Melissa Beegle

Rafael Seligmann & the German-jewish Negative Symbiosis: Breaking the Silence Melissa Beegle

More than fifty years have past since the Shoah, butthe relationship between Jewish and non-JewishGermans is still strained. Why do Jewish-Germanschoose to live in post-Shoah Germany? How does theirpresence affect the lives of their non-Jewish Germancountrymen? Rafael Seligmann (1947 - ) was one of thefirst German-language Jewish authors to write aboutcontemporary life in post-Shoah Germany. He isconsidered one of the most controversial of thecontemporary German-Language Jewish writers becausehe breaks taboos and negatively portrays Jewishcharacters in his novels. He feels there is a silencein Germany surrounding the Holocaust that he hopes tobreak by provoking his readers to discuss how theShoah affects their lives. This book applies theideas of scholars such as Gershom Scholem, Dan Diner, Todd Herzog, Jack Zipes, Hannah Arendt and KatjaBehrens to Seligmann's novels, RubensteinsVersteigerung (1989), Die jiddische Mamme (1990), andDer Musterjude (1997) to evaluate Seligmann'sperception of the manifestations of the German-Jewishnegative symbiosis on life in post-Shoah Germany.