What Is a German Jewish Author? Authorial Self-Fashioning in Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, and Barbara Honigmann

Abstract

IT HAS OFTEN BEEN NOTED that there is something qualitatively new about the literature of the second generation of German and Austrian Jewish writers after the Holocaust. Since the late 1980s, and especially in the decade after the 1990 unification of Germany, writers such as Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, Barbara Honigmann, Rafael Seligmann, Ruth Beckermann, Robert Menasse, and Doron Rabinovici have created a new German Jewish literature reflecting a new set of conditions. Born after the war, these second-generation writers were profoundly shaped by their parents’ experiences of exile, internment, and genocidal terror. In their writings they often confront this traumatic legacy by registering the conspicuous silences, ruptured genealogies, and loss of cultural traditions in their Jewish families. At the same time, they also challenge taboos of Holocaust representation and, on occasion, even question the centrality of the Holocaust for contemporary German Jewish identity altogether. Another prominent feature of their literature is its international character; its narratives are often set in different places in Eastern Europe, in North America, and especially in Israel. This geographical range reflects the diasporic existence of the authors, many of whom were either not born in Germany or Austria or at some point moved away from these countries. Finally, second-generation writers self-identify in interviews and other public forums both as self-conscious Jews and as German-language writers who are committed to both of these self-identifications, an attitude that differs markedly from the first generation's sense of “sitting on packed suitcases.” While they are far from resurrecting the myth of the “German- Jewish symbiosis”—they in fact rather highlight the tensions between the German and the Jewish—their public presence and self-declared Jewish identity has led scholars to speak of the “re-emergence” “rebirth,” or “renaissance” of German Jewish literature. Early on in the process, Thomas Nolden used the term “young Jewish literature” to characterize this new literary movement. One way of explaining the rise of a new German Jewish literature is that it served the changing needs of the literary market. Thus Sander Gilman has read the new German Jewish literature in terms of the contemporary interest in ethnic literatures.