Israel in New German Jewish Writing

• In Event: Contemporary German Jewish Literature and Culture

Abstract

Close readings of Benjamin Stein’s DIE LEINWAND (2010), Mirna Funk’s WINTERNÄHE(2015), and Dimitrij Kapitelman’s DAS LÄCHELN MEINES UNSICHTBAREN VATERS (2016) explore how Israel is portrayed. Works by younger German and Jewish writers frequently imagine Israel as a positive place of desire, serving as a site for projection to address traumas of the past. Individual and collective Holocaust memories, as well as other instances of ethnic persecution and genocide are reflected. Israel is embedded into these narratives as a specific place of reconciliation and working through collective and individual past. Given the difficult and multiply unsatisfactory history of German Jewish relations and the persistence of anti-Semitic speech in every day contemporary German discourse, and of course the ongoing tensions in Palestine, how do we evaluate the positive stance that these young, new texts take towards Israel? Are we dealing with a return – or escape – to Israel from a German Jewish perspective, perhaps as a counterpoint to the specifically German context? How does the Jewish experience of Diaspora that especially the previous generations of Jews were significantly affected by relate to this newfound positivity? How do the diverse, often migratory, fictional accounts of places of terror and mourning connect with the idea of healing and a locus amoenus? And, finally, how do these newer texts relate to notions of “cosmopolitan” or “multidirectional” memory?

Author

• Agnes Mueller, University of South Carolina