The Postmigrant Society and the Limits of Solidarity?

With the term “postmigrantisch,” Grjasnowa’s protagonist is most likely citing the “postmigrant theater” introduced by Shermin Langhoff at the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theater in 2008 and then at the Maxim Gorki Theater, following her appointment as manager and artistic director in 2013. Langhoff’s concept placed migrants and migrant themes at the heart of the production and thus at the center of cultural discourse.2See Sharifi, “Postmigrant Theatre.” Alternatively, although perhaps less likely, Mascha may be alluding to the work of sociologists including Naika Foroutan and Erol Yıldız, who—also drawing on Langhoff’s theater work—reference the term as a conceptual tool in their rethinking of German (and Austrian) society today. While they have different emphases and objects of study, Foroutan and Yıldız broadly understand postmigrant society to mean: first, a theoretical lens in academic research that focuses on migrants and the migrant experience as fundamental to the study of contemporary Germany; second, a social reality that has been comprehensively shaped by migration, with this fact now acknowledged in social, political, and cultural discourses; and, third, the preponderance of cultural artifacts by migrants, about migrants, or with migrants central to the performance or text.3See, for example, Foroutan, Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft and Yıldız and Hill, eds., Postmigrantische Visionen.

The close readings presented in this book have focused on Jewish protagonists’ self-positioning vis-à-vis other Jews and, to a lesser extent, in relation to the non-Jewish majority. Applying the lens of the postmigrant society, however, opens up a new perspective on the other characters that inhabit recent German Jewish novels, sometimes at the margins—such as the migrants and gypsies in Kaufmann’s Superposition—and sometimes at the heart of the narrative, as in Grjasnowa’s Der Russe. How Jewish protagonists position themselves with regard to other minorities may be just as significant as the dynamics that exist between Jews and between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Reading—or rereading—German Jewish writing as a reflection of and an engagement with the social reality of the postmigrant society, then, can deepen our understanding of both the texts themselves and how Jews in Germany might respond in quite different ways to the challenges and opportunities it presents. As we shall see, for some protagonists the postmigrant society is largely ignored as they align themselves, even implicitly, with the white German majority. For others, engagement and empathy is tempered by caution and even detachment. And for a third set of Jewish lead characters, there is a potential for situating Jews not as a “people apart”4See Vital, A People Apart. but as fundamentally connected through alliances and activism, albeit with concerns regarding their own relative privilege and power.

In Altaras’s titos brille, accordingly, there is no mention of any other minorities—excepting, of course, the Russian-speaking immigrants who arrive after 1991. This is striking, given the fact that the period that Adriana describes from the mid-1960s—when her family fled Yugoslavia and settled in Germany—largely corresponds to the period in which several million Turkish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, and even Yugoslav “guest workers” arrived. (In fact, the recruitment of foreign workers began in 1955.) For Adriana, it could be argued, Soviet-born Jews after 1991 may represent yet another wave of newcomers from whom the established Jewish community might wish to distinguish itself. Unlike, say, Maxim Biller’s Esra (2003), which at least imagines a Jewish-Muslim intimacy,5Even in Esra, however, it turns out that the jilted Jewish protagonist’s Turkish German ex-lover hails from a family of Dönme—“hidden Jews” who were once followers of the heretic Sabbatai Zevi. (See the discussion in chapter 1 of Benjamin Stein’s Rabbi Löw.) See Taberner, “Esra.” Adriana is entirely focused on her situation—and status—within the Jewish community and in relation to the non-­Jewish German majority. Her narrative is certainly not a “touching tale” of engagement between minorities, to use the term American scholar Leslie Adelson introduced to describe a subset of novels by Jewish and Turkish authors in the 1990s.6See Adelson, “Touching Tales.” Channah, in Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin, similarly makes no reference to other minorities—with the exception of her parody of a Russian Jewish mother—and defines herself only in relation to her non-Jewish German friends and her non-Jewish German boyfriend. Of course, there is no requirement for German Jewish writers to allude to other minorities—any more than authors from the non-Jewish majority are obliged to cite Jews—but in these two novels the omission seems significant.

In most of the other texts examined in this study, other minorities are more visible, and Jewish protagonists more consciously define themselves in relation to these “other” others. In Kaufmann’s Superposition, as noted above, homeless people, migrants, and gypsies exist at the margins of the narrative, which is otherwise largely focused on Izy’s interactions with her German-majority friends, her fellow Soviet-born Jewish on-off lover Timur, and Sascha, a Russian woman who was admitted because (like 1.8 million others) she could prove German ancestry.7Kaufmann, Superposition, 98. See Panagiotidis, Postsowjetische Migration. In fact, Izy’s engagement with non-white minorities is limited and betrays her own prejudice and privilege. She assumes that Muslims automatically dismiss women while she also objectifies a young Iranian woman in a way that is both misogynist and orientalizing. In Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung, Arthur is less condescending toward the asylum seekers whose hostels are being burned down (and to the victims of genocide in Rwanda, taking place in the narrative present) but he too is unable—or unwilling—to overcome the difference he perceives between his experience and that of other migrants to Germany. His journey from Russia, he notes, was comfortable, by train, and without bureaucratic delays or hostile border guards. He could be confident that his belongings would not be stolen by local police in Ukraine, and he only left behind his books because it wasn’t possible to pack them all in his suitcases.8Himmelfarb, Sterndeutung, 247–48. (The relative comfort of Soviet-born Jews’ transit to Germany is a theme in other recent novels. The narrator of Kapitelman’s Das Lächeln, for example, compares his family’s arrival, facilitated by bureaucrats and border guards, with the hostility faced by Syrian refugees in 2015.)9Kapitelman, Das Lächeln, 23–24.

In her widely read study of how Jewish immigrants in the United States marked their difference from other minorities, assimilated, and eventually achieved success in their new country, anthropologist Karen Brodkin Sacks argues that they effectively “became white.”10See Brodkin Sacks, How Jews Became White Folks. In a similar vein, literary scholar Karolina Krasuska has recently argued that for Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis, and other Soviet-born Jewish writers who arrived in America beginning in the late 1980s or as part of the large migration wave after 1991—in parallel with those who went to Germany—a concern with whiteness, and white privilege, is central.11See Krasuska, Soviet-born. There are hints of this same concern in Kaufmann and Himmelfarb, as indicated above. In Funk, Petrowskaja, and Salzmann, it is addressed more directly. In Funk’s Winternähe, Lola flees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the complexities of solidarity—to a remote Thai island, where she meets a German couple and an Israeli couple and indulges, with these white Western tourists, in a neo-colonial exploitation of the local Muslim population. In Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther, Katja travels to Kalisz in Poland and is shown around the city by a Muslim immigrant, including the Hebrew letters on paving stones made out of recycled gravestones. This passage is the only one in the narrative that names another minority group in the present day and appears somewhat incongruous until the reader grasps that a parallel is being drawn. Katja comments that her Muslim tour guide was “die perfekte Andere” (the perfect other)12Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther, 134. and that this is a term that is also applied to her by non-Jewish Germans. On the one hand, there is a suggestion here of solidarity between Jewish and Muslim minorities, a kind of “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” to use Homi Bhabha’s term.13See Bhabha, “Unsatisfied.” On the other hand, it might be that Katja repeats—and even endorses—the prejudice behind the ostensible compliment aimed at the good-natured foreigner who integrates and asks for nothing in return.

As discussed in chapter 3, in Salzmann’s Außer sich Ali/Anton appropriates the exotic otherness of Turkey’s marginalized minorities in order to rip off German sex tourists while also playing at being white on the terrace of one of Istanbul’s finest hotels. In fact, Außer sich can be read as a counterpart—but also potential corrective—to the author’s collaboration with Max Czollek on the “Desintegrationskongress” (de-integration congress) in 2016 and the 2017 “Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage” (radical Jewish cultural days). (Czollek was mentioned in the introduction as the target of Maxim Biller’s ire. Biller accused Czollek of exploiting his grandfather’s wartime exile in Shanghai to “fake” Jewish credentials.) The “Desintegrationskongress” and the “Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage” brought together minority artists, activists, and intellectuals to debate their resistance to “integration” into the white German mainstream.14See Landry, “Rethinking Migration.” Both events took place at Berlin’s Gorki Theater—where Shermin Langhoff is the director—and sought to build coalitions across ethnic and sexual minorities to challenge concepts of “majority culture” and “belonging.”15See Roca Lizarazu, “‘Integration.’” What Außer sich offers, therefore, is a literary reflection on what is required to actually achieve this solidarity, insofar as Jews in Germany today enjoy a degree of privilege—or at least “passing”—that is not available to people with darker skin. Holocaust memory plays a relatively minor role in both the novel and Salzmann’s wider program, with Czollek, of forming Jewish-Muslim-queer alliances. The impetus for solidarity comes instead from a shared experience of marginality, it seems, but effort is still needed to acknowledge significant differences and impacts.

Grjasnowa’s first novel Der Russe, as discussed above, presents the postmigrant society as a given. Mascha and her friends from other minorities support one another and Mascha eventually connects her grandmother’s tale of flight from the Nazis to the ethnic clashes in Azerbaijan in 1992 and to Palestinians in the narrative present. In Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe, released two years later in 2014, the focus is on differences between minorities and on how citizenship and legal residence confer rights on some while excluding others. Jonoun, Leyla, and Altay express their Jewish-Christian-Muslim solidarity through their queerly three-way relationship and travel freely on their Western passports, in contrast to the refugees, asylum seekers, and sex workers who ghost through the background of the narrative but are never directly named. Indeed, this contrast may be summarized in a passing reference to a reproduction of (one of) Maurycy Gottlieb’s self-portraits, in which he appears as Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, with regal hints of the Persian king also of that name who—in the Old Testament—spared the Jews of his realm following the pleading of his Jewish wife Esther.16Grjasnowa, Ehe, 203. Mendelsohn, Painting a People, 110–11. Maurycy Gottlieb was one of the most significant Polish Jewish artists of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. In his work—and in his life—Gottlieb confronted the dilemma of remaining loyal to his Jewish roots versus complete assimilation, and his self-portrait of 1876 hints at this with its obvious suggestions of stereotypically Jewish traits combined with an aspiration to Polish nobility. At the same time, the figure of the wandering Jew17See Cohen, “The ‘Wandering Jew.’” also suggests a contrast between the novel’s privileged protagonists and the “‘irregular’ migrants” at its margins. Like the mention of the reproduction of Gottlieb’s self-portrait on the wall of Altay’s well-connected Azeri lover, they simply add detail to the setting in which the main action takes place. In the New Testament, Ahasuerus taunted Christ en route to crucifixion and was thereafter condemned to wander the globe for all eternity. Today, people attempting to flee war, persecution, and poverty are similarly doomed to live without rights and always at risk of violence. More generally, Grjasnowa has acknowledged the work of Judith Butler and Jasbir K. Puar18Sheaffer, “Olga Grjasnowa.” on how the West now embraces gay rights—and philosemitism—as a means of asserting its moral superiority over “Islamic intolerance.” Ehe, accordingly, is clearly inspired by the author’s reading of Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007). The “juridical haziness of their marriage” (juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe) can be tolerated as long as Jonoun, Leyla, and Altay conform to Western liberal norms and distinguish themselves from the fundamentalist, women-hating, and antisemitic Islamicists supposedly threatening to terrorize Europe. Salzmann too cites Puar’s book as a key influence.19See Salzmann’s essay “Unsichtbar,” especially 19.

As described in chapter 3, Grjasnowa’s 2017 Gott is nicht schüchtern is about the civil war in Syria and the sudden arrival of between one and two million refugees in Europe in the summer of 2015.20FRONTEX recorded 1,802,267 border crossings for 2015, but that may include a number of multiple attempts by the same people. See https://frontex.europa.eu/along-eu-borders/migratory-map/. Last accessed July 25, 2024. In part, the novel responds to the representation in sections of the media and political discourse of the predominantly Muslim refugees as a faceless mass, a threat to “Western civilization,” and especially a danger to women. Some public figures—including members of the Jewish community—also claimed that they represented an existential threat to Jews in Germany.21See Arnold and König, “‘One Million Antisemites?’” In relating why and how each of the three Syrian protagonists flee, accordingly, the third-person narrator emphasizes their humanity. Beyond this, infrequent but unmistakable references to the Holocaust provide a framework for the German reader to grasp the brutality of the Syrian regime and the suffering of its victims. At the same time, however, the Holocaust is provincialized—or decolonized—as a peculiarly European (and North American) obsession. The narrator—Jewish, it can be inferred—and the most likely non-Jewish German reader thus assimilate the conflict in Syria into their shared discourse of Holocaust memory, including via allusions to Jewish and non-Jewish writers who fled Nazism (Anna Seghers, Erich Maria Remarque, and Bertolt Brecht). The refugees themselves, however—insofar as their words are directly reported at key moments in the narrative—make no mention whatsoever of this most horrific episode in European history. Indeed, the narrator’s abstract invocations of Jewish suffering—resonating with European publics22See Diner, “Restitution and Memory.”—are relativized by more visceral episodes in which Syrians, North Africans, and other migrants speak with one another and shape their own “refugee solidarity” by exchanging stories of state repression, forced conscription, torture, and indiscriminate bombing.23Grjasnowa, Gott, e.g., 243. The suggestion may be that while in Europe Jews and the non-Jewish white majority are (broadly) aligned, those with roots in other parts of the world have different experiences, and memories.

In her essay “Aus sicherer Entfernung” (From a safe distance; 2015) on the civil war in Syria and the “refugee crisis,” Grjasnowa directly invokes—and even instrumentalizes—Holocaust memory as a call for intervention on behalf of others: “Wozu brauchen wir überhaupt noch das Gedenken an den Holocaust, wenn sich daraus keine Maxime für unser Handeln ergibt?”24Grjasnowa, “Aus sicherer Entfernung,” 62. (What do we need commemoration of the Holocaust for at all, if nothing results for the way we act?). The author’s 2021 book-length essay Die Macht der Mehrsprachigkeit (The power of multilingualism) likewise frames (her) Jewish family history as underpinning a philosophical position that emphasizes multiculturalism, anti-­racism and pro-migrant activism, and global solidarity.25See Grjasnowa, Die Macht. Her novel Gott, though, suggests that while Holocaust memory may be useful—and even necessary—to mobilize a European public, it also implies a position of privilege. In an interview with Katja Garloff and Agnes Mueller, then, Grjasnowa confirms that she considers her novel to be “Jewish writing” because “migration is a very Jewish topic,”26Garloff and Mueller, “Interview with Olga Grjasnowa,” 227. yet this does not—cannot—mean that the experiences of Jewish refugees in the past are the same as those of Muslim refugees now, or that Soviet-born Jewish writers can necessarily relate. Likewise, in her essay “Privilegien” (Privileges), published in the collection by migrant writers Eure Heimat ist unser Alptraum (Your home is our nightmare; 2020), Grjasnowa notes that the arrival of dark-skinned, dark-haired refugees from the Middle East means that she is no longer regarded as foreign. On vacation with her daughter in Istanbul, her German passport distinguishes her from the Syrians begging for their help. She further reflects on the term “migrant literature” as a racist category and how Muslims in Europe are denied the security that she—white, and with German papers—easily enjoys.27Grjasnowa, “Privilegien,” 130-9.

Finally, rereading Grjasnowa’s work through the lens of the postmigrant society adds an important dimension to the close reading of her most recent novel, Der verlorene Sohn (2020), presented in chapter 3.28Grjasnowa’s Juli, August, September was due to be released in September 2024, several months after the completion of this manuscript. The pre-­publicity describes a plot centered on a Berlin-based post-Soviet Jewish family, who travel to Gran Canaria to meet their Russian-speaking relatives from Israel and to explore their Russian Jewish identity. There, the emphasis was on the—likely—Jewish narrator as a mediator of sorts between the experience of the nineteenth-century Muslim protagonist and the present-day non-Jewish German reader. It was argued that the narrator’s allusive framing of Jamalludin’s abduction and subsequent marginalization in Tsarist Russia illuminates the broader failure of the Enlightenment to realize its promise of tolerance and equality for all—including for Muslims today. What was left unexplored, however, was the relationship between Jewish narrator and Muslim protagonist, both minorities in relation to the (probable) German-majority reader. If the novel as a whole functions as an allegory for the treatment of Muslims in contemporary Germany, and Europe, then it is surely also an allegory for the possibilities—and limitations—of Jewish-Muslim solidarity. This novel about nineteenth-century Russia, it seems, might actually be about today’s postmigrant society.

Now, the complexity of privilege is more fully articulated. In Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn, it can be argued, a (likely) Jew explains the dynamics of anti-Muslim discrimination for the majority while “passing” for the conventional narrator of a European novel in the nineteenth-century tradition, that is, as white and a Christian. (Imagining Gott’s narrator as a Jewish woman further undermines this tradition, of course.) On the one hand, this suggests privilege, or at least proximity to privilege. On the other hand, it suggests self-effacement, as the unnamed narrator benefits from the presumption of authority only for as long as she conceals her true identity. The non-Jewish Jew must not appear Jewish. Equally, it is an open question whether mobilizing on behalf of others supersedes Jewish interests.