousness is unlikely to develop without its material determinants.