Meertalige praktijken in het eentalige paradigma : Jacques Presser en Franz Kafka

This paper approaches Dutch-Jewish historian Jacques Presser's work from the perspective of multilingual practices. It is largely an elaboration on the argument developed by Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. She shows how for Franz Kafka, language and ethnicity were inextricably tied, which posed problems for him as a German-speaking Jew. This article explores the consequences of Jacques Presser's Jewishness for how he and his work relate to the several languages he spoke. It concludes that Presser's relationship to language is less fraught than Kafka's, and argues that one important explanation for this difference lies in the mutual distinctness of German and Dutch discourses of national identity.