Unashamedly Jewish

 

I may confess that my first encounter with Barbara Honigmann´s writing was not an outstanding experience. It may be that I was not prepared - mentally and linguistically - or just it was not a good book. It happens to everyone - both readers and writers.

My second meeting with this German Jewish author and translator living  in France is in fact a collection of discourses held on the occasion of being awarded literary prizes and public appearances, where elements of personal biography, particularly related to her Jewish identity are omnipresent. Written in German, they are inspiringly connecting European Jewish biographies - like Proust and Kafka´s - with personal literary experiences and her own Jewish journey. 

On one side, there are the intellectual references and the arguments for a critique, literary or philosophically. On the other side, there are her own personal/subjective encounters with her own Jewishness - that she assumes ´unashamedly´/unverschämt - as growing up in a secular Jewish family that decided to return from Exile after the war in the Soviet-occupied communist Germany. Some of the few whose family histories did not include Nazis. 

Honigmann writes about different kind of Jews. Jews like Heine or Proust or Edith Stein. Obviosuly, about Kafka too.  ´Western´ Jews that preferred to abandon their identity for joining the majorities, nevertheless Jews. Sometimes, there are the stories themselves that matter. Another time, the intellectual histories.

I may acknowledge that right now, I will not hesitate to start reading another book by Honigmann, particularly for the authentic GDR-Jewish stories, that keep interesting me and whose reliability through personal memoirs is at a certain extent problematic - for reasons that maybe will be able to explain one time.

Henny Brenner: A Jewish Destiny in Dresden

The Allies bombing of the city of Dresden on mid-February 1945 saved the life of Henny Brenner (born Wolf) and to many other Jews who were ready to take the road to concentration camps. Henny, the mother of Munich-based historian Michael Brenner (his father is also a Shoa survivor) shared her story of survival during those terrible years with a journalistic detachement. 

People, situations and political circumstances are displayed in a slow moving cinematic chain of events. It is a relatively short book, but informative enough to request at least two additional readings. One, about the situation of Jews married with non-Jews and the other regarding the anti-Semitism in the ex-GDR.

Henny was the only child of a family with a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father. This situation delayed at a certain extent the moment of the deportation to the concentration camp, although the family properties were seized and she and her mother were obligated to do forced arbeit for ZESS Jena factory. Although mistakenly taken as an example of the pure 'Aryan race' by a teacher, she was expelled from school and suffered under the absurd anti-Semitic measures directed against Jews: among others, the interdiction of using the public transportation, to get a normal hair cut, to go to cultural events, to use the services of a non-Jewish doctor. However, her book also includes testimonies on the Jewish (reform) religious life in Dresden.

Henny and her mother lives' were saved by the Allies bombings, but what followed after the war was over in the so-called Nazi-free Germany was not pleasant either. Following the patterns of the set-up trials against Jews members of the communist establishment, the GDR leaders followed and put into prison representatives of the local community. Adviced by the wise - probably the only after the war until today - leader of the Berlin Jews, Heinz Galinski, Henny and her family will escape to Berlin, before the Wall and from here, she will further move to Bavaria after marrying Hermann Brenner. 

Henny Brenner book about her experiences as a young Jew in Dresden adds on to the literature about those times. It shares some new and detailed information about those times and outlines the horrors of facing on a daily basis racism and discrimination. Another dramatic testimony of a disturbing and haunting human experience.

Rating: 4 stars