Reframing Current Scholarship

In a field-defining intervention from 1995, Thomas Nolden identified the emergence of a Young Jewish Literature,3Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur. drawing a distinction between writers active in the postwar decades—mostly exiles from National Socialism or survivors of the ghettos and camps—and a new generation of self-identified Jewish authors, notably Maxim Biller, Ruth Beckermann, Barbara Honigmann, Rafael Seligmann, Esther Dischereit, Katja Behrens, Lea Fleischmann, Robert Menasse, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Schindel. The work of this second generation after Auschwitz, Nolden argued, was marked by its “konzentrisches Schreiben” (concentric writing), as the children and grandchildren obsessively circled around the horrors endured by their parents and grandparents, and by how the traumatic legacy passed down by Holocaust victims continued to impact on those who came after. Commenting on the same group of writers a decade or so later, Stephan Braese suggested that they remained fixated on the incongruity of their presence as Jews in the country responsible for the genocide. Writers of the second generation, consequently, “insistently speak about themselves as Jews, however incomplete this identity might be perceived. More specifically, they write about themselves as Jews in the concrete German present.”4Braese, “Writing against Reconciliation,” 28. Finally, and emphasizing the apartness of second-generation authors from the country they grew up in, literary scholar Andreas Kilcher in 2002 described their physical or psychological “Exterritorialität” (exterritoriality), even as they wrote in German and cited German culture.5See Kilcher, “Exterritorialitäten.” See also Kilcher, “Was ist ‘deutsch-jüdische Literatur’?” For some, like Biller, “exterritoriality” meant a form of (self-)estrangement in Germany (or Austria) while relentlessly confronting it with its Nazi past and exposing its hypocrisy in the present day. For others, it meant quitting the country—Honigmann moved to France; Fleischmann went to Israel—in order to continue the German and German Jewish literary tradition from outside the land of the perpetrators.

Certainly, many examples can be cited.6See Morris and Remmler, eds., “Introduction.” Biller’s columns “100 Zeilen Hass” (100 lines of hate) in the monthly magazine Tempo, published between 1986 and 1997 (and collated in a book of the same name in 2017), assail not only German hypocrisy but also what the author sees as the passive acquiescence of the Jewish community, often Holocaust survivors. The same is true of his collections of essays, stories, and short novels throughout the 1990s, including, most notorious of all, Harlem Holocaust (1998), in which the American Jewish writer Warszawski exploits his German audience’s insincere obsession with Jewish victimhood to satisfy his sexual perversions.7See Chase, “Shoah Business.” In Dischereit’s Joëmis Tisch: Eine jüdische Geschichte (Joëmi’s table; 1988), the protagonist reclaims her Jewish identity by interweaving stories of her mother’s persecution with conversations with the non-Jewish Germans around her, while the autobiographically informed Merryn (1992) features a sixteen-year-old runaway who seeks out the site of her grandparents’ deportation from Berlin.8See Nolden, “Contemporary German Jewish Literature.” Schindel’s Gebürtig (native; 1992), Rabinovici’s Suche nach M: Roman (Search for M: A novel; 1997), and Menasse’s Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (The expulsion from hell; 2001) exemplify these Austrian authors’ focus on excavating traces of the Nazi past and the persistence of fascist mentalities in the present day. Honigmann’s “trilogy of Diaspora,” Roman von einem Kinde (Novel about a child; 1988), Eine Liebe aus nichts (a love from nothing; 1991), and Damals, dann und danach (Back then, next, and after; 1999), alternatively, constructs a German Jewish identity outside of Germany but still immersed in the German language and in German culture.9See Guenther, “Exile.” (Honigmann left East Germany for France in 1984—after the war, her parents had preferred communism to Judaism). In these and other novels such as Soharas Reise (Sohara’s journey; 1996), Orthodox as well as Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions are explored.10See Fiero, Zwischen Enthüllen und Verstecken, especially 91–100. Finally, Fleischmann marked her departure with Dies ist nicht mein Land: Eine Jüdin verlässt die Bundesrepublik (This is not my country: A Jew quits Germany; 1980) and today writes for German readers to “explain” Israel and Jewish customs. In 2006 Fleischmann published Meine Sprache wohnt woanders: Gedanken zu Deutschland und Israel (My language lives elsewhere: thoughts on Germany and Israel; 2006) with Chaim Noll, who quit East Germany for West Germany and then Israel after he detected anti-Jewish tones on the German Left.

Taken together, these authors demonstrate what ethnographer Dani Kranz characterizes as the second generation’s “non-rootedness, or out-of-placeness, a non-identification with Germany.”11Kranz, “Where to Stay and Where to Go?,” 188. At the same time, their self-understanding as German Jews, or even as Jews, can seem insecure. They are called upon—by non-Jewish compatriots, publishers, the media, and scholars—to speak for Jews in Germany even as their connection to, and even knowledge of, Judaism and Jewish culture is by definition interrupted.12Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur, 67.

Katja Garloff’s Making German Jewish Literature Anew (2022) is the most substantial study to appear to date on the subsequent development of German Jewish literary fiction from the early 2000s, as the authors discussed above evolved and were joined by new names, mostly younger immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Garloff identifies a caesura around the turn of the millennium after which second-generation writers—she discusses Biller, Dischereit, and Honigmann, along with the recently emerged Benjamin Stein—began more consciously and decisively to fashion a Jewish authorial identity through their literary work, public performances, and, most often, essays. This more assertive self-presentation, Making German Jewish Literature Anew implies, initiates, or at least anticipates, dynamic processes of “remaking memory” and “claiming places” more generally, perhaps because Jewish writers now feel less constrained to only ever write against—against German (and Austrian) repression of the Nazi past, against their parents’ and grandparents’ overwhelming trauma, and even against their own uncanny presence in the land of the perpetrators. Recent novels by Doron Rabinovici and Katja Petrowskaja, Garloff suggests, thus enact a “metamemorial shift in Holocaust remembrance,” pointing toward the potential for more dynamic understandings of the genocide that, for example, might enable parallels between the Holocaust and other historical traumas.13Garloff, Making German Jewish Literature Anew, 10. (Rabinovici was born in Israel in 1961 and moved to Austria with his family in 1964. Petrowskaja was born in Ukraine in 1977 and settled in Germany in 1999). With regards to “claiming places,” Garloff examines literary texts by Honigmann, Vladimir Vertlib, and Julya Rabinowich—Vertlib’s family moved from Russia to Austria in 1981, via America and Israel, and Rabinowich arrived from Russia in 1977—and Lena Gorelik, Dmitrij Kapitelman, and Jan Himmelfarb, who came as children from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The argument is that through their work these Jewish migrants lay a claim to belong in Germany (and Austria), and in German literature, often by reanimating historically Jewish spaces in German cityscapes and Jewish resonances in German culture.

In general terms, Garloff’s Making German Jewish Literature Anew identifies a change in tenor in the evolution of German Jewish writing from the Young Jewish Literature of the 1980s and 1990s to the New German Jewish Literature that began to emerge from the mid-2000s. The more or less reactive stance that typified the early work of second-generation authors—writing against—has given way to greater assertiveness. Jewish writers no longer feel the need to justify their presence in Germany and German culture, neither to themselves nor to their non-Jewish compatriots, and they are reshaping memory and place in ways that point beyond the (natural) obsession with Jewish suffering and German perpetration.

Garloff sees “authorial self-staging and self-fashioning,” then, as “a process of becoming: learning to speak German, practicing to be Jewish, moving from the past to the present.”14Garloff, Making German Jewish Literature Anew, 27–28. This insightful summary of the gradual transformation of German Jewish writing since the early 2000s needs to be nuanced, however, both to account for the full diversity of authors who are now active—her study includes no German-born, third-generation authors, for example—and to properly appreciate how far German Jewish authors may have moved beyond the categories that scholarship has typically used to apprehend their work. For one, while it is self-evident that authorial self-fashioning establishes a stake in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish literary culture, careful attention to how protagonists position themselves within texts suggests two important correctives to the conventional approach of reading German Jewish literature primarily in relation to the majority—for all that nearly every reader will be a non-Jewish German, of course. First, there is no single, homogenous Jewish identity being staged. Second, the plurality of Jewish perspectives across recent texts references debates in the Jewish world as much as the need to define either apartness from, or integration into, wider German society. The same can be said with regard to “claiming places.” In her close readings of Vertlib, Rabinowich, Gorelik, Kapitelman, and Himmelfarb—all originally from the former Soviet Union—Garloff speaks of “migration narratives” and “arrival narratives,” which again suggests that protagonists are primarily focused on Germany as their ultimate destination, even as they now more confidently assert a Jewish presence. What is perhaps under-appreciated, however, is the degree to which some recent novels also articulate Jewish identity beyond Germany. A close reading of a broader selection of texts can engender a new perspective on German Jewish writing, and specifically its striving to be worldly.

This worldliness is at least implied in Garloff’s discussion of key works by Rabinovici and Petrowskaja, and specifically how they tentatively propose comparisons between the Holocaust and other atrocities. Here, Garloff invokes Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s thinking on “cosmopolitan memory”15Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust. and Michael Rothberg’s notion of “multi­directional memory.”16See Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory. These are not the same, of course. The concept of cosmopolitan memory, developed during the benign geopolitical context of the immediate post-Cold War period, refers to a commitment to universal human rights underpinned by the globalization of Holocaust memory, whereas multidirectional memory references how the Holocaust is invoked, in a noncompetitive way, to draw attention to other historical traumas. Both, however, suggest an opening-out of Holocaust memory to the global and the potential for solidarity with other minorities. Yet in limiting her analysis to Rabinovici and Petrowskaja, Garloff may not be able to show just how prevalent this rethinking of the Holocaust as cosmopolitan/multidirectional memory has become, or its far-reaching implications for the rearticulation of Jewish identity.

The close readings presented in later chapters of recent novels by Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Olga Grjasnowa—in addition to Petrowskaja—thus present a corrective to Garloff, who most likely underestimates the worldly orientation of German Jewish writing, but also to other scholars who may overestimate its instinctive solidarity with other minorities. Reading recent texts as emerging out of and engaging with real-life debates in the German Jewish and global Jewish communities moderates the tendency in articles by Bühler-Dietrich, Maria Roca Lizarazu, J. Rafael Balling, Francesco Albé, and others to remove Jewish protagonists from their concrete social and political contexts—in their communities, and in Germany—and to idealize them as “nomadic subjects” (Rosi Braidotti’s term)17See Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. and thus as somehow “naturally cosmopolitan.”18See Buehler-Dietrich, “Relational Subjectivity.” See Roca Lizarazu, “‘Integration’.” See also Roca Lizarazu, “Ec-static Existences.” See Balling, “Intimate Associations.” Albé, “Becoming Queer.” Contemporary German Jewish writing, this book argues therefore, is increasingly characterized by its exploration of the tension between insisting on the Jewishness of the Holocaust and emphasizing its universalistic implications, and more generally between Jewish self-sufficiency and cosmopolitan engagement on behalf of others.

Jewish particularism versus Jewish universalism, in fact, both invokes an age-old thematic in Jewish culture and thought and goes to the heart of the modern-day debate about what it means to be a Jew that is occurring in Germany and across the diaspora more broadly. In a final reconceptualization of existing scholarship, then, the present book explores how elements of the New German Jewish Literature pose even bigger questions about Jewish identity after Holocaust memory. If Holocaust memory increasingly functions simply as a reference point for solidarity with others—and faith and religious ritual are largely absent for the secular majority—what is left of Jewishness other than a vaguely defined sense of a Jewish ethical commitment to “repairing the world,” typically summarized in the expression tikkun olam? This question is addressed in chapter 3.