A New German Jewish Literature?

IN 1995, MAXIM BILLER DECLARED that there is only one country in the world apart from Israel “in dem noch eine ganze Weile eine originäre, selbstbestimmte jüdische Literatur entstehen wird” (in which an original, autonomous Jewish literature will be produced for a long time to come), and that is Germany. According to Biller, this is so because the spatial proximity to the perpetrators and their offspring will not allow German Jews to forget about the Holocaust or assimilate to mainstream culture. Precisely because their situation is so atypical, German Jews are forced to think more deeply through their identity and articulate it more clearly. “Daß man als Jude in Deutschland nicht leben und schreiben sollte, ist logischerweise der erste und triftigste Grund dafür, warum man ausgerechnet als Jude in Deutschland besonders bewußt jüdisch lebt und schreibt.” (That one should not live and write as a Jew in Germany is naturally the first and most compelling reason why, precisely as a Jew in Germany, one lives and writes particularly consciously Jewish.) Biller's statement captures something important about German-language Jewish literature since the 1980s, and especially after German unification. This period saw the emergence of a new generation of German-speaking authors who self-identify as Jewish in interviews and other public forums, including Katja Behrens, Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, and Rafael Seligmann in Germany, Ruth Beckermann, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, and Robert Schindel in Austria, Chaim Noll in Israel, and Barbara Honigmann in France. The writers themselves are highly aware of the novel, collective, and precarious character of their literature; several of them reflect on their position vis-àvis German-language culture and society in nonfictional forms such as essays. The concomitant development of new German Jewish public spheres—marked, for instance, by the founding of the journal Babylon: Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart, which began publication in 1986—also indicates a fundamental shift in the literary-cultural field.

The young German Jewish writers quickly drew the attention of critics and scholars, especially in the English-speaking world. Scholars who analyzed their works often spoke of the “reemergence,” “rebirth,” or “renaissance” of German Jewish literature, terms that signal both the novelty of the literature and its connectedness with an earlier period of cultural vibrancy and artistic innovation, presumably German Jewish culture before the Holocaust.