Past, Present, Future – Multidirectional Memory and 21st-Century German Jewish Writing

• In Event: Contemporary German Jewish Literature and Culture

Abstract

Amir Eshel’s comparative study, FUTURITY: CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND THE QUEST FOR THE PAST (2013), introduces “futurity” as a concept that signifies literature’s capacity to “redescribe” different histories and traumas and in this process open up new relationships and contexts. The multidirectionality that it often entails has powerful implications. I will specifically focus on how the memory of the Holocaust as an always-present past shapes the critique of the present and has a bearing on any vision of the future. Discourse on the Holocaust is mobilized in literary texts, as Michael Rothberg argues in MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY (2009), “to unsettle binary and linear conceptions of culture, violence, and history and to construct in their stead a model of relationality and ripple effects.” At the same time, following Eshel, literature has the potential to create “the ‘open, future, possible’ by expanding our vocabularies, by probing the human ability to act, and by prompting reflection and debate.” I will engage with these approaches and discuss their usefulness in the context of German Jewish literature with a specific focus on Israel/Palestine.

Given the relative importance of Israel in much of contemporary German Jewish writing, I ask about responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “redescriptions” of both the past and the present, and the consequences for visions of the future. What impact can we expect these literary interventions to have? What are the implications of writing in German, for a German or Austrian readership, about human rights violations that may have been committed by survivors of the Shoah or their descendents? A telling example of the complexities involved is a character in Doron Rabinovici’s novel ANDERNORTS (2010), who doesn’t recognize the translated excerpt of one of his own Hebrews articles when it appears in German translation in an Austrian newspaper, and he publicly accuses the unnamed author of antisemitism. I will also briefly touch on Maxim Biller’s BIOGRAFIE (2016) and Olga Grjasnowa’s ALL RUSSIANS LOVE BIRCH TREES (2013), both of which mention repeatedly human rights topics in playful, yet strategic fashion. The novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory creates ripple effects that break open binary models of culture and create new forms of solidarity across ethnic and religious boundaries.

Author

• Sebastian Wogenstein, University of Connecticut