A Migrant from an Imaginary Empire: Manfred Winkler’s Hebrew Poetry

Abstract This article examines the post-imperial poetics of Manfred Winkler. Tracing the imperial imaginary from the Austro-Hungarian “Habsburg myth” through its disintegration in the Holocaust, Winkler reconfigures Israeli space as a heterotopic, palimpsestic site layered with memories of imperial tolerance, Jewish trauma, and Zionist displacement. Rejecting the dominant Zionist migration narrative – structured by the binary of exile and homeland – Winkler constructs a poetic identity grounded in multiplicity and non-binary spatiality. An analysis of the poems reveals how Winkler’s Hebrew poetry enacts a dialectical Aufhebung (Sublation) of the empire’s cultural legacy: both negating and preserving its pluralistic ideals within the later Israeli context. Winkler’s work emerges as a critique of the national literary canon’s erasure of diasporic and Holocaust-inflected voices, articulated most poignantly through his translations of Paul Celan’s poems and his affiliation with the marginalized Eked publishing house.