German Jewish Writing as World Literature

• In Event: Contemporary German Jewish Literature and Culture

Abstract

This presentation attempts a broad conceptualisation of recent writing in German by women authors with Jewish backgrounds. The focus, therefore, is not on any single text or author, but rather some of the key issues that shape scholarly efforts to categorise and ‘read’ heterogeneous works by writers who are of the same gender, share a more or less loose (cultural or religious) affiliation to Judaism, but compose quite differently. The starting point for this discussion, therefore, is the conventional question of whether there exists something that—despite differences across and between authors—we can term ‘Jewish writing’, and, of course, the parallel question of whether there is such a thing as ‘women’s writing’.

Matters become still more complicated when we attempt to define the relationship of this ‘Jewish writing’ to ‘minority writing’. My presentation will reference writers including Alina Bronsky, Mirna Funk, Lena Gorelik, Olga Grjasnowa, Katja Petrowskaja, Nele Pollatschek and Julya Rabinowich to argue that contemporary Jewish writing in German is not so much a sub-category of minority writing as an exemplar of a new world literature. This world literature paradoxically styles itself as a ‘minor(ity) literature’—even when the author is non-minority, and even when the text circulates beyond language and nation—in order to place the particular into global circulation. This ‘worldly orientation’ of the particular—often achieved through invoking memories of transnational imbrication (e.g. Soviet, central European, Asia minor) and/or intersectionality (e.g. religion, gender, sexuality)—eschews the hubris of national literature, and indeed reveals German (French, British, etc.) literature to be the true ‘minor literature’. To the extent that it does more than simply respond to a ‘dominant’ literature or ‘deconstruct the nation’, therefore, contemporary Jewish writing as world literature more fully realises the ‘worldly’ potential implicit in minority literature conceived of not as the ‘expression’ of this or that subgroup, but as an aspiration towards more global—or cosmopolitan—modes of belonging.

Author

• Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds