I owe my connection with Germany to the fact that my parents emigrated there from Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968. It was an accidental choice, made on the basis of such arbitrary factors as a job in Hamburg for my father and contacts with a few emigré friends. However, I quickly discovered that there are significant consequences when a Jew chooses to live in post-Holocaust Germany.
On my very first day in a German high school, our class received a distinguished visitor: a well-known Israeli journalist who was interested in German teenagers' knowledge of their country's past. He asked a simple question: what did they know about Hitler? My new classmates answered that Hitler was a dictator who was very good for the German economy because he built the Autobahn and solved the unemployment problem. They were critical of his nationalism and militarism, but did not mention the Holocaust. The Israeli visitor seemed amused, but the school principal, who was present during the discussion, looked horrified and embarrassed. This was 1970, twenty-five years after the end of World War II.
In Germany I did not have any obvious reason to feel discriminated against or ostracized in any way. But after a while, certain experiences began to leave an unpleasant aftertaste. German reactions to my Jewishness would range from awkward philo-Semitism to cautious anti-Semitism, depending not so much on the person I was dealing with as on the circumstances of our encounter. Thus, the same teacher would ask me solicitous questions about my family's past, and on a different occasion mutter something concerning "all those lies about the camps."
As a Jew in Germany, one develops a sort of divided vision: suspect all the older people, don't blame the young ones. It doesn't always help. From the moment I realized that the sense of history of the Germans--including those of my generation--did not exactly match my own, I no longer saw Germany as a country like any other. I saw myself as a polite visitor who was trying hard to ignore the fact that her (equally, if not more) polite host was a child molester. Once, I dozed off on an express train from Hamburg to Munich; when I opened my eyes, we <%1>were passing Dachau. The station signs--Dachau-Dachau-Dachau<%0>--triggered an emotional turmoil I can describe only as a flash of collective memory. To the German friends traveling with me, Dachau was just another town.
Yet, thanks to a very knowledgeable and demanding teacher in high school, I immersed myself in German language and literature. I studied German classics, German contemporary writing, German translations of world literature from the ancient Greeks to Marcel Proust. This teacher was very surprised, and sorry, when I later informed her that I felt myself to be incompatible with the German language. As an aspiring writer, I experienced a strong conflict between my desire to write and my reluctance to do so in German. So I moved away, in search of a more compatible adopted home and language. My brother (Maxim Biller), however, surprised me some years later by becoming a German writer. The idea for this anthology emerged when I discovered that he was only one of many young Jewish authors writing in German.
New generations of Germans have grown up with hardly a notion of the evil that happened under Hitler. On the other hand, young Jews raised in postwar Germany or Austria by parents who had either returned from exile or had survived the concentration camps, were brought up on the (often very immediate) memories of that evil, as if the Holocaust had happened only yesterday.
In this collection, fourteen young Jewish authors write about their experience of growing up in post-Holocaust Germany and Austria. There are 40,000 Jews living in Germany and 10,000 in Austria today, a mere shadow of their pre-Holocaust presence. Yet, less than fifty years after the virtual annihilation of their communities by the Nazi regime, Jewish writers are, once again, a distinctive and important voice on the German and Austrian cultural scene.
To be a young German Jewish writer takes more than talent and the desire to write. It requires, at the very least, the writer's acceptance of his or her parents' decision to make or remake Germany their home, however transitory. And it means writing in the language of those who committed genocide against the Jewish people. It is a conscious choice one makes, and it is not an easy one, as one can see from my own experiences.
The writers whose work is presented here have all made this choice. A few are very close to the experience of surviving the Holocaust, most quite remote from it. None can ignore the issue, and some have tried (more or less successfully) to remove themselves physically, though not culturally, from the country where they feel both rootless and comfortable.
Their books and articles are of great interest to the German reading public. They are widely read and reviewed. In fact, it is tempting to think that to be demonstratively Jewish is a definite asset for a young writer in Germany today. Observed with curiosity as exotic representatives of an almost extinct species, they attract a great deal of critical attention, which sometimes lacks literary objectivity. The German cultural establishment looks upon the very existence of young Jewish authors with self-satisfaction, as it suggests that Germany and Austria are, once again, "ordinary" European countries.
If this were actually the case, we would expect contemporary German literature to reflect a deep recognition of these countries' recent history of brutality. As it is, however, the discrepancy is quite blatant: for most young German writers, the past appears to have been deleted, whereas for their Jewish counterparts it is an indelible part of their consciousness of the present. In Germany there seems to be a significant gap between the way in which the Holocaust is approached in scholarly works and historical documentaries, and the capacity of German writers to cope with their past on an emotional level.
It should be noted that young Jewish authors writing in German do not produce what has come to be known as "Holocaust literature." They do not dwell on the horror and the suffering of the Holocaust, nor do they, for the most part, reach into their own family history for their material. On the contrary: some are eager to show how tired they are of constantly having to deal with the past, of being singled out as interesting, unusual specimens. They realize their anomalous position, and they are fed up with its implications.
The official Jewish community in Germany, if it is mentioned at all, is depicted in unflattering terms by its literary offspring, and is not seen as a source of support by those who feel isolated as Jews. Their resentment of their parents' choice to ignore all they lived through or sought exile from is expressed in an antagonistic attitude toward the postwar Jewish establishment, and an unwillingness to conform to the older generation's notion of a "committed Jew." In the view of some of these authors, a Jewish revival in Germany and Austria is an absurd concept.
Unlike their pre-Holocaust counterparts, most of these writers are best described as Jews writing in German, rather than Germans and Austrians who happen to be Jewish. Thus, these authors cannot, in any straightforward sense, be considered heirs to a continuous German-Jewish literary tradition. They can no longer assimilate into the German literary environment, "passing," as could their predecessors, for German authors. The uniqueness of new German and Austrian Jewish writing consists in creating a literature which is, above all, markedly Jewish.
Contemporary German literature tends to be abstract and impersonal; Jewish authors represent a different approach. They tell stories in which the author/narrator's personal voice is strongly felt. Their language is an instrument of storytelling, of soul-searching, not a cold medium for linguistic experiments. This is true of both the fiction and the nonfiction in this volume.
To tell a story is to try to remember and to understand a sequence of events which might otherwise vanish from memory. For postwar German and Austrian Jewish authors, the Holocaust is not an abstract notion, but a tangible issue affecting their lives and their writing. At the same time, it is a source of stifling and complex social taboos. These writers want to understand the crippling barriers between themselves and their parents, between Jews and Germans. They want to transcend and to break the taboos; to remember the past, but not to wallow in it.
Some German Jewish writers have been influenced by Jewish-American writing. This affinity expresses more than an ethnic connection; it also indicates a need to fit into a literary framework other than the German, a form of literary exile: writing in German without producing a recognizably German quality in their writing. A good example is the Rothian element in the fiction of Rafael Seligmann and Maxim Biller.
Several of the authors in this anthology have chosen physical exile, where they continue to write in German. Thus, Barbara Honigmann, Peter Stephan Jungk, and Benjamin Korn now live in France; Henryk Broder divides his time between Germany and Israel; and Chaim Noll lives in Rome. The concept of exile plays a central role in German Jewish writers' fiction and nonfiction, in various forms. In his essay, "Heimat? No Thanks," Henryk Broder contemplates the history of Jews in Germany in relation to his own decision to live in Israel as a German citizen.
Chaim Noll's account of his refusal to conform to the East German regime is a story of an inner exile through books, which leads him to Judaism. Noll's parents were prominent Communist functionaries, and he was raised in an atmosphere in which the family's Jewish background was a taboo subject. Noll himself did not dissent from Marxist ideology until he began to discover his Jewish roots. His rebellion culminated in his refusal to be drafted into the East German Army. As a result, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Both selections from Barbara Honigmann's fiction deal with exile, also from East Germany. The narrator in "Novel of a Child," an isolated, lonely single mother, speaks of her hunger for "foreign cities and foreign countries," and a longing for Jerusalem. Instead of this unattainable exile, she is drawn to the tiny East Berlin Jewish community, "the Jews of the Jews." In Honigmann's novel A Love Out of Nothing, the protagonist, who has emigrated from East Berlin to Paris, argues with a Jewish-American student about living in Germany: "He would always reproach me: how could Jews bring themselves to live in Germany after everything that happened to them there . . . He wanted to persuade me to come to New York with him . . . I said, No, no, once I'm at Ellis Island, I'll never get out again. Ellis Island is my home."
Maxim Biller's short story "Finkelstein's Fingers" contains an unusual exile motif. In a scene where a young Jewish writer from Germany becomes aware of the onset of Shabbat in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York's Lower East Side, there is a sense of escape into a kind of atavistic Jewish utopia, a Jewish world unto itself, seemingly intact and untouched by the Holocaust.
As a journalist, Biller tries to describe without sentiment the pilgrimage of young Frankfurt Jews to Auschwitz and other "Holocaust sites" in Poland. Their encounter with Polish anti-Semitism is almost as powerful as their visits to concentration camps. In Germany, "the place of forgetting," raw, exposed anti-Semitism is a rare occurrence in these teenagers' lives. But in Poland they discover that it is as alive as if the Holocaust and the local aftermath had never happened, and as if that country's ancient, vibrant Jewish culture had not been dead for almost half a century. In spite of the fact that they hate their parents for raising them in Germany, the young members of the tour group to Poland welcome their return to Frankfurt as a blessing. In "See Auschwitz and Die," Biller's attitude to "the whole Holocaust shit" is neither cynical nor indifferent, despite his sacrilegious language and images. This author's bellicose ego tortures German and Jewish sensibilities alike.
Rafael Seligmann shares with Biller an impatience with both Jewish and Gentile taboos, and with the enormous accumulation of symbols and "forbidden" feelings on either side. These two authors have been accused of creating negative caricatures of both Jewish and non-Jewish characters, and of unnecessarily provoking sentiments which, some critics contend, are best left dormant.
Seligmann's novel Rubinstein's Auction has been compared to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. The principal points of comparison are the neurotic Jewish family dominated by a caricature of a Jewish mother, and the frequently masturbating adolescent son in desperate search of his first sexual experience. Seligmann's protagonist feels profoundly alienated from his parents because they made him leave his native Israel when he was ten, and decided to return to their native Germany, where he is very unhappy. This novel reflects the author's personal background. His parents fled Nazi Germany and made their home in Palestine, returning to Germany in the 1950s. Seligmann is thus the only one of the current generation of young German Jewish writers for whom Germany is, on the one hand, the home of his immediate ancestors and, on the other hand, doubly forbidden territory, due to his parents' returning there from Israel after fleeing the Holocaust. Unlike the American diaspora, which symbolizes freedom, the German diaspora carries the stigma of a forbidden home. Seligmann's protagonist resolves his inner conflict by finally arriving at the conclusion that, having grown up in Germany, he is no longer an ex-Israeli, but a German Jew. This author writes with brutal self-mockery and frequent attempts at humor that often dissolve in anger and self-pity.
Robert Schindel was born in 1944 in Bad Hall, Austria. His parents were communist resistance fighters who had come back to Austria from France under false names (Robert Schindel was in fact born as Robert Soel), and were denounced and deported to Auschwitz four months after his birth. His father was killed at Dachau; his mother survived and managed to find her son after the war. In Schindel's poem "Memories of Prometheus," the author alludes to his family history in painfully concrete terms, and defines his identity as a survivor.
In language usually reserved for poetry, Schindel's novel Gebürtig ("Native") attempts to cover as much post-Holocaust ground as possible: the children of the Final Solution's perpetrators or onlookers or even innocent bystanders meeting with, living with, sleeping with, not getting along with (in various degrees), or loving the children of the victims and the survivors. It is a novel about the impossibility of breaking down the glass wall between young Austrian and German Jews and non-Jews, because of a past that remains unforgotten and unforgiven. Yet it is also a novel about the need to live and to enjoy life, in spite of the past and because of it.
Robert Menasse is a younger Austrian Jewish author. His novel Happy Times, Brittle World tells the story of Judith Katz and Leo Singer, both children of Viennese Jews who fled Austria in 1938 and ended up in Saõ Paulo, Brazil. Their first meeting takes place in the 50s, in their parents' native Vienna, where they are now students. Leo's parents have come back to live in Vienna after the war, whereas Judith's refuse to return and she is studying in Vienna against their wishes. The excerpt in this collection shows how Judith and Leo are affected by a pro-Nazi demonstration. Their argument reveals their differing attitudes in general. He is full of self-hatred and impotence; she is a committed intellectual with a tendency toward self-destruction. Both are victims of the war, although physically they were unharmed by it. They are second-generation survivors who have become permanent emotional invalids. Austria, unlike Germany, did not officially acknowledge its role in the Holocaust until very recently. Instead, it hid behind the ludicrous pose of a "fellow-victim," when in fact it had been a very willing partner of Hitler's Germany. Austrian Jews are not as explicitly ("antagonistically") Jewish as German Jews. This is reflected in the subdued presentation of Jewish topics in Menasse's writing.
At first glance, Esther Dischereit appears to deviate from the storytelling pattern that characterizes the work of German Jewish writers. The narrative of her novel Joemi's Table is fragmented and seemingly disconnected. However, it is not abstract play with words and structure, but rather a coherent whole broken up into many pieces, like a shattered mirror. She tells the story of a Jewish woman born after the war who, after a lifetime of denying her Jewishness, faces the necessity of accepting her identity. The protagonist also comes to grips with the story of her mother's persecution under the Nazis, and her own sense of political justice, expressed in a lack of sympathy with Israel. The two histories, her mother's and her own, are intertwined in the text. This is an angry book, in which the protagonist offers herself to her German surroundings as "living history."
Matthias Hermann, a young East German Jewish poet, also presents a view of Germany in which history, Jewish history, cannot be separated from the present German landscape. One of his poems, "The Shower Rooms in Prison," speaks of "hereditary memory," which must necessarily draw a line between young Germans and Jews today.
This division is also the subject of Thomas Feibel's essay "Gefilte Fish and Pepsi: A Childhood in Enemy Territory." Feibel is the youngest contributor to this anthology. He describes his own sense of liberation when, as a teenager, he decided to rebel against his burdensome Jewishness--not by abandoning it, but rather by ceasing to make a big deal out of it. For Feibel, being a Jew should not occupy too much of an active young person's time, especially in Germany, where one can easily become paranoid and live one's life in unnecessary fear. Although he is able to get his parents and the official Jewish community "off his back," it is Germans who do not let him forget that he is Jewish. As a journalist, he is always asked to write on Jewish topics, as if he had nothing to say about anything else. So, for his first journalistic assignments he is sent back to his Jewish community.
Henryk Broder provides a more political account of German-Jewish relations. Although he was active in the German student movement in the sixties, he has made clear his disenchantment <%2>with the German Left's position on Israel and with its anti-<%0>Semitism disguised as "anti-Zionism." In "Our Kampf," Broder documents the German peace movement's behavior during the Gulf War. He achieves a chilling effect by quoting statements made by various German politicians and other public personalities during the war, and then drawing his own frightening conclusions. The past figures in these Germans' thinking only to the extent that it can be connected with their current political needs and views. But this would be the most benign interpretation. To put it more bluntly, as Broder himself did in one of his books: "The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." In two senses: as a reminder of their guilt and as evidence of their failure.
Benjamin Korn is a theater director and essayist. One of his essays, "Shock and Aftershock," deals with the Fassbinder Affair; in 1985, a number of Jews occupied the stage of a Frankfurt theater in protest against the planned presentation of a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that they considered anti-Semitic. Korn found himself witnessing the scene and being forced to reflect on the implications of each side's reasoning. His situation was unexpectedly complicated by the fact that his mother was one of the protesters. As a theater director and believer in artistic freedom, he could not identify with the demonstrators. But as a Jew, he could not fail to sympathize with the underdog's--in this case his own--cause. Korn's essay provides an excellent example of the dilemmas and split loyalties Jews encounter in post-Holocaust Germany. As bitter as he sounds in this piece, the tone there is conciliatory compared to that of his essay "Witching Hour," a pointed comment on the questionable nature of the new, re-unified Germany.
Katja Behrens is also very sensitive to the "unreality" of a "wholesome new Germany." In her short story "Perfectly Normal," she describes the narrator's need to get beneath the surface of the pervasive sense of German "normalcy," the trademark of the postwar decades. She discovers that it is not only fragile, but to her, as a Jew, nonexistent. In the story "Crows of God," her protagonist goes to Israel, where she can stop dealing with the exhausting German-Jewish issue. But here she discovers a different problem, this time related to being a woman. She is obscenely propositioned by an elderly ultra-orthodox man in the streets of Tel Aviv. This encounter is juxtaposed with the memory of a Christian male religious figure, also clad in black, who had played a role in her wartime survival. As a woman, she feels equally threatened by both.
Leo Sucharewicz's story "The Girl and the Children" also deals with an attempt to find a haven in Israel. The narrator of this story is torn between his student life in Munich and his need to serve in the Israeli army. The "girl" of the title is the narrator's non-Jewish German girlfriend, who has no sympathy at all with her boyfriend's sense of duty toward an army in general and toward the Israeli army in particular. The "children" are the children of the Warsaw Ghetto, to whose memory the narrator owes his commitment to Israel as the secular symbol of post-Holocaust Jewish survival.
In Peter Stephan Jungk's novel Shabbat: A Rite of Passage in Jerusalem, Israel is a source not of secular, but rather of religious identity. Jungk's hero is a rootless, assimilated Austrian Jew in search of a spiritual home. He hopes to find one by discovering his Jewish God in a yeshiva in Jerusalem. But it is a difficult process, hard for the young man and presumably just as hard for God. The student asks God questions to which no Jew since the Holocaust can hope to receive a satisfactory answer. He also tries to reconcile his sense of a cultural home in a German-speaking country with a strong religious identity as a Jew, and fails: "There, where I grew up, everyone says `Grüss Gott' when they greet each other. I share the woods, cities, tavern tables, I share the language of the inhabitants of that country and am obliged to forget, forget each day anew, what took place there, forty years ago. I must speak with You in their language, the only one whose subtleties I really know. I beg you, forgive me."
Imagine an old house burned down with the original inhabitants still inside, and then a gleaming new structure erected in its place. You might move into the new building and never feel a thing. But if you happen to be related to those destroyed in order to make place for the home you now call your own, chances are you will think about it a lot. This is the situation of young Jews in Germany and Austria. Although they are by no means a homogeneous group, the writers among them all try to cope with their ambiguous status as perennial outsiders in a country and language that are still hostile territory.