German Jewish identity today
JVL Introduction
Alex Cocotas meditates on the peculiarities of being Jewish in Germany today in The Baffler.
Germans can’t get enough of Jews it seems. So much so, that many are busy inventing Jewish identities. And then writing about them.
Cocotas chronicles some of them: Fabian Wolff who in “Only in Germany” in 2021 wrote that “I am a Jew in Germany”; Marie Sophie Hingst, whose memoiristic blog reportedly had a quarter-million regular readers; Wolfgang Seibert, Jewish community leader of Pinneberg; Max Czollek, author of De-Integrate Yourselves, and others.
Their “Jewish” identities turn out to be questionable to non-existent.
A friend of the author’s is invited to a Shabbat dinner, at which he discovers he is the only Jew in attendance, the other just performing being Jewish.
Cocotas tries to make sense of what is going on.
He suggests that Jewish identity is formulated as a feeling of being an outsider, of searching for one’s true identity. It is a feeling, most of all, of not being German. For to be a German is to be a Täter, a perpetrator; it has no positive connotations.
Germans need Jews as victims to escape their own past. And that increasingly means inventing Jewishness – and standing with Israel, whatever…
RK (h/t MR)
This article was originally published by The Baffler on Thu 9 May 2024. Read the original here.
How German Isn’t It
The ceremonial performance of Jewishness in Germany
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Why would someone claim to be what they are not unless there was some sort of advatage or presumed advatage to be made from it?
Well life is complicated there are people with such unhappiness in their lives that transforming themselves into something else is a promising alternative.
At the age of almost sixteen I went to Aberdeen as a Mothers Help to care for three children which in time became four children. With no qualifications and no gift for figures due to bad eyesight that had never been diagnosed, the opportunity to make new friends and a new life was something not to be wasted. I had new teenagers and other people I met call me elizabeth dropping the name that had always come with reprimends and accusations of lazyness not to mention physical punishment in the post war years of 1950s Real Austerity where windows frosted over in Winter. Changing my name but not disguising my Catholic upbringing offered an opportunity to start again and stand upright. Much later working as a housekeeper for a family I discovered the Mother of the children , who had left the family home, had pretended she was Jewish and met my employer in Israel on a Kibutz. They married and returned to Britain some time later after spells in other countries. she was obviously a deeply unhappy woman as she used and was dealing in drugs to support a habit. Happily I discovered that that my headaches and migrain were caused by my poor eyesight when I was thirty five , and have been able to use my inteligence to gain good exam results and a BA Hons. Degree, plus persuing other interests. Perhaps the German Population is still carrying the collective guilt of the Nazi generation in the same way that many modern Brits are carrying the guilt of slavers and the “Being Jewish” pretence is simply trying to escape that burden they were handed as the “Sins of the Fathers” Perhaps teaching history a little differently would remedy that problem.
Mind-boggling contortions. And to me, a ‘Vaterjudin’, hilariously funny (if they were not so cruel in their results). As far as I know my Hungarian relatives are still frantically concealing their own Jewish origins, so I am viewing this process through the other end of a historical telescope.
The process has happened elsewhere of course, with African-American leadership being claimed by at least one institution led by someone with all-white (Caucasian) ancestry.
Perhaps the most moving and genuine ‘coming-out’ process has been seen in the young Turkish citizens discovering their Armenian roots. To do this entails no societal pay-off , it is just a search for truth now that a little safe space exists. Leading perhaps, one day, to reconciliation.
Congratulations on republishing this wonderfully acerbic and satiric piece. The reality is almost beyond belief and the writer has done it the justice of mockery.
There is a long history of this sort of cultural appropriation in Germany. In the 19th century, there arose a fascination with Native Americans (German: ‘Indianer’) which persists into the present day. Reenactment groups across Germany meet, dress up and act out an imagined Native American lifestyle.
Much of this is attributed to a prolific 19th century author, Karl May, a former petty criminal who wrote his best-selling tales of the adventures of the Apache chief Winnetou without ever having visited America. The stories painted a romantic picture of the brave and noble savage, qualities which some Germans presumably sought to project onto themselves.
It may be that those Germans who adopt a false Jewish persona are similarly seeking to appropriate perceived honourable qualities. In view of Germany’s absolute identification of Jewishness with Zionism, this would be ironic, as the ‘Indianer’ was presented as the noble indigenous custodian of the land, who stands in opposition to the effete and perfidious coloniser.