A Jew in the New Germany
2005; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoBroder, Henryk. A Jew in the New Germany. Ed. Sander L oilman and Lilian M. Friedberg. Trans. Broder Translators' Collective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 151 pp. $29.95 hardcover. In this volume, oilman and Friedberg offer a series of essays that accurately capture Henryk Broder's witty, acerbic, polemical, exasperated, and, it has to be said, sometimes exasperating style and outlook on a number of controversial and recurring issues in German public discourse. In the introduction, Gilman recounts the story of Broder's life from his birth in Poland to his youth in, and 1981 flight from, Germany and locates the author within a centuries-old tradition of German-Jewish feuilletonism characterized by caustic voices demanding change from the status quo(x). essays chosen here span a period of twenty-three years (1979-2002) and yield four basic groupings: those that deal with anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and memory politics in Germany (1-7, 9, 12 and 16); those that tackle reunification and its aftermath (8, 10 and 11); those that wrestle with the oddities of life in Israel (13-15); and a single essay that broaches the German reaction to the events of September 11th, a topic covered extensively in Broder's 2002 book Kein Krieg, nirgends: Die Deutschen und der Terror. Broder's 1981 You Are Still Your Parents' Children stands out among the early essays. In it, he defends his conviction that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Germany, only masquerading now as a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli leftist and pacifist fixation. With this essay, he bids Germany goodbye, berating the left for its sanctimoniousness and a racism that begins with the overestimation of your own morality (23). In 1996, a few years after his semi-return to Germany, he pokes fun at the American institution of Holocaust Studies in the irreverent and witty The of the He ponders how this name makes it hard to tell whether the discipline is designed to teach how to organize a Holocaust or how to avert one (102) and proceeds to encourage Germans to reclaim the Holocaust: It is time for a counteroffensive that speaks in terms of the Germanization of the Holocaust. There's no way around it: we must firmly establish that we own the historical copyright on this concept... (102-03). On a more serious note, he laments that Germany's concern with Holocaust memorialization seems driven by a desire to create the appearance of remorse for the Holocaust, the appearance of a new antifascist Germany, rather than by a desire to actually deal with the racism that still exists and manifests itself frequently in violent attacks on foreigners. …
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