Description

A declaration of love for Germany by the Jewish author Lena Gorelik in her semi-autobiographical text "Dear Mischa" (2011) poses the question whether the Holocaust is still the point of reference and central characteristic of self-conception of the contemporary or third generation of Jewish writers in Germany after 1945. In addition to Gorelik's text, the study analyzes Katja Petrowskaja's "Maybe Esther" (2014) and Olga Grjasnowa's "All Russians Love Birch Trees" (2012). This third generation of authors, publishing after 2010, is part of the 'new' German Jewry, composed mainly of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their children - a fact which significantly influences contemporary Jewish identity in Germany: The analysis of the literary identities, which the authors constructed for their protagonists, sheds light on current trends in contemporary Jewish life in Germany and demonstrates that these 'new' Jews from the East reject the special status assigned to them as 'victims of the Holocaust' or 'exotic' outsiders. Instead the authors voice the desire for 'normalization' in the German-Jewish relationship in their autofictional texts.