The Encyclopedia of the Novel - Peter Melville Logan 2014

German Novel

Irene Kacandes

Goethe, Mann, Kafka, Canetti. The Sorrows of Young Werther, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Man Without Qualities, The Tin Drum. The novel is barely conceivable without the contribution of literature written in the German language, and yet, the German novel is rarely the focus in general histories of the genre (see HISTORY). To be sure, the development of the German novel can be understood through many of the same categories that have been used to explain the Spanish, French, or English novel. There are German picaresque, epistolary, historical, realist (see REALISM), modernist (see MODERNIS), postmodernist and even magical realist novels (see MAGICAL REALISM). Explanations of these terms as well as histories of the novel in other European countries, particularly in France and England, would apply in great part to the German case. This entry, therefore, presents certain historical factors, in distinction to those countries, influencing the development of the German novel and points to central contributions of the German novel to world literature: Modernist experimentation, the processing of national trauma, and multiculturalism.

German?

During the critical centuries of the novel's development in other places in Europe, there was no single German state. Dating back to evenearlier traditions among Germanic tribes, the Merovingians and the Carolingians, German-speaking rulers of the Holy Roman Empire (the Middle Ages to 1806) often passed on land and power through division among heirs rather than according to the principle of primogeniture, resulting in the existence of not one German nation but rather many smaller political units, Kleinstaaterei, where German dialects were spoken. This state of political affairs led to many wars, smaller and greater in scope. The most protracted and international of these was the Thirty Years War (1618—48), which caused the decimation of numerous populations within the Holy Roman Empire. It also inspired what many rightly consider the first German masterpiece, a picaresque-like novel, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669, dated 1668, Simplicius Simplicissimus), by an individual who experienced the war directly starting at age twelve, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. However, Kleinstaaterei also led to the kind of linguistic and social diversity that can impede the type of reading audience many literary historians consider necessary for the development of the novel.

Some linguistic cohesion developed in the wake of Reformer Martin Luther's (1483—1546) translations of the New and Old TRANSLATION into the vernacular (1521—34). Translations into German from literature primarily of England and France further refined and unified the language, in Eric Blackall's view, transforming it over the course of the eighteenth century from “an uncouth language into one of the most subtle literary media of modern Europe” (211). German lands, however, continued to diverge politically, culturally, and linguistically. Even under the Prussian hegemony that led to the declaration of a German nation-state in 1871, numerous other German-speaking political units and regions remained, from Prussia's main rival, the Hapsburg Empire, to German-speaking Swiss cantons. Twentieth-century developments reinforced this pattern, as the post-WWII Allied division of Germany (1945—49) created two separate political entities, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, “West Germany”) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR, “East Germany”). Thus there are histories of West German, East German, Austrian, and German Swiss literature. Though it is hardly accurate to speak of “the” German novel, in the same way that one speaks of the French novel, other literary historians do so all the time, capaciously applying the term to longer fictional prose narratives written in the German language and obscuring differences in geography, government, and nearest linguistic influences on “German” novelists.

Writers who gain recognition easily become absorbed into an indiscriminate if not imperialistic German canon. To cite just a few salient examples among famous twentieth-century novelists: Franz Kafka was born in Prague, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but its German-speaking community constituted only seven percent of the city's population; Kafka wrote his Czech friend Milena Jesenskà (1896—1944) that while German was his mother tongue, Czech went straight into his heart. Zürich was the birthplace and longtime residence of Max Frisch, who, however, also lived in Rome, New York, and Berlin. The most acclaimed writer of the GDR, Christa Wolf, was born in Landsberg an der Warthe, now known by its Polish name Gorzów Wielkopolski, and from which her family was forced to flee in the closing stages of WWII; she now lives and writes in what has become the united Germany. W. G. (Winfried Georg) Sebald was born in Wertach, a small town in the Allgäu, shortly before it became part of the American occupation zone, but he lived, taught, and wrote more than half of his life in England. The winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for literature, Herta Müller, hails from the Banat, a German-speaking region of Romania, and studied German and Romanian literature in Romania; her first novel, Niederungen (1982, Nadirs) could be published there only in a highly censored form (see CENSORSHIP), and she migrated to West Germany in 1987. A more accurate common denominator among these writers than labeling them “German” would be to remark that the German language was for them a mother tongue. A recent and fecund development concerns individuals who have acquired German linguistic ability after (mainly voluntary) migration to a German-speaking country and who then choose to write in German, providing another interesting contrast to England or France, where “non-natives” writing in English or French mainly come from places that were previously colonized by those powers and for whom the language in which they write is perhaps one of several native tongues.

Novel?

The modern German word for novel is Roman. According to Hartmut Steinecke, this term came into use to describe a new prose genre via translations from the French in the seventeenth century. It was not without competition, however, since the word's connotations of “fantastical,” “exaggerated,” and “untrue,” and its etymological closeness to the earlier established genre of the romance, led numerous authors of what we would now consider novels to designate their works as Historie, Geschichte, or Geschichtsgedicht (history, story, history poem); two of many examples would be C. M. Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon (1766—67, The Story of Agathon) and Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771, The History of Lady Sophie Sternheim). This emphasis on reality and truthfulness, however, was also not without competing claims from another developing prose genre, the Novelle (novella), that which reported the news, an uncanny or uncommon event (see JOURNALISM). It was this competition from and solidification of the features of the Novelle, along with the Romantics' admiration for the new longer genre—the common linguistic root in Roman and Romantik did not escape the German Romantics' attention, and philosopher and writer Friedrich Schlegel (1772—1829) famously praised the novel in his often quoted 116th Athenäum fragment—that led to the hegemony by the end of the eighteenth century of the word Roman over a term in German that might have been closer to the word “novel” (Steinecke, 318). This piece of literary-linguistic history should signal the interlocking and contemporaneous development of several prose genres in German-speaking territories. To put it otherwise, some of the greatest works written by some of the greatest German novelists are actually novellas, short stories, or Kunstmärchen (artistic fairytales). While the fairytales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812—15) are known the world over, few nonspecialists realize how many pieces of prose fiction were drafted by German writers in the form of the artistic fairytale (see SCIENCE FICTION).

Some scholars consider the success of these shorter forms as undermining the development of the German novel. Sagarra and Skrine explain the phenomenon very much in the accepted framework for the development of the novel in the dominant Western cultures of England and France: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's

relegation of the description of contemporary manners to the periphery, and his emphasis on the timeless issues raised by the encapsulated stories [in Goethe's set of stories Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, 1795; Conversations of German Refugees] told with economical mastery of form, set a seal of approval on shorter prose fiction as an aesthetically superior genre and helped to demote the novel of society to a less elevated position in the literary perception of German writers, readers and critics than it occupies in the literary culture of England and France. (87—88)

I take a different lesson from this observation about Goethe and suggest that the novel of society was not the only way forward for the still-developing novel form. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German writers experimented with shorter and longer forms, including the shorter, as mentioned above, and the longer most notably in the form of the bildungsroman (novel of the education of an individual) and a specific subgenre of bildungsroman, Künstlerromane (novels of the development of an artist). Ultimately this writing in multiple prose-fiction genres leads not only to the novelistic genius of Theodor Fontane but also then to the astounding explosion of Modernist experimentation by which the German novel is perhaps best known elsewhere (see MODERNIS).

We can illustrate these points with some facts of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literary history. In addition to the series of tales inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio mentioned above (Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten), Goethe is of course known for one of the first European bestsellers, the epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther). He is considered the initiator of the bildungsroman, in which the central figure achieves self-knowledge through a series of experiences and encounters (Goethe worked on the “Wilhelm Meister” novels for most of his writing life: Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (written 1777—85, The Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795—96, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821, 1829, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Travel). Goethe is also the author of a novella called Novelle (1828) and the coiner of one of the most famous definitions of the novella form as “eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit” (“an unheard-of occurrence that really happened”). He even wrote a fairytale, “Märchen,” within the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. While it has a very different tone from, say, Jane Austen's works, Goethe himself wrote a fascinating novel of society, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809, Elective Affinities).

The German Romantics experimented with numerous genres; the idea of Universalpoesie (a universal, historical concept of literature), originally Schlegel's, was important for all of the Romantics. With regard to prose forms, they sometimes combined them within one work, as Novalis did with the embedded fairytale in his fragmentary bildungsroman Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). Ludwig Tieck, author of perhaps the first Künstlerroman, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798, Franz Sternbald's Travels), is also the author of numerous novellas and shorter works, including one of the most famous literary fairytales, Der blonde Eckbert (1796, The Blond Eckbert). Similarly, E. T. A. Hoffmann is known both for his novels—e.g., the brilliant satirical rendering of a bildungsroman as the story of the development of a cat with the story of the musician Kreisler scattered throughout, Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1821, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr)—and novellas and literary fairytales. The most fascinating of these include Der goldne Topf (1814, The Golden Pot) and Der Sandmann (1817, The Sandman). Adelbert von Chamisso's refashioning of the tale of Faust into the story of a man who gives up his shadow for magical powers, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814, The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl), might be considered a literary fairytale, novella, or short novel.

Similarly, the major novelists of the mid-nineteenth century also exercised their storytelling alternately in shorter and longer forms and in contrast, again, to many of the most famous English or French novelists of the same period. The Austrian (Bohemian) Adalbert Stifter and the Swiss Gottfried Keller both produced novella cycles practically simultaneously with drafting huge bildungsromane. To cite just the most famous, Stifter's novella collection Bunte Steine (Rock Crystal) came out in 1853, and his novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) in 1857; Keller's first version of Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry) appeared from 1853—55, and one of his numerous novella cycles, Die Leute von Seldwyla (People of Seldwyla) appeared in 1856 among other haunting tales, his retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story, “Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe” (“A Village Romeo and Juliet”). The Austrian (Moravian) Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote in numerous genres, including extensively for the stage. She self-consciously subtitled her prose works everything from fairytales to stories to novellas to novels, e.g., Das Gemeindekind (1887, Their Pavel). Even Theodor Fontane—the most highly acclaimed novelist of the nineteenth century who was often compared to the likes of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac, and Émile Zola—experimented and excelled in numerous forms, honing his skills as a journalist and travel writer, and publishing belles-lettres in the form of novellas, detective fiction, and of course, realist novels (the most famous of these last being Effi Briest, 1894—95).

German Modernism

Provisos about “German” and about generic influences on German “novels” are confirmed by examining Modernist experimentation in prose fiction written in German. As pointed out above, Franz Kafka, probably the German author most widely known in our times (the way Goethe was for earlier generations), was neither a citizen of Germany nor did he write exclusively novels. Indeed, it is hard to imagine understanding the world Kafka created in novels like Der Prozess (1925, The Trial) and Das Schloss (1926, The Castle) without having read the short stories such as “Das Urteil” (wr. 1912, “The Judgment”) or the novellas such as Die Verwandlung (1915, The Metamorphosis). Another striking example is Austrian-born Robert Musil, whose short novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (1906, Confusions of Young Törless) and short stories Drei Frauen (1924, Three Women) rehearse themes, poetic techniques (especially the use of metaphor to describe mental states), and character development that inform his brilliantly satirical portrait of middle European decadence in the early twentieth century, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1931—32, The Man Without Qualities). Even Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann, at least in his own estimation the most German of German novelists, thought of himself as the product of two major cultural temperaments, northern German and southern (his mother was part Brazilian). Mann is at least as well admired for short fiction like Tonio Kröger (1903), Der Tod in Venedig (1912, Death in Venice), or Mario und der Zauberer (1930, Mario and the Magician), as for his novels such as Buddenbrooks (1901) and Doktor Faustus (1947); his monumental Der Zauberberg (1924, The Magic Mountain) began as a short story.

German Modernist experiments in NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE and novelistic form deserve to be better known. While Edouard Dujardin's use of interior monologue in his novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887, The Bays are Sere) has been registered in most literary histories as the forerunner of James Joyce's deployment of it in Ulysses (1922), Austrian dramatist and writer Arthur Schnitzler's novella Leutnant Gustl (1900, Lieutenant Gustl) is the first example of stream of consciousness used throughout an entire text (see PSYCHOLOGICAL). Schnitzler repeated the experiment in Fräulein Elsa (1924); however, the most famous and extensive German example of freestanding interior monologue is Austrian Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil (1945, The Death of Virgil).

Though Rainer Maria Rilke's most important literary accomplishments came through the lyric, his sole novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), with its budding artist's anxious confrontation with Parisian urban space, the fear of death, and thematization of language's inability to reflect reality, should be better integrated into the Modernist canon for its experimentation with form (Rilke called it a Prosabuch, prose book). Another poet, Gertrud Kolmar, also drafted a novel about a Jewish female photographers haunting encounter with Berlin and its inhabitants, Die jüdische Mutter (wr. 1932, not pub. in German until 1965, A Jewish Mother from Berlin), that deserves to be much better known for the way it reflects the underlying problems of the time and place in which it was written. Probably the most important contribution to the genre of big-city novels is Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). No one contests Döblin's interest in the work of John Dos Passos and James Joyce. However, the particular effect to which Döblin put interior monologue as well as collage technique—his incorporation of the city's many discourses into his novel, indeed his move to make the city itself protagonist—merits separate evaluation and praise.

German women writers of the period introduced themes previously ignored or inadequately treated that reflected urban and modern life, such as education and employment for women, abortion, and antisemitism. Vicki Baum's stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1928, Helene) or Menschen im Hotel (1929, Grand Hotel) made into the Hollywood film Grand Hotel in 1932) and Irmgard Keun's Gilgi, eine von uns (1931, Gilgi) and Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932, The Artificial Silk Girl) were widely read in their day and deserve the attention they are now getting from younger scholars (e.g., Brandt).

Mann's intermedial introduction of musical leitmotifs—a melody, rhythm, or even a chord used to signal a character, symbol, or situation (often deployed, though not invented by Richard Wagner, 1813—83)—into prose has been frequently noted and should be included in any discussion of German modernism. While there are numerous additional developments and authors that merit mention, Monika Maron's translation into prose fiction of the experience of trauma in Die Überläuferin (1986, The Defector), and any number of novels by the Austrians Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature) can be considered productively in the tradition of modernist experimentation outlined here.

Working through the Nazi Past

The Stunde Null (zero hour) of 1945 Germany applies not only to the defeated nation, bombed cities, occupied territory, and bankrupt political system, but also to the idea that in terms of language and culture, National Socialist Germany had reached an endpoint and whatever remained of “Germany” needed to begin again. While many public figures, aspects of social life, and habits never really changed, or alternately, returned to “normal” after a short time, the German people as a whole and German artists in particular confronted the horrid chapter of their past to an extent that is hard to identify elsewhere or at other times in world history. German writers tried not only to purify and revivify a language they felt had been hijacked by the Nazis, but also to attempt, through new artistic creation, to lay out, examine, and work through the crimes Germans had perpetrated, including, of course, the Nazi-led persecution and destruction of European Jewry. The term coined for this process was Vergangenheitsbewältigung (conquering or mastering of the past), and though the term itself has been recast several times, in phrases like Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working-through of the past) and the even more general Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembering), to indicate the unrealizability and in many ways undesirability of a mastery and therefore forgetting of the past, the process has continued to the present day. The German novel has played an important if not leading role in this working-through. Indeed, the novel has been used in so many ways by so many authors to examine so many aspects of the Nazi past, World War II, and the Holocaust, that only a few salient examples can be considered here.

One of the earliest and most sustained literary efforts to move language and literature forward came through a group of writers who first gathered together in July 1947 and hence have been referred to ever since as “Gruppe 47” (Group 47). Convened annually or biannually for the next twenty years by Hans Werner Richter (1908—93), the meetings were meant to provide a supportive forum for young writers and also to further democracy. In 1950 Gruppe 47 began awarding a prize to bring recognition and money to hitherto unknown writers. Novelists among the prizewinners or Gruppe 47 participants include Austrian Ilse Aichinger, Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann, Swiss Peter Bichsel, Nobel Prize-winner (in 1972) Heinrich Böll, Uwe Johnson, and Martin Walser. Perhaps the most famous is eventual Nobel Prize-winner (1999) Günter Grass, whose sensational anti-bildungsroman, Die Blechtrommel (1959, The Tin Drum), was lauded by the group. Grass quickly followed it up with two other works also critiquing characters in the snares of Nazism or its remembrance: a novella, Katz und Maus (1961, Cat and Mouse) and another novel, Die Hundejahre (1963, Dog Years); together these three works are referred to as the Danzig trilogy for their setting in that formerly German city (now Gdansk) and their casts of mainly German protagonists. Wolfgang Koeppen's postwar novel trilogy composed of Tauben im Gras (1951, Pigeons on the Grass), Das Treibhaus (1953, The Hothouse), and Der Tod in Rom (1954, Death in Rome) also deserves mention in this context, although the adequacy of Koeppen's reckoning with his personal Nazi past has been questioned (e.g., by Morris, 299—300).

Since an unstated founding principle of the GDR was that all its citizens were good socialists and that socialists were the first victims of the Nazis, it is comprehensible that a working-through of the Nazi past would have taken a very different form there. Today many commentators would say that there simply was no working-through and that this fact explains, for instance, the attraction of Eastern German youth to Neo-Nazism. Literary evidence, however, suggests that this is too broad a generalization. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is Christa Wolf's novel, Kindheitsmuster (1976, A Model Childhood), whose first sentence already announces that we cannot get by the past: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen” (“The past is not dead, it's not even past”). Although an author's disclaimer at the beginning of the book states that it does not concern actual people or historical events, it is very clear that the outline of the story matches that of chapters in Wolf's own life. The accomplishments of this novel are several: it focuses on the process of trying to come to terms with a Nazi past, and it does so in a way that is technically interesting, using distinct pronouns for the present writing-self of the narrator (second-person singular) and for the child that the protagonist narrator once was (third-person singular)—a child who was entranced by the spectacle of Nazism and its furnishing of a sense of community, though that sense, even to the child, was clearly established at the price of excluding some (see NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE). The narrator achieves tentative enlightenment, signaled through a single use of the first-person pronoun ich, I, toward the novel's conclusion.

Wolf's Patterns of Childhood stands in fascinating contrast to W. G. Sebald's magisterial and yet humble Austerlitz (2001), reflecting the generational differences of their authors and their concomitantly different relationships to the Nazi past. Whereas Wolf's narrator is trying to connect with her own past, Sebald's makes gargantuan efforts to be a proper sounding board for another's search, that of the titular figure Austerlitz, who discovers as an adult that as a Jewish child he had been put on a Kindertransport out of Prague to England just before the war began. Sebald's novel concerns what Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory (1997); a person (the narrator) becomes connected to the Shoah not through his own autobiography, but through his emotional and intellectual involvement with Austerlitz, an enigmatic figure who escaped the horrors to which his family was subjected but only at the price of those familial relationships being completely erased by his adoptive parents and Welsh and British society (see MEMORY). Thus the German narrator's connection to the Nazi past is doubly diffuse, and in any case imprecise and fraught (something that is also reflected in the bizarre use of photographs in the book). Through his novel, then, Sebald takes what many consider a proper stance toward the events of the last mid-century for Germans today: displaying an interest in learning new things about the Nazi past, while recognizing that full knowledge of what happened and the ability to comfort those who were the war's victims ultimately elude us.

Due to the tragic loss of Sebald himself (killed in a car accident) and the maturity and artistic accomplishment of his last work, many wonder about the next steps in a German processing of the past. There have been ample attempts to portray Germans themselves as victims, for instance, of an unjustifiably brutal air war and vicious expulsion policies for Germans living in eastern territories. Among others, including younger authors like Tanja Dückers in Himmelskörper (2003, Celestial Bodies), Grass has returned to the lost German East, to the events of the war, and to generations of Germans remembering various parts of the Nazi past with various motivations, through his short novel Krebsgang (2002, Crabwalk) and his autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006, Peeling the Onion). In an interview and in the autobiography itself, Grass revealed his voluntary joining of the Waffen-SS as a 17-year-old, precipitating a public outcry against the person who had been prodding other Germans to work through their pasts for decades. To outsiders, the energy of that discussion itself reveals that a “working-through” is still very much in progress for everybody.

Multikulti

There is a current flourishing of prose fiction written in German by individuals for whom German is not their native tongue. This literature has been referred to variously over the last decades in consonance with the way German society looked at the presence of non-Germans in their midst. Gastarbeiterliteratur (guest-worker literature) referred to those from countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Spain who, starting in the 1950s, had been formally invited by the West German government to work for a time there. After the policy changed (1973), the same literature was called Migrantenliteratur (immigration literature), reflecting an awareness that guests were staying for good. Ausländerliteratur (literature by foreigners) mirrored the growing understanding of the variety of foreigners who were in fact choosing to live in Germany. And Literatur deutschschreibender Ausländer (literature of German-writing foreigners) reflected a certain political correctness. As Fischer and McGowan point out, all of these terms are insufficient or misleading (42); today's Interkulturelle and Multikulturelle, or Multikulti, Literatur, also have their drawbacks but seem intended to reference and celebrate the idea of writing from multiple cultural viewpoints.

Vibrant writing has been coming for several decades from writers with names like Franco Biondi (Italy), Rafik Schami (Damascus), Zafer enocak (Ankara), and Yoko Tawada (Tokyo). Since 1985 a special award has been aimed at writers “whose mother tongue and cultural background are non-German and whose works make an important contribution to German literature,” the Adelbert von Chamisso. Chamisso, the nineteenth-century writer, was himself a refugee to Prussia from Revolutionary France. Naming the prize after him is a gesture on the part of the donors to connect current developments with earlier literary history, reminding all of us of the caveat with which this entry began, that “German” never really has meant from one place or tradition. The 2009 awardees provide further insight into the truly international origins of contemporary intercultural writing in German: Artur Becker (Poland), María Cecilia Barbetta (Argentina), and Tzveta Sofronieva (Bulgaria). A particularly fine novel from a writer “with migration background,” as another current expression goes, is Emine Sevgi Özdamar's (Turkey) Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (1998, The Bridge of the Golden Horn).

German Jewish writers are not normally considered under the rubric of literature by foreigners writing in German. This intentional stance of postwar literary scholars is meant to counter, correct, and make amends for the Nazi belief that individuals who themselves or whose ancestors practiced the Jewish faith could not be considered Germans. Today's literary historians count German Jewish writers as having been an integral part of German literature for centuries. An interesting reflection of this attitude can be seen on the cover of a reference work by one of Germany's largest publishers, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Lexikon deutschsprachiger Schriftstellerinnen (1986, Dictionary of German Women Writers): a photograph of Gertrud Kolmar. Contemporary writers who have taken up issues of German Jewish identity in the novel include Robert Schindel, Barbara Honigmann, and Esther Dischereit. Rafael Seligmann (Tel Aviv) and Maxim Biller (Prague), who both immigrated to Germany with their parents at age ten, are usually also identified as German Jewish writers of the post-Holocaust generation. Of course this returns us to the main point of this section and ultimately of this entry.

SEE ALSO: Translation Theory, Yiddish Novel.

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