Introduction: German Jewish Identities in the Plural
This book argues for a new approach to the significant corpus of German-language fiction by self-identified Jewish authors that has appeared since around the early 2000s and which researchers now generally refer to as the New German Jewish Literature.
1See, for example, Garloff, Making German Jewish Literature Anew. This approach draws heavily on recent sociological and ethnographic scholarship on the dramatic transformation of the Jewish presence in Germany, in order to interrogate key literary texts as dynamic interventions in the debates and controversies that are reshaping Jewish life in that country and across the global diaspora. In today’s German Jewish novels, the book suggests, authors elaborate competing versions of what it means to live as a Jew in Germany and often reimagine what it means to be a Jew more generally. These rearticulations of Jewish identity typically involve a reframing of family history and traumatic memory, especially the Holocaust.
Reading recent German Jewish literary texts in the context of sociological and ethnographic insights into the transformation of the Jewish community in Germany and of debates about Jewish identity both there and globally reveals important shifts. Firstly, in the New German Jewish Literature, Jewish identity is now articulated not only—or even primarily—in relation to the country that was responsible for the Holocaust and to which Jews returned only with feelings of great ambivalence following the genocide. Jewish protagonists thus position themselves vis-à-vis other Jews, whether immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Orthodox, or liberal Jews, or they bypass faith altogether for a secular understanding of Jewish solidarity with other minorities. Secondly, transcending the understandable fixation on the uncanniness of Jewish life in the land of the perpetrators that previously characterized German Jewish fiction, many authors now articulate Jewish identity “beyond the nation.” Jewishness need no longer be domesticated or integrated, therefore, but can (perhaps once again) become truly worldly. Thirdly, while contemporary German Jewish writing continues the post-Holocaust convention of working through traumatic family memory—whether direct experience of flight, ghettos, and camps, or the suffering of parents and grandparents—it now presents and represents the legacy of the genocide in a multitude of ways, with different implications for the framing of a Jewish identity. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, how Holocaust memory is expanded, inflected, centered, or not centered within the literary text reflects but also evolves a variety of modes of Jewish engagement with others, including demarcation, retrenchment or alliance-building, and worldliness.