The Zionist Comedy in the Drama of Sammy Gronemann – On Origins and Characteristics of a Latent Genre

Sammy Gronemann (1875-1952) is one of the most important Zionist playwrights in the German language, at the same time one of its most neglected authors. His life encompasses the era stretching from the emergence of the Zionist movement to its realisation of the Jewish State, to which Gronemann had contributed decisively as decade-long chief-judge of the Zionist Congress Court (1921-47). Research had hitherto neglected his drama, which consists exclusively out of comedies that reflect this political development.
Starting from an entry in Theodor Herzl’s diary about his expectations towards the first drama genre in the Jewish State, my presentation for the 2017 World Congress of Jewish Studies analyses two genealogical approaches to Gronemann’s comedy, within the early Zionist movement and the Jewish Renaissance. It analyses its relation to the salvific history of the Exodus, as the central myth underlying Herzl’s Zionism and its reflections in the “Tragedies of Assimilation” written by Herzl (*Das neue Ghetto*) and Max Nordau (*Dr. Kohn*), as well as in the Zionist Congress Protocols (1897-1946). Thereby, the convergence of the Pessach-motif with that of Purim becomes apparent in the juxtaposed relation, respectively, between the literary and metaphorical uses of comedy and tragedy. Finally, these motifs are described in their mutual and interdependent relationship as literary and structural motifs in Gronemann’s drama, whereby the aforementioned dichotomic relationship – of both salvific histories as well as genre distinctions – is being depicted in their ludic disintegration and reconstruction towards a new aesthetical and ideological paradigm of modern Jewish culture.