3: Worldliness: Channah Trzebiner, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Olga Grjasnowa
In the decade after the end of the Cold War, when hopes were high that the world might finally coalesce around (Western) liberal values, some Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers alighted on the reemergence of Jewish life some fifty years after the Holocaust as evidence that Jews could model and even help to shape a more united Europe. Intellectual historian Diana Pinto, for example, introduced the concept of a “Jewish space,” as old and new democracies across the continent began to integrate the Holocaust into their national histories and set about promoting the Jewish past as an arena in which Europeans could engage and develop a common self-understanding.
1See Pinto, “A New Jewish Identity.” In subsequent articles Pinto adapts the concept to the increasingly challenging global geopolitical context from the late 1990s. See, for example, “The New Jewish Europe” and “A New Role for Jews in Europe.” There has been much debate on Pinto’s optimistic thesis. See Ganter and Oppenheim, “Jewish Space Reloaded.” In relation to the Jewish community in Germany specifically, Julius Schoeps wondered whether the arrival of post-Soviet Jews might foster a “cross-fertilisation of worldviews.”
2See Schoeps, “Saving the German-Jewish Legacy,” 58. Likewise, David Shneer saw the emergence of a new “German–Russian–European Jewish identity.”
3See David Shneer, “The Third Way.” Historian Dan Diner and literary scholar Oliver Lubrich both wondered whether newly arrived Russian Jews might point toward a postcolonial future for Europe, beyond empire and embodying hybridity,
4See Diner, “Residues of Empire.” See Oliver Lubrich, “Are Russian Jews Post-colonial?” and Sander Gilman and Y. Michal Bodemann (with Gökce Yuedakel)
5See Gilman, “Diaspora Judaism.” See Bodemann and Yuedakel, “Learning Diaspora.” were among a number of scholars who asked whether Jewish integration could serve as a model for Muslim integration. In each case, there is a suggestion that Jewishness, as the essence of intercultural exchange, might serve a higher aspiration, namely a new Europe characterized by diversity, openness, and tolerance. Dmitrij Belkin hints at this as well in his prognosis of an emerging “Patchwork-Judentum” (patchwork Judaism) in Germany and indeed across Europe.
6Belkin, “Wir könnten Avantgarde sein.” Recent scholarship on German Jewish authors and texts tends to affirm and even expand the suggestion of the fundamentally cosmopolitan significance
of Jewish existence in Germany and Europe. Luisa Banki and Casper Battegay, for example, offer seven theses on the newest Jewish writing, including aspects addressed in this book—a focus on families and generations and on historical trauma rather than on the Holocaust as an event; transgression; the ambivalence of Israel; and how depictions of casual sex are used to explore stereotypes of Jewishness. Banki and Battegay’s thesis seven is more abstract, and even programmatic, however: “contemporary German-language Jewish writing, therefore, points to the future of Europe: it contributes to a transnational, ‘European Europe’ and also even requires it.”
7Banki and Battegay, “Sieben Thesen,” 47. Recent German Jewish writing, in this analysis, anticipates the essence of a European unity that is (yet . . .) to come, and embodies the imperative of global interconnectedness.
Jews, it seems, suggest the potential for a more integrated and harmonious future simply by
being Jews. Indeed, their apparently intrinsic worldliness might even imply what British historian Adam Sutcliffe calls “Jewish purpose.” In his 2020 book
What are Jews for? History, Peoplehood, and Purpose, then, Sutcliffe examines the proposition, long debated in the Jewish tradition and in Christian and post-Christian frameworks, that “Jews are endowed with a particular historical purpose.” This, he summarizes, has been construed in different ways at different times: to transmit the scriptural evidence for the truth of Christianity; herald the second coming of Christ (through Jews’ return to Zion or conversion, or both); exemplify universalism through their overcoming of their own particularity; embody modernity with its myriad social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic transformations; be a “light unto the nations” through their ethical behaviour; or—through their suffering—point toward the imperative of universal human rights.
8Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For?, 1–24. Throughout, of course, there is a presupposition of Jewish singularity—Jews as the chosen people, or, more negatively, as “the people apart.”
9See Vital, A People Apart.For many Jews in Germany today, a framing of Jewishness, and Jewish purpose, as inherently cosmopolitan and socially engaged may have practical advantages. For younger Soviet-born Jews especially it likely accords with the lived experience of existing between nations, languages, and cultures. For these Russian speakers, in addition,
and for secular Jews, those not considered “properly” Jewish, and those whose gender identity or sexual orientation is at odds with Orthodox Judaism, it may validate their Jewishness vis-à-vis skeptics and infuse it with meaning. In short, solidarity might be an essential Jewish value—incorporating ethical injunctions from religious texts
10See Roth, The Jewish Idea of Ethics and Morality. and Jews’ striking participation in progressive causes—but, as argued in previous chapters, it is also a form of self-positioning.
Chapter 2 analyzed three novels in which solidarity seemed to be contingent on a reconciliation of Jewish universalism and Jewish particularism, or, to put it another way, on balancing an aspiration to engage on behalf of others with a desire to recover the specificity of the Jewish experience. In each text, the past is presumed to be original and originating, that is, it both grounds and founds Jewish identity in the present—Izy’s Soviet Jewish past in Superposition (2015), the Holocaust trauma of Lola’s grandparents in Winternähe (Near winter; 2015) and, in Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther; 2014), Katja’s efforts to reconstruct the fates of her relatives, including the manner of their execution by the Germans and their Ukrainian accomplices. Precisely because the past is so fundamental to their articulation of Jewish identity, however, all three struggle to fully embrace a worldly perspective. The same might be argued in relation to the protagonists of Altaras’s titos brille (2011), Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung (2015), and Stein’s Rabbi Löw (2014), who are all are concerned to find ways of living as Jews in modern-day Germany despite the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust.
This chapter begins with an analysis of Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin (The granddaughter; 2013) and specifically its protagonist’s wish not to integrate the past into her Jewish identity but rather to overcome Holocaust memory, and her Orthodox background, almost entirely in order to achieve a quite different kind of worldliness, now unburdened by trauma and fully aligned with the present. Following this, we turn to two novels that situate the Jewish past as a resource rather than as a legacy to be faithfully (or speculatively) reconstructed. The past, even including the Holocaust, becomes a literary trope, as it were, that can be reframed and even rewritten to underpin global engagement in vastly different contexts. In Salzmann’s Außer sich (Besides oneself; 2017) and Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn (The lost son; 2020), it is argued, a diffuse worldliness is communicated through generalized motifs of exile, marginalization, and persecution. How Jewish this is may be an open question.