In the spring of 2024 I taught a comparative literature class at Columbia University called Unland: Writing Utopias. The word Unland is a neologism of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, from his poem “Hawdalah” from 1963. Unland, in my reading, could refer to a decimated postwar geography that is no longer recognizable as itself. It could refer to the ghoulish moral transformation of a polity like Germany, whose population had become “unpeople” (Unmenschen) — people who commit heinous acts and deny them, who are haunted by their crimes. The German word alludes to the Greek etymology of utopia, ou topos, a no-place that is ever-emergent, unconnected to any existing political entity. Unland struck me as connoting a tentative “not yet,” a place in formation, like the nascent State of Israel in 1963 and perhaps more aptly like poetry, a place where one exists as if “dreamed.” Here one can convene with murdered friends and family, parlay with an inscrutable divinity, hold and cherish words independent from their worn-out everyday use. Through this sacred intentionality the post-Shoah poet grasps for scraps of healing in the face of unspeakable loss. The poet in the rubble strives for new realms, where contradiction hangs together, where life and justice are honored, while at the same time casting critical, even satirical aspersions at the apocalyptically failed politics of the present. In other classes I taught, Celan appeared in the context of German postwar writers, in a larger arc of German-Jewish writing from the Enlightenment to the present. But in this class I relished the opportunity to place Celan in a culturally heterogeneous and transhistorical context, in which science fiction mingled with highbrow literature. We read speculative writers whose depiction of reality was touched by dystopian or utopian alterations, who found refuge in writing itself as a realm suspended from the invariable violence of the real world to which they respond. Touching off from Celan’s poem, we read The Castle by Franz Kafka, “Uqbar, Tlön, Tertius Orbis” by Jorge Luis Borges, and works by Georg Büchner, Shakespeare, Theodor W. Adorno, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanisław Lem, Samuel Delany, and Donna J. Haraway. I found the syllabus to be one of the most rewarding and intriguing I had ever taught, and I had a sensitive and highly engaged group of eighteen students representing many academic disciplines and countries of origin. After teaching in Columbia’s Core curriculum I found it gratifying to work closely with texts by Kafka and Celan, paying careful attention to the violent antiJewish context that shaped their writings, while also engaging both of them as “world” writers who set formal and thematic precedents for writers in many languages. Celan, as I was coming to see him, offered a unique link between canons that were deeply Jewish and deeply Western. He was not a Jew who had shed his “accidental” biography in order to join a wider discourse; rather, the precision and subtlety of his Jewish references, the delicacy of his language, and the necessity for clear context about the Holocaust seemed to make his writing more rather than less universal. Yet the spring of 2024 was one of the most challenging and painful semesters I ever spent in a university setting. As the war between Israel and Gaza worsened in the Middle East, Columbia’s campus became a global flashpoint for its vociferous protest movement, whose organizers possessed a newfound faith, in the wake of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, that “anti-colonial” violence was not only justified, but a most effective tool for bringing a just future to Israel-Palestine. In addition to the protest movement, the university’s administration was under scrutiny for its failure to set a tone of civil, compassionate, and informed discourse, at a moment when students connected to all sides of the war were in deep pain. They pursued a strategy of police crackdowns that incensed the university community and escalated the conflict between protesters and the administration. On April 30, 2024, this escalation came to a head when activists forcefully occupied Hamilton Hall, the home of my department at the time, draping a banner that renamed the building for Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who had been killed by the Israeli military in January. Banners were unfurled from all sides of the building, including “Free Palestine” written in English and Arabic, “Intifada,” and “Glory to the Martyrs: Tortuguita Vive, La Lucha Sigue,” referring to the police killing of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an environmental activist in Atlanta. The police presence was high around campus, and an atmosphere of chaos, confusion, and joy spread through Morningside Heights. There was a feeling that the orderly rule of the university had been breached and, for a short while, the protest movement had wrested control. Around 3 PM that afternoon, I stood at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 116th Street, steps from my office in Deutsches Haus, and looked on dumbstruck as a crowd of some three hundred protesters congregated at the base of Hamilton Hall outside the campus gates and erupted in ecstatic cheers as a masked protester appeared on the roof with a billowing Palestinian flag. Helicopters circled above and dozens of newscasters documented (and helped to comprise) the spectacle. That evening the New York Police Department was called in for a massive evacuation, with many hundreds of officers in full riot gear. Students who came to see me later in the week expressed deep fear, even trauma, from having witnessed a swarm of police envelop the campus and the SWAT team break down the doors to Hamilton Hall, throwing flash grenades and — as we later found out — accidentally firing a bullet. Around this time of the semester we had been reading The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, a dystopian satire of totalitarian police violence in the face of earth’s crippling overpopulation, including bombing campaigns that drop drugs to neurologically wire the population to experience happiness. From this point onward, the social and infrastructural fabric
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