Holocaust Memory, Solidarity, and Worldliness

Recent German Jewish writing incorporates this diversity and offers the likely non-Jewish German reader an insight into the history, religious practices, conventions, and sensitivities of the minority. Some novels are accompanied by glossaries of Yiddish terms or integrate explanations of culture and customs, for example, while others draw on historical works to situate life stories within the contexts of Nazi persecution, the Holocaust, or Soviet antisemitism. Likewise, there are obvious references to lived experiences of migration, antisemitic prejudice, or the suffering of parents and grandparents. Yet the corpus comprises far more than fictionalized auto-ethnography or lightly reworked biography. Echoing Nolden’s comment on the Young Jewish Literature, therefore, today’s German Jewish fiction is not simply “minority literature,” with individual works to be read solely as “sociological phenomena (which they also—but not only—are).”2Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur. The chapters of close reading of literary texts that follow thus highlight formal strategies and stylistic innovations and how these not only respond to but also creatively refashion social reality. These aesthetic features most commonly include a propensity to merge author and narrator; multiple, speculative, or even fabulated reconstructions of the Jewish past, including the genocide; a flagrantly pop aesthetic that similarly appears to undermine the sanctity of Holocaust memory; an emphasis on gender and sexuality relating to narrative stance and “voice”; and, in many novels, frequent intertextual allusions to German, German Jewish, and Russian literature.

Chapter 1, “Self-positioning and Holocaust memory,” examines three novels that enact different artistic approaches but are all fundamentally concerned with how their Jewish protagonists position themselves vis-à-vis the non-Jewish majority and other Jews, whether the “Russians,” the “Germans,” or the Orthodox and (increasingly) Reform congregations that largely determine who does—and doesn’t—count as a Jew. Adriana Altaras’s 2011 titos brille (tito’s glasses) is conventionally autobiographical, then, presenting an account of her parents’ wartime experiences and their role in the reestablishment of the Jewish community following their move from communist Yugoslavia to West Germany in the mid-1960s. The impetus for this chronicling of postwar history—including the fate of Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust—is the arrival of immigrants from the former Soviet Union in her area of Berlin, which also appears to prompt the daughter to align herself more closely with the non-Jewish majority. Soviet-born Jan Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung (Star reading; 2015), in contrast, combines ethnographical description, historical facts, and pure fabulation. The novel depicts its middle-aged protagonist’s struggles to integrate into the existing German Jewish memory culture while narrating his obviously implausible recollection of his birth in 1941 and summarizing what he has read in academic works about the deportations and mass killings taking place around the same time. Finally, Benjamin Stein’s 2014 Das Alphabet des Rabbi Löw (The alphabet of Rabbi Löw), which had already appeared in 1995 as Das Alphabet des Juda Liva, is analyzed as an act of literary and religious nonconformity, in which Holocaust memory still reverberates but is far less defining of Jewish identity. This scandalously inventive novel combines elements of Kabbalah with allusions to the German Jewish literary tradition, to contrive an unorthodox Orthodox Judaism for modern Germany.

The close readings presented in chapter 1 reference the key insights that have emerged in the introduction, namely that the pluralization of the Jewish community has been accompanied by a gradual accommodation with Germany; a growing impetus to look beyond the land of the perpetrators; and an increasing tendency to ask what it means to be a Jew beyond the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust. Further to this, however, the chapter develops an argument that protagonists’ self-positioning vis-à-vis the non-Jewish majority and other Jews contributes to a broader process of expansion and differentiation with regard to German (Jewish) memory culture—even when this process is provoked by a pragmatic or sometimes even parochial desire to signal standing within the community. This often involves an element of transgression, as aesthetic, memorial, and group norms are tested and reframed.

Chapter 2 focuses on Jewish solidarity with migrants and refugees (especially Muslims), victims of state persecution, and other marginalized groups. As German Jewish writing looks outwards to include Soviet and Soviet Jewish histories and parallels with other atrocities—even including, for example, the genocide in Rwanda or the civil war in Syria—the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism comes into sharper focus. In Funk’s Winternähe, then, Lola travels to Israel to flee German antisemitism and to affirm her sense of Jewish identity—she is Jewish “only” on her father’s side—but soon discovers that her desire to experience a sense of belonging in the Jewish state is in tension with her empathy with Palestinians. After a few months, she flees to Thailand before ultimately returning to Germany. In Kat Kaufmann’s 2015 pop novel Superposition, the twenty-something jazz musician Izy Lewin is unable (or unwilling) to transcend the specificity of her Soviet Jewish past in order to imagine a cosmopolitan oneness with her German peers, never mind solidarity with the homeless people, migrants, and gypsies who inhabit the margins of the narrative. Finally, Petrowskaja’s autobiographically inspired Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther; 2014) recounts its Soviet-born protagonist’s travels to recover family history across eastern Europe and her efforts to think through the near-extermination of European Jews as simultaneously particular and universal. Here too, it seems that the attempt to imagine the “as if” of empathetic identification with others can only ever be partially successful.

In the Young Jewish Literature, the focus was on Jewish victims and German perpetrators. To reprise Braese, authors wrote “insistently [. . .] about themselves as Jews [. . .] about themselves as Jews in the concrete German present.”3Braese, “Writing against Reconciliation,” 28. In the New German Jewish Literature, in contrast, a multidirectional, cosmopolitan, or universalizing Holocaust memory can underpin solidarity with others and a readiness to defend general principles of anti-racism and anti-fascism. At the same time, chapter 2 argues, even as this reframing of the genocide makes possible a more outward-looking German Jewish identity, it might also obscure the Jewishness of the Jewish past—which Soviet-born writers especially may only recently have recovered in their own family histories—or dissolve it into the abstraction of politico-philosophical discourses on historical justice and universal human rights. Relatedly, there is a difficulty in how to render this panoramic perspective on the Holocaust in compelling literary form, when German Jewish writing has conventionally focused on the intimacy of traumatic memory transmitted down through the generations in families turned in upon themselves. As the scale changes to encompass “the world,” new narrative approaches must be found.

Chapter 3, “worldliness,” examines three novels that articulate a worldly Jewish identity beyond the fixation on family trauma and indeed beyond Holocaust memory itself, and—in the first—without “burdening” Jewishness with a “special mission” to mobilize in solidarity with others. (Jewish identity can be rooted in faith, of course, which is what Stein attempts in Rabbi Löw, with his unorthodox Orthodox Judaism.) Channah Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin, oder Wie ich zu Pessach die vier Fragen nicht wusste (The granddaughter, or how I didn’t know the four questions at Passover; 2013)—like Funk’s Winternähe—features a young female protagonist struggling to honor her grandparents’ trauma and to define her own, authentic way of living as a Jew in modern-day Germany. Trzebiner’s literary alter ego Channah leaves behind her family’s strict, patriarchal Orthodox Judaism in order to throw herself into consumer culture. Again similar to Winternähe, the attempt to give meaning to Jewishness without continually invoking the Jewish exceptionalism of the Holocaust involves a triangulation of Germany, Israel, and “the world,” also referencing current debates across the diaspora about support for Israel given its treatment of the Palestinians and about where Jewish values now reside. A distinctly, even provocatively, “pop” aesthetic underscores the aspiration to integrate into the global—or rather Western—mainstream while also communicating the protagonists’ apparent transgression of the sanctity of Jewish memory.

The second novel considered in chapter 3 is Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich (Beside oneself; 2017), arguably the most experimental German Jewish text to have appeared in recent decades. The analysis of this novel suggests that Jewish worldliness can be “written back into” Jewish family history, as it were, once received narratives of nation, gender, and the imperative to integrate and conform have been queered to recover moments of difference, self-transcendence and self-­transformation, and solidarity. The argument, then, is that Außer sich revives a Jewish worldliness that—unlike the ultimately superficial imitation of global consumer culture depicted in Trzebiner and Funk—is deeply rooted in Jewish thinking on the meaning and purpose of diaspora, including to exemplify the ideal of cosmopolitanism. Here, Holocaust memory may be less central, and Jewishness itself might specify an attitude of social and ethical engagement rather than Jewish ritual and practice, or even belief.

Chapter 3 concludes with a discussion of Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn (The lost son; 2020), in which discernibly Jewish characters play only a small role, and asks whether the trend toward worldliness in recent German Jewish writing necessarily implies self-effacement, that is, the setting aside of Jewish concerns in order to attend to global histories and to mobilize on behalf of others. If Jewish identity is focused on solidarity rather than on faith, tradition, and heritage, or even the genocide, might it eventually fade from view entirely? (Der verlorene Sohn focuses on the fate of a young Muslim prince abducted by the Tsar in nineteenth-century imperial Russia.) Or can a Jewish sensibility suffice to underwrite the Jewishness of a text—and the Jewishness of a humanistic and, above all, universalistic mode of engagement with the secular? These questions are thought through with reference to Polish Jewish philosopher Isaac Deutscher’s self-characterization as a “non-Jewish Jew.”4See Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew.”

Chapters 1 to 3 build on the ethnographic and sociological scholarship reviewed earlier in this introduction to argue that the protagonists of contemporary German Jewish novels position themselves in relation to other Jews as much as the German majority; debate whether Holocaust memory can be mobilized in solidarity with others; and sometimes even gesture beyond the traumatic legacy of the genocide in order to establish, or reestablish, a Jewish worldliness that can be less burdened by the past and even point the way toward a more just and harmonious future for all humankind. The trend in today’s German Jewish writing is an evolution away from a fixation on German perpetrators and Jewish victims toward a framing of Jewish identity as fundamentally and productively diasporic. This literary development, it can be argued, reflects shifts in Jewish self-understanding across a newly diverse and self-assertive community, but it also contributes to the reimagining of this self-understanding.

The conclusion reiterates these findings while drawing out resonances across chapters and between texts, with particular attention to the thematization in many recent novels of the relative privilege Jewish protagonists enjoy vis-à-vis other minorities by virtue of being, as it were, “white.” This leads into a discussion of what sociologists Naika Foroutan and Erol Yıldız term the “postmigrant society.”5See, for example, Foroutan, Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft and Yıldız and Hill, eds., Postmigrantische Visionen. To the extent that Jews now position themselves in relation not (only) to the white majority but (also) to the other minorities, including many Muslims, who together constitute Germany’s social reality as an ethnically diverse European nation, there is the potential for new alliances and new forms of Jewish self-articulation. At the same time, differences persist, cultures and values may clash, and the global context—including, of course, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East—cannot be wished away.