Conclusion: The Postmigrant Society and the Limits of Solidarity—After October 7, 2023
This book started out from the dramatic demographic transformation of the Jewish presence in Germany since the early 1990s. The Holocaust survivors from eastern Europe who largely reestablished the community after 1945 have now almost all passed away. Their second- and third-generation descendants are in the minority compared to the more than 220,000 people who arrived as jüdische Kontingentflüchtlinge from the successor states of the former Soviet Union and their children; and immigrants from America and Israel in particular have also made a contribution, albeit far smaller. Along with demographic renewal, there has also been a pluralization of Jewish life, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations, a strongly secular understanding of Jewish heritage and culture, and the emergence—or importation from overseas—of feminist and LGBTQ challenges to traditional Judaism.
The next section presents a summary of the outcomes of the close readings in chapters 1–3 of recent novels by Adriana Altaras, Jan Himmelfarb, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Kat Kaufmann, and Katja Petrowskaja, Channah Trzebiner, Marianna Sasha Salzmann, and Olga Grjasnowa. Cross-cutting themes and key stylistic features are identified as well as a unifying concern across the diversity of the New German Jewish literature with the rearticulation of Jewish identity. This is followed by a discussion of the emerging trend in German Jewish writing to position Jews in Germany in relation to what sociologists Erol Yıldız and Naika Foroutan describe as the “postmigrant society,” that is, explicitly in relation to a public discourse in Germany that now accepts the reality of migration and its profound reshaping of politics, culture, and identity. Here, the focus is on protagonists’ engagement with other minorities but also on the limits of their solidarity. A final section examines interviews and essays by some of the authors examined in this book that appeared in the months after the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ferocious response. As this study was being finalized, the war was still ongoing, provoking polarized responses around the world—including among Jews in Germany and across the diaspora.