Translation as politics : the German library in Hebrew

Bibliogr. 194-196.

Translation of books from German into Hebrew began in the late eighteenth century and was motivated not only by aesthetic reasons and the will to enrich the target literature. Throughout the years, the selection of German repertoire had also a political undercurrent and was related to the project of nation building and the creation of the new state. The initial years (1780–1880) saw the project to establish a secular Hebrew bookshelf, modeled on the benchmarks provided by German literature. The expansion years (1881–1932) and the will to provide the younger generation with daily access to Hebrew motivated a sharp rise in the translations of children’s books. In the following period (1933–1947), dominated by antifascist efforts, the massive project of translating works authored by German Jews became a political statement. In the formative years of the state (1948–1969), when Holocaust survivors constituted a significant segment of the Israeli society, the relations with the Federal Republic of Germany remained tense. Thus, the translations from German into Hebrew were limited to reprints and new translations of titles that had already been published. New critical writings by the younger generation of authors also enjoyed some attention. The 1970s and 1980s saw a significant change, with an increase in new translations of both highbrow and lowbrow literature. Literature referring to the period of Nazism still enjoyed a particular attention. The corpus built from 1990 onward suggests normalization in the attitude toward German culture, representing a range of subjects, with a special emphasis on contemporary children’s literature and highbrow literature.