“Inglorious Jews”: The Language of Jewish Revenge, Integration Theater, and GEGENWARTSBEWÄLTIGUNG in Max Czollek’s Work

• In Event: Scraps of Memory: The Literature of Third-Generation Holocaust Survivors in Germany

Abstract

This paper explores the critique of Germany’s contemporary memory culture in the poetry and cultural criticism of the poet and activist Max Czollek, who belongs to the third generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Germany. Czollek is critical of the German aspiration to overcome the past, which does not require a continuous, critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust but rather denotes an endeavor to achieve reconciliation and absolution for a new generation of Germans, whose own identity is established by the act of overcoming the past. For Czollek, this kind of engagement with the past is directly linked to what he terms, following sociologist Michal Bodemann, “integration theater”. This has specific ramifications for Jewish persons in contemporary Germany, as Czollek argues, who, through this work of overcoming the past, are expected to serve a particular affirming function vis-à-vis German society.
In this paper, I will explore how Czollek’s critique is manifested by aesthetic means through the use of language in his poem cycle A.H.A.S.V.E.R (2015) and show how Czollek’s own engagement with the past antisemitic trope of the Wandering Jew as well as tropes of Jewish revenge work towards a role-reversal of Jewish victims and German perpetrators in his language and poetry that sabotages the integration theater of the German hegemonic culture through what Czollek terms GEGENWARTSBEWÄLTIGUNG (overcoming the present) borrowing from Gabriel Geis’s terminology.

Author

• Adi Nester, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill