Eine verwandtschaftliche Verbindung (A Connection of Kinship)? Jewish-Turkish Alliances in Contemporary Jewish Writing in German

Abstract

“Every time I racked my brains about how to overcome the distance between Esra and myself, I would ask myself why we were so close”, muses Adam, the Jew of Armenian and Czech heritage who is the narrator-protagonist of Esra, Maxim Biller’s second novel.1 This sentence captures particularly well the feelings of proximity, nearness and irreconcilable difference experienced by the literary inventions of contemporary Jewish authors as they attempt to relate to Germany’s largest minority: the Turks. Esther Dischereit suggests, moreover, that Germany’s Jewish and Turkish populations share common ground, and that a closer relationship with Germany’s Turkish minority might prove less painful than diasporic Jewish identities, which give rise to “conflicts, marginalization and hurt”.2 Relationships between Jewish and non-hyphenated Germans and Austrians seem fraught with difficulties: philo- and antisemitism, misplaced curiosity, and thoughtlessness, as Tanya Ury, a Jewish artist resident in Cologne, writes: A German artist proposed that I participate in a collaborative project in which I was to research her Nazi family and she, my Jewish family. Taken aback at the enormous insensitivity of her request … , I calmly told her that she might be avoiding the issue by offloading her responsibility onto me.3