eJournals Colloquia Germanica 51/1

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2020
511

Refugees Past and Present: Olga Grjasnowa’s “Gott ist nicht schüchtern” and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s “Außer sich”

31
2020
Brangwen Stone
This article focuses on two 2017 novels touching on themes of flight, migration and displacement written by former Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) from the Soviet Union: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s “Außer Sich” and Olga Grjasnowa’s “Gott ist nicht schüchtern”. While the former novel intertwines a narrative of gender transition in Istanbul with the protagonist Ali’s experience as a quota refugee and his family history, the latter focuses on two Syrian refugees who flee to Germany. Drawing on both Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, this article explores how these two novels draw parallels between present suffering and discrimination and German-Jewish and Sovielt-Jewish history, and simultaneously attempt to evoke empathy for those marginalized in the present day.
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Refugees Past and Present: Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern and Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich Brangwen Stone The University of Sydney Abstract: This article focuses on two 2017 novels touching on themes of flight, migration and displacement written by former Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) from the Soviet Union: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern � While the former novel intertwines a narrative of gender transition in Istanbul with the protagonist Ali’s experience as a quota refugee and his family history, the latter focuses on two Syrian refugees who flee to Germany. Drawing on both Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, this article explores how these two novels draw parallels between present suffering and discrimination and German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish history, and simultaneously attempt to evoke empathy for those marginalized in the present day� Keywords: Kontingentflüchtling, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, refugee, multidirectional memory In 2015, the movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe, which had increased after the so-called “Arab Spring,” 1 reached its peak� In late summer 2015, Angela Merkel opened German borders at a time when many neighboring countries did not, and Germany briefly relished the international community’s admiration of its “welcome culture.” Yet this “halcyon moment” was not to last (Sieg, “Refugees”). Merkel soon began to face criticism both domestically and internationally, and in the 2017 federal elections the right-wing AfD ( Alternative für Deutschland ) party won 12.6 percent of the vote with a campaign platform largely based on opposition to immigration (Mudde)� While the bulk of refugees currently arriving in Germany come from the Middle East, especially from Syr- 58 Brangwen Stone ia, many refugees who settled in Germany in the twentieth century came from Eastern Europe. They arrived in Germany in several waves as a result of war and political turmoil, the most recent wave following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent conflicts in Eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia, in the 1990s. Writing about the “Osterweiterung” of German-language literature in 2008 - the same year that Brigid Haines observed an “eastern turn” (Haines 138) - Irmgard Ackermann argued that “die Literatur [braucht] längere Zeit, oft erheblich längere Zeit, zur Aufarbeitung der historischen Ereignisse” (Ackermann 13)� Though it might take a number of years for the refugees recently arrived in Germany to start writing and publishing in German, the current so-called “refugee crisis” and its attendant narratives of flight, trauma, and resettlement were almost immediately reflected in German-language literature. 2 A number of writers of Eastern European background with personal experience of flight have publically commented on parallels between their fates and those of the recent arrivals, and some have published literary works touching on themes of flight, migration, and displacement. Thus, Herta Müller, for instance, wrote a short piece published in the tabloid Bild newspaper in August 2015, entitled “Ich war auch ein Flüchtling,” in which she declared she had been a refugee too, and reminded of the many who had fled from both Nazi Germany and Eastern European dictatorships (Müller)� 3 In 2016, Saša Stanišić, who fled Bosnia as a teenager during the war, published a collection of short stories entitled Fallensteller , several of which feature Syrian refugees. The same year, Julya Rabinowich, an Austrian-Jewish author of Russian origin, published Dazwischen: Ich , a youth novel centering on a fifteen-year-old female refugee. A year later, the Bulgarian-German Ilja Trojanow reflected on his own experiences and flight generally in Nach der Flucht (2017)� This article will focus on two 2017 novels touching on themes of flight, migration, and displacement written by former Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) from the Soviet Union: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern � While the former novel intertwines a narrative of gender transition in Istanbul with the protagonist Ali’s experience as a quota refugee from Moscow and his family history, the latter focuses on two Syrian refugees who flee to Germany. Drawing on both Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Judith Butler’s concepts of “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives, I will explore how these two novels draw parallels between present suffering and discrimination and German-Jewish and Soviet-Jewish history, and simultaneously attempt to evoke empathy for those marginalized in the present day� I argue that placing narratives of Soviet anti-Semitism alongside present day anti-transgender violence in Außer sich , and interweaving the Refugees Past and Present 59 experiences of Syrian refugees with allusions to and citations of literary narratives of those fleeing Nazi persecution in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , represents what Rothberg calls “complex acts of solidarity” (Rothberg, Multi-directional Memory 11). I contend moreover that narrating such experiences, and drawing such parralels, is an attempt to establish empathy with those marginalized in the present day by making their experiences intelligible and thus bringing them “under the rubric of the ‘human’” (Butler, Precarious Life 46). The two authors are almost the same age and share similar backgrounds: Grjasnowa was born in 1984 in Azerbaijan, where she grew up as part of the Russian minority, and arrived in Germany in 1995, while Salzmann was born in Volgograd in 1985, grew up in Moscow, and came to Germany in 1996. Furthermore, both writers were part of a group of approximately 200,000 Kontinengentflüchtlinge , also called Kontingent-Juden , who emigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union between the early 1990s and 2005, when new restrictions were introduced� 4 This wave of emigration reshaped and revived the Jewish community in Germany, and more than 90 percent of Jews in Germany now stem from the former Soviet Union (Belkin). Wladimer Kaminer, who arrived in Germany in his twenties, and “put Russian-German literature on the map,” was the first quota refugee to become well known as a German-language author in the early 2000s and also to comically thematize the experience of quota refugees both in the Soviet Union and on arrival in Germany (Biendarra 212). Like Kaminer in Russendisko before Salzmann humorously addresses both the fact that many of those now arriving in Germany as quota refugees were not previously practicing Jews, and the cultural insensitivity of the German authorities in their provision for the new arrivals: Sie waren alle mit dem Eintrag “Kontingentflüchtling” in ihren Papieren gekommen, was hieß, dass sie in Familienstammbäumen nach jüdischen Ästen gesucht hatten, und wer keine fand, der erfand sich welche, je nach Inhalt des Portemonnaies� Man tat alles, um das geliebte Sowjetland zu verlassen, man war sogar bereit, Jude zu werden. [. . .] Viele konnten nicht essen, was in die Kantine gekarrt wurde, das war vor der Zeit, als man darauf kam, man müsste der Mischpoche, die mit dem Emigrationsgr- und “Jude” ins Land gekommen war, vielleicht koscheres Essen anbieten. (Salzmann 108—09) In the years since Kaminer first became an acclaimed author, a number of other quota refugees, including Alina Bronsky and Lena Gorelik, have also emerged as writers� 5 As Maria Roca Lizarazu notes, these more recent arrivals “no longer centre their writing on the Holocaust but tackle the issues surrounding transnational Jewish identities in modern-day Germany” (Lizarazu 169). Agnes Mueller and Katja Garloff speculate that this shift may be explained by the fact that 60 Brangwen Stone “[f]or many Jewish authors from the former Soviet Union, Stalinist terror, the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Communist regimes, and the interethnic conflicts following the collapse of those regimes are more immediate historical reference points than the Holocaust” (Mueller and Garloff, “Introduction” 7—8). Außer sich , which was nominated for the German Book Prize and received a number of other prizes, is Salzmann’s first novel, but the author has been a successful and prizewinning playwright for a number of years� Ali, born as Alissa, the central protagonist and main narrator of Außer sich , arrives in Turkey to search for his missing twin brother, Anton, who sent a postcard from Istanbul only bearing his mother’s address, leaving the other side blank, “kein Text, kein Gruß” (Salzmann 87). In Istanbul, Ali is taken under the wings of Cemal, the uncle of his best friend and sometimes lover, Elyas, who has stayed behind in Berlin. Soon after arriving in Istanbul, Ali meets the transgender Ukranian dancer Katho, formerly Katüscha, still in the process of transition, with whom he begins a relationship. As Ali becomes more and more embroiled in questions about his own identity, he also delves into his past and the past of his family in “Odessa, Czernowitz, Grosny, Wolgograd, Moskau, Deutschland” reaching back three generations, and exploring different periods of Soviet history and the harsh realities of migration in the process (Salzmann 144)� Eventually, Ali also starts injecting himself with testosterone bought on the black market, turning every day more and more into his absent twin brother, and exchanging the pronoun “she” for the pronoun “he.” 6 Ali and family were, like Salzmann, quota refugees, who emigrated to Germany from the former Soviet Union. On moving to Germany, the family exchanged generations of anti-Semitic discrimination - particularly harshly felt by Ali’s great-grandparents Etinka and Schura who were banned from practicing as doctors in Stalin-era Russia - for anti-Russian slurs� Shortly before Ali came to Turkey, the father, whom Ali’s mother Valja had left a few years earlier, had committed suicide. He had thrown himself off a balcony following a short-lived attempt to return to live in Russia ended after he was swindled out of his parents’ apartment (Salzmann 254—56, 296). Valja darkly says, “Migration tötet, es klang wie eine Warnung auf einer Zigarettenschachtel: Migration fügt Ihnen und den Menschen in Ihrer Umgebung erheblichen Schaden zu” (Salzmann 297), but as Ali ventures into the family’s past and remembers his own childhood, it becomes clear that the parents were no happier in Russia than in Germany� Gott ist nicht schüchtern is Grjasnowa’s third novel, and she has already built a reputation as a migrant literary success story with her two previous novels� Her first novel, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt 7 , was published in 2012 and Refugees Past and Present 61 won both the Klaus Michael Kühne Prize and the Anna Seghers Prize� Her second novel, Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe , was published in 2014 and was awarded a Chamisso Prize the following year, which is the third last year that this prize for German-language authors of non-German origins was awarded� Both these novels were adapted for the stage by the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, where Salzmann is author in residence� The third-person narration of Gott ist nicht schüchtern centers on two main Syrian protagonists: the actress Amal and the doctor Hammoudi. The novel traces their lives in Syria during the revolution, their flight to Western Europe along different routes, and their life on arrival in Germany. Grjasnowa acknowledges that these two characters are privileged in having the money to make their way to Europe: “Es ist der Mittelstand, der flieht, die Armen bleiben in den Flüchtlingslagern zurück” (Grjasnowa 242). The two central protagonist’s narratives, occasionally interrupted with brief digressions to trace other characters’ fates, are told separately for most of the novel. They are acquaintances in Syria and meet a few times before they flee. The bulk of the novel is devoted to their experiences as dissidents in Syria, as they suffer persecution and torture, and their grueling flight to Europe during which both survive as many of their fellow refugees die� After Amal and her boyfriend Youssef’s boat sinks, and the survivors drift in the ocean, Amal is entrusted with the baby Amina by its tired mother, and when they are rescued while the mother is not, they pass themselves off as a married couple and claim Amina as their own� Both Amal and Hammoudi end up in Berlin, but go separate ways� While Hammoudi spends his days listlessly wandering the streets, Amal becomes a TV cook, and “[w]enn sie Essen zubereitet, beschwört sie Erinnerungen herauf, nicht nur ihre eigenen, sondern auch die der Menschen, die sie die jeweiligen Gerichte gelehrt hatten, und die der Generationen zuvor” (Grjasnowa 295). The title of this TV show - “Mein Flüchtling kocht” - seems to satirize both the well-meaning condescension of Germans towards refugees and the use of food as shorthand for transcultural acceptance� Elsewhere in the novel too, Grjasnowa ironically evokes food as a metaphor for multiculturalism, “that arch cliché of capitalist pluralism“ (Sieg, Ethnic Drag 138), as Hammoudi and his fellow refugees bribe a police officer at the Serbian-Hungarian border: “Der ranghöchste Offizier nimmt das Geld entgegen, er sieht fröhlich aus und blickt seine Gefangenen neugierig an, als würde er sagen wollen, nehmt es nicht persönlich, auch ich esse gerne Hummus” (Grjasnowa 271). Towards the end of the novel, the fates of the two central protagonists intersect again, when they recognize each other in front of a supermarket on Sonnenallee (in the Berlin suburb of Neukölln) and begin a brief affair that ends 62 Brangwen Stone when Hammoudi is moved to a refugee hostel in the countryside. They stay in contact for a while, but eventually Amal stops answering Hammoudi’s messages. Hammoudi dies when a “Dorfnazi” throws a small homemade bomb through the window of his room (Grjasnowa 306). On a flight to Los Angeles to film a pilot for a cooking show, Amal awakes suddenly, “[s]ie hat von Hammmoudi geträumt und ein ungutes Gefühl macht sich in ihr breit” (Grjasnowa 307). Looking out the window she sees the endless blue surface of the Atlantic, and “das Wasser löst in Amal ein Ekelgefühl aus, sie kann das Meer plötzlich riechen und die Kälte in ihren Gliedern fühlen” (Grjasnowa 307). She vomits into a paper bag and resolves to call Hammoudi as soon as she has arrived in Los Angeles� In fact she does not, instead she calls her mother Svetlana in Russia to tell her the truth about her daughter Amina and of not being able to bear the Ocean anymore� Amal immediately books another flight back to Berlin, and requests a seat as far away from the window as possible. She flies back to Berlin on the same plane she arrived on, and the novel ends with the prosaic line, “Eine neue Besatzung kam an Bord” (Grjasnowa 309). This ending signifies Amal’s decision to grapple with the truth about Amina’s parentage, rather than moving to the United States to ensure that there is even less of a chance that anyone will ever find out as Youssef wants to (Grjasnowa 303). The decision against secrecy seems informed by the revelation in recent years both of her father’s second secret family, and the realization that her mother had not, as her father pretended all these years, cut of all contact with her children, but that he had made letters and parcels disappear, and even managed to prevent her from entering Syria twice despite a valid visa (Grjasnowa 297)� Yet the ending is also freighted both with Hammoudi’s death at the hands of a Neonazi - which Amal has not yet learnt of - and the continuing bodily effect that the trauma of fleeing Syria has on Amal. Using Grjasnowa’s writing as one of his examples, Stuart Taberner argues that in the work of a number of German-language authors of Russian-Jewish backgrounds Russian(-Jewish) protagonists interact almost solely with other recent migrants and secondor third-generation Turkish-Germans noting that this intensifies the “vague linkage between ‘things Jewish’ and ‘things Turkish’” that Leslie Adelson noted in 2000 (Taberner, “Possibilities and Pitfalls” 920). Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz also reference Adelson when remarking that “[m] uch of the discourse since the 1970s connecting migrants to the Nazi past has proceeded via the analogy ‘The Turks are the new Jews’ - meant critically by some and threateningly by others” (Yildiz and Rothberg 40). While Grjasnowa’s most recent novel shifts away from a Russian-Jewish protagonist to two Syrian protagonists (though there are still traces of this heritage as will be discussed later), in Salzmann’s novel this nexus is clear and the link becomes almost fa- Refugees Past and Present 63 milial in the form of the Turkish Cemal who becomes the nurturing accepting parent that Ali’s Russian-Jewish parents are not. Like the Stadtmütter project in Neukölln that Rothberg and Yildiz discuss, Salzmann’s novel opens “very different lines of affiliation and historical connection” (Yildiz and Rothberg 40). In both novels, the characters speak several languages and resist being defined by national identities. Salzmann’s Ali, who is transgender and feels neither German nor Russian, illustrates Jessica Berman’s argument that “[h]owever represented on our passports or other identity cards, our bodies often slide between and among the categories of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century citizenship, resisting and, at times, we hope, remaking, in a kind of catachresis, the forms and values of gendered national identity” (Berman 235). Ali has a German passport and is able to travel freely and legally, though his passage through immigration in Istanbul is briefly delayed by the fact he no longer presents as female (Salzmann 15—16), while Grjasnowa’s Syrian Hammoudi becomes trapped in Syria when the authoritarian government decides not to renew his passport, and his elite cosmopolitan existence as a doctor in Paris with a French girlfriend is suddenly taken from him� In Außer sich , Cemal‘s family, who has taken Ali under his wing, suggests that he join them in Germany after an attempted military coup, but he refuses: “Wenn man [ein Land] hat, kann man es nicht verlassen. Das schleppt man immer mit. [. . .] Das alles konnte ich nicht nachvollziehen damals, ich hatte keine Ahnung, was das heißt, ein Land zu haben” (Salzmann 361). Ali’s attitude to nation - he cannot identify with the feeling of belonging to a particular nation - mirrors the findings of ethnographer Regina Römhild that migrants in Germany, especially younger migrants, increasingly “refuse to define themselves in the territorialized terms of the nation states. And by creating transnational, imaginary homes of their own, they are slipping out of the hold of the nation state, both that of their family’s origins and that of their residence” (Römhild). One aspect that complicates national belonging for migrants such as Ali is collective memory, as it is integral to national identity, particularly in the German case. Rothberg coined the term “multidirectional memory” to describe “the dialogic emergence of hybrid memories in transnational and multicultural contexts” (Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory” 125) arguing that rather than competing, and threatening to erase one another, memories of different traumatic histories can coexist and resonate with each other. Rothberg and Yildiz apply this concept in the context of migrants in Germany, exploring the interplay between memory of the Holocaust and migrant memories (Yildiz and Rothberg)� In some recent German novels featuring refugees, memory of the German national past is similarly placed alongside memory of the refugees’ experiences. This includes Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen ging gegangen in which the narrator 64 Brangwen Stone frequently draws parallels between the fates of the refugees he meets and the German past (Stone). But other texts have also placed memories of earlier flight alongside the experiences of recent refugees. Furthermore, Mueller and Garloff note that German-Jewish authors of Eastern European background “often establish connections between oppression and violence in different geographical locations, including Eastern Europe” (Mueller and Garloff, “Introduction” 8). In Grjasnowa’s earlier novel Birken , for instance, the link between past and present suffering is more explicit, and Stuart Taberner argues that central protagonist “Mascha’s internalization of her grandmother’s story of displacement and dispossession during the Nazi genocide enables her empathetic identification with those traumatized in the present” (Taberner, Transnationalism 121)� He further suggests that the way in which the novel connects German, Middle-Eastern and Eastern-European pasts and presents undermines the “parochialism of the nation, and indeed national narratives” (Taberner, “Possibilities and Pitfalls” 926). Both Grjasnowa and Salzmann have specifically drawn parallels between the narratives of displacement in their novels and their personal and familial history in interviews, and Salzmann goes so far as to label Außer sich “autobiographische Fiktion” (May). Salzmann’s multigenerational story of life and suffering follows a general trend in German literature identified by Lizarazu towards the multigenerational or family novel (Lizarazu 169). The novel has similarities to other recent long novels exploring the multigenerational history of a family in Eastern Europe, such as Nino Haratschwili’s Das achte Leben , or Natascha Wodin’s Sie kam as Mariupol . Yet although Salzmann follows the “familiar framework” of third generation narrators exploring their family’s history “from a position of belatedness,” the narrative of gender transition in the present day, to which a sizeable part of the narrative is devoted, distinguishes Außer sich from these multigenerational novels (Lizarazu 169). In Grjasnowa’s novel, on the other hand, personal family history is less evident� Yet talking to Die Welt , Grjasnowa first emphasizes, before any discussion of either her Syrian husband or her personal experience as a quota refugee, that she grew up with the story of her Jewish grandmother’s flight, saying: Als sie vierzehn war, ist der Zweite Weltkrieg ausgebrochen� Sie und ihr Bruder waren die einzigen Überlebenden einer großen jüdischen Familie. Sie flohen von Weißrussland nach Baku. Sie haben für diese zweieinhalbtausend Kilometer drei bis vier Jahre gebraucht, damals wollte niemand zwei jüdische Waisenkinder beherbergen (Kämmerlings)� Grjasnowa later explains that the personal stories of flight and exile that her Syrian husband and his family members and friends have told her, “hat [alles] viel bei mir getriggert, aus meiner Kindheit. Das ist oft wirklich eins zu eins” Refugees Past and Present 65 (Kämmerlings). Moreover, she describes flight and exile as experiences that are timeless, and reflects that the questions those forcibly displaced from their homes ask are always the same questions her own grandmother asked, “Wo geht man hin? Und wie? ” (Kämmerlings). In an interview with Mueller and Garloff, Grjasnowa also underlines the universality of experiences of displacement, saying, “[w]hat interests me above all are the underlying structures of flight, expulsion and migration” (Mueller and Garloff, “Interview” 228). Speaking of Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Grjasnowa further emphasizes that “there aren’t any Jewish characters, but it is nonetheless a Jewish book for me. Migration is a very Jewish topic” (Mueller and Garloff, “Interview” 227). Yet although Grjasnowa specifically links the story of her own family’s forced migration with the experiences of the Syrian refugees in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , and labels it a Jewish novel, this history is not specifically present in the novel. Instead there are oblique references to this family history and to Jewish history in the form of references to a number of canonical literary works - both diegetic and extra-diegetic in the form of intertitles with marked citations - and Amal’s Russian (but not apparently Jewish) mother. Amal’s parents fell in love at the box office for the St. Petersburg Philharmonic when they spent seven hours in line for tickets next to each other while Amal’s father was studying in Russia (Grjasnowa 36). Amal had grown up speaking Russian at home, and before her parents divorced and her mother had left for Russia (though her father had for many years pretended she was dead), Amal and her family lived in a Russian parallel world. They had Russian friends, “meistens Männer mit dichten Schnurrbärten und Wohlstandsbäuchen, die als Professoren an syrischen Universitäten arbeiteten -, fuhren im Sommer auf die Datscha ihrer Großeltern in der Nähe von St. Petersburg, und am Neujahrsabend gab es einen Weihnachtsbaum, eine Flasche Sekt und ein Netz Mandarinen” (Grjasnowa 35). With her multigenerational family story, Salzmann illustrates the obvious point in Außer sich that multidirectional memory can also apply to family history as differing, even conflicting, histories overlap and fail to be contained within one nation state, crossing physical and cultural borderlines� Ali’s mother warns “[d]ie Erinnerung ist ein Parasit, fang ihn dir lieber nicht ein,” yet Ali ignores this directive, piecing together his family’s past through his own memory, remembered conversations and a brief unpublished memoir written by his grandfather Schura (Salzmann 274). Memories of personal and familial suffering - much of which is focused around anti-Semitic persecution - are placed alongside the contemporary suffering that Ali encounters in Istanbul. While Anton and Ali are repeatedly beaten up as children in Germany for being Russian, and in Russia for being Jewish, Aglaja and other protesters are attacked by the military during the violent crushing of the protests in Gezi park and the trans- 66 Brangwen Stone gender Katho is brutally attacked in the men’s toilets of a bar. Writing about violence against those who do not conform to gender norms in the essay which Salzmann has indicated Außer sich owes its title to, Judith Butler argues that the “person who threatens violence proceeds from the anxious and rigid sense that a sense of world and a sense of self will be radically undermined if such a being, uncategorizable, is permitted to live within the social world” (Butler, “Beside Oneself” 34). Elsewhere in the essay, which argues that “the terms by which we are recognized as human [. . .] have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the model of the human entitled to rights or included in the participatory sphere of political deliberation” (2), Butler notes the “racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human” (24). Racial violence is also apparent in Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern when Hammoudi is killed in a neo-Nazi attack, and earlier in the novel when a policeman at the Serbian-Hungarian border pulls out his penis “klein, rot und unbeschnitten” and urinates on Hammoudi’s face as he screams “’You immigrant cunt’” (Grjasnowa 270; English in original). Violence and discrimination based on racial difference is central to Außer sich , in the form of anti-Semitism, which mars Ali and her brother’s lives as it marred the lives of her parents and grandparents before her� Ali’s great-grandparents Etinka and Schura escape the fate of their fellow Jewish doctors (all summarily fired in 1953, the year of the supposed doctor’s plot) to some extent, as an exception is made for Etinka due to her unique expertise in treating children with tuberculosis, and Schura manages to become a renowned researcher despite his dismissal (Salzmann 168—79). Yet although they are spared the fate of many of their fellow Jewish doctors they face anti-Semitism on a daily basis. Etinka tells Ali of the endless series of anti-Semitic graffiti on their house wall: “‘Ich habe die Schmierereien jedes Mal überstreichen lassen, so oft, dass die Maler, ich weiß noch die Namen, Gena und Lölja, zu mir kamen und sagten, Etina Natanowna, wir machen das ja gerne für Sie, wir küssen Ihnen die Hände, aber wollen Sie nicht lieber einfach wegziehen? ’” (Salzmann 180—81). Ali’s mother Valja’s first husband beats and curses her with “Du Judensau, verrecke doch in deinem Israel” (Salzmann 62). Even her second Jewish husband beats her and curses her as a “Judensau” (Salzmann 65). Although quota refugees were granted refuge in Germany to escape the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, the family continues to face anti-Semitism in Germany, including from other quota refugees wearing chains with crosses around their necks (Salzmann 109—10). As a child Anton asks “warum die anderen ihn als Russen beleidigten, wo sie ihm doch beigebracht hatte, stolz darauf zu sein, dass er Jude sei” (Salzmann 104—05). Yet once he tells them he is Jewish to escape the anti-Russian slurs, Refugees Past and Present 67 despite his mother’s advice to the contrary, he is beaten up by boys at school even worse (Salzmann 106). Though the Holocaust may be a common thematic concern for German-Jewish authors and, as Rothberg observes, the “emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 11), the Holocaust is only mentioned a few times in Außer sich . The word “Nazi” is only mentioned once in Außer sich , when the quota refugees in the refugee home respond to the twins being brutally beaten up: “Es fielen Wörter wie ‘Nazis’, noch mehr ‘Nazis’ und sie ‘wollen an unsere Kinder ran’” (Grjasnowa 107). The Holocaust itself is only referred to twice in a novel of 365 pages. Once when Ali describes a branch of his family that escaped from Germany to Kazakhstan in the thirties, just in time to live happily “fern der Schrecken der Schoah” (185), and a second time when commenting on his father’s suicide: “von allen meinen Rote-Armee-Verwandten inklusive Schoah- und Perestroika-Hintergrund war er der Einzige, der eines nicht natürlichen Todes gestorben ist, sondern einfach nur eines peinlichen” (296). This latter mention pragmatically groups the Red Army (short hand for the Soviet Union), the Holocaust, and Perestroika together as events with a traumatic effect. Elsewhere in the novel too, Salzmann brings “disparate histories in contact with each other” (Rothberg “Multidirectional Memory” 134). Ali and Katho, for instance, imagine that their Jewish and Ukranian ancestors respectively crossed paths in Odessa, and also wish for a past in which their gender variance has a family tradition: “Vorfahren, die so waren wie sie” (Salzmann 136). Salzmann’s scarce mention of the Holocaust confirms the observation of a number of scholars, including Lizarazu, Mueller, and Garloff, as noted earlier, that the Holocaust is not as central to the new influx of German-Jewish writers with Soviet origins as it was to earlier generations of German-Jewish writers. Yet the mentions that are made seem to assume that it is a history that readers are familiar with and does not need further elaboration� While Außer sich focuses on the discrimination faced by Soviet Jews and transgender people, in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Amal contemplates “[d]ie Welt hat eine neue Rasse erfunden, die der Flüchtlinge, Refugees, Muslime und Newcomer. Die Herablassung ist mit jedem Atemzug spürbar” (Grjasnowa 281). This observation of the lack of empathy felt for Muslim refugees reflects Butler’s argument that we are less likely to feel empathy for those who fall outside our dominant Western cultural frame of the human - including Arabs and gender nonconforming people - as signified by the way in which the loss of different kinds of lives are treated (“Beside Oneself” 24). In both the essay “Beside Oneself” that Außer sich derives its title from, and elsewhere, Butler argues that while some lives are publically acknowledged and grieved, other lives (such 68 Brangwen Stone as large-scale famine deaths in Africa, or deaths during the AIDS crisis) are “ungrievable” (“Beside Oneself” 24—25; Precarious Life 35)� Butler contends that the narratives in the Western media “stage the scene and provide the narrative means by which ‘the human’ in its grievability is established” ( Precarious Life 38)� In Gott ist nicht schüchtern, the local newspaper reports the attack on the refugee hostel in which Hammoudi is the only fatality, but “[ü]ber ihn selbst werden die Leser nichts erfahren, außer seinem Alter und seiner Nationalität” (306). While the local newspaper thus does little to establish Hammoudi as a grievable human being, the stories of Amal and Hammoudi narrated by Grjasnowa have a “humanizing effect,” producing “an intense identification by arousing feelings of fear and sorrow,” as did the accounts about the final moments of those who died in the 9/ 11 attacks published in the newspapers discussed by Butler ( Precarious Life 38)� Another way in which Grjasnowa urges empathic identification in the novel is by establishing parallels to lives that are recognized as grievable - the lives of those who fled Nazi persecution. Thus Amal takes Erich Marie Remarque’s Die Nacht von Lissabon (1961) and Anna Seghers’ Transit (1944) on her flight from Damascus (Grjasnowa 230). These two novels, which both focus on those fleeing from Nazi persecution and their desperate attempts to be granted asylum in other countries, share a number of central plots features, including the setting of Marseille and central émigré protagonists who attempt to flee to the United States by assuming the identities of dead men, yet decide shortly before embarking to give their ships passage to someone else� In both Die Nacht von Lissabon and Transit , the protagonists and other refugees are embroiled in a tedious Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare as they attempt to obtain all the documents necessary to escape wartime Europe. There are clear parallels in this respect between Seghers’ and Remarque’s novels and Grjasnowa’s description of Amal and Youssef’s endless waiting on arrival in Germany in the “Wartezimmer deutscher Behörden, die hoffnungslos überfüllt, deren Mitarbeiter chronisch überlastest sind und die zum Verzweifeln langsam durch die Gänge schlurfen” (Grjasnowa 278). 8 Elsewhere in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Grjasnowa also devotes an entire page prefacing Amal and Youssef’s arrival in Germany - and lengthy engagement with German immigration bureaucracy - to a well-known extract from Bertolt Brecht’s Flüchtlingsgespräch e that emphasizes the central significance of nationality and passport with bitter satire: Der Pass ist der edelste Teil von einem Menschen� Er kommt auch nicht auf so einfache Weise zustand wie ein Mensch� Ein Mensch kann überall zustandekommen, auf die leichtsinnigste Art und ohne gescheiten Grund, aber ein Pass niemals. Dafür wird Refugees Past and Present 69 er auch anerkannt, wenn er nicht gut ist, während ein Mensch noch so gut sein kann und doch nicht anerkannt wird” (Grjasnowa 277). The multidirectional memory evoked through the reference to Seghers’, Remarque’s, and Brecht’s texts is a memory of all those who were persecuted by the Nazis, rather than German Jews specifically. Elsewhere though, Grjasnowa does remind of the persecution of Jews, quoting the following passage from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory : “Someone in a Cambridge common room asked the self-designated ‘non-Jewish Jew’ and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher about his roots. ‘Trees have roots’ he shot back, scornfully, ‘Jews have legs’” (Grjasnowa 143). While Salzmann’s novel suggests, but does not explicitly articulate, a commonality between anti-Semitic violence and violence against political dissidents and transgender people, the quotations and literary allusions Grjasnowa inserts into her text are clear invitations to draw parallels between the fate of the Syrian refugees, German émigrés, and Jews historically. Grjasnowa seems to consciously preempt the criticism often leveled against such comparisons, especially in the case of the Holocaust, where some critiques see such parallels as threatening the recognition of the unique nature of the Holocaust, when her protagonist Amal reflects “sie weiß auch, dass Leid nicht vergleichbar ist” (Grjasnowa 181). Writing about Grjasnowa’s first novel Birken , Jonathan Skolnik argues that “multidirectional” readings of the novel “mistakenly obscure the continued centrality of the Holocaust in contemporary iterations of Jewishness,” and contends that his reading of the novel reveals “the Holocaust to be the trauma that underwrites all the other traumas which ostensibly displace it” (Skolnik 124). While I would not dispute that the Holocaust continues to be important to third-generation German-Jewish writers such as Salzmann and Grjasnowa, I would argue that Skolnik’s interpretation of multidirectional memory clings to the exact notion of “competitive memory” - in which memories are understood to crowd each other out of the public sphere, or “displace” each other in Skolnik’s words - that Rothberg is deliberately countering (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 3)� I contend, moreover, that in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , which focuses almost wholly on a different traumatic experience, Grjasnowa clearly does wish to bring these experiences into dialogue with exile in the Nazi era - albeit cryptically - and it is clear from interviews with her too that she has an approach to memory that could very much be described as multidirectional� Whereas Grjasnowa places memories of the Nazi era exile alongside more recent refugee experiences in Gott ist nicht schüchtern , Salzmann inscribes the memory of an earlier generation of Eastern European migrants to the German-speaking countries into her multidirectional narrative in Außer sich by 70 Brangwen Stone directly and indirectly alluding to the Swiss-Romanian author Aglaja Veteranyi and her work. Veteranyi, who arrived in Switzerland as a refugee and committed suicide in 2002, is best known for her first novel Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht (1999)� Some aspects of Salzmann’s style, including moments of dark humor and scenes that border on absurdity, remind of Veteranyi’s writing. The first reference to Veteranyi comes early in the novel, when Ali sprays the bed bug infested Istanbul apartment he is living in with poison, “setzte sich auf den Balkon und rauchte, in der Hoffnung, das Veteranyi-Buch, das sie gerade las, wäre erst zu Ende, wenn alle Wanzen tot waren” (Salzmann 19—20). Later a figure called Aglaja, a red-haired accordion player, enters the narrative (Salzmann 39). This figure Aglaja, with whom both Ali’s lover Katho and Ali’s twin brother Anton - who may or may not be his alter ego - have a relationship, seems to be a combination of Veteranyi and the nameless child protagonist of her novel Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht . The injured, unconscious Aglaja later becomes a symbol for the Gezi park protests after she is hit in the head by a gas cartridge (Salzmann 131—33). When Brigid Haines first posited the development of an “eastern turn,” she suggested that the literature that was part of it had a “thematic concern with the communist period, in the eastern bloc, and its aftermath” (Haines 136). This description does fit one aspect of Salzmann’s Außer sich , though this narrative is queered, while Grjasnowa’s novel has a completely different thematic concern, and both novels venture both beyond Eastern Europe and beyond Germany� Yet in both novels, even in Grjasnowa’s, which focuses on Syrian refugees, there is still a reference to a German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish past. Placing these narratives alongside narratives of present-day discrimination and suffering represents what Rothberg calls “complex acts of solidarity in which historical memory serves as a medium for the creation of new communal and political identities” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 11)� Both novels also represent a desire to reposition those with whom the West does not easily feel empathy - in Grjasnowa’s case Syrian refugees, in Salzmann’s case transgender people - “under the rubric of the ‘human’” by telling their stories and drawing parallels to the lives of Jews and German émigres, who are now squarely under this rubric but were not always in the past (Butler, Precarious Life 46). Notes 1 The term “Arab Spring” refers to a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s� Refugees Past and Present 71 2 A few German writers of Middle Eastern background, who either arrived in Germany many years ago or were born in Germany, have also published novels on flight and arrival in the last couple of years. These include Abbas Khider, who fled Iraq as a teenager after being imprisoned and tortured in 1996 and wrote Die Ohrfeige (2016), and Shida Bazyar whose parents fled from Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the 1980s and whose first novel is entitled Nachts ist es leise in Tehran (2016). The project “Weiter schreiben” (https: / / weiterschreiben.jetzt/ ) pairs displaced authors - many Syrian - with established German authors and also publishes their texts in the original and in German translation on its website� A number of the German authors are of Eastern European background, among them Lena Gorelik, Nino Haratischwili, Olga Grjasnowa, Martin Kordić, and Saša Stanišić. 3 From a legal standpoint, Müller was not a refugee, as she left Romania with an exit visa for Romania and an entry visa for West Germany. 4 For a detailed discussion of the Jewish Kontingentflüchtlinge see Gorelik� 5 Bronsky has a Jewish father, but does not identify as Jewish. Vladimir Vertlib is sometimes also named amongst this group of Russian-Jewish authors writing in German, but left the Soviet Union much earlier (in 1971) and lives in Austria rather than Germany� 6 Although the novel uses the pronoun “sie” to refer to Ali until he decides to change pronouns, I will use the pronoun “he” for Ali throughout. 7 Henceforth referred to as Birken � 8 Grjasnowa is not the only artist to evoke Seghers’ Transit in the current so-called “refugee crisis”: Christian Petzold created a 2018 film adaptation of the novel, retaining the context of Nazi-occupied France, but setting the film in the present day, thus inviting viewers to see congruencies between Seghers’ narrative and contemporary events� Works Cited Ackermann, Irmgard. “Die Osterweiterung in der deutschsprachigen Migrantenliteratur vor und nach der Wende.” Eine Sprache - viele Horizonte. Die Osterweiterung der deutschsprachigen Literatur. 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