242 Apocalyptic City Versus Apocalyptic Shtetl: The Experience of Catastrophe in the Work of the Jewish Expressionists Małgorzata StolarSka-Fronia Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń It is not we who are to blame that the Jewish town has spat us out with the blood of its throat and lung us, quaking, into the depths of angst: cities of electricity, bridges, heights, innumerable storeys, cafés, cham- pagne, disgrace, and opium! —Uri Tsevi Grinberg Manifesto to the Opponents of New Poetry 1 the generation oF artiStS born in the 1890s, who came of age in the irst two decades of the twentieth century, experienced a profound spiritual and ideological transfor- mation rooted in their participation in World War I. The experience of war, described as apocalyptic, gave these art- ists a “mystical, utopian impulse.” 2 It was precisely at this time, as Stephan von Wiese points out, that Expression- ism ceased to be shaped by and associated with German- speaking circles of artists and became a universal, “complex movement of cultural protest.” 3 The literature exploring this phenomenon from the social and cultural perspec- tive has evolved the term “Generation of 1914.” 4 Various publications have also striven to bring out the Jewish face of this phenomenon. According to Anson Rabinbach, the Jewish generation of 1914 was characterized by a messi- anic drive one could describe as a modern form of Jewish thought, both in the secular and theological sense; a tradi- tion as removed from secular rationalism as from “norma- tive Judaism.” 5 Rabinbach considers the main proponents of this current in philosophy to be Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, who infused it with a radical, apocalyptic character. 6 They see war as a crisis of culture; citing Bloch: “apocalypse was the a-priori of all politics and culture.” 7 As Rabinbach concludes: “Only in the cataclysm of the old order could the promise of culture be realised in ‘an anarchist-expressionist determined world.’” 8 In art, the apocalyptic fate of the modern human and, of the modern Jew, determined by the recurrent cycle of creation and destruction, achieves its most radical expres- sion in the writings of avant-garde Yiddish poets: “God was not pleased with the world he created the irst time. So he destroyed it and created it anew. And when neither this sec- ond world found approval in God’s eyes, he created it again but, unsatisied, destroyed it once more. And so he created and destroyed the world twelve times, and the thirteenth time a smile lit up his face.” 9 In philosophy and literature, the idea of apocalypse was closely bound up with the messi- anic idea. According to Gershom Scholem: “Jewish messian- ism is by its origin and its nature—this cannot be stressed enough—a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary and cataclysm element in the transition from the historical present to the messianic future.” 10 At the same time, as Löwy and Larrier point out, Scholem draws a sharp distinction between Jewish and Christian messianism and “considers redemption as a necessary event that takes place on the stage of history, ‘publicly,’ so to speak, in the visible . . . .” 11 Developing this idea, one might argue that the open, visual aspect of catastrophe is of signiicance when it comes to the messianic ideal. Destruction—its physical, sensual character: color, texture, fragrance—is testament to the experience of catastrophe; it is thanks to tangible evidence of destruction that one can begin a messianic renewal of the world. The inseparableness of the experience of catastrophe and the messianic ideal, coupled with a radical attitude, was characteristic of the “new Jewish spirit” 12 which, accord- ing to Rabinbach, was the product of a “post-assimilatory Renaissance.” The modern Jewish messianism of the gen- eration of 1914 was “radical, uncompromising, and com- prised of an esoteric intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamoured of apocalyptic visions—whether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense.” 13 It follows from the above interpretations that the notion of apocalypse, as that part of Jewish experience whose expression has been particularly clear in art, has been expounded at length not only in sources but also in sub- sequent critical analyses. The latter, however, are mostly devoted to literature and philosophy. 14 The same theme meanwhile appears in a similar context in the visual arts, while both media—word and image—form an Expres-