Judith Müller’s Ph.D. thesis on the perception of Europe in Hebrew literature from 1890 to 1938 examines prose texts by Micha Josef Berdichevsky, David Fogel, Gershon Shofman and Lea Goldberg. Those novellas and novels were written against the geo-cultural background of Central Europe and thus show a Europeanness that is directly connected to the link between centre and periphery as well as a constant cultural translation and transition. It is in this context of great interest to take a closer look at the triangle of the metropolises Berlin–Vienna–Paris. Each of these cities attracted one or several of the authors to be discussed and thus influenced their writing, their language and the content of the examined texts. These cities enabled authors and characters to leave the narrowness of tradition and decorum in the Shtetl. The crossing of multiple boundaries is a central condition in this process and allows the arrival in a new spatiotemporality. However, thereafter the paths became more and more individualized: for some the artistic free space is indeed a specific place, for others it is embodied in the temporality of their writing and the realms created hereby.

A crucial goal of the thesis is, moreover, to to show how figures of Europe in those texts point towards a debate on and cultural rooting in a general idea of Europe and its conception. The term Europe itself does almost never appear in the primary sources, thus the question is rather how Europe manifests itself in Hebrew literature as a representation of the credo maximum diversity in minimum space, as a constant exchange between its spatial centres and margins or as a permanent transition and cultural translation.