Posits a New German Jewish Literature that has surprising implications for today's German Jewish - and Jewish - identity, including solidarity with others, even after October 7, 2023. Eighty years after the Holocaust, it is now possible to speak of a New German Jewish Literature. Emerging out of a community that, following the arrival of more than 200,000 people of Jewish ancestry from the former Soviet Union, is now vastly larger, increasingly diverse, and culturally vibrant, German Jewish writers are re-articulating what it means to be Jewish in the "land of the perpetrators." More generally, they are also rethinking Jewish values and Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of global events and trends such as the resurgence of antisemitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and growing intolerance toward ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. Stuart Taberner's book provides the first comprehensive account of the tension between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism that characterizes this New German Jewish Literature. To what extent should Jewish identity be focused on the "Jewishness" of the Jewish experience, including the Holocaust? Or does "Jewish purpose" reside in expressing solidarity with persecuted minorities everywhere? Taberner argues that this new literature presents an aesthetically engaging and politically nuanced deliberation on Holocaust memory, on worldliness, and on solidarity - with sometimes surprising and radical implications for modern-day German Jewish and Jewish identity. He also examines authors' responses to the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and speculates about the future of German Jewish writing. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

The worldliness that characterizes the literary fiction of the self-identified Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa can be understood as an expression of “Jewish purpose” (Adam Sutcliffe), entailing solidarity with other persecuted minorities rooted in the Jewish experience, and especially Jewish suffering. This article focuses on Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn, in which a Muslim child is taken from his family and brought to St. Petersburg. The article explores the depiction of Islamophobia in Imperial Russia and how seemingly extraneous allusions to anti-Semitism in fact underpin a broader critique of the Enlightenment’s unfulfilled promise. Subsequently, it is argued that the narrator can be construed as a “non-Jewish Jew” (Isaac Deutscher), with a Jewish identity that is expressed through social and ethical commitment rather than belief. Finally, the article explores tensions inherent in Jewish purpose—including the perennial worry that Jews may be required to elide their particularity for the sake of universal values.

This article examines Benjamin Stein's Das Alphabet des Rabbi Löw (2014; first published as Das Alphabet des Juda Liva in 1995) as an intervention in current debates about the emerging pluralism of German Jewish identity. It is argued that esoteric allusions to Jewish mysticism symbolically repair the ruptures in Jewish genealogies and that intertextual references to German (Jewish) literary traditions hint specifically at a revival of German Jewish identity. Above all, however, allusions to the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi suggest the heretical dynamism of this identity and position Juda Liva/Rabbi Löw at the centre of contemporary German Jewish literature.

This article examines the emergence of new forms of German Jewish identity after unification, the arrival of over 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union, and the fading of the generation of Holocaust survivors. It is argued that Adriana Altaras's titos brille (2015) and Dmitrij Kapitelman's Das Lacheln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (2016) suggest a spectrum of potential actualizations of German Jewish identity along three related axes: continuity <-> innovation; apartness <-> normalization; and particularity <-> cosmopolitanism. More generally, the article proposes that these axes might structure a comprehensive examination of the growing corpus of fiction by authors with a Jewish background to which the two novels belong.

ABSTRACTThis article examines Vladimir Vertlib's Viktor hilft (2018) and Olga Grjasnowa's Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) in relation to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and specifically the disillusionment of humanitarianism that has become evident in recent years following the war on terror, the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of popularism, and the rapid explosion of humanitarian need. In the main body of the article, it is argued that both novels engage critically with the long‐established motif of empathy as a foundation for humanitarian action, but that only Gott ist nicht schüchtern points to a way out of the disillusionment of humanitarianism by relativising European perspectives on the suffering of others (including repeated references to the Holocaust) and by encouraging the reader to think and act politically. Concretely, this means that the reader should focus on the political and moral responsibility of the state even towards non‐citizens and should agitate for the state's adherence to international conventions (e.g. the right to asylum). At the close of the article, Hannah Arendt is invoked, as is a possible definition of ‘ironic solidarity’ in literary texts dealing with the suffering of others.Dieser Artikel untersucht Vladimir Vertlibs Viktor hilft (2018) und Olga Grjasnowas Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) in Bezug auf die Flüchtlingskrise von 2015 und spezifisch auf die Ernüchterung des Humanitarismus, die infolge des Krieges gegen den Terror, der Wirtschaftskrise von 2008, des Aufstiegs des Populismus und des rapide steigenden humanitären Bedarfs in Erscheinung getreten ist. Im Hauptteil des Artikels wird argumentiert, dass sich beide Romane – von zwei ansonsten sehr verschiedenen Autoren mit sowjetisch‐jüdischem Hintergrund – kritisch mit dem längst etablierten Motiv der Empathie als Grundlage für das humanitäre Handeln auseinandersetzen. Darüber hinaus bietet Gott ist nicht schüchtern aber auch einen möglichen Ausweg aus der Ernüchterung des Humanitarismus, indem der Roman die europäische Perspektive (inklusive wiederholter Verweise auf den Holocaust) auf das Leid fremder Menschen relativiert und den Leser dazu auffordert, anstatt von Empathie geleitet zu werden politisch zu denken und zu handeln. Konkret bedeutet dies, dass der Leser auf die politische und moralische Verantwortung westlicher Staaten auch gegenüber Nichtbürgern fokussieren und sich für die Befolgung konventionsrechtlicher Verpflichtungen mobilisieren soll. Im Schlussteil des Artikels wird auf Hannah Arendt hingewiesen sowie auf eine mögliche Definition einer ‘ironic solidarity’ in literarischen Texten, die fremdes Leid thematisieren.

This article examines Olga Grjasnowa's depiction of the 2015 'refugee crisis' in Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017), focusing on how this German-language writer of Russian Jewish extraction offers a nuanced understanding of refugees’ motives for flight. Further to this, the article explores the novel's implied critique of cosmopolitan memory and multidirectional memory (Levy/Sznaider; Rothberg) as an underpinning of contemporary humanitarian activism and empathy with refugees. Gott ist nicht schüchtern instead promotes a ‘pragmatic cosmopolitanism’ that in harking back to states’ obligations under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention recalls Hannah Arendt and present-day political philosophers such as Seyla Benhabib.

IN THEIR INTRODUCTION TO Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (2011), editors Sheila E. Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner note that “the act of defining, circumscribing and demarcating has long been a principle activity of modern Jewish literary scholarship.” Because Jewish writing does not readily map onto a national literature, because certain authors may not even identify as Jewish (or be identified by others as such), and because a given book may not appear to have a Jewish theme—for example, diaspora or the Holocaust—the question of what is and isn't Jewish writing, Jelen, Kamer and Lerner continue, must “remain unsettled.” The volume in which this chapter appears adds to this debate by positing that there is such a thing as a German Jewish literature even as it interrogates this—after the Holocaust—always unavoidably jarring formulation. In her 1994 edited volume What Is Jewish Literature?, the Israeli scholar Hana Wirth-Nesher had already pondered whether the question in the book's title was in fact the only thing that unified scholars searching a definition that could encompass Jewish languages— that is, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino—non-Jewish languages, and the diversity of diasporic and non-diasporic writing both in the past and in the present.

This article returns to a question posed by Andreas Huyssen (and others), namely whether and how minority writers can “migrate into” a German memory culture that is largely shaped by the “ethnic German” memory of German responsibility for the Holocaust. Here, however, the focus is on two “other” ethnic German memories that are arguably repressed in today’s Germany, namely German wartime suffering and the forty-year history of the German Democratic Republic. The article offers a close reading of Russian migrant writer Nellja Veremej’s 2013 novel Berlin liegt im Osten as a highly unusual—even unique—literary engagement with these “non-integrated” German pasts that not only critiques present-day Germany’s memory culture but also challenges what the novel frames as its self-satisfied liberal nationalism. A brief concluding section speculates on how “big history” and growing global consciousnes of the Anthropocene might impact our engagement with twentieth-century German and even world history. (ST)

In an essay of 1993 Helmut Peitsch compactly summarizes the divergence in emphasis between Günter Grass and Martin Walser: 'Die Demokratie wurde von Walser mit ihren gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen konfrontiert, von Grass hingegen mit der faschistischen Vergangenheit'. The political differences between Walser and Grass correspond to their different emphases, that is, Grass's focus on the Nazi past and Walser's criticism of the Federal Republic. Grass's insistence in 1989/90 that Auschwitz should remain an eternal obstacle to a single German state exemplifies his fixation on the nation's failed history. From the mid-1970s, Walser's priorities have shifted from Auschwitz to the divided nation. This reflects the extent to which coming to terms with the past had become the dominant social paradigm by the end of the 1960s. For Walser, the same alliances are at work in a conspiracy coordinated by the media and intellectual classes to suppress the 'natural' development of national feeling in post-unification Germany.

Abstract In his Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Natan Sznaider shows how Jewish thinkers both before and after the Holocaust have advanced universalist ideas out of their particularist Jewish identities, connecting the Jewish experience to contemporary cosmopolitan concerns such as Human Rights, genocide prevention and international justice. Sznaider focuses on Hannah Arendt and illustrates how this post-Holocaust Jewish thinker both defended her rootedness in her Jewish identity and drew universalising conclusions from it. This article explores Sznaider’s notion of a ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’ in tandem with a close reading of Russian-Jewish writer Olga Grjasnowa’s 2012 German-language novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees). The empathy Grjasnowa’s protagonist feels for the plight of Palestinians reveals her commitment to a universalist ideal of Human Rights even as she remains rooted in her Jewish identity: her activism draws on the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust down through the different generations of her family. At the same time, Grjasnowa’s novel also suggests some of the limitations – and indeed problems – of Sznaider’s conceptualisation of a Jewish cosmopolitanism.