Jews in German Literature since 1945

This volume contains some 46 essays on various aspects of contemporary German-Jewish literature. The approaches are diverse, reflecting the international origins of the contributors, who are based in seventeen different countries. Holocaust literature is just one theme in this context; others are memory, identity, Christian-Jewish relations, anti-Zionism, la belle juive, and more. Prose, poetry and drama are all represented, and there is a major debate on the controversial attempt to stage Fassbinder’s Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod in 1985. The overall approach of the volume is an inclusive one. In his introduction, the editor calls for a reappraisal of the terms of German-Jewish discourse away from the notion of ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ and towards the idea that both Jews and non-Jews, all of them Germans, have contributed to the corpus of ‘German-Jewish literature’.