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Rebirth of a Culture
Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria today
Edited by Hillary Hope Herzog, Todd Herzog and Benjamin Lapp
198 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-84545-511-8 $135.00/£99.00 Hb Published (August 2008)
eISBN 978-0-85745-028-9 eBook
Reviews
“This incredibly useful and interesting book brings together contributions from scholars and writers who have been working on the dynamic changes in Austrian and German Jewish writing over the last few decades.” · H-Net, Habsburg
“Without exception, all contributions constitute informative, well-researched and reasonably argued pieces of scholarship…thoughtfully conceived and carefully edited, adding up to an informative source book with a useful index of names and topics.” · German Studies Review
"...it is an outstanding piece of scholarship, focusing on an important emerging topic within contemporary German literature." · Guy Stern, Distinguished Professor, Wayne State University
Description
After 1945, Jewish writing in German was almost unimaginable—and then only in reference to the Shoah. Only in the 1980s, after a period of mourning, silence, and processing of the trauma, did a new Jewish literature evolve in Germany and Austria. This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a lively Jewish cultural scene in the German-speaking countries and the various cultural forms of expression that have developed around it. Topics include current debates such as the emergence of a post-Waldheim Jewish discourse in Austria and Jewish responses to German unification and the Gulf wars. Other significant themes addressed are the memorialization of the Holocaust in Berlin and Vienna, the uses of Kafka in contemporary German literature, and the German and American-Jewish dialogue as representative of both the history of exile and the globalization of postmodern civilization. The volume is enhanced by contributions from some of the most significant representatives of German-Jewish writing today such as Esther Dischereit, Barbara Honigmann, Jeanette Lander, and Doron Rabinovici. The result is a lively dialogue between European and North American scholars and writers that captures the complexity and dynamism of Jewish culture in Germany and Austria at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Hillary Hope Herzog is an Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Kentucky. She has written articles on a wide range of topics, including Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian-Jewish culture, and Irmgard Keun. She is currently working on a book about Austrian-Jewish culture from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Todd Herzog is an Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He has authored articles on contemporary German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish literature, crime films and techniques of criminal investigation, and theories of cultural hybridity. He is co-editor (along with Sander Gilman) of A New Germany in a New Europe (Routledge, 2001) and author of Crime Stories (Berghahn, 2009).
Benjamin Lapp is currently Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University and lives in New York City. His publications include Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class and the Rise of Nazism in Saxony, 1919-1933 (Humanities Press/Brill, 1997). He is now pursuing a research project on Holocaust survivors in the United States.
Subject: Jewish Studies General Cultural Studies
Area: Germany Europe
Contents
Introduction
Dagmar Lorenz
German-Jewish Writing and Culture Today
Chapter 1. The Monster Returns: Golem Figures in the Writings of Benjamin Stein, Esther Dischereit, and Doron Rabinovici
Cathy S. Gelbin
Chapter 2. Hybridity, Intermarriage, and the (Negative) German-Jewish Symbiosis
Petra Fachinger
Chapter 3. A Political Tevye? Yiddish Literature and the Novels of Stefan Heym
Richard Bodek
Chapter 4. Anti-Semitism because of Auschwitz: An Introduction to the Works of Henryk M. Broder
Roland Dollinger
The Case of Austria
Chapter 5. "What once was, will always be possible:" The Echoes of History in Robert Menasse’s Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle
Margy Gerber
Chapter 6. Austria’s Topography of Memory: Heldenplatz, Albertinaplatz, Judenplatz, and Beyond
Eva Kuttenberg
Chapter 7. The Global and the Local in Ruth Beckermann’s Films and Writings
Hillary Hope Herzog
Transatlantic Relationships
Chapter 8. The Holocaust Survivor as Germanist: Ruth Kluger and Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Benjamin Lapp
Chapter 9. Transatlantic Solitudes: Canadian-Jewish and German-Jewish Writers in Dialogue with Kafka
Iris Bruce
Chapter 10. A German-Jewish-American Dialogue?: Literary Encounters Between German Jews and Americans in the 1990s
Todd Herzog
Jewish Writers in Germany and Austria
Chapter 11. "Attempts To Read The World": An Interview with the Writer Barbara Honigmann
Bettina Brandt
Chapter 12. Behind the Tränenpalast
Esther Dischereit
Chapter 13. Germans Are Least Willing to Forgive those who Forgive Them: A Case Study of Myself
Jeanette Lander
Chapter 14. Mishmash und Mélange
Doron Rabinovici
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index