Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by Jessica Ortner Stuart Taberner Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature. By Jessica Ortner. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2022. 285 pp. £85. ISBN 978–16–401–4022–6. There is much to recommend this volume. In it, Jessica Ortner examines recent German-language writers with a Jewish background whose lived experience of the Soviet Union (or, in the case of Barbara Honigmann, the former East Germany) introduces Eastern European histories into a historical narrative that has largely been [End Page 636] shaped by Western institutions. Whether it is Stalinist crimes, Soviet antisemitism, or less familiar sites of the Nazi genocide, these writers offer an important corrective, Ortner argues, to dominant social, political, and cultural discourses that tend to construct 'Auschwitz' as the single most significant memory around which Europe could—or should—shape a unified identity. Ortner thus offers an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the 'Eastern turn' (Brigid Haines: see 'Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature', German Life and Letters, 68 (2015), 145–53 ) in recent German-language writing and inflects this with an emphasis on the migration of Jewish memories from east to west following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. This also relates, of course, to the spectacular revival of the Jewish community in Germany following the arrival after 1990 of around 200,000 people from the former Soviet Union able to claim Jewish heritage. Ortner's book is organized into three sections. The first gives a detailed overview of and engagement with the 'mnemonic divide' between Eastern and Western Europe, with countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc tending to their victimization under communism while Western European countries focus on the Nazi genocide. This section also attends to recent scholarship in memory studies and identifies the volume's original contribution to this literature. Section 11 examines three contemporary authors, Vladimir Vertlib, Katja Petrowskaja, and Barbara Honigmann, and specifically their endeavours to parallel Stalinism with Nazi crimes—without, however, relativizing the Holocaust. Section in then examines two writers, Olga Grjasnowa and Lena Gorelik, who more explicitly contest Germany's dominant memory culture, by de-emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust and placing it within a multidirectional, transcultural framework alongside other atrocities and injustices—for example, the Armenian genocide or even Israel's military interventions in the West Bank and Gaza. The close readings are detailed, generally sound, and occasionally excellent. The chapter on Petrowskaja, then, is highly illuminating in its detailed and nuanced focus on the memory politics of Soviet and post-Soviet representations of the Holocaust, and the chapter on Honigmann brings out a neglected aspect of her work, namely her depiction of communist oppression. This is an ambitious volume that largely 'works'. On occasion, Ortner perhaps overstates the normative power of what she calls social frameworks of memory. The European Union might well mandate a particular interpretation of the European past, based on Holocaust memory, but it is is clear that member states, and more importantly, individual citizens, have a wide range of divergent and even contrary memories of their own. Ortner's thesis does not need this detailed reference to European Union policies to be persuasive. Similarly, the volume's two main arguments—that Eastern European writers focus on Stalinism rather than the Holocaust, and that Eastern European Jewish writers focus on different aspects of the Holocaust—are sometimes in tension with each other, or at least the interaction between the two arguments is not always clearly articulated. These are framing issues, or occasional infelicities relating to the clarity of expression, that do not [End Page 637] detract from the cogency of the close readings and the overall originality of the volume, however. Scholars of contemporary German and German Jewish literature will find Ortner's Transcultural Memory more than useful for its framing of the contribution of writers from the former Soviet Union (and GDR) to current debates on German (and more generally Western) memory culture. More than this, however, its close readings...