1: Holocaust Memory: Adriana Altaras, Jan Himmelfarb, and Benjamin Stein

For example, in an influential book published in 1996, sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann coined the term “Gedächtnistheater” (memory theater)1See Bodemann, Gedächtnistheater. to describe how Jews are required to perform the role of admiring and appreciative witnesses to German contrition, and thereby to confirm the nation’s transformation not only into a place where Jews could feel safe but also—non-Jewish Germans liked to think—into an example to the world of a successful confrontation with a “difficult past.” (In recent years, “Gedächtnistheater” has been recast as “Integrationstheater” by the polemicist Max Czollek, to describe how migrants are compelled to “perform” German values in order to secure their acceptance.)2See Roca Lizarazu, “‘Integration.’” Other scholars, especially from outside Germany, have focused on the cultural appropriation of Jewishness that emerged from the early 1990s in the wake of Unification, generational change, and the global interest in Jewish and Holocaust history. Jack Zipes, for example,3See Jack Zipes, “The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish.” noted a “fascination for things Jewish,” as Jewish food, theater, and klezmer music was suddenly everywhere, along with a proliferation of Holocaust memorials, for example in the once heavily Jewish Scheunenviertel in East Berlin.4See Alt, “Yiddish.” As Constantin Goschler and Anthony Kauders put it, “the intensified interest in everything Jewish [is] directed less at the Jews who now actually lived in Germany than at an imagined Jewry. Jews became a preferred object of nostalgia—along with windmills and water towers.”5Goschler and Kauders, “The Jews in German Society,” 362. Similarly, Karen Remmler speaks of an “imagined cosmopolitanism that would return Germany to a sense of ‘normalcy.’”6Remmler, “Encounters Across the Void,” 21.

The “fascination with things Jewish” extends to Jewish authors too, needless to say. Typically, publishers draw attention to a Jewish biography in marketing materials, including on a book’s back cover or on the inside of the dust jacket. In part, this is a reflection of what Sander Gilman calls the “market value of ethnic literature”;7Gilman, “Introduction,” 24. more specifically, it relates to the particularly—or peculiarly—representative function that is expected of Jews in public discourse. Jewish writers are called upon to “speak for” Jews on television programs, in newspaper articles, at cultural events, and on anniversaries of key dates relating to Nazism and the Holocaust. Vladimir Vertlib’s Letzter Wunsch (Last wish; 2003) is one of many contemporary texts that thematize this pressure to speak for all Jews for a non-Jewish German audience. In this novel, Gabriel Salzinger joins a live radio show to discuss his deceased father, who cannot be buried in a local Jewish cemetery because he is not held to be halachically Jewish (his maternal grandmother had converted in a non-Orthodox ceremony). Rather than engaging with his personal distress, however, listeners inundate Gabriel with their ill-considered opinions about Israel, Jewish community leaders, and antisemitism.8See Guenther, “The Poetics of Ritual in Diaspora.” Similarly, from the younger generation, Dana Vowinckel satirizes the inclination of non-Jewish Germans to read Jewishness into everything a Jewish writer does or says. In her short story “In my Jewish Bag” (2022), for example, the entire contents of her bag seem to relate to her Jewishness, notably a pen, sedatives, and the Kippah she carries with her to express her “Sympathie mit Philosemiten”9Vowinckel, “In my Jewish Bag.” (sympathy with philosemites). Here, the joke is a reference to the stereotype of Jews as neurotic scribblers and to the perversity of Germans who expect to be congratulated for their embrace of the victims. Vowinckel’s first novel, Gewässer im Ziplock (Still water in a ziplock; 2023), is a portrait of Jewish family life that is itself evidently addressed to a non-Jewish German reader, complete with a glossary.

Maxim Biller has long railed against the opprobrium heaped on Jews if they fail to meet German expectations. Frequently styled in the German media as a Provokateur vom Dienst (provocateur by profession),10For Biller’s own commentary on how he is received, see his 2018 essay “Wer nichts glaubt, schreibt” (He who believes in nothing, writes). A thoughtful reflection on Biller’s public persona can be found in Stefan Willeke’s 2017 article in Zeit-Magazin, “Der Unzumutbare” (The unreasonable one). the author’s truculent public persona and taboo-breaking journalistic and literary work undermine the majority’s preferred image of Jews as purely victims, worthy of pity on account of their suffering and grateful for the care now lavished on them by the descendants of the perpetrators.11See Remmler, “Maxim Biller.” Biller’s newspaper articles, essays, and short stories thus relentlessly expose the rank hypocrisy of a country that has still not fully acknowledged its Nazi past and the cravenness of the older generation of German Jews that desired only to prosper and not draw attention to themselves,12Biller’s journalistic pieces and short stories are collated in Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (Once I am rich and dead; 1990), Die Tempojahre (Tempo years; 1991), Land der Väter und Verräter (Country of fathers and traitors; 1994), Deutschbuch (German book; 2001), Bernsteintage (Amber days; 2004), Moralische Geschichten (Parables; 2005), and Liebe heute (Love today; 2007). whereas many of his novels more specifically push back against the stereotype of the virtuous Jewish victim by presenting protagonists who are self-regarding, sex-obsessed, and even deviant. In the opening pages of Die Tochter (The daughter; 2000), for example, Motto masturbates to a pornographic film featuring the daughter that he has not seen for ten years. Later, he exploits the sexual availability of German women wishing to learn Jewish customs. In Biografie (Biography; 2016), Soli Karubiner—who shares key biographical details with Biller—quits Germany after a younger author threatens to release a video of him pleasuring himself in a sauna, and flees to Prague and Tel Aviv, also to escape his neurotic Jewish family. (Biografie was poorly received by critics, whereupon Biller accused them of antisemitism.)13See Platthaus, “Brauchen Kritiker jetzt einen Ahnennachweis?” In these two novels, as throughout his oeuvre, Biller is self-admittedly influenced by the scurrilously priapic fiction of Philip Roth.14See Rubin-Dorsky, “Philip Roth.” In his 2009 autobiographical account of his emergence as a writer, Der gebrauchte Jude (the used Jew), Biller describes the scandalous appeal of Roth and other American Jewish authors and his own struggle to develop an authentic voice in a literary culture where he is always immediately co-opted as a “representative Jew.”15See Codrai, “Lost in Third Space?”

Biller’s self-staging as an uninhibited but also overly sensitive, and above all, ungrateful Jew, however, is also directed against what he sees as the conformist quietism of parents and grandparents. Der gebrauchte Jude thus relates how young Jews in the 1980s desired to demarcate themselves not only from the non-Jewish German majority but also from the older generation that had reestablished the Jewish community after 1945 and now wished only to “fit in.” In fact, Biller’s transgression—not only of the expectations of the majority but also of the norms of “living as a Jew in Germany” established by the survivors after 1945—is exemplary of the aesthetic and ideological program of second-generation writers. Biller’s friend and oftentimes rival Henryk Broder is comparably outspoken in his journalistic attacks on German hypocrisy and Jewish acquiescence,16See Dollinger, “Anti-Semitism.” and Rafael Seligmann too undercuts the idealization of the innately virtuous Jewish victim by both non-Jews and Jews in novels such as Der Milchmann (The milkman; 1999), in which it is hinted that the elderly protagonist Weinberg may have falsely claimed credit for an act of altruism in a camp fifty years previously. (Broder quit Germany for Israel in 1981, assailing the antisemitism of the German Left in an article titled “Warum ich gehe” [Why I am going]. He returned in 1993.)17Broder, “Warum ich gehe.” Biller, Broder, and Seligmann have routinely been decried as Nestbeschmutzer (foulers of their own nests).18See Bower, “Rafael Seligmann (1947–).”

Speaking to the BBC in 2012, Seligmann declared: “People feel it’s not enough to have a ‘Holocaust identity.’ We are trying to show that the Jewish identity is broader [. . .] It’s about culture and history and politics.”19Seligmann, quoted by Steven Evans, “Anti-semitism still Haunts Germany.” Indeed, the urge to disrupt and even subvert that characterizes the work of Biller, Seligmann, and other second-generation writers is not just an attitude against something. By challenging the majority’s exploitation and exoticization of Jews and the conformity of their parents and grandparents, authors such as Biller, Seligmann, Barbara Honigmann, Robert Schindel, Esther Dischereit, and Doron Rabinovici also at least suggest that a more expansive depiction of the Jewish experience might be possible, even desirable—even if their own work remains largely fixated on the incongruity of living as a Jew in Germany (or Austria) after the Holocaust. In recent novels, correspondingly, Seligmann presents a twentieth-­century Jewish story rather than simply the Holocaust and its legacy and suggests the affection that Jews once felt for the German language, German culture, and even Germany itself—and now might be able to feel once again. The first two installments of a planned trilogy of autobiographical novels, Lauf, Ludwig, lauf! Eine Jugend zwischen Synagoge und Fußball (Run, Ludwig, run! A youth between Synagogue and football; 2019) and Hannah und Ludwig—Heimatlos in Tel Aviv (Hannah and Ludwig—uprooted in Tel Aviv; 2020) thus relate his father’s Bavarian childhood, flight to Palestine, service in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade, Israel’s War of Independence, and Ludwig’s return in 1957 to Germany with his wife Hannah and the ten-year-old Rafael. Similarly, Biller’s Biografie, Sechs Koffer (Six suitcases; 2018), and Sieben Versuche zu lieben (Seven attempts to love; 2020), excavate family history in the communist bloc (including a relative who may have denounced a grand­father to the KGB), Soviet antisemitism, and flight to the West. This focus on Soviet and Soviet Jewish history aligns Biller, perhaps unexpectedly, with the cohort of Russian-speaking younger writers who immigrated as children in the early 1990s.

Transgression enables an expansion of the scope of Jewish memory and a more differentiated articulation of Jewish stances on life in Germany, the “function” of Holocaust memory, and Jewishness itself. It is a gesture of self-positioning, therefore, that authors—and, of course, the protagonists of their novels—enact in order to “try out” the various and sometimes competing versions of German Jewish and Jewish identity that have emerged over recent decades in consequence of the greatly increased size and diversity of the community, or to imagine (or revive) other potentialities of Jewish self-understanding entirely. Here, the term self-positioning is drawn from social psychology, and especially the work of Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove. Self-positioning, Harré and van Langenhove argue, constitutes “the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s actions intelligible” in relation to the “moral order within which the discursive process takes place,” including forms of speech and behavior that challenge this order and assert novel articulations of selfhood.20Harré and van Langenhove, “Varieties,” 355 and 399.

In later chapters, other modes of self-positioning will be discussed, including the (re)fabulation of Jewish family history both before the Holocaust and beyond its geographical extent, an embrace of a distinctly unOrthodox pop aesthetic, and the queering of Jewishness itself. In each and every form it takes, however, self-positioning describes how Jewish protagonists triangulate their Jewishness in relation to non-Jewish Germans and to other Jews with different cultural, religious, and historical experiences. Members of the established community reconfigure previous norms of engagement with the majority in order to reassert their position vis-à-vis the “Russians.” The immigrants from the former Soviet Union, in turn, must define a Russian German Jewish identity against both non-Jewish and Jewish Germans united by their skepticism of the newcomers. Otherwise, Jews debate with one another and with the overwhelmingly non-Jewish society in which they reside about secularism, religious faith, and what constitutes Jewish identity today above and beyond Holocaust memory.

This chapter examines three contemporary novels in which German-born, Soviet-born, and religiously-oriented Jewish protagonists triangulate their identities in dialogue—and often disagreement—with each another and with the non-Jewish majority. In essence, it is argued that the self-positioning in response to the pluralization of Jewish life in Germany that takes place in Adriana Altaras’s titos brille (tito’s glasses; 2011), Jan Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung (Star reading; 2015), and Benjamin Stein’s Das Alphabet des Rabbi Löw (The alphabet of Rabbi Löw; 2014)—depends on but also promotes an “opening-up” of Holocaust memory, and of Jewish memory more generally. Subsequent chapters will then explore the tensions that arise in other texts when the legacy of the genocide is further universalized and an even more radical reorientation of Jewish identity toward “worldliness” is insinuated.