2: Solidarity: Mirna Funk, Kat Kaufmann, and Katja Petrowskaja

Yet a “community of Jews without Judaism” need not mean a community of Jews without Jewish values, or at least a Jewish sensibility—however that is defined. Indeed, while Bodemann and Wolffsohn seem to equate cosmopolitanism and globalization with a decline in Jewish faith and knowledge of ritual and practice, it is still possible to glimpse Jewish elements within a thoroughly secularized outlook, including how Jewish memory, thought, and even theological commentary might actually inspire worldly engagement. Writing about young Russian Jews in Germany, for example, Alina Gromova argues that many view their “political and social engagement as a central component of their identity as Jews.”3Gromova, “Eine heterogene Gruppe,” 55.

Contemporary novels by German Jewish writers from all backgrounds suggest solidarity with migrants, refugees, and other marginalized groups. In Julya Rabinowich’s Erdfresserin (Eater of earth; 2012), for example, the Holocaust is invoked as a historical foil to a story about a woman from Dagestan who now works in Vienna as a prostitute, and reworkings of the golem figure suggest a more generally Jewish framing for the novel’s indictment of the trafficking of women after the collapse of communism.4See Mayr, “Europe’s Invisible Ghettos” and Nagy, “Representations of the Other.” Lana Lux’s 2017 début Kulkolka tells a similar tale about a trafficked Ukrainian orphan who ends up in Berlin, where she suffers more abuse. (Lux arrived from Ukraine in 1996.) And Vertlib’s Viktor hilft (Viktor helps; 2018) prompts empathy with Muslims arriving from North Africa and the Middle East in the summer of 2015,5See Garloff, Making German Jewish Literature Anew, 132–36. as does Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht Schüchtern (God is not shy; 2017). In fact, solidarity with Muslims in particular is especially common, whether refugees or residents. Esther Dischereit’s opera libretto Blumen für Otello (2014) is a well-known example, which exposes the structural racism of German society with specific reference to the murders committed by the National Socialist Underground between 1998 and 2001. Haunting the text is the legacy of the Holocaust, although the present-day victims were almost entirely Muslim. Likewise, in Olga Martynova’s 2013 novel Mörikes Schlüsselbein (Mörike’s collarbone), a secondary character compares anti-Muslim rhetoric with Nazi antisemitism: “er erzählt, dass in Deutschland momentan anti-muslimische Propaganda herrscht, damit vergleichbar, wie in der Nazizeit die Juden behandelt wurden.”6Martynova, Mörikes Schlüsselbein, 59. I am grateful to Dr. Miriam Wray for drawing my attention to this scene. (He says that anti-Muslim propaganda is everywhere in Germany right now, comparable to how the Jews were treated in the Nazi period.) Here, it is important to note that Muslim writers such as Sevgi Özdamar and Navid Kermani as well as Islamic organizations in Germany have long been active in opposing antisemitism and in engaging in Holocaust remembrance.7See Kermani, “Auschwitz morgen.” See also Esra Özyürek, Subcontractors of Guilt.

Recent German Jewish literary fiction thus provides some evidence for the emergence—or rather reemergence—of what Andreas Kilcher, in a discussion of early twentieth-century German Jewish authors including Joseph Roth, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig, and Carl Zuckmayer, describes as a “decidedly diasporic model,” that is, a self-consciously exilic mode that is “essentially universalistic, cosmopolitan, exterritorial or transnational” and also references Jews’ specific “historical mission” to demonstrate the principle of solidarity with all humankind.8Kilcher, “Diasporakonzepte,” 135–36. Jewish and Christian thinkers and theologians, of course, have long asked whether such a mission might derive from Jews’ exemplary status as the chosen people, their dispersion around the world, and their experience of suffering.9See Gelbin and Gilman, Cosmopolitanism and The Jews.

In German Jewish writing of the 1920s and 1930s, Kilcher argues, this “universalistic, cosmopolitan, exterritorial or transnational” diasporic consciousness often implied both a refusal of complete integration into German society and a rejection of the Zionist movement that had been growing in strength since the late nineteenth century, with its goal of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Kilcher cites Roth’s 1934 essay “Jedermann ohne Pass” (Anyone without a passport), therefore: “Unser Vaterland ist die ganze Erde.” (Our fatherland is the whole earth.)10Kilcher, “Diasporakonzepte,” 147. Roth, “Jedermann,” 546–47. In at least some twenty-first century German Jewish novels, a similar dynamic is evident, when protagonists reject Germany and (now) Israel for a more diffuse worldliness—with worldliness associated with engagement on behalf of others. In Olga Grjasnowa’s début Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians love birch trees; 2012), for instance, the Azerbaijan-born, Russian-speaking Jewish woman Mascha is indifferent to Germany but also feels no affection for Israel once she has witnessed its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Instead, Jewish memory—her grandmother’s narrow escape during the Holocaust—enables Mascha’s reckoning with her own childhood trauma, when she witnessed the bloody clashes between ethnic Armenians and Azeris in 1992, and her empathy with Palestinians.11See Skolnik, “Memory without Borders?”. See Taberner, “Possibilities and Pitfalls.” Throughout Grjasnowa’s work, in fact, a worldly Jewish identity is articulated almost exclusively through solidarity with other minorities. In the Soviet-born author’s other novels—notably Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Der verlorene Sohn (The lost son; 2020)—Germany and Israel hardly feature, as a globally-engaged Jewishness no longer depends on belonging to/in a nation but rather expresses “Jewish values.”

To the extent that the “universalistic, cosmopolitan, exterritorial or transnational” diasporic model is fundamentally about openness to the world as opposed to the fixation on where Jews “belong,” it is best understood within the larger context of the debate on Jewish universalism versus Jewish particularism. On the one hand, the Jewish experience of exile and diaspora, persecution, and, of course, genocide is understood to exemplify all human suffering and to imply a universal obligation to intervene to counter injustice wherever it may occur. What British historian Adam Sutcliffe terms “progressive Jewish universalism”12Sutcliffe, What are Jews for?, 257. endorses this universalization of Jewish memory and inspires individual Jews to engage on behalf of others enduring prejudice, discrimination, and worse. On the other hand, the fact that Jews have for the most part been victimized as Jews is taken to demonstrate the necessity of insisting on the Jewishness of Jewish history—and especially Jewish suffering—and for Jews to remain focused on their particularistic interests, first and foremost their own survival.

An avowedly cosmopolitan outlook can also be a form of self-­positioning, of course, contrasting with the established community’s traditional fixation on Germany and offering the younger generation and especially younger Russian speakers a way of being Jewish that makes sense for them, given their familiarity with Moscow, Tel Aviv, and New York, and their transnational networks and global travel. More specifically, Jewish universalism may suggest a critical attitude toward Israel (again generally taboo in the established community) and a distinctly modern Jewish self-understanding, defined by anti-racism and an emphasis on intersectionality. As we shall see in chapter 3, in the novels of Grjasnowa and Salzmann, Jews and Muslims are sometimes also LBGTQ individuals or migrants, or both, and build alliances to advance their own and others’ cause, though not always without tension or differentials of privilege, of course. Likewise, younger Jews and Soviet-born Jews may reframe Holocaust memory as a call to realize universal human rights, reframing it as what sociologists Levy and Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory” or as what Michael Rothberg calls “multidirectional memory.”

In fact, embracing global solidarity may offer secular Jews, Jews without a Jewish mother, and Soviet-born Jews a way of establishing a Jewish identity that does not depend on religious conviction (or even knowledge), Holocaust trauma in the family, or an unbroken, matrilineal Jewish lineage. In essence, a Jewish identity can be asserted with reference to the Jewish credo of engaging “to repair the world” (tikkun olam). This suggests a far more diffuse Jewishness, of course, as conventional classifications—Orthodox, Reform, and non-believing-but-still-avowedly-­Jewish—break down and are replaced by a more fluid self-ascription as a Jew by virtue of intervening in solidarity with others. (This may be thought of as a secular variation on Stein’s performance of Jewish ritual as a means of styling an unorthodox Orthodox Judaism.) This does not mean that Jewish universalism is insincere—or that only Jews without faith or non-halachic Jewish ancestry espouse it—but it is clear that mobilizing on behalf of other minorities also propounds a kind of legitimacy as a Jew.

The three close readings that follow provide further insight into the self-positioning that is implied by acting in solidarity with others, but also reveal that Jewish worldliness is by no means unequivocal or without sacrifice. In Kat Kaufmann’s Superposition (2015), Mirna Funk’s Winternähe (Near winter; 2015), and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther; 2014), self-identified Jewish protagonists, born in Germany or from the former Soviet Union, without a Jewish mother or with only a tenuous connection to their heritage, attempt to reconcile worldliness with their insistence on the specificity of the Jewish identity that they have only just recovered. Notwithstanding their very different literary styles—a brash pop aesthetic in Superposition and Winternähe, a formal complexity reminding of early twentieth-century modernism in Vielleicht Esther—all three novels address the fundamental question of what it means to be a Jew “in the world” when Jewish identity itself is inherently fragile.