Abstract
This article uses two examples of postwar German Jewish literature to explore the way in which these literary reflections on fictionality can also serve to subvert and complicate the national narratives that were developed in East and West Germany. The novels explored here, Jurek Becker’s Jakob the Liar (1969) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s The Nazi and the Barber (1977), directly thematize storytelling and specifically, storytelling in the context of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Both also share an interest in the intersections between German and Yiddish narrative traditions and reflect on the ways in which the latter was coopted by the former in the decades following the Second World War. Ultimately, this article argues that these two novels of lying create spaces in which the foundational myths of both German states are called into question.
Highlights
The narrative suggested by East German writing and cultural events related to Yiddish is that the storytelling traditions in this language, anything that could be connected to a proletarian volk, were part of a broader Germanic antifascist tradition
This is seen, for example, in the ways in which the Yiddish-speaking world was portrayed on East German stages and the ways in which translations of Yiddish literary classics were packaged and introduced to readers
In the West, several notable novels that thematized Yiddish instead seem to paint as uncanny this language and culture that is at once so familiar and so distant,3 after the near destruction of Eastern European
Summary
The narrative suggested by East German writing and cultural events related to Yiddish is that the storytelling traditions in this language, anything that could be connected to a proletarian volk, were part of a broader Germanic antifascist tradition. This is seen, for example, in the ways in which the Yiddish-speaking world was portrayed on East German stages and the ways in which translations of Yiddish literary classics were packaged and introduced to readers. In the West, several notable novels that thematized Yiddish instead seem to paint as uncanny this language and culture that is at once so familiar and so distant, after the near destruction of Eastern European. Becker’s protagonists Jakob Hein, who lies about the proximity of the Red Army to his fellow ghetto inmates, evokes quite a different reaction in readers than Hilsenrath’s Nazi-turned-Jew, Max Schulz, whose story was controversial enough to warrant a six-year delay in the publication in German Both novels open themselves up to controversy and misreading. Pól O’Dachartaigh and Thomas Schmidt have already pointed to Jakob as a deviation from East German literary norms in content, and in form, as the self-referential narrative style stood in contrast to the preference for linearity and clarity of Socialist Realism.6 This new form is often attributed to supposed similarities between Becker’s literary style and the aesthetics of classic Yiddish fiction based on the assumption that the primary utility of Yiddish literature was to insert humor or hope into the lives of the downtrodden. This allows for a novel that calls into question the very fictions and fictional strategies that stand at the heart of post-war German identities
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