The Jewish-theme whodunnit in contemporary Poland and Germany

Abstract

This article offers a comparative perspective on the intersection of popular fiction and national paradigms of representing the Jewish “other” in Poland and Germany, using as an example the contemporary Polish and German crime novels dealing with Jewish history or featuring Jewish characters. Looking at how a literary genre, which relies on strict conventions of representing crime and punishment, fictionalises the history of antisemitism or anti-Jewish violence, I adopt principles of translation theory to map the ways crime fiction transposes Jewishness for a popular reader. Given the particular function of crime fiction as both potentially escapist and reflecting the moral and social codes of a given society, I examine how Jewish-theme crime novels in Polish and German frame Jewish suffering in narratives of retributive justice, offering the reader a “magical” experience of relief, and how they mirror desires, anxieties and taboos of contemporary Polish and German society.