A Note on Translation and on Terminology
Quotations from German-language scholarship are directly translated into English, without the German original. Quotations from literary texts and authors’ essays and interviews are given in the original German, with the English translation in parentheses. The titles of literary texts are rendered in a plain translation, even where there is a published English version. All translations are my own.
In the groundbreaking collection of essays from 2002 that he edited with Sander Gilman, Hartmut Steinecke notes that the hyphenated adjective “German-Jewish” is “to a large degree ideologically and politically laden.”
1Steinecke, “‘Deutsch-jüdische’ Literatur heute,” 10. See also Brenner and Frei, “German Jews or Jews in Germany?” This book employs the term German Jewish—without the hyphen—not only to emphasize that in many of the texts examined there remains a tension, and a distance, between German and Jewish but also to signal that for at least some authors a primary concern is to explore Jewish identity both in its own terms and in its engagement with the world beyond Germany. For the same reasons, circumlocutions such as Jews in Germany are for the most part used in place of German Jews.