Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place

by Katja Garloff

Overview

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust.

Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253063724
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Series:	German Jewish Cultures
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.49(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Katja Garloff is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. She is author of Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture and Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: Performing Authorship
1. Authorial Self-Fashioning in Second-Generation Writers: Maxim Biller, Esther Dischereit, and Barbara Honigmann
2. Playing with Paratext: Benjamin Stein's Die Leinwand
Part II: Remaking Memory
3. Memory and Mobility: The Novels of Doron Rabinovici
4. Memory and Similarity: Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther
Part III: Claiming Places
5. Returning: Diasporic Place-Making in Barbara Honigmann
6. Transitioning: Migration Narratives in Vladimir Vertlib and Julya Rabinowich
7. Arriving: Arrival Stories in Lena Gorelik, Dmitrij Kapitelman, and Jan Himmelfarb
Conclusion
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Leslie Morris

Making German Jewish Literature Anew  probes the complexity of Jewishness, identity, culture, and ethnicity in post-1989 Jewish writing in Germany. Katja Garloff's thoughtful and trenchant work invites us to reflect on the reconfigurations of Jewishness in Germany today and the very category of Jewish literature itself. This is a brilliant work that opens up new spaces for thinking about the mechanisms of Jewish history and literature in a post-migrant Germany.

Leslie A. Adelson

Brilliant and riveting at every turn, Making German Jewish Literature Anew opens up entirely new vistas for understanding the evolving literary forms, paratextual shifts, and transcultural significance of multifaceted Jewish writing in Germany and Austria today. Katja Garloff's luminous study of "founding gestures" in this contemporary connection sparkles with countless conceptual insights for the broader humanities too. Anyone interested in thoughtfully revelatory approaches to literature, diversity, migration, comparison, similarity, difference, authorship, memory, place-claiming, innovation, and even literary tradition itself will be well served to read this remarkably refreshing book.

Stuart Taberner

Garloff's Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers an insightful analysis of the growing corpus of contemporary German Jewish literature, including by writers who arrived from the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. The book's key strength is its focus on how writers are both shaping a new canon and at the same time reflecting on the possibilities and potentialities of German Jewish literature, and indeed Jewish literature more generally. This is a volume of insightful and incisive readings of literary texts, supported by an original and highly productive theoretical framework.

William Collins Donahue

Garloff's new study shows how wrong we were to think of German Jewish literature has having reached its apex in prewar 'assimilation' or in postwar thematization of the Holocaust. On the contrary, German Jewish literary output has remained breathtakingly prolific and complexly heterogeneous; it is treated here—in Making German Jewish Literature Anew—with particular insight, precision, and candor.

Godela Weiss-Sussex

This discussion of German Jewish writing from 1989 to the present is firmly embedded in current literary and theoretical debates and takes them further in compelling ways, urging the reader to think anew. Structured around the three gestures of 'performing authorship', 'remaking memory' and 'claiming places' – all central to the project of a literature that is always 'made anew' –, this book provides a rich and important contribution to current research into the hybrid, heterogeneous and dynamic character of Jewish writing in German.

Editorial Reviews

"Garloff's new study shows how wrong we were to think of German Jewish literature has having reached its apex in prewar 'assimilation' or in postwar thematization of the Holocaust. On the contrary, German Jewish literary output has remained breathtakingly prolific and complexly heterogeneous; it is treated here—in Making German Jewish Literature Anew—with particular insight, precision, and candor."—William Collins Donahue, Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities, and Professor of European Studies, University of Notre Dame

"Garloff's Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers an insightful analysis of the growing corpus of contemporary German Jewish literature, including by writers who arrived from the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. The book's key strength is its focus on how writers are both shaping a new canon and at the same time reflecting on the possibilities and potentialities of German Jewish literature, and indeed Jewish literature more generally. This is a volume of insightful and incisive readings of literary texts, supported by an original and highly productive theoretical framework."—Stuart Taberner, University of Leeds

"This discussion of German Jewish writing from 1989 to the present is firmly embedded in current literary and theoretical debates and takes them further in compelling ways, urging the reader to think anew. Structured around the three gestures of 'performing authorship', 'remaking memory' and 'claiming places' – all central to the project of a literature that is always 'made anew' –, this book provides a rich and important contribution to current research into the hybrid, heterogeneous and dynamic character of Jewish writing in German."—Godela Weiss-Sussex, King's College Cambridge

"Brilliant and riveting at every turn, Making German Jewish Literature Anew opens up entirely new vistas for understanding the evolving literary forms, paratextual shifts, and transcultural significance of multifaceted Jewish writing in Germany and Austria today. Katja Garloff's luminous study of "founding gestures" in this contemporary connection sparkles with countless conceptual insights for the broader humanities too. Anyone interested in thoughtfully revelatory approaches to literature, diversity, migration, comparison, similarity, difference, authorship, memory, place-claiming, innovation, and even literary tradition itself will be well served to read this remarkably refreshing book."—Leslie A. Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies, Cornell University

"Making German Jewish Literature Anew  probes the complexity of Jewishness, identity, culture, and ethnicity in post-1989 Jewish writing in Germany. Katja Garloff's thoughtful and trenchant work invites us to reflect on the reconfigurations of Jewishness in Germany today and the very category of Jewish literature itself. This is a brilliant work that opens up new spaces for thinking about the mechanisms of Jewish history and literature in a post-migrant Germany."—Leslie Morris, Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota

"The theoretically rigorous and readable monograph will serve as an important intervention into the field for scholars of German Jewish literature while at the same time serving as a strong introduction to the authors and debates for readers interested in German literature and Jewish studies more generally."—Helen Finch - University of Leeds, Leeds UK, The German Quarterly

From the Publisher