The Helen and Martin Schwartz lectures in Jewish studies

Distinguished literary scholar Geoffrey H. Hartman, himself forced to leave Germany at age nine, collects his essays, both scholarly and personal, that focus on the Holocaust. Hartman contends that although progress has been made, we are only beginning to understand the horrendous events of 1933 to 1945. The continuing struggle for meaning, consolation, closure, and the establishment of a collective memory against the natural tendency toward forgetfulness is a recurring theme. The many forms of response to the devastation - from historical research and survivors' testimony to the novels, films, and monuments that have appeared over the last fifty years - reflect and inform efforts to come to grips with the past, despite events (like those at Bitburg) that attempt to foreclose it. The stricture that poetry after Auschwitz is "barbaric" is countered by the increased sense of responsibility incumbent on the creators of these works.

This is the first book to examine an emerging new German Jewish culture that has become visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Shoah seemed to have erased the historical Jewish presence in German culture. Since the late 1980s, however, a once-silent and therefore relatively invisible Jewish community of the victims of the Shoah has been restructuring itself, as a new generation of German Jews enters the mainstream of German cultural life. Sander L. Gilman surveys the recent explosion of works by creative artists who invoke their Jewish identity and place at the center of their art the question of what it means to be a Jew in contemporary Germany. After introducing this new generation of German Jewish novelists, dramatists, film makers, and critics, Gilman analyzes the critical reception of the novels of Rafael Seligmann and Esther Dischereit, two of the most interesting younger writers. A chapter is devoted to the issue of visibility or invisibility as it is inscribed in the representation of the Jewish body in contemporary German Jewish culture. The book concludes with a study of the central role of gender in the structuring of Jewish identity and the author's observations on the complexities of life in the present-day German Jewish Diaspora.