Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology

Abstract

Morris, Leslie, and Karen Remmler, eds. Contemporary Writing in Germany: An Anthology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 245 pp. $60.00 hardcover. Less than ten years ago, English-speaking readers had virtually no access to contemporary German-language writing. Today Morris and Remmler's anthology is one of five anthologies of German writing in English translation. Elena Lappin (Ed.) and Krishna Winston's (Trans.) Voices, German Words: Growing Up in Postwar and Austria (1994), the first collection in English translation of writing by the younger generation in postwar and Austria, covers broad ground by including short texts (prose fiction, essays, poems) from 14 writers. Ritchie Robertson's anthology The German-Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993 (1999) encompasses nearly 250 years of the German dialogue via a wide variety of genres (short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters, diary entries) and texts by both Jews and Gentiles. Morris and Remmler do not duplicate Lappin and Robertson's efforts; they complement them. Featuring only prose texts from the last twenty years, they include longer texts and feature fewer authors (only four), whose contribution to writing in today is significant ... and merits a wider audience (preface). Their anthology appears in Sander Gilman's series Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World, which includes the remaining two anthologies of contemporary German-speaking writing, Dagmar Lorenz's Contemporary Writing in Austria (1999) and Rafael Newman's Contemporary Writing in Switzerland (2003). Gilman's comprehensive series (which also includes volumes on contemporary writing in Britain and Ireland, Poland, South Africa, and Hungary) paves the way productive work in comparative literatures, as well as Diaspora studies, by taking diverse Diaspora writings beyond their respective linguistic, disciplinary, or national literary ghettos. Gilman's choice to devote separate volumes to German, Austrian, and Swiss writings is a productive one, as it respects the differing histories as well as the contemporary political climates and cultural landscapes of German-speaking countries. Morris and Remmler's concise yet comprehensive introductory essay is an invaluable resource readers of diverse backgrounds. It neither oversimplifies the complexities of the texts in the anthology and the context in which they were written, nor presupposes specialized knowledge. In addition to analyses of the individual texts and introductions to the authors and their larger oeuvre, the editors provide an outline of pertinent political and cultural events and trends of the 1980s and 1990s (the Historikerstreit; the boycott of Fassbinder's Garbage, the City and Death; Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Germany's re-unification, among others), as well as an introduction to concepts vital understanding contemporary German writing, such as post-memory, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, and negative symbiosis. Morris and Remmler's translations, which strive for accuracy while taking some liberties to convey the disparate styles and literary experimentation of the original texts, are impeccable, and they have chosen their texts wisely, accomplishing their aim to present the English-speaking reader with a range of texts that express the complexity and diversity of contemporary writing in Germany (preface). …