The Demographic Transformation of the Jewish Community

The generational shift that took place in the 1980s and 1990s was from a community dominated by survivors of the Holocaust to their children and then grandchildren, now reaching maturity and starting to rethink their relationship to Germany. Writing in 1998, Micha Brumlik went so far as to assert that the Holocaust had become less centrally defining for younger generations and that social, cultural, and economic integration was now paramount.4Brumlik, Zuhause, keine Heimat. The close readings in this volume nuance this claim and suggest instead that the focus of second- and third-generation Jewish writers is now on balancing a fierce insistence on the right to remember, and to remind about, the past with a conditional accommodation with Germany. Recent novels, then, evidence a more reflexive, more differentiated attitude than those of the 1980s, when the urgency to confront German (and Austrian) hypocrisy—e.g., as seen in the Bitburg controversy, the Waldheim scandal, and the Historikerstreit (historians’ controversy)—provoked a combative response from emerging authors such as Maxim Biller, Henryk Broder, Rafael Seligmann, Robert Menasse, Doron Rabinovici, and Robert Schindel.

The fact that the last survivors of the Holocaust are now passing away also shapes how younger Jews grasp their familial connection to the genocide and how it is communicated in the present and then into the future, in Germany and across the world. At the same time, Germany itself is also changing. If Jews in postwar West Germany were expected to serve the “politically symbolical function” of proving the country’s democratic rehabilitation, as Karen Körber describes it, then since Unification there has been a “gradual political and legal recognition that Germany could handle diversity and immigration as a modern pluralistic state.”5Körber, “Conflicting Memories.” Younger German Jews especially are reimagining their place in a society that, to use the term popularized by sociologist Erol Yıldız, is now postmigrant,6See Yıldız and Hill, eds., Nach der Migration. that is, self-consciously aware of the multiplicity of voices that constitute its public sphere and the need to navigate difference. This diversity includes ethnic minorities from around the world and, of course, several hundred thousand coreligionists from the former Soviet Union. (The situation of Jews in this postmigrant society is explored further in the conclusion.)

The arrival of Russian-speaking Jews after 1990 was not without precedent. A first wave had come to Germany after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, a second wave in the immediate postwar period, and a third wave fled Soviet repression in the 1970s. (Biller’s family was part of this third contingent.) What was different about the fourth wave, however, commencing in the late 1980s and accelerating following unified Germany’s adoption of a policy of unrestricted Jewish immigration introduced by the German Democratic Republic in its dying days,7See Tress, “Soviet Jews”; Dietz, “German and Jewish Migration”; Göttsche, Eberle, and Brückner, “Immigration into Germany.” was the very large number of arrivals—dwarfing the existing community—and the motives for migration. Refugees after the war and in the 1970s had fled antisemitism, whether in the form of hostility and even violence when they tried to return to their homes across Eastern Europe or in the form of witch hunts, scapegoating, and persecution in the Soviet Union. After 1990, in contrast, jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge were more likely to be driven by the hope of a better life in Germany, given the political and economic insecurity in the Soviet successor states, and were less likely to feel a strong attachment to Judaism. Many Soviet-born Jews went instead to Israel or the United States, of course, and for the majority the motive was not religious but economic.8See Cohen, Haberfeld, and Kogan, “Who Went Where?” This distance from Judaism was in part a consequence of the Soviet policy of treating Jews as a national minority—with a marker in their passports—while repressing religious or ethnic identity.9See Becker, “Migration,” 20–23. And it was in part a function of what Benjamin Pinkus identifies as the negative nationalism of what remained of Soviet Jews’ connection to their origins, that is, an association of Jewishness with the experience of marginalization and harassment rather than positive aspects of Jewish culture and practice.10See Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union. In her account of her new life in Germany, Ich bin es, jüdische Kontingentflüchtlingin (I am a Jewish quota refugee; 2006), Alexandra Grushko describes this initial reluctance to embrace a Jewish identity—and the tensions that emerged with the established community.

Indeed, much of the existing scholarship, especially focusing on the first twenty or so years of post-Soviet Jewish settlement, highlights the gulf between the new arrivals from the former Soviet Union and the existing postwar community in Germany.11See, for example, Schoeps, “Russian-Speaking Jews.” Weiss and Gorelik, for example, claim that “many of the refugees rejected parallels drawn between their own experiences and those of the Eastern European Jews who had arrived in Germany after the war.”12Weiss and Gorelik, “The Russian-Jewish Immigration,” 402. Certainly, attitudinal surveys from the 1990s appeared to confirm a lack of interest in Judaism among the new arrivals,13See Ben-Rafael, “Russian Jews in Germany,” 93–108. a strong attachment to Russian language and heritage,14Judith Kessler, “Homo Sovieticus.” intense connections to the Russian diaspora around the world,15See Ben-Rafael, “Russian-speaking Jews.” and a marked sense of social alienation, especially among older people, whose German was generally poor and who struggled to find work commensurate with their qualifications.16See Remennick, “‘Idealists.” See also Remennick, “The New Russian-­Jewish Diaspora,” and Tress, “Germany’s New ‘Jewish question.’” (It is worth noting here that jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge were part of a much larger migration of Russian speakers to Germany after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1991, around 1.8 million Russlanddeutsche—ethnic Germans—were also welcomed.17See Panagiotidis, Postsowjetische Migration. In Kat Kaufmann’s 2015 novel Superposition, the Russian Jewish protagonist feels most connected to a fellow migrant from the former Soviet Union—an ethnic German.) Early studies, therefore, reflected and even intensified widespread doubts about Soviet-born Jews’ willingness to integrate as Jews.18Becker, “Migration.” See also Tress, “Foreigners or Jews?” Robin Ostow describes how the Jüdische Allgemeine, an important mouthpiece for the established community, lionized the newcomers as a potential renaissance of Jewish existence in Germany while also running stories suggesting that many of them were criminals.19Ostow, “The Post‐Soviet immigrants.” And even if there were a welcome revival of Jewish life, it would be something different. The historian Dan Diner famously declared that the arrival of “the Russians” meant that the “history of Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany has come to an end.”20Dan Diner, “Deutsch-jüdisch-russische Paradoxien.”

A specific complaint leveled by members of the established community against Soviet-born immigrants was their apparent lack of commitment to German Jewish memory culture.21See Schoeps, Jasper, Vogt, eds., Russische Juden in Deutschland. As Oliver Lubrich frames the concern, recently arrived Soviet-born Jews seemed to display “indifference to German-Jewish traditions and [a] distanced attitude toward the Holocaust.”22Oliver Lubrich, “Are Russian Jews Postcolonial?” Indeed, members of the existing community noted that their coreligionists preferred to celebrate the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany on May 8 each year rather than commemorate the genocide. This was one aspect of a larger disconnect between different historical experiences. “While other Jews in Germany experience the Second World War as the great trauma,” Y. Michal Bodemann and Olena Bagno summarize, “this is not necessarily so for the Russian Jews; for them, present-day Russian anti-Semitism and earlier the Gulag, have often been the greater traumatic experience.”23Bodemann and Bagno, “In the Ethnic Twilight,” 163. For many descendants of the victims, references to the Soviet experience implied a diminution of Holocaust memory.

In all these ways, Soviet-born Jews were a disappointment to the survivors who had rebuilt the community after 1945, but also to the non-Jewish population more broadly,24See Körber, “Zäsur.” See also Körber and Gotzmann, eds., Lebenswirk­lich­keiten. who, as Sveta Roberman puts it, made “no particular demands on the newcomers, with one exception: Germany expected them to be Jewish.”25Roberman, “Performing Jewishness,” 187. The newcomers were disappointed too, insofar as they rejected the expectation imposed on them to rebuild Jewish life in Germany.26See Roberman, “Haunting Images.”

More recent ethnographic and sociological research, however, suggests that “homo Sovieticus” (Kessler)27Kessler, “Homo Sovieticus,” 131–43. is not as one-dimensional as early studies imply, and that dispositions are changing quite rapidly, particularly among the younger generation. In an article published in 2003, just a few years after government policy had become much more restrictive and immigration had largely ended, Barbara Kietz notes that the new arrivals had “introduced new social and political elements into Jewish communities,” including a more secular outlook, Russian culture, and distance from the way Jews had previously interacted with Germany, and concludes that “all these elements reshape Jewish communities in Germany, also making them, in all probability, less traditional and more pluralistic in the long run.”28Tress, “Jewish Immigrants,” 7. In a retrospective from 2008, Julius Schoeps and Olaf Glöckner describe continuing tensions with the established community, the existence of “Russian colonies,” ignorance of Jewish rituals, and high unemployment, but they also note key successes, including the stabilization of a population in decline and a cultural and religious revival.29See Schoeps and Glöckner, “Fifteen Years of Russian-Jewish Immigration.” Eliezer Ben-Rafael even suggests that for many Russian-speaking Jews, “Germany provides the conditions to re-attach themselves to Jewishness—and as a corollary to Israel as a focus of all-Jewish solidarity—even among the sons or daughters of mixed families and those who live with non-Jewish partners.”30Ben-Rafael, “Germany’s Russian-speaking Jews,” 78–79. Judith Kessler argues that younger Soviet-born Jews have developed a more “dualistic orientation,” acquiring “the competence and cultural savvy to be successful within the new environment” and being more likely than their parents to be interested in Judaism and Jewish politics.31Kessler, “Homo Sovieticus,” 140. And Dani Kranz focuses on how “Russian Jews” in their twenties and thirties—along with young Israelis—are shaping a dynamic, diverse, and hybrid Jewish culture. “Forget Israel,” Kranz quips: “The Future is in Berlin!”32Kranz, “Forget Israel.”

Moreover, many Soviet-born Jews do have a family memory of the Holocaust, or at least of fighting the Nazis. “Most Soviet Jews of the older generation lost relatives in mass executions of Jews during the German occupation of the western parts of the USSR in 1941–43,” Larissa Remennick notes: “Thousands of Jewish women and children survived the war as a result of the organized evacuation of citizens from Moscow and Leningrad [. . .] Tens of thousands of Jewish men were recruited to the Soviet Army.”33Remennick, “Idealists,” 32. Indeed, as literary scholar Harriet Murav argues, it is of course not the case that Soviet Jews were not impacted by the Nazis’ program of attempted extermination. The Holocaust, Murav summarizes, followed a “different trajectory”34Murav, Music, 151. in those parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans. Mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) and their local accomplices in forests and ravines were the primary mode of killing rather the death camps in Poland that feature more prominently in Holocaust memory in Western Europe and the United States. As we shall see in later chapters, contemporary writers with a Soviet background are concerned to counter this Western ignorance of the “Holocaust by bullets”35See Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets. even as they are also focused on “recovering” the specificity of their Jewish identity, including the genocide, from its partial occlusion under the communist system. As many historians have pointed out, the ethnic specificity of the Holocaust was generally downplayed, at least until the 1980s, with the victims generally categorized as Soviet citizens rather than Jews. Equally, the Soviet Jewish experience was part of the broader Soviet experience of the war, including combat in the Red Army or as civilians suffering German air raids, encirclements, or forced displacement.

In any case, as Franziska Becker notes, migrants’ biographies are not simply a piece of luggage, “in which finished life-stories are placed, which just need to be unpacked.”36Becker, Angekommen in Deutschland, 9. Rather, the stories they bring with them interact with, are impacted by, and subtly alter what they encounter in their new environment. Karen Körber suggests that an examination of the family narratives of Russian-speaking Jews reveals “a process of reevaluation, deferral or overlapping of different memories enabling both the war and the specific fate of Jews to become visible.” Just as important, she continues, “the experience of the present includes the encounter with Germany’s writing of history and the identity of the Jewish communities in which the Holocaust has become an elementary part of the collective memory.”37Körber, “Conflicting Memories,” 286. See also Körber, “Widerstreitende Erinnerungen.” To illustrate these points, Körber cites Lena Gorelik, a Soviet-born writer who came to Germany in 1992 (and who is cited above, as an academic), and specifically the preface she wrote for the diary of Lena Muchina, who survived the siege of Leningrad as a girl. (The diary was published in German in 2013). For Körber, this is evidence for how Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants have contributed to the “pluralization of the Jewish community’s communicative memory with their own painful, different experiences that also demand a place around the central narrative of the Holocaust.”38Körber, “Conflicting Memories,” 285. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 2014, in fact, Gorelik revealed that her own family had been trapped in Leningrad and argued that this episode of Nazi terror should also be commemorated on Holocaust Memorial Day.39Gorelik, “Jüdisch sein.” In 2022–23, Gorelik toured Germany with the publicist Carolin Emcke and the actress Maryam Zaree, staging readings of texts by Holocaust survivors in a variety of venues.

Joseph Cronin gives further concrete examples of what has changed as Soviet-born Jews have adapted to norms of remembrance but also inflected them. He cites Rabbi Levy Barsilay, from Hamburg, who suggested in 2005 that the presence of immigrants from the former Soviet Union could encourage the established community to celebrate May 8, in honor of Jews who had resisted the Nazis in the ghettos or who had fought against them as soldiers in the Red Army. From among the new arrivals, Cronin refers to Larisa Fukelman, a Russian Jewish journalist who, also in 2005, and on the same occasion, noted that the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany sixty years earlier was not only a Soviet victory but also the end of the genocide of European Jews. What is happening, Cronin infers, is the emergence of a new kind of Holocaust commemoration as a result of changing attitudes in both groups, with “more encompassing forms which made space for Jewish heroes alongside victims.”40Cronin, Russian-speaking Jews, 80–83.

The analyses of literary texts in subsequent chapters provide further indications that over the course of two to three decades since their arrival in Germany, Soviet-born immigrants have developed a stronger sense of Jewish identity and are now articulating new versions of a (Russian) German Jewish identity. The newcomers are not only absorbing but also reshaping Holocaust memory culture, both from within and in dialogue with national and global discourses on the meaning of the genocide for the present day. More generally, Soviet-born writers embody the innovation and creativity that younger Russian-speaking Jews have introduced—reimagining the community into which they migrated, forging new alliances with other minorities, and opening German Jewish identity up to the world.