In the radio archive, among many other treasures, there is a discussion on the subject of “What was Jewish – what is Jewish?” from the early nineties. The show served as a continuation or corrective to a similar one about being German, with Henryk M. Broder as a guest in both. Walter Boehlich described the angry Michael Wolffsohn’s patriotism as “nonsense”, and otherwise it seemed easier for the discussants – please do not quote Mephistopheles – to name what being Jewish is all not is.
The program was broadcast almost exactly 30 years ago, the question of the nature and content of being Jewish remains open, even if the explanations offered have become more numerous and louder. In current German-language literature, perhaps only the sum of the texts from Barbara Honigmann’s “Unashamedly Jewish” collection comes close to a kind of answer – an answer from many, but not as a Talmudic response, but as an aggada, a collection of narratives. The texts came about by chance, often as award and acceptance speeches, in which Honigmann deals with the namesake, such as Elisabeth Langgässer, or the location of the award.
What unites them is the preoccupation with two core aspects of their own life, writing and being Jewish. In contrast to others, Honigmann never blurs the lines between the two too much and takes both seriously. When read superficially, the title of the volume falls behind and is strongly reminiscent of one of the “my Jewish life so crazy again” lifestyle paperback books of recent years. But, as so often in these texts, it points to Honigmann’s past and her bookshelf.
Barbara Honigmann: Outrageously Jewish. Hanser, Munich 2021. 155 pages, 20 euros.
Sartre’s “juif inauthentique” from the “Reflections on the Jewish Question” is translated in the Ullstein paperback from 1963 as “a shameful Jew”; reading the volume smuggled out of West Berlin brought Honigmann on her way to becoming an outrageous Jew as a 14-year-old in the GDR. Her parents had met in exile in England and moved to the Soviet Zone as a matter of course. Her mother Litzi was married in England to the double spy Kim Philby, whose ghost has haunted popular culture ever since, and she also worked as an agent herself. Her father had worked as a liberal journalist before 1933 and kept moving to the left.
As classic Jewish bourgeois children, they had tried on a number of other ideologies until they landed on communism. The step into the party was also a step out of Judaism, “to simply be a human being, comrade, comrade,” as Honigmann writes. There wasn’t much tradition left anyway. This can already be seen from the fact that both father and grandfather had their first names Georg. In the Ashkenazi naming tradition, children are actually only named after relatives who have already died.
Outsiders often find words like “interesting” and “exciting” for biographies such as these, which are not so rare. those who grew up with them behind their backs also feel the leaden weight of the aberrations, wrong and right political decisions, betrayal, lies and the proverbial rootlessness of which they seem to be composed. Honigmann has written several books about this feeling, without false tears, even without the anger of Kafka’s “Letter to the Father”, but with great tenderness.
Honigmann does not gloss over her parents’ belief in the party
The texts from “Outrageously Jewish” read like worthwhile footnotes to the great autobiographical project of their complete works between memory, recording and oral transmission. The various occasions to speak allow Honigmann to walk through the many stations and worlds of her life, such as as a not unrebelable cadre daughter in East Berlin and as a young playwright in the GDR.
This un-Jewish-Jewish life of their GDR generation reverberates to this day, especially because the representatives of the next, third generation are trying so loudly to position themselves and define themselves on it as a basis. Honigmann, as a member of the second generation, does not gloss over her parents’ belief in the party and that is precisely why he can work out the anti-Semitic connotations of the Stasi protocols about her father without releasing him from his own responsibility.
“A man at home and a Jew on the street,” she quotes her father. With her descriptions of completely different speeches in the family and orally inherited knowledge, the daughter shows that the reverse is also true: outwardly comrade, inwardly Jewish. It remains a mystery to her why the parents returned to the Germans of all places. In this supposedly different Germany, too, there could be no mourning about Jews as Jews in public space.
In the end, religion gives the answer to the question of what is Jewish
The Jewish remigrants “contributed to this distortion of history; I don’t know what they had in their hearts. With their decision to live in the GDR, they had decided to adapt to the power-political tendencies of the prevailing ideology,” writes Honigmann sober and clear, without indignation. She describes this adaptation of Jewish and non-Jewish artists and writers again and again, sometimes with ambivalent judgment, sometimes with clearness, when a writer has once again “wasted his poetic energy in the concern of maintaining the favor of the rulers”.
She herself withdrew from this adaptation with an often quoted “triple death leap without a network” and in the eighties moved from the GDR to France, that is, from the east to the west, and began a practicing life with her husband, “von der Assimilation into Torah Judaism “. From this step, in terms of family biography at the same time back and forward, arose her quiet, not at all cocky self-assurance. It allows her to appreciate both elements in the often tragic representatives of an alleged German-Jewish symbiosis like Jakob Wassermann and not to play them off against each other. In the case of the “non-Jewish Jews” like Heine (or their own parents) described by Isaac Deutscher, she does not have to consider what is non-Jewish about them as the truth even interpreted Jewish, but can withstand the dialectical tension.
Most importantly, she hasn’t stopped asking. If she belongs to a movement, then it is probably the modern-orthodox “Shomer Mitzvot”, that is, “to strive without exaggerated zeal to observe the commandments and prohibitions”, as she writes in a beautiful text about the question of female headgear in Judaism . Even if cultural Judaism and Zionism (in practice, according to Honigmann, only a variant of the former) are negotiated as valid drafts of Jewish identity, it is precisely the religion that gives the answer to the question of what is Jewish here.
In response to the subsequent question, which has often been presented and answered with great perfidy in recent months, who is actually Jewish, Honigmann would answer with certainty or with certainty that they are children of Jewish mothers or Orthodox converts. Certainly this answer would not aim at exclusion, but at invitation.
Honigmann himself asks, as in a memory of a spontaneous conversation with a Jewish person sitting next to you on the plane, the much more profound question of how Jews should relate to one another. Your own answer would be, again without exaggerated zeal, with serious tolerance and without resentment. That too is a result of her self-assurance as a Jew. Barbara Honigmann, that is what makes her masterful texts so valuable here, does not have to prove anything to anyone, especially not to herself.