Hybridity, Intermarriage, and the (Negative) German-Jewish Symbiosis

Abstract

As Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes observe in their introduction to Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000, seems that Dan Diner's declaration of between Germans and Jews that may have been true during first 30 years following Holocaust may no longer be true. Certainly, relations between Jews and Germans since 1945 keep undergoing major shifts (xii). In much of Austrian-Jewish and GermanJewish fiction of 1980s and 1990s, and particularly in texts by writers born after World War II, relationship between Jews and non-Jews is one of central themes. The term Austrian/German-Jewish fiction refers to a body of texts written by self-identified Jewish writers that deal with experience on part of narrator or protagonist of being a Jew. Dan Diner, who reintroduced term negative symbiosis to discourse on German and Jewish identities in early 1980s, claims that for both Jews and Germans the aftermath of mass murder has been starting point for self-understanding – a kind of communality of opposites (251).' Although Diner addresses German, not Austrian, situation, this article will discuss Austrianand GermanJewish fiction in tandem. While both Austrian and German Jews are exposed to anti-Semitism and are marginalized in various ways in their respective societies, historical, political, and cultural contexts in which non-Jewish/Jewish dialogue takes place differs in these two countries. The myth of Austria as Hitler's first victim enabled successive governments after war to avoid serious confrontation with past. Ironically, Austria's alleged innocence made it easier for Jews born after war to integrate themselves into Austrian society. Matti Bunzl observes that while Austria's seemingly unproblematic relationship to Nazi past in pre-Waldheim era allowed `ordinary' Austrians to effectively externalize Nazi past as an episode of German, not Austrian, history, it also invited Jews to imagine country as a genuinely antifascist state that had