Gentile Tales revisited. The Figure of the Antisemite in Contemporary German Literature
About the Event
Fischer will discuss Maxim Biller's novel “Der falsche Gruß” [English translation: The Bad Salute] which provocatively holds up a mirror to the German cultural industry, forcing readers to dive deep into the mind of the main character, Erck Dessauer, a modern antisemite. Against all expectations, the unsuccessful author Erck Dessauer writes a bestseller about a Jewish Soviet functionary who expands Stalin's Gulag system and develops a perfidious method of first exploiting and then starving prisoners. This system of mass extermination, invented by a Jew, claims Erck Dessauer, served as a model for the Nazis. In Biller's novel, the feuilleton is enthusiastic about Erck Dessauer's book and celebrates the author like some kind of figure of salvation. Biller shows German intellectuals cheering the revelation that 'the Jews' themselves were -so to speak- 'responsible' for the Holocaust. The exaggerated enthusiasm of the intellectuals and the cultural scene in the novel is illuminating. It seems to point to a central need in the midst of the supposedly successful Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) in Germany, namely the desire for relief from and defense against guilt and responsibility for the past. Fischer will also show how the novel can be understood as a direct allusion to Martin Walser's controversial text "Tod eines Kritikers" ("Death of a Critic").
About the Speaker
Saskia Fischer, Ph.D., is a research associate at the German Department of the Leibniz University Hannover (Germany) and a Young ZiF Fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University. Her research interests lie in the field of German Jewish literature, Holocaust literature, guilt and moral repair, literature and religion as well as literary antisemitism. She is the author of Ritual und Ritualität im Drama nach 1945 (Wilhelm Fink 2019), co-editor of the volumes Kunst-Rituale – Ritual-Kunst. Zur Ritualität von Theater, Literatur und Musik in der Moderne (Königshausen & Neumann 2019), Lagerliteratur: Schreibweisen, Zeugnisse, Didaktik (Peter Lang 2021) and Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). In addition, she is writing her second monograph on Figurations of Antisemitism in European Literature.
