First-World Privilege: Mirna Funk’s Winternähe

Lola, the German-born protagonist of Mirna Funk’s Winternähe, seems to have a much firmer sense of her Jewish identity—at least initially. Her close relationship with her father’s parents, both survivors, motivates her protest against resurgent antisemitism in Germany and her empathy with Israelis and Palestinians in Tel Aviv, and the progression from Jewish suffering to Lola’s solidarity with others is even explicitly framed as Jewish universalism. As we shall see, however, Lola’s efforts to articulate a Jewish identity that does not require faith or even two Jewish parents are overwhelmed by contemporary controversies, including the bitter wrangling about who “counts” as a Jew and European and diasporic Jewish responses to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In its final third, set in Thailand, the novel poses the question of whether Jewish worldliness is actually just first-world privilege.

Winternähe opens with a shocking affront to German memory culture, which—the novel’s protagonist suggests—prescribes just how the Nazi past is to be remembered while overlooking the persistence of antisemitism in the present day. Lola returns to the Berlin courtroom where two coworkers are about to be acquitted of racially abusing her in several Facebook posts, having drawn a Hitler moustache on her upper lip while in the bathroom. She is ejected from the proceedings, but not before she mimics a Hitler salute from her hip.2Funk, Winternähe, 9–11. Hereafter W. Subsequently, Lola spirals into despair, quitting her job, engaging in casual sex, and doubting all her relationships with her non-Jewish compatriots, before she leaves for Tel Aviv to spend time with her grandfather Gershom—he later dies—and to pursue her affair with Shlomo, a traumatized former Israeli soldier whom she met through Tinder when she was still in Berlin. Disillusioned with Israel, and with Shlomo, Lola travels to Thailand, where she composes letters to her estranged father in Australia. At the end of the novel, she goes back to Germany.

Lola’s taboo-breaking self-adornment with a Hitler moustache in the first few pages of the novel suggests a thematic focus on the righteousness of Jewish resentment in the face of the persistence of antisemitism despite the formal—and formulaic—abhorrence of anti-Jewish sentiment in contemporary German memory culture. To this extent, and as often in the work of younger self-identified Jewish writers, comparisons can be drawn with Maxim Biller as well as with a tradition of “ugly feelings”3See Ngai, Ugly Feelings. reaching back to Holocaust survivors such as Jean Améry.4See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue. As Lola exclaims some way into the narrative: “Ich verstehe nicht, wieso man immer alles verzeihen muss.” (I don’t understand why we always have to forgive everything; W, 183.) Her courtroom protest, then, is aimed at the judge and the police—for their self-serving attempts to mollify her—but it is also intended to disrupt the expectation that Jews should affirm Germany’s smug self-image of successful confrontation with its dark past. Following the failed prosecution of Olaf and Manuela for posting pictures of her on social media with a Hitler moustache, Lola begins to perceive the reality of anti-Jewish prejudice all around her. Colleagues at her office invoke the trope of Jewish property mogul driven by greed (W, 23); a washed-up pop singer comes on to her and then racially abuses her (W, 97–100); and German filmgoers celebrate a film about a Nazi functionary directed by his granddaughter—who once delighted in telling Lola what she would have done to her during the Third Reich (W, 105–6). Almost as bad are the philosemitic Germans whose declarations of solidarity actually serve their own psychological needs. Her acquaintance Myrna, for example, is a fervent Zionist and hates Palestinians, but only because her mother was killed in the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem during a tourist trip in 2002 (W, 101–4).

German hypocrisy is most evident, Lola suggests, in the responses to the flare-up of hostilities in the summer of 2016, when Israel sent troops into Gaza and Hamas fired rockets toward Tel Aviv and residential areas across the country. Her friends’ Twitter feeds are full of references to a supposed genocide committed by Jews against the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza (W, 201), and her date Toni is more explicit in his outrageous paralleling of the Holocaust and Israeli military interventions: “Aber was da in Gaza und hinter der Mauer der Westbank passiert, ist nicht besser als Auschwitz.” (But what’s happening over there in Gaza and behind the wall of the West Bank is no better than Auschwitz; W, 33). For Lola, it is evident that antisemitism lurks behind much of the self-righteous criticism of Israel she witnesses, not only in Germany but also throughout the whole of Western Europe (W, 203).

Lola’s personal encounter with German antisemitism changes her, “grundlegend, auf stille Weise” (completely, in a subtle way; W, 22). She becomes withdrawn and mistrustful, and engages in casual sex of a kind that implies self-negation. (Rebekah Slodounik makes the intriguing argument that through casual sex Lola asserts the one component of her identity as a German Jewish woman that is not contested by others. This is persuasive but does not mean that Lola’s self-assertion is necessarily emancipatory.)5See Slodounik, “German, Jewish, and Female.” Alienated by Toni’s comparison of Gaza and Auschwitz, and by the tone of the discussion of the current conflict in the Middle East in the bar where they are drinking, Lola calls Benjamin, a Jewish friend with whom she occasionally has a masochistic form of intercourse that recalls the so-called “Stalaghefte” (Stalag books; W, 39), a form of Nazi-exploitation pornography that circulated widely in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. Once Benjamin arrives, Lola slides under the table, gives him oral sex, and, after he has ejaculated in her mouth, takes her coat and leaves (W, 38–40). With both Toni and Benjamin—and during a later encounter in Israel that similarly hints at humiliation (W, 237–39)—there is also a power imbalance in Lola’s relationships with men, Jewish and non-Jewish. Funk’s protagonist is subjugated as a half-Jew by Jews, as a Jew by Germans, and as a woman by both, and can only respond by “living out” her absolute marginality.

Winternähe thus touches on the often-acrimonious debate about who “counts” as a Jew. Most immediately, Lola implies that German efforts to categorize Jewishness are themselves a form of antisemitism—even as these efforts are also stimulated and even legitimized by the Jewish community’s own bitter disagreements on the matter. The lawyer for the colleagues who added a Hitler moustache to her image on a Facebook post argues in court that Lola is not Jewish according to Jewish law and that they therefore cannot be guilty of antisemitism (W, 56). Her German date Toni later tells her the same to her face: “Dann bist du ja gar keine Jüdin. Soweit ich weiß, muss deine Mutter Jüdin sein.” (Then you’re not even a Jew at all. As far as I know, your mother has to be Jewish; W, 34.) Benjamin, on the other hand, accepts her as Jewish, but her Jewish lover’s preference for redheads suggests a degree of self-negation (W, 66 and 73). (Lola’s father has a similar proclivity, as discussed later.) In contrast, a young Orthodox Jew she sits next to on a flight to Thailand simply dismisses her claim to be Jewish out of hand (W, 254–56). For her own part, when she has sex with Shlomo—the Israeli she met on Tinder in Berlin and then takes up with again after she arrives in Tel Aviv—she craves his Hebrew words while responding, unavoidably, in her mother(’s) tongue: German (W, 143–44).

More generally, Lola’s status as a Vaterjüdin (Jew “only” on the father’s side) complicates her endeavor to define a Jewish identity in relation to both Germany, the country of her nationality, and to Israel, where, supposedly, a more authentic Jewishness can be forged. She is the daughter of a parent from each of the victim and the perpetrator collectives: “Sie war Täter und Opfer in einem.” (She was a perpetrator and victim in one; W, 313.) This oxymoronic identity provokes confusion and even incomprehension in Israel (W, 313–44). As will be discussed shortly, Lola also feels alienated by both Israeli ethno-nationalism and the empty posturing of the leftist peace protesters that she spends most of her time with there. Unlike Shlomo, who also lacks a Jewish mother (W, 70), she is unable to commit to either side in the national debate and thus to take a position as an Israeli Jew. In Germany, likewise, she is aware that her lack of a Jewish mother means that she does not “count” for many in the community (W, 313). Her thought that she might formally convert is quickly frustrated. Rabbi Goldberg informs her that her efforts will only count for Reform congregations, and she is repulsed by the inauthenticity of her fellow students. These include the German men who enthuse about their Jewish wives while uttering Yiddish and Hebrew phrases, and a young Ukrainian woman whose great-grandfather had run a concentration camp (W, 59–64).

If Lola cannot be accepted as a Jew “by birth” and she cannot convert, she might instead ground her Jewish identity in family trauma and in solidarity with others. In fact, Jewish memory—and Jewish universalism—is anticipated in the novel’s epigraph, consisting of a quotation from the well-known essay “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (On the concept of history) by the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin: “Das wahre Gesicht der Vergangenheit huscht vorbei. Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten.” (The true picture of the past flashes by. Only as a picture that flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability is the past to be held fast.)6Benjamin wrote the text in 1940 while interned in France. His subsequent attempts to flee the Nazis ended in suicide. Funk has most probably not engaged extensively with the vast scholarship on Benjamin’s idiosyncratic philosophy of history, of course—she most likely simply wishes to signal a “Jewish sensibility.”7See Steinberg, ed., Walter Benjamin. Indeed, Lola’s rather wooden allusions to “Erinnern, diesem im Judentum tief verankerten Brauch” (remembering, this tradition deeply rooted in Judaism; W, 217) and to “Eingedenken”—the “Erinnerungsgebot zwischen Gott und den Menschen, das das Judentum und seine Tradition prägt” (commemoration, the obligation to remember between God and people, that shapes Judaism and its tradition; W, 217)—suggest a desire to position herself within the broad Jewish tradition rather than a detailed knowledge.

Notwithstanding the likely superficiality of Lola’s understanding of Jewish thought, her anchoring of her identity in concepts of Jewish memory and Jewish universalism has consequences. First and foremost, her internalization of memory as trauma—including her grandmother’s experiences of the camps, her grandfather’s experience of flight (W, 29–30), and her father’s inherited distress (W, 120–24)—predisposes her to generalize her empathy to include others who are plagued by the past. Above all, this means Shlomo, who is tortured by his responsibility for the killing of a Palestinian boy when he was in the army. Following his discharge, he became a peace activist, a fervent critic of Israel’s reference to the Holocaust to justify its military interventions (W, 71–72), and a campaigner for an independent Palestinian state (W, 137–43). Lola helps him with his sexual dysfunction (W, 76), refrains from judging him (W, 153), and creates a photo exhibition, “Shlomos Vergangenheit” (Shlomo’s past; W, 241). She installs this exhibition in his flat before she leaves for Thailand, as a kind of making-material of his guilt but also of the trauma he endures: “Es war die Geschichte von Shlomo und seinem Schmerz.” (It was the story of Shlomo and his pain; W, 247). At the same time, Lola’s empathy also extends to the Palestinians who suffer the excesses of the Israeli army in Gaza. Here, in fact, she refers more specifically to Jewish memory and Jewish universalism. In conversation with her grandfather Gershom, she wants to know why he cannot relate to those now being oppressed by the survivors and their descendants: “Wo ist deine jüdische Identität, wenn es um Palästinenser geht?” (Where is your Jewish identity, when it’s about Palestinians?; W, 162). Being Jewish, Lola implies, means an inclination, even an obligation, to look beyond Jewish suffering to embrace solidarity with others.

Yet this abstract elaboration of diasporic Jewish identity is quickly revealed as potentially vacuous and even suspect. Three Yeshiva pupils are killed, followed by the revenge killing of a Palestinian boy. Lola initially has empathy with all four victims, whereas Shlomo—the Israeli soldier turned peace activist—sees only Palestinian suffering and Israeli guilt, in a simple reversal of a discourse of mutual antagonism that is structured along ethnic and nationalist lines (W, 164–69). Instead of holding her ground and insisting on compassion for both sides, however, Lola quickly agrees to accompany Shlomo to the Palestinian boy’s funeral. Solidarity with all, it seems, is an ideal that dissolves as soon as political realities intrude, and always whenever intimacy predisposes an individual to choose one side or the other. For Shlomo’s sake, Lola will march with Palestinian rather than Israeli mourners.

Even more undermining of Lola’s Jewish universalism is the suggestion that empathy is in any case always ultimately solipsistic, that is, directed toward the self rather than others. Shlomo, it turns out, weeps not for the boy whose funeral he is attending but for the youth he killed while in the army, and actually for himself, on account of the guilt that burdens him (W, 192). Equally, the supposed generalizability of traumatic memory to the suffering of others that underpins Lola’s solidarity may engender a surprising and even dubious moral relativism. Lola thinks of traumatic memory as an anthropological constant: “Aus jedem Menschen blutet die eigene Vergangenheit und manchmal sogar die Weltvergangenheit.” (Every person bleeds their own past, and sometimes the whole world’s past; W, 151). In the understanding of empathy and solidarity with others that emerges from this, there are only victims. Everyone is weighed down by the past, even the perpetrators—like Shlomo—and it seems that no distinction is to be drawn between different kinds and degrees of harm suffered. Lola’s formulation that everyone bleeds their past—and indeed the trauma of the whole world—is adapted, she says, from Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1980–91), based on the American author’s conversations with his father: “My Father bleeds History” (W, 151). However, this account of Holocaust victimhood is directly paralleled with Shlomo’s act of perpetration—“aus Shlomo blutete die Vergangenheit” (Shlomo bleeds the past; W, 151)—perhaps suggesting an equivalence between the trauma experienced by the survivor and that endured by the Israeli soldier who killed a boy throwing rocks. Inserted between her account of the murders of the three Yeshiva students and her attendance at the funeral of the Palestinian youth killed in revenge, moreover, Lola writes a letter to Simon bemoaning how he has erased his own past—including his Jewish past—and, tellingly, how she is not permitted to dwell on the hurt that she has had to live with through the years. Lola’s experience of being abandoned by her father is juxtaposed with the burden of guilt endured by Shlomo and even with the lasting trauma inflicted on Holocaust survivors (W, 170–74).

Lola is at least dimly aware that her grounding of her Jewish identity in solidarity is not only dubiously vague and relativizing but also a consumer choice, as it were. The peace activism that she becomes involved in is as much an opportunity to eat, drink, and stimulate the senses as it is a commitment to a cause. On the way to the funeral, Shlomo and Lola visit a museum (W, 180). Later, on the way to a demonstration, they stop for a banana-and-orange juice (W, 213). Similarly, Lola’s photographing of violence and the mark it leaves on individuals contributes to the flood of images that shape consumer tastes, from Facebook—where Manuela and Olaf added a Hitler moustache to her portrait (W, 15–16)—to Instagram, even Tinder (W, 67), and the magazines she freelances for. On Instagram, Lola posts pictures “auf denen ihr Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und irgendwie auch die Zukunft verwoben schienen” (on which past, present, and somehow also the future seemed to her to be woven together), and then sells them for 33,000 EURO (W, 83). For her magazine work, she composes even more stylized images:

Lola, in fact, objectifies Shlomo: “Sie würde ihn fotographieren [. . .] Wie schläft ein Mörder? [. . .] Wie sieht sein weicher Penis und sein harter Penis aus?” (She would take his picture . . . How does a murderer sleep? . . . what would his soft penis and his hard penis look like?; W, 152). Elsewhere, she intrudes on his privacy to create art: “Lola machte Fotos von Shlomo, von Shlomos Tränen, von Shlomos Fingern, die sich um den Maschendraht klammerten.” (Lola took photos of Shlomo, of Shlomo’s tears, of Shlomo’s fingers, clasping the wire fence; W, 192). In this image, empathy equates to commodification. For Walter Benjamin, history could be grasped “nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt” (only as a picture that flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability). As Lola sees it, however, the current obsession with the fragile ephemerality of the past is little more than a commercialization of trauma.

Almost three months after her arrival, Lola quits Israel for Thailand (W, 242). Her disillusionment with the nationalist turn taken in the Jewish homeland is perhaps summarized within her recollection, a few weeks later in Southeast Asia, of seeing TV images of the assassination of Prime Minister Isaac Rabin, nineteen years earlier, on November 4, 1995 (W, 316–18). Rabin was killed by an Israeli ultranationalist who was opposed to his rapprochement with the Palestinians and signing of the Oslo Accords. For Lola, modern-day Israel no longer embodies the openness to dialogue and embrace of others that she—with other progressive Jews in the diaspora—sees as quintessentially Jewish values. More prosaically, in traveling to Thailand Lola is also retracing her father’s route to Australia and even hopes that he will come and meet her halfway. Simon is present throughout the narrative, as the focus for Lola’s attachment to Jewish identity, the proximate cause for her feelings of abandonment, and the recipient of lengthy letters, included in the text, that mostly go unanswered. On the one hand, Lola’s father embodies the internalization of Holocaust trauma in the second and third generations, including an instinctive abhorrence of Germany. (A contrast is apparent with Lola’s non-Jewish mother, Petra, a redhead who is not interested in dwelling on the past but only in accumulating wealth and social standing; W, 66.) On the other hand, Simon is elusive, even absent, impatient, and sometimes unforgiving, as intimated by an episode Lola recalls from her early childhood when, during a brief visit several years after he had left his daughter to flee West, he plays hide and seek with her but cannot be found. Lola panics, but her father can only express irritation that she had not thought to look upwards (W, 41–44). Simon, it seems, also encapsulates the fragility of Lola’s connection to her Jewishness.

Simon’s incessant travel through the tourist spots of Southeast Asia presents the novel’s second—more pragmatic but ultimately less inspiring—possibility for a Jewish worldliness that is not fixated on either Germany or Israel. Simon quit communist East Germany (the GDR) in 1986, abandoning his young daughter to the care of her grandparents, but decided against settling in Israel, or even taking out Israeli citizenship (W, 23; 273). Now he refuses to think at all about the past, including his parents’ Holocaust trauma and his childhood in the GDR. (As communists, Simon’s parents had opted after the war to return to the Soviet zone. More generally, the novel touches on but doesn’t explore in depth the ambivalent situation of the Jewish community in East Germany.)8W, 307. See Ó’Dochartaigh, Germans and Jews, especially 55–67 and 91–101. Funk is the great-granddaughter of the East German writer Stephan Hermlin. To this extent, Lola’s father might seem to embody an unburdened Jewish existence, or an existence in which ethnic, religious, and cultural markers no longer weigh heavily. Simon ends up in Australia and makes a new start with an American woman he met while busking in Melbourne.

There is nothing transcendent about Simon’s globetrotting, however. He pursues only his own happiness, and his own interests. Likewise, Lola’s own brief sojourn on an island off the coast of Thailand undercuts any notion that this diasporic existence can substantiate her Jewish identity in any meaningful way. What she experiences instead is consumerism, the smug complacency of Western tourists, and her own orientalizing impulses. She arrives in Bangkok, delights in architecture that reminds her (of her stereotype) of Shanghai in the 1930s,9In the 1930s, Shanghai was a major destination for Jews fleeing the Nazis. There is no indication that Lola is referencing this history. imagines herself as an opium-addled white prostitute for rich Chinese men, and changes her Tinder profile to her new location before opting for a handful of Europeans only. She meets a Frenchman, and they undertake a tour of the city by tuk tuk (W, 262–67). On her taxi-boat crossing to the island, Lola’s gaze lingers on the naked torso of her Thai pilot as he fixes an entangled propeller, and she takes a colonizing pleasure in his “archaischen Männlichkeit” (archaic manliness; W, 278–79). Later, she removes her bikini top, just as was the norm in the former East Germany and just as she used to do in Tel Aviv, but now without regard for the cultural norms prevailing in the Muslim part of the island (W, 290–91).

Above all, it is the uncanny symmetry between two couples—one German, the other Israeli—also sojourning on the island that most obviously undermines the prospect that Lola might be able to define a diasporic Jewish identity through world travel. Toni turns up, quite unexpectedly, with his girlfriend Peggy. This is the non-Jewish German man who, on their date in Berlin, had told Lola that she could not be Jewish without a Jewish mother. Also present on the island are Maya and Hillel, Israelis who are resident in Berlin. Though one is from the perpetrator collective and the other from the victim collective, the two couples seem to mirror one another in a way that suggests a progressive generation of young people from around the world embracing cosmopolitanism, anti-racism, and diversity, underpinned by a critique of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and an idealized notion of Jewish values. However, as was evident from the earlier episode when Lola and Toni met in Berlin, Toni’s stance on Israel is tinged by antisemitism. Likewise, his presumption that he, a German, can define who is a Jew is both reminiscent of Nazi precedents and, in its reliance on Orthodox precepts, fundamentally conservative. His insistence that Jewishness is simply a matter of a maternal bloodline is quite the opposite, therefore, of the liberal Jewishness that Lola hopes for. In any case, she implies, this worldly Judaism does not even exist, or rather no longer exists. Maya and Hillel, accordingly, reject Israel on account of what they perceive as its turn toward ethno-nationalism and desire to find a more authentic Jewishness in Berlin. After the Holocaust, Lola demurs, this is pure nostalgia (W, 305–6). The truth is that the two young Israelis, like so many others, have moved to the German capital because of the freedom it offers to experiment personally and artistically—and because chocolate pudding is cheaper. This is a reference to the uproar caused in 2014 by a Facebook page run by a young Israeli, calling for his fellow citizens to immigrate to Berlin, where they could enjoy a cheaper cost of living (W, 305). As well as an affront to Israel’s campaign to encourage the diaspora to make aliyah—the Minister of Finance described the website as “anti-Zionist”10See Salloum, “The Chocolate Pudding Exodus.”—such a motive to live in the land of perpetrators is hardly a statement of universalistic Jewish values.

Lola seems unable to articulate either a self-confident Jewish identity, whether in Germany or Israel, or a more abstract notion of Jewish worldliness. She rejects Germany for its persistent antisemitism; Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians; and her father’s peripatetic, self-denying Jewishness as a consumerist pose. All Lola is left with is what she had before her travels even began, that is, Jewish memory not as a universalistic imperative but as perhaps the only source of her persistently fragile identity. Lacking a Jewish mother, and with her father having abandoned her, Lola’s Jewishness appears to derive solely, or at least primarily, from her grandmother’s Holocaust trauma—not unlike Izy in Superposition, in fact. Indeed, Hannah’s story grounds Lola’s narrative, as it were, as the only memory that does not seem to be ultimately self-indulgent—whether the endless stream of letters Lola addresses to her father, which together make an exhibition of her sorrow akin to the thirty-three images of Shlomo’s pain that she installs in his apartment, or indeed Shlomo’s shedding of tears for his own guilt. In a letter to her granddaughter, to be read after her death, Hannah relates how her family remained too long in Germany, how she was deported with her parents and older brother, and how she alone survived. She ended up in Dachau, where she was pulled from a pile of bodies by an American GI, Joshua Simon Katz—Simon’s real father (W, 226–27). Indeed, Hannah’s Jewish story seems to resonate with Lola more enduringly than the connections she makes in the present day to either Israelis or Palestinians. She wears her grandmother’s jewellery (W, 242) and writes Winternähe on her typewriter (W, 247). This investment in the materiality of Jewish memory, of course, suggests Jewish particularism rather than Jewish universalism.

At the end of the novel, Lola returns to the place she knows best: Berlin (W, 310). This homecoming perhaps signals a rejection of both forms of Jewish worldliness that she has tried out, in Israel and Thailand, and even an acceptance of her presence in Germany as the descendent of Holocaust survivors—if only on her father’s side, of course. As she writes to Shlomo, she can now live with the legacy of the Holocaust without being overwhelmed by the past: “Die Geschichte im Jetzt zu fühlen, ohne davon überfordert zu sein” (W, 315; To experience history in the present day, without being overwhelmed by it.) At the same time, Lola is back where she started. She is still unsure of her Jewish identity, still fixated on Germany, and still driven by resentment rather than a positive vision of Jewish solidarity. In the closing pages of the narrative, then, Lola reveals that she had commissioned placards featuring the Facebook post Olaf and Manuela had doctored to add a Hitler moustache to her upper lip, and she had paid for these to be placed around Berlin in a week’s time. The date is November 10—the morning after the anniversary of the pogrom of November 9, 1938.