Katja Garloff Livres

In 1960, Paul Celan faced plagiarism accusations that sparked a public debate in West Germany, leading to a personal crisis despite support from many critics. This crisis coincided with a pivotal moment in Holocaust remembrance, marked by significant criminal trials. The book explores the tension between public rituals and personal turmoil, tracing the emergence of a new literary diaspora among German Jewish writers displaced during World War II, who began to reinterpret their experiences over a decade later. While the concept of diaspora lost its significance in nineteenth-century German Jewish culture, it becomes essential for articulating German Jewish identity post-Holocaust. The analysis includes works by Celan, Peter Weiss, and Nelly Sachs, framed by theoretical reflections on distance and proximity among German Jewish intellectuals such as Theodor W. Adorno and Jean Améry. Utilizing postcolonial, diaspora, trauma, and psychoanalytical theories, the author, Katja Garloff, offers a nuanced examination of how these writers navigated their experiences of dispersion, viewing it as both traumatic and productive. The book serves as a vital resource for understanding these authors and contributes to the broader discourse on trauma and displacement.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the development of German Jewish literature from 1990 to the present and offers a new theory of Jewish diaspora literature. Whereas earlier studies focused on the second generation of German Jewish writers after the Holocaust, Garloff's analysis extends to third-generation writers, many of whom come from Eastern European or mixed-religion backgrounds. The works of these more recent writers, include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, Jan Himmelfarb, and Katja Petrowskaja. Garloff suggests that the emergence of a new German Jewish literature affords a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and the formation of group identity. Throughout the Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish--the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices--and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is innovatively structured around a series of founding gestures--performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a continually reinvented German Jewish literature into the twenty-first century.

Edited volume tracing the development of a new generation of German Jewish writers, offering fresh interpretations of individual works, and probing the very concept of "German Jewish literature."