
Literature Matters
Negotiating identity in contemporary German fiction
by Agnes Mueller
The Hamas attacks of October 7 and Israel’s destructive war in Gaza have dramatically increased tensions in America—not just between Jews and Muslims, or in widely publicized university campus protests. An unprecedented level of tension also infiltrates nearly every level of political discourse. Antisemitism has become newly charged—despite various attempts to define it—owing to new acts of hate speech; it is just as often weaponized for rhetorical gain. Concerns about how to position oneself vis-à-vis accusations of Zionism, genocide, and colonial hegemony shape Jewish and non-Jewish identities and shore up troubling alignments. Younger generations disillusioned with an already divisive political landscape are no longer interested in conversations about the value of Western democracy.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the memory of the Holocaust. Israel today would not exist in its highly contested current form were it not for the challenges to create a space for Jews after the Shoah. Israeli Jews’ feelings of persecution may date back to biblical times, but today’s conflict is enmeshed with political decisions and opinions originating in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Antisemitism has become newly charged—despite various attempts to define it—owing to new acts of hate speech; it is just as often weaponized for rhetorical gain.
What can we do to alleviate this threadbare opposition between Jews and Muslims? How can we engender new kinds of conversations that have been dominated by entrenched positions of “oppressor” and “victim”?
Germany—yes, Germany, land of historical Nazi perpetrators that today has a significant Muslim population—might lend a fresh yet well-versed perspective, thanks to new works of creative fiction. Instead of unleashing countless opinions on social media, recent German art and literature is providing more congenial access to the issue of Holocaust memory, Jews, and Muslims. The wider world should take note.
German Jewish Azerbaijani writer Olga Grjasnowa’s recent novel Der verlorene Sohn [The Prodigal Son] (2020) is, at first glance, not a book about Holocaust memory. Born in 1984, Grjasnowa came from Azerbaijan with her family at the age of 11. Her novel, about a kidnapped Muslim boy subjected to suffering outsider status and eventually assimilating to the culture of his czarist Russian imperialist captors, seems to tell us more about expansionist Russia than about Judaism, much less Holocaust memory, since the setting in the novel predates the twentieth century.
The plot centers on a Muslim boy named Jamalludin, son of Imam Shamil, in the Caucasian region of Dagestan. In 1839, Jamalludin is given as a hostage to the Russians by his father, a powerful sheik. Jamalludin grows up as a special protégé of Czar Nicholas I. Even though he is initially very much a stranger, an “other” in the Russian Empire, he learns about the history of his new home and also how to suppress his resistance to Russian imperialism. His assimilation, as well as his career as an elite officer of the czar ends abruptly when he is suddenly sent back to Dagestan. But in his “home” of Dagestan, Jamalludin is also now a stranger. His brothers and even his father regard him with suspicion. He is a “foreigner” twice over: in Russia, as a Muslim and Arab stranger, the other to czarist and Christian-orthodox norms; in Dagestan, a stranger regarded as a czarist and infidel.
To the contemporary German reader, Grjasnowa’s story evokes Holocaust memory in multiple ways: the plot details the situation of a permanent exile, the abduction and then deportation to a location that is not chosen by the protagonist, as well as the protagonist’s fate as stemming from authoritarian and repressive power structures, war, and ethnic discrimination. It is important that the central theme of the novel is precisely not a genocide. (Grjasnowa had, in fact, written on the theme of genocide as it inflects Holocaust memory in her 2012 novel, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt [All Russians Love Birch Trees].) The kidnapping, deportation, and exile in The Prodigal Son happen to a boy who is Muslim, not Jewish, and the experiences of anxiety and resulting fragmentation of identity described can be seen as comparable to other experiences of flight, expulsion, exile, or forced migration. The text thus evokes important points of connection between the Muslim protagonist and different figures who are marked “Jewish.” Especially with our contemporary, post-1945 knowledge about antisemitism before and after the Holocaust, “being different” stands out as the main theme.
The novel’s title is not only a reference to the prodigal son of Jesus’s parable in Luke; it also thematizes a son who is actually lost. Jamalludin is lost to his homeland and to his father, and he has lost a home. “Lost” is a signifier for Jamalludin being without a home, twice, and being culturally different in each of the places he inhabits. His permanent homelessness reminds one of the figure of Ahasverus, the eternally wandering Jew. Jamalludin’s deportation to imperialist Russia and migration back to Dagestan impart upon him the quality of wandering. More concrete narrative moments indicate a connection between Jamalludin’s experiences with images of Jewish flight and expulsion during the Shoah and post-Shoah times. For example, after a confrontation with the explicit, disturbing, and for him unacceptable antisemitism of his Russian officer companions, Jamalludin reacts with outrage, shame, and pity:
Jamalludin was angry, but also ashamed [. . .] for his entire surroundings, and then there was another, quieter feeling that he had not yet known: self-pity. Images of the Jewish boys never left him, and those from his own departure from Akhoulgo reappeared.
Jamalludin’s trajectory of flight, expulsion, deportation, and migration is compared directly with the fate of the Jewish boys who, also separated from their parents as young children, were forced to march from their remote villages to St. Petersburg. To the contemporary reader, this is an easily recognizable reference to the death marches of Jewish prisoners during the Shoah. A Muslim story set long before the Second World War recalls later Jewish suffering. Such an overlay challenges our preconceived ideas about identity by relating the Jewish fate to that of Muslims. Historical specificity is momentarily suspended so that the emotions are what matters most. In literary fiction, the Jewish voice can align with the Muslim voice. This new voice articulates shared feelings of anger, shame, and (self) pity—emotions that shape our contemporary moment, as well.
Another example is Kat Kaufmann’s Superposition of 2015. Focused mostly on post-Soviet experiences in Berlin, it tells the story of 26-year-old jazz pianist Izy Lewin. Jewish and originally from St. Petersburg, Izy dives into contemporary Berlin nightlife and its rugged alcohol, drug, and sex scene. (Kaufmann was born in 1981 in Leningrad but now lives in Berlin.) Izy’s Russian and Jewish identity is woven into an experimental, tough-sounding, contemporary idiom. Antisemitism is cited as the reason for the narrator’s dystopian outlook. The text suggests that it is a privilege for the narrator and her imaginary child to be able to conceal their Jewish and Russian identities, and Izy seems especially pleased that no one would guess that she was Jewish and from Russia because of her pronunciation—her ability to roll the German “r.” Izy wants to pass as a German; she achieves this through language.
The object of Izy’s unhappy, unrequited love throughout the story is Timur. He is the only person who can provide an imaginary home for her. Importantly, the name “Timur” suggests a connection with Islam and Muslim identity. The fourteenth-century figure of Timur was a Turco-Mongol conqueror who called himself the “Sword of Islam.” His expansive empire included Transoxiana (today Uzbekistan), parts of Turkestan, Afghanistan, Persia, Syria, Kurdistan, Baghdad, Georgia, and Asia Minor; he also invaded parts of India. Though not explicit, this latent contextual reference weighs heavily for contemporary Berlin with its significant Muslim population. The name has ties to Islam but also dilutes any specific place of identity into a more ubiquitous “other,” one that is Eastern but not clearly Russian.
Germany—yes, Germany, land of historical Nazi perpetrators that today has a significant Muslim population—might lend a fresh yet well-versed perspective, thanks to new works of creative fiction.
Presenting such an ambiguous figure charged with being a “home” for the Jewish protagonist, while not providing strong markers of racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural identity, other than alluding to Islam, challenges and broadens our views concerning German Jewish and Muslim identity. Via the figure of Izy’s aspirational love, we are invited to transcend the Russian Jewish identity, to one that, like Timur, is merely defined as Germany’s “other.” The repeated invocation of Heimat (homeland), which Izy can only find in the memory of her love for Timur, dispels any previous expectations of her recovery of a Russian Jewish identity. As spelled out towards the end of the narrative, Izy is in a position (or superposition) of “polysingularity.”
Polysingularity describes a state of mind that defies our conventions of identity. Singular identity means that we subscribe—consciously or subconsciously—to one way of being. We can even subscribe to multiple singular identities. For example, Izy is Jewish, Russian, and female. Polysingularity means that each of these identities informs, changes, and alters all the others, causing a multiplicity of differently interacting parts. This concept is paratextually inserted, in English, in the middle of the book, as it best describes the continually changing mode of existence in which Izy finds herself. Taken as a marker for Izy’s experiential way of thinking, polysingularity is a form of memory—first and foremost, “the natural condition of our mind.”
Kaufmann’s fictional migration narrative is productive when discussing the topics of Holocaust memory, antisemitism, and current politics, because of the ways in which it opens the concept of identity to dismantle its confining features. In Superposition, language acts as a transmitter of identity, but one that is tenuous, malleable, and pliable rather than fixed or fated. Identity—Jewish, Muslim, German, or Russian—is not subject here to politics or posturing or to advancing political, social, and intellectual pursuits. As such, Kaufmann’s literary imagination offers a new conceptual frame for German, Jewish, Russian, Muslim, or American identity that helps defy antisemitism by creating a new link to Holocaust memory. That link is now made via migratory, polysingular identities, articulated by Jewish subjects who are Muslim, Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, and geographically as well as historically removed migrant “others.”
This new German literature explicitly shows how identity is always constructed, never fixed, and how young people especially make meaning of their worlds by connecting with the experiences and emotions of other “others.”
Some new German fiction, as such, invents Jewish subjects who understand that their identity is no longer fixed, even while Holocaust memory still defines and redefines experiences of being Jewish. Hybrid, superimposed identities may narrate new experiences of Muslims and Jews alongside each other, rather than in binary opposition: Grjasnowa’s story is set in a Russian past, informing a later Jewish moment and showing the similarity in Muslim and Jewish emotions; Kaufmann’s story is set in today’s Berlin, providing a model for bringing Jewish and Muslim identities in conversation.
But Grjasnowa and Kaufmann are but two examples of new German and Jewish literary voices in Germany, among them Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Dimitrij Kapitelman, Lena Gorelik, Marina Frenk, and Jan Himmelfarb. These Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union arrived as children with their parents as part of Germany’s quota refugee program. Initiated in the early 1990s, it was enacted in part to show the rest of Europe—and the world—how Germany was actively addressing the atrocities of the past by inviting new Jewish migrant populations into a newly unified Germany. Flippantly referred to as Wiedergutmachungsjuden (“make-good-again Jews”), the program itself yielded only mixed results, since not all migrants were “Jewish” in the ways that politicians had expected. But the literary production of many who arrived as young children and found their migration experiences aligned with that of Muslims is astoundingly prolific, popular, and highly visible, even in spite of—or because of—their first language not being German.
To return to the opening conundrum: this moment of a new literary production in Germany (many of the texts are available in English translation) can help us in America, Israel, and elsewhere seize new opportunities to approach entrenched debates around Jewish and Muslim identity positions. This new German literature explicitly shows how identity is always constructed, never fixed, and how young people especially make meaning of their worlds by connecting with the experiences and emotions of other “others.” In so doing, it evidences the simplicity of the “victims” versus “oppressors” setup—often the tagline of current popular opinion. Literature matters, despite rumors to the contrary. And Germany’s memory culture may be flawed and insufficient in many ways. But young migrants have set their migratory experiences in Germany against the forever present backdrop of Holocaust to create works of fiction that address the current moment. □
This article appears in the 2024-25 Berlin Journal (38).
Photo: Bekky Bekks. Courtesy: Unsplash.