Junge judische Literatur

Abstract

Nolden, Thomas. Junge judische Litertur, Wurzburg. Konigshausen and Neumann,1995.189 pp. DM 34.00 paperback. Early on in his superb study, the author alerts us that his history and criticism of the (predominantly) postwar generation of German-speaking Jewish writers will not introduce us to a homogeneous group of authors. Die hier betrachteten Autoren arbeiten mit hochst verschiedenen Stilmitteln and Konzeptionen and verstehen sich nicht als eine wie such immer definierte Gruppe oder literariache Bewegung [...] (12). Nolden's study of fers abundant examples of this authorial individualism. Some of the new Jewish authors maintain relatively close ties to their religion; others are estranged from their faith or indifferent to it; their political adherence ranges from the Green Party to the CDU; their pref erence of literary genres veers from poetry and fiction to pared-down documentary and (though rarely) to drama. Some, like Rafael Seligmann, ultimately declare themselves to be German Jews; others like Chaim Noll, find residing in Germany too problematic for a Jew and immigrate, sometimes for a second or third time, to countries as far apart as France, Israel, or Brazil. They differ from one another in their attitude to the generations of their parents and grandparents; they sometimes quarrel among themselves, likely as not about such subjects as to whether to take a conciliatory or aggressive stance towards today's Germans and Austrians and they often approach common themes, e.g., the Shoah (the term Nolden prefers), from diametrically opposed vantage points. Their styles range from the highly emotional and subjective (exemplified by Lea Fleischmann's opening chapter in Dies ist nicht mein Land to chronicle-like objectivity (e.g., Romith Neumann, Der Hut). Add to this their widely divergent biographies-Peter Stephan Jung was born in idyllic Santa Monica, Katja Behrens spent her infancy in a less than idyllic hiding place in war-time Vienna-and one might assume that the literary history of these young Jewish writers would result in a bio-bibliographical compilation rather than a monograph. But Nolden finds a most felicitous working hypothesis to establish a congruence between them. He sees them as related by a common concentric movement. While the term is borrowed from David Rousset's L'univers concentrationnaire (133), its meaning here transcends its origin. The term refers to the writers' common intent, rarely fully realized, to reach back to the roots of their Jewish tradition, to involve themselves in vital issues defined by Germany's historical past and societal presence and to do so through an inwardly directed examination, often motivated by a search for their individual identity. This working hypothesis is applied and tested in all chapters beyond the first two, which supply initially a most useful introduction to the situation of Jews in present-day Germany and, in the second chapter, sketches their attitudes toward their German surroundings. But the third chapter, which focuses in good part on the attempt by Jewish authors to come to grips with the fate and philosophies of the parental generations, the fourth, which defines the literary devices employed by the authors and the fifth, which evolves a new aesthetic of post-Holocaust literature, adduce abundant proof for Nolden's hypothesis. …