Words, as we know, have their own histories. The history of words, concepts, or metaphors, and the way in which they change over time and gain new meanings, also reveal complexities, contradictions, differences, and paradoxes in social, cultural, and political processes. This is the case with the German term Luftmensch, whose history shows the complexities and bitter ironies of German and German-Jewish cultural and political discourses around 1900. Luftmensch is the name for a rootless, nomadic subject, one that lacks belongingness, is detached, and embodies a “weak” connection to earth and reality. Luftmensch is a metaphor, and possibly every metaphor is a Luftmensch—a dynamic, changeable, de-territorial figure.

In his book, Nicolas Berg discusses the history of Luftmensch and its literary emergence and ideological decline. Berg reconstructs the Jewish origins of the metaphor in the literary circles of eastern European Jewry in the nineteen century, and deals with its reinterpretations and ambiguous implications in the discourses of Zionism and of modernist literature. His book shows how the metaphor that was originally charged with literary wit, irony, and self-criticism collapsed in anti-Semitic theory into a negative stereotype and a collective image of Judaism. In the anti-Semitic context, Luftmensch has been seen as a code for the degenerate, abstract, and foreign existence of the Jews, which manifests itself in intellectualism, urban life, and capitalism (the abstract, “air-like” wealth is “Jewish”). In the Nazi era this image was reinterpreted and radically “realized.” The destruction of European Jewry, the methods of murder and annihilation can be symbolically read, Berg argues, as a realization of the metaphor—an attempt to make the image real, which implied bringing about the displacement of the Jews and their disappearance from the face of the earth. The terrible metaphorical structure of the murder of the Jews is poetically and philosophically reflected in post-Holocaust literature that comes back to Luftmensch, now as a call and a recollection of the Jewish victims. Berg substantiates his argument with examples from Paul Celan's poetry in which the metaphor of Luft (air) turns into poetics of remembrance and mourning.

Berg's book follows the historical process that is reflected in the semantic fields of Luftmensch. In addition to his major thesis on the politicization and ideological collapse of the sign (his argument about the disappearance of the irony, the differences and the sympathy that could still be found in the Yiddish literary genre, and their transformation into ideological projects of negation), he investigates further complexities in Zionism, modernism, and anti-Semitic theories that were bound up with the Luftmensch discourses. Berg shows that the image of a Jew who “lives in the air,” lacking a real, positive, and firm attachment to being, and who ostensibly has no Beruf (vocation/profession) was indeed very prevalent in the Zionist discourse. In the writings of Chaim Weizmann and A. D. Gordon, he finds evidence for the association of Luftmensch and other “aerial” figures with the critique of diaspora and the “unproductive” Jewish professions. Luftmensch was often defined as a pathological symptom of the Jewish exilic tradition. This symptom had to be solved, according to Zionist thought, through enterprises of re-territorialization, namely, the settlement of the Jews in Palestine. The return to one's homeland, to land, work, and physical, masculine frames of national life were supposed to cure the Jew of the sources of his alienation and detachment.

Luftmensch was one of the terms used to describe Jewish Unheimlichkeit (homelessness/uncanny existence). The Jew was regarded as a subject without a stable, territorial identity, but rather one that embodies Bodenlosigkeit (rootlessness). In the age of nationalism, this mode of existence was considered a threat, and conservative writers designated Luftmensch, the “Jewish spirit,” as a danger. Around 1900, however, modernist writers, partly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's writings, were able to recognize also the subversive, progressive potential of this symbol. They considered the metaphor to be a sign of freedom and revolt. Luftmensch, Berg shows, stands in affinity to the figure of flight—itself one of the greatest techno-political myths of modernism. Visions of flight, hovering, space travel, and other aerial movement were part of the progressive and yet futuristic imagination of the era.

Modernist Jewish writers were aware of the ambiguous meaning of these visions. In Franz Kafka's literature, Luftmensch, like its older brother, the ewige Jude (the eternal/wandering Jew), was transformed and imprinted in a new style of writing that was committed both in form and content to the representation of endless movement, alienation, and rootlessness. Modernist interpretations of Luftmensch that retained the open, progressive, and ironical connotations of the term were doomed to vanish in the bio-political interpretations of anti-Semitism.

Berg's book is written in essay form—a form that provides his project with a distinguished frame for a sophisticated, theoretical text that is nevertheless poetic and very well narrated. His book summarizes a rich, original research project that is based on an excellent selection of material and very convincing readings and text interpretations. Berg's reading of Theodor Herzl in conjunction with Jules Verne is masterly, and his thoughts on Kafka and Celan are valuable. The way he links Luftmensch with the history of psychoanalysis and the dialectics of German political thought is significant. This book provides its readers not only with rich historical insights on the dialectical image of the Jew around 1900, but also reveals the complications of a metaphor—an image, a “spirit” that still haunts us.