Katharina Hall, ed. Esther Dischereit. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. xi + 181 pp. $55.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7083-1991-8.

Reviewed by Joanne Sayner (Department of German Studies, Birmingham University)
Published on H-German (June, 2008)

Jüdisch zu schreiben

As part of the Contemporary German Writers series, this book follows the accessible and expected pattern of these volumes. Intended as a compilation of information and scholarship currently available on an author, it serves both as an introductory text for those unfamiliar with Esther Dischereit, and as a useful tool (including a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary literature) for those already engaged with her work.

The book begins with an essay by Dischereit, "Mama, darf ich das Deutschlandlied singen" (2002). Dischereit explores the (im)possibility of refusing Jewish identity and the effects of living such identity in contemporary Germany. This absorbing introduction is followed by a biographical sketch of the author by Katharina Hall, aimed at non-specialist readers. The breadth of Dischereit's work--from essays, to plays, poems, books, radio productions, and collaborative projects with musicians--becomes immediately apparent, as does her practical political engagement with trades unions and involvement within recent literary and historical debates (for example, the Martin Walser-Ignaz Bubis and Daniel Goldhagen debates). Dischereit's role as a participant in the public sphere is also stressed in a 2004 interview with Hall. This interview is similarly characterized by a breadth of topics and begins with Hall's questions about the way German literature has dealt with the Nazi past. In the light of Dischereit's provocative response that "[i]m Großen und Ganzen warte ich noch auf das Buch, das die Schuldfrage beispielsweise in der eigenen Familie literarisch scharf thematisiert" (p. 19) and her very critical dismissal of Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser (1995), it would have been interesting to know what her reaction to the "Familienromane" of Uwe Timm and Dagmar Leopold, among others, would have been.[1] Her conclusion that "in den Familienbiografien [sind] recht selten Nazis zu finden. Ein Mirakel--Nationalsozialismus ohne Nationalsozialisten" (p. 20) goes to the very heart of continuing discussions on texts by, for example, Dieter Forte.[2] Equally fascinating is the discussion about Dischereit's reception within a German-Jewish tradition and Dischereit's claim that the public revelation of her Jewishness in her writing is tantamount to prostitution, a theme to which other chapters in this book return. This wide-ranging interview also covers the topical influence (or rather its lack) of 1968, the appropriateness of remembering the Holocaust through the Peter Eisenman memorial, and the (non-Jewish) "German victim debate": "die Umschreibung der Geschichte der Täter in Deutschland in einer Geschichte der Opfer hat längst begonnen, nicht gradlinig, aber doch und unabhängig von weltanschaulich politischen Dominanzen in der Regierung" (p. 28).[3]

Six impressive articles follow these introductory chapters. The first, by Karen Remmler, "suggests that the fragmentary and jarring cadences represented by the narrative voices in Joëmis Tisch (1988), and in the juxtaposition of voice with electronic sound in Mellie(2003), creates a 'Zwischenraum', an in-between space" (p. 28). It is in this space that Remmler sites the ethical impetus of Dischereit's writings. By investigating "the sounds and spaces of memory" (p. 29), Remmler argues for an "interaurality" (p. 36) between her texts and considers the ways in which this allows for the productive possibility of acknowledging disparate memories of suffering.

Cathy S. Gelbin's chapter focuses on a close reading of Dischereit's texts in order to show how the author "draws out the inherent instability of the Golem trope in order to position her own work in relation to the canon of Jewish poetry after the Shoah" (p. 49). It is a canon that, Gelbin argues, Dischereit deconstructs in order to "resist the forging of coherent cultural narratives that would allow for the past to be laid to rest" (p. 68). Gelbin maintains that Dischereit undermines references to and within a Jewish poetic tradition in order to write against a "fetishizing" (p. 63) of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. At the same time, Dischereit positions herself in relation to more contemporary poets, such as Thomas Brasch, Matthias Hermann, and Günter Kunert, and "recognises the potential of the Golem figure to disrupt hegemonic ethnic-cultural and political discourses" (p. 60). Pointing to Dischereit's rejection of gendered approaches to the Shoah, Gelbin highlights the "limits of her engagement with feminism" (p. 61) and thus situates her texts within the continually contentious debates about the validity of gendered understandings of the persecution.[4]

In her contribution, Jenny Warnecke concentrates on the concept of "corporeal memory," which she defines as "das Einschreiben von (traumatischen) Erfahrungen in den Körper" (p. 76), in relation to Joëmis Tisch. Beginning with an examination of "die historische Darstellung des jüdischen Frauenkörpers in der christlichen Ikonographie mit Bildern aus Dischereits Frauenarsenal" (p. 72), this excellent chapter first looks at the ways in which sexualized Jewish female bodies have figured in European history. Insisting on the materiality of inscriptions of femaleness and Jewishness, Warnecke looks at the embodiment of violence in Dischereit's radio play Ich ziehe mir die Farben aus der Haut (1992). Using Remmler's concept of "silenced memories" (p. 77), Warnecke gives a persuasive reading of the physical manifestation of such memories in Dischereit's texts.

Focusing on Dischereit's Joëmis Tisch and Barbara Honigmann's Soharas Reise (1996), Brigitte Bachmann draws out the differences between the two texts despite their similar themes. Returning to the question of gendered identification in relation to the Shoah, Bachmann considers identity in relation to border crossings. Backmann sees Joëmis Tisch and its protagonist, who is unable to identify with either Germanness or Jewishness, as an ultimately negative site of "Identitätslosigkeit" (p. 107). In contrast, she reads Honigmann's text as resulting in a more positive progression of the protagonist's identity, which ends on a more optimistic hope for the future.

Returning to the notion of prostitution, Annette Seidel-Arpaci investigates Dischereit's positioning as an author, that is her own "self-positioning and the way in which she is positioned by her readership" (p. 116). Examining what it means to be "writing in Jewish" or "jüdisch zu schreiben" (p. 117), Seidel-Arpaci refers to Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other (1998) and Judith Butler's concept of performativity to stress the materiality of language use and its inscription on the body.

In the final analysis in the volume, Katharina Hall begins by problematizing reductive, gendered, autobiographical readings of authors' fictional texts. Instead she advocates the usefulness of the term "life-writing" (p. 140) which allows for the understanding of autobiographical elements as part of the "symbolic fabric" of a text but specifically sees these as part of an "intellectual project".[5] Hall suggests that the examination of such a project highlights the reciprocal influencing of fictional work on Dischereit's literary essays. Hall argues for the usefulness of Marianne Hirsch's term "post-memory" for allowing "an enriched appreciation of Dischereit's literary project, and the connections within her work between 'gelebte Zeit' [and] 'aufgeschriebene Zeit'" (p. 150).[6]

Together these essays produce a compelling book that combines close textual analysis with varied theoretical frameworks, while always stressing the materiality of memory and identity. The investigations of embodied language (including its silences) suggest political possibilities for those writing as members of the second generation, while the chapters at the same time continually highlight the dangers of reductionism and easy categorization. The actuality of the analyses is evidenced by their reference to the continuing debates about non-Jewish German victimhood, gendered approaches to the Holocaust, and the often gendered, autobiographical reading of fictional texts. The book is both a timely and user-friendly compilation of texts for those who would include Dischereit in a course on contemporary writing, and at the same time a stimulating and provocative volume for those engaged with the challenges of Dischereit's own texts and the debates surrounding them.

Notes

[1]. Uwe Timm, Am Beispiel meines Bruders (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2003); Dagmar Leupold, Roman eines Lebens (Munich: Beck, 2004).

[2]. Dieter Forte, Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1995), and In der Erinnerung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1998). For competing readings see Helmut Schmitz, "Representations of the Nazi Past II: German Wartime Suffering," in Contemporary German Fiction: Writing the Berlin Republic, ed. Stuart Taberner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142-158; C. Cosentino, "'Der Krieg, ein Kinderspiel': Romane mit Kinderperspektive im Kontext der Luftkriegsdebatte,' Neophilologus 91 (2007): 687-699.

[3]. For further discussion see Helmut Schmitz, A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

[4]. For example, Joan Ringelheim, "Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory," in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 18-33.

[5]. Hall relies here on concepts used by Georgina Paul, "'Life Writing': Reading the Work of Anne Duden through Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past'," in Autobiography by Women in German, ed. Mererid Puw Davies, Beth V. Linklater, and Gisela Shaw (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 7-16.

[6]. Marianne Hirsch, "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory," Discourse 151 (1992): 659-686.

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Citation: Joanne Sayner. Review of Hall, Katharina, ed., Esther Dischereit. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14622

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