Making German Jewish Literature Anew

More about the book

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the development of German Jewish literature from 1990 to the present and offers a new theory of Jewish diaspora literature. Whereas earlier studies focused on the second generation of German Jewish writers after the Holocaust, Garloff's analysis extends to third-generation writers, many of whom come from Eastern European or mixed-religion backgrounds. The works of these more recent writers, include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, Jan Himmelfarb, and Katja Petrowskaja. Garloff suggests that the emergence of a new German Jewish literature affords a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and the formation of group identity. Throughout the Making German Jewish Literature Anew, 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. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is innovatively 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 continually reinvented German Jewish literature into the twenty-first century.