Jews in Today's German Culture

This penetrating study focuses on Jewish writers in Germany and Austria who place at the center of their work the very question of what it means to be Jewish today. Among the writers examined are feminist novelist Esther Dischereit; Rafael Seligmann, whose novel Rubinstein's Auction has been called ``a German Portnoy's Complaint''; columnist/essayist Maxim Biller; and Viennese poet/novelist Robert Schindell. Gilman, a professor of German, the history of science and psychiatry at Cornell, finds that one strategy shared by many German-Jewish writers is ``masochism''-employing one's sense of powerlessness as a tool to shape and control those who claim dominant power. He argues that circumcision symbolizes or accentuates Jewish males' sense of isolation and difference within the German body politic. (Feb.)