At the start of this chapter, reference was made to the hope expressed by some Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals in the 1990s that newly vibrant Jewish communities might herald a new era of pan-European solidarity. The collapse of communism and the spread of liberal democracy, philosophers, historians, and sociologists speculated, had created the conditions for a reemergence of Jewish life across the continent, which would in its turn both embody and inspire a more cosmopolitan future. Literary scholars too believed that this renaissance of Jewish thought and culture might anticipate more hybrid and fluid identities, in Europe and indeed globally. More recently, they have focused less on the specific context of the end of the Cold War and revived a more general association of Jews with diaspora, even nomadism, cosmopolitan exchange, and the emancipatory potential of mediating between cultures.
The three texts examined above respond to this expectation that there should be a purpose to Jewish existence beyond simple self-perpetuation, that is, to point the way toward a more enlightened future for all humankind. Each novel positions its Jewish protagonist or (likely) Jewish narrator differently in this regard, confirming that Jews are of course not all alike while perhaps also exemplifying the complexity, choices, and compromises of actually living “in the world” as a Jew. In Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin (2013), accordingly, worldliness means exiting Orthodox Judaism, keeping Holocaust memory alive but not being defined by it, and integration into the mainstream: becoming “normal” by not deriving a specific mission from Jewish suffering or from Jewish particularity. For Ali in Salzmann’s Außer sich, Jewish solidarity—which may not be all that Jewish—must be lived rather than only theorized, via pragmatic engagement that builds alliances across minorities while acknowledging persisting differences. Finally, Grjasnowa’s nameless narrator in Der verlorene Sohn may embody a Jewish imperative to mobilize on behalf of others that tends toward the transcendence of Jewishness itself. More negatively, however, this may appear as a kind of self-erasure.
In Salzmann and Grjasnowa in particular, the reference to the concrete situation of Jews in contemporary Germany—their self-positioning vis-à-vis other Jews and in relation to the non-Jewish majority and to other minorities—may be less obvious than in the texts by Altaras, Himmelfarb, Stein, Funk, Kaufmann, and Petrowskaja analyzed in chapters 1 and 2, but it can still be inferred. Indeed, it might even be argued that relative privilege and the limits of solidarity with other minorities are just as central to the debate on Jewish identity today as Holocaust memory, disagreement about who “counts” as a Jew, and divisions on Israel. For the younger generation especially, it might even be more important. Following a brief summary of the close readings in chapters 1–3 and how they relate to the theoretical framework set out at the beginning of this study, accordingly, the conclusion returns to this overarching concern. The argument is that the trend in recent writing for Jewish protagonists to position themselves no longer primarily in relation to the non-Jewish German majority but now in relation to other “others” reflects the broader development of what scholars including Erol Yıldız and Naika Foroutan term a “postmigrant society.” This new self-positioning, however, does not mean that the question of what it means to be a Jew in Germany has been resolved—it has simply been reframed. The final section of the conclusion reflects on self-identified Jewish authors’ responses to the atrocity perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 and speculates about how the most lethal attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and Israel’s ferocious offensive in Gaza—might shape the next evolution in German Jewish writing.