Jews in Today's German Culture (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies, 1993) - Hardcover

Gilman, Sander L

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253325730 ISBN 13: 9780253325730

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1995

Synopsis

This is the first book to examine an emerging new German Jewish culture that has become visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Shoah seemed to have erased the historical Jewish presence in German culture. Since the late 1980s, however, a once-silent and therefore relatively invisible Jewish community of the victims of the Shoah has been restructuring itself, as a new generation of German Jews enters the mainstream of German cultural life. Sander L. Gilman surveys the recent explosion of works by creative artists who invoke their Jewish identity and place at the center of their art the question of what it means to be a Jew in contemporary Germany.
After introducing this new generation of German Jewish novelists, dramatists, film makers, and critics, Gilman analyzes the critical reception of the novels of Rafael Seligmann and Esther Dischereit, two of the most interesting younger writers. A chapter is devoted to the issue of visibility or invisibility as it is inscribed in the representation of the Jewish body in contemporary German Jewish culture. The book concludes with a study of the central role of gender in the structuring of Jewish identity and the author's observations on the complexities of life in the present-day German Jewish Diaspora.

About this title

About the Author

Sander L. Gilman is Professor of German, History of Science, Jewish Studies, and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

From the Back Cover

This is the first book to examine an emerging new German Jewish culture that has become visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Shoah seemed to have erased the historical Jewish presence in German culture. Since the late 1980s, however, a once-silent and therefore relatively invisible Jewish community of the victims of the Shoah has been restructuring itself, as a new generation of German Jews enters the mainstream of German cultural life. Sander L. Gilman surveys the recent explosion of works by creative artists who invoke their Jewish identity and place at the center of their art the question of what it means to be a Jew in contemporary Germany. After introducing this new generation of German Jewish novelists, dramatists, film makers, and critics, Gilman analyzes the critical reception of the novels of Rafael Seligmann and Esther Dischereit, two of the most interesting younger writers. A chapter is devoted to the issue of visibility or invisibility as it is inscribed in the representation of the Jewish body in contemporary German Jewish culture. The book concludes with a study of the central role of gender in the structuring of Jewish identity and the author's observations on the complexities of life in the present-day German Jewish Diaspora.

Reviews

This penetrating study focuses on Jewish writers in Germany and Austria who place at the center of their work the very question of what it means to be Jewish today. Among the writers examined are feminist novelist Esther Dischereit; Rafael Seligmann, whose novel Rubinstein's Auction has been called "a German Portnoy's Complaint"; columnist/essayist Maxim Biller; and Viennese poet/novelist Robert Schindell. Gilman, a professor of German, the history of science and psychiatry at Cornell, finds that one strategy shared by many German-Jewish writers is "masochism"-employing one's sense of powerlessness as a tool to shape and control those who claim dominant power. He argues that circumcision symbolizes or accentuates Jewish males' sense of isolation and difference within the German body politic.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253325730
• ISBN 13: 9780253325730
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132