Jewish writers in Germany

German-Jewish writers do not take their hyphenated existence lightly. Up to the 1970s, most writing by Jewish authors in Germany dealt specifically with documenting autobiographical experiences of the Holocaust or with life in exile. Today, there is a veritable genre in the German publishing marketplace that deals not with these firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, but with a thriving secular Jewish writing tradition of the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors. The work of many of these German-Jewish writers is characterized by ambivalence to Judaism as a religion. The problematic of being both Jewish and German, as well as the increasing fetishization of Jews and Jewish writing by the publishing industry also play a role for these authors.

As the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, Jewish writers in Germany often refuse to be relegated to the role of the victim, a role which they see increasingly forced upon them by the media and the government. They live in a country characterized by the relative absence of Jews, but where this void drives political decisions, identities, and social interactions and takes center stage in the public discourse. In fact, Jewishness plays but one role in their work, alongside the issues of feminism, generational conflict, society, politics, and culture.

Four of the most prominent German writers whose works in some way deal with Jewish identity in Germany today are Katja Behrens, Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, and Barbara Honigmann. They are Jewish writers, but foremost, they are writers who reflect on all levels of German society.

Katja Behrens

Born in Berlin, 1942, Katja Behrens escaped Nazi persecution by hiding with her family in Austria before returning to Germany after the war. She has amassed a body of work that includes prize-winning children’s literature, fiction, travel essays, and radio plays. She has also been instrumental in translating texts dealing with Jewish themes from English into German.

Her sometimes experimental writing style is characterized by a lack of certainty. Like other Jewish writers, she writes about the search for place and identity in the decades after the Holocaust. Over the course of her long career in letters, she has published many books, among them “Die dreizehnte Fee,” (“The 13th Fairy”), “Die weisse Frau,” (“The White Woman”), and “Die Vagantin” (“The Vagrant”). One of her most recent publications was a contribution to the books “Ich bin geblieben – Warum?” (“I stayed, Why?”), a collection of essays by prominent Jews in German society that seeks to pinpoint the current state of Anti-Semitism in Germany.

Katja Behrens’s homepage

Maxim Biller

Maxim Biller has been called the “punk intellectual” and is a prominent author of the “Single Generation.” He was born in Prague in 1960 and immigrated to Germany with his parents when he was ten. After studies in German literature and journalism and a tenure at the culture magazine “Tempo,” where he made a name for himself with the column “100 Lines of Hate,” he published his first collection of short stories, Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (“Someday when I’m rich and dead”), in 1990. With sarcasm, intellect, wit, and a bit of self-ingratiation, Biller tells the stories of the children of Holocaust survivors trapped between integration in a society of perpetrators and their roles as outsiders to that society. In 2000 followed his first novel, Die Tochter (The Daughter).

Biller’s works are biting satires of the relationship between Jews and modern-day Germans. In his works, the perpetrator/victim roles seem etched in stone. By stalwartly refusing to adapt a language of remorse and solemnity, he has become one of the most provocative writers in Germany today. He breaks taboos, and he imparts a language incongruous with traditional “Jewish” writing. He has tapped a nerve in Germany that has literary critics both condemning and celebrating his work.

Review of the English translation of"Bernsteintage" ("Days of Amber")

Esther Dischereit

Esther Dischereit’s work explores the desire to escape the burden of being Jewish, a weight that she feels has been placed on her in part by non-Jewish Germans and by the events of the Holocaust. Her mother survived World War II in hiding, and she grew up in West Germany before moving to Berlin, where she now is a major intellectual voice. Through op-eds, film and book reviews, and articles in newspapers and magazines, she dissects what it is like to be Jewish in Germany today.

In her works, she “presents Jews not as outsiders to German society but as major participants within that society where Jewishness or Germanness are but two markers of identity.” She is also one of Germany’s most well-respected feminist writers. Her most important works include the novel “When my Golem opened itself to me” and the essay “Lessons in being Jewish.”

Barbara Honigmann

Honigmann moved to Strasbourg, France, from East Germany in 1984. Some of her most recent novels, including “Sohara’s Journey and “Back then, then and after” explore the growing distance she feels from Germany, which in part has come to be because the Germany that she grew up in doesn’t exist anymore.

In a critical essay that appeared in “Born after the Shoah,” a collection of writing by Jewish women living in Berlin, Honigmann discusses her complicated role as Jewish daughter of parents who defined themselves as socialists, not Jews. She is among a handful of Jewish writers who grew up in the East German Regime, where religion was outlawed, and who later became observant Jews.

Honigmann writes about Jewish and German identity – and she does so by dissecting her own life and that of her parents, who were not practicing Jews. “I believe that we children of the Jews in my parents’ generation have remained our parents’ children for an exceptionally long time because it was difficult to free ourselves from the history and stories of our parents,” she wrote in a recent essay.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Few nations can boast having a literary critic as colorful, respected, and well-known as Marcel Reich-Ranicki. For years, he led a group of rotating book critics in a television show called “The Literary Quartet,” which panned or praised the latest books to hit the German book market. Most recently, he compiled a list of his own personal “Canon of German Literature,” the first 20 books of which were published last Fall and included his choices for the best German short stories of all time. His next project is a similar collection of the 20 best German novels.

But being a critic ironically referred to as "the Pope of German literature" does not come without its share of scandals. As one of the most prominent Jewish voices in German, Reich-Ranicki has become embroiled in quite a few literary scandals over the past few years. Nevertheless, his opinion is one that continues to matter to readers and writers alike.

New Walser novel sparks literary debate, from Germany.info

Literary critic weighs in on German "Lolita," from Germany.info

Much of the information found in this article was adapted from the book “Contemporary Jewish Writing in Germany: An Anthology,” published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Edited by Leslie Morris and Karen Remmler, it includes an excellent introduction to the authors and the English translation of seven short stories and excerpts by the abovementioned writers.

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