Holocaust Memory, Solidarity, Worldliness

In many recent novels, casual sex is an especially significant marker of the protagonists’ desire to participate in the secular non-Jewish mainstream, although it often also signals female and/or Jewish (self-)debasement, as in Funk’s Winternähe. In other texts, gender and sexuality more generally—and especially queerness—are linked more explicitly to the exploration of Jewishness. Salzmann’s Außer sich is the most striking example, of course, but gay and bisexual characters also abound throughout Grjasnowa’s work. It is surely also significant that women writers—or, in Salzmann’s case, a trans author—dominate in recent German Jewish literature and that their themes very often include gender and sex norms, discrimination, and the body as well as Jewish identity. A detailed study of gender, sexuality, and Jewishness in contemporary German Jewish novels is yet to be written.

Intertextual references to the German, German Jewish, and Russian literary traditions are a further stylistic feature of contemporary German Jewish writing. In Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn (The lost son; 2020), for example, there are obvious allusions to, and even quotations of, the nineteenth-century Russian novel and the debate on parochialism and Europeanness. Other novels by Grjasnowa similarly cite Russian classics—most obviously Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt (All Russians love birch trees; 2012)1See Braese, “Auf dem Rothschild-Boulevard.” See also Jeffreys, The White Birch.—while in Gott ist nicht schüchtern the author again invokes early twentieth-century modernism and especially German Jewish and non-Jewish exiles from National Socialism, namely Erich Maria Remarque, Anna Seghers, and Bertolt Brecht, to establish a parallel with refugees in the present day. In an article on Gott, Jonathan Skolnik also speculates that Grjasnowa might have modeled the novel on Frank Werfel’s Die vierzig Tage von Musa Dagh (The forty days of Musa Dach; 1933), which narrates the Armenian genocide, and its foregrounding of a “Jewish authorial voice” speaking out on behalf of other minorities.2See Skolnik, “‘Jewish Writing.’” Elsewhere, Skolnik notes how, in Der Russe, the collected works of Lion Feuchtwanger are prized possessions in the Russian Jewish protagonist’s childhood apartment in Baku, next to family photographs. Andree Michaelis-König also identifies Feuchtwanger’s influence as well as that of the nineteenth-century satirist Heinrich Heine and the early twentieth-century lyricist Alfred Wolfenstein, both Jewish exiles from Germany just as Feuchtwanger was.3Michaelis-König, “Exterritoriale Visionen,” 75. (Feuchtwanger fled to France after Hitler came to power in 1933, spent a few months in the Soviet Union in 1936–37, and then emigrated to the United States in 1941.) In September 2022, Grjasnowa curated a workshop on exile at the Berliner Ensemble to accompany its dramatization of Feuchtwanger’s 1939 novel Exil. As Skolnik points out, such references suggest Grjasnowa’s resumption of the German Jewish literary tradition,4Skolnik, “Memory,” 131. and Michaelis-König makes the same argument for Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther and another Soviet-born writer, Dmitrij Kapitelman, whose 2016 début novel Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (The smile of my invisible father) has clear echoes of Kafka.5Michaelis-König, “Exterritoriale Visionen,” 75. For these Soviet-born authors, allusions to German literature indicate prior familiarity with German culture—in Sterndeutung, Arthur quotes Goethe, Kafka, Rilke, and Grass—and references to early twentieth-century German Jewish writing hint that they might be the heirs to its “decidedly diasporic model,” to paraphrase the literary scholar Andreas Kilcher, as “essentially universalistic, cosmopolitan, exterritorial or transnational.”6Kilcher, “Diasporakonzepte,” 136.

Kafka especially is a key intertext for both Soviet-born and German-born writers: Stein, Himmelfarb, Petrowskaja, Salzmann (in their second novel Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein / Glorious people; 2021), and Grjasnowa, including a direct mention of Kafka’s parable “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the law; 1915) in Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe (The legal haziness of a marriage; 2014).7Grjasnowa, Ehe, 102. Most obviously, the early twentieth-century Prague writer provides a prototype for authors’ engagement with the question of what it means to be a Jew—Kafka was riven with ambivalence, of course—and many have argued that that his work even predicts Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. More generally, however, Kafka is also a model for the autobiographically inspired writing that is perhaps the most salient characteristic of contemporary German Jewish literature. The burden of family expectations, including the responsibility to honor parents’ or grandparents’ traumatic experiences, shape almost all of the narratives examined in this study, as protagonists struggle to tell their own stories, which, more often than not, are versions of their authors’ experiences. In Altaras’s titos brille and Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther, the lead characters even share their author’s first name; in other novels, the correspondence is less overt but still obvious. This does not mean, of course, that literary texts are simply a reworking of “real life.” As in Kafka’s work, the actual life lived is only the starting point. In recent German Jewish novels, moreover, the autobiographical self is almost always positioned in relation to broader currents of history, primarily twentieth-century fascism and totalitarianism but also—in Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther, Salzmann’s Außer sich, and Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn—Jewish life in Europe from the period of the Enlightenment. As important, of course, is the self-positioning of autobiographically inspired protagonists as they navigate the continuing debate on Jewish identity today.

Self-positioning is a key term throughout the close readings that are presented in chapters 1–3. Specifically, how Jewish protagonists position themselves vis-à-vis other Jews is as significant as how they position themselves with regard to the non-Jewish majority. In some novels this “inner-Jewish” dialogue is prominently staged in the narrative, for example Sterndeutung, in which Arthur is determined to show the Holocaust survivor Roth that he has fully assimilated into German Jewish memory culture, and indeed has expanded it to include the Soviet Jewish experience. In others, it remains in the background even as it clearly drives the plot. In Funk’s Winternähe, Lola references the Orthodox establishment only briefly, but her urge to prove that she is “properly” Jewish is clearly a response to its doctrinal inflexibility.

Self-positioning, moreover, is a dynamic process. In Altaras’s titos brille (titos glasses; 2015), when Adriana asserts her claim to embody the established Jewish community against the Russian speakers recently arrived from the former Soviet Union, she also signals a shift in her attitude toward the German majority, and most likely a more general shift in how second- and third-generation Jews relate to the land of the perpetrators. Accommodation, if not reconciliation, is a marker of difference from the “not quite Jewish” newcomers. In Stein’s Rabbi Löw, this plasticity of identity in response to changed circumstances and competing claims is even more apparent. Rottenstein’s unorthodox Orthodox Judaism thus draws on Jewish heretics such as Sabbatai Zevi in order to reinvent German Jewish identity. On the one hand, he defies the religious establishment with its insistence on an unbroken Jewish lineage. On the other, he berates the laxity that characterizes how many, if not most, Jews in Germany actually practice the faith. Both Adriana and Rottenstein, moreover, implicitly call into question the centrality of Holocaust memory for Jewish identity today. Adriana, then, emphasizes her Sephardic Jewish family’s experience of antisemitism at the hands of Yugoslav communists after 1945 as well as at the hands of Germany’s Croatian fascist allies during the war. Rottenstein’s observant though scandalously transgressive Judaism alludes, of course, to the genocide but puts belief and ritual at the core of Jewish identity.

Rearticulating Holocaust memory, in fact, may be the most momentous way in which protagonists reposition themselves and define Jewish identity anew. In Funk’s Winternähe, Lola first plays the conventional second- and third-generation role of decrying German hypocrisy—even possibly channeling provocateurs such as Maxim Biller—before rethinking the legacy of the genocide, in Israel, as a basis for empathy with all oppressed minorities, even Palestinians. (Of course, she subsequently deconstructs this universalistic empathy.) In Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin, Holocaust trauma must be (largely) consigned to the past if Channah is to emerge into the “normality” of the non-Jewish mainstream. The protagonists of Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther and Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, in contrast, reconstruct or even fabulate the details of Holocaust family trauma in order to reassert the Jewishness of Russian Jewish identity against the skepticism of the established community. As noted above, Adriana does much the same in titos brille with regard to her Sephardic Jewish heritage.

Above all, Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin, Stein’s Rabbi Löw, Altaras’s titos brille, Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, Funk’s Winternähe, and Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther all challenge, more or less explicitly, the dominant role of Orthodox Jews in the community and as the custodians of Holocaust memory. In Die Enkelin, Channah overcomes the Holocaust fixation of the largely eastern European survivors so that she might “integrate.” Rabbi Löw puts the emphasis on faith rather than the genocide. The novels by Altaras, Himmelfarb, and Petrowskaja focus on other Jewish geographies as well as the “use” liberal and secular Jews make of Holocaust memory. And all of these texts by writers born between the 1960s and early 1980s assert the right of the children and grandchildren to define the meaning of the Holocaust for themselves, including from a defiantly non-religious perspective that might also even criticize Israel, as in Funk’s Winternähe and Altaras’s titos brille. Winternähe and Rabbi Löw also confront Orthodox strictures, of course, with protagonists who insist that a lack of a Jewish mother does not mean not Jewish at all. The challenge posed by the queerly Jewish—or Jewishly queer—Ali/Anton in Salzmann’s Außer sich is obvious here too. Though not explicitly mentioned, the context for this novel may be the increasingly visibility in recent decades of gay and lesbian Jews in Berlin synagogues and even as rabbis.8See Becker, “A Revived Congregation’s New Vision” and Igelhaut, “Young, Jewish and Queer.”

German-born Jews, therefore, position themselves in relation to Soviet-born newcomers. Observant Jews position themselves vis-à-vis their secular counterparts. Jews without a Jewish mother set themselves against those who insist on halachic conformity, just as gay, lesbian, and trans Jews similarly reinterpret Jewish identity. And all of these second- and third-generation Jews position themselves against the establishment, largely dominated for so long by the survivors, and largely Orthodox. Holocaust memory is the focal point of these maneuvers, but rethinking the legacy of the genocide is not an end in itself.

The close readings in chapters 1–3 further demonstrate that a key aspect of a protagonist’s self-positioning in relation to other Jews—and to the non-Jewish majority in Germany and ultimately globally—is whether and how he, she, or (in Außer sich) they is/are able to resolve the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism. To the extent that they position themselves as “worldly” in contrast to the conventional fixation of the postwar Jewish community on Jewish victimhood and the uncanniness of Jewish life in the land of the perpetrators, both younger German-born and Soviet-born Jews find that they need to express just what this Jewish worldliness means, for them. This can imply different degrees of willingness to accept the subsuming of the specificity of the Jewish experience into a universalistic framework that emphasizes its significance for humankind as a whole.

Stein’s Rabbi Löw is perhaps the most unworldly of the texts considered in chapters 1–3, with its allusions to the esotericism of Jewish ritual and Kabbalah, even as its non-halachic protagonist seeks to lift German Jews out of their introspective, arguably parochial focus on the Holocaust and to reconnect them to the wider Jewish tradition. There is no hint in Rabbi Löw that Jews should be for anything else other than their own survival. Likewise, in Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin and Funk’s Winternähe, Channah and Lola conclude that Jews have as much right as anybody else to be focused on their own history, although they are also determined to participate in the non-Jewish mainstream, unlike Stein’s Rottenstein—but the price to be paid for “integration” may be their relinquishment of overt markers of their Jewish identity. Adriana, in contrast, sees no contradiction between her insistence, in titos brille, on the specificity of her Jewish family story and her participation in secular society. However, she is also aware that, as a well-known author and actress, she is called upon by the majority to “represent” the Jewish presence in Germany. For the Soviet-born heroes of Kaufmann’s Superposition, Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, and Petrowskaja’s Veilleicht Esther, matters are complicated by the urge to assert a Russian identity in addition to a Jewish identity, and by the fact that this Jewish identity must in any case be first reconstructed. In all three novels, the worry that becoming more engaged “in the world” might dilute the particularity of a Jewish past that has only just been recovered from its historical erasure is limiting.

Expressing solidarity with others is both an articulation of Jewish worldliness and a form of self-positioning, of course. In general terms, the solidarity with refugees, trafficked women, and Muslim victims of neo-Nazi violence demonstrated in the work of writers such as Rabinowich, Lux, Vertlib, Dischereit, Martynova, Grjasnowa, and others—discussed at the start of chapter 2—asserts a vision of what Jews are for, of “Jewish purpose” therefore (Sutcliffe), that contrasts with the established community’s focus on Jewish concerns and its interactions with the non-Jewish German majority. The close readings presented in chapters 1–3, however, nuance any suggestion that Jewish solidarity is either easy or without limits. To the extent that Jewish protagonists position themselves not only in relation to other Jews and the non-Jewish white majority but also in relation to other minorities—whether Turkish Germans or recent refugees from predominantly Muslim countries—they become enmeshed in discussions of relative privilege, “Western” values, and liberal preconceptions.