De-Integrate!: A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century

Poet Czollek makes his English-language debut with an unsparing critique of how Jews and other marginalized groups are viewed in modern Germany. According to Czollek, Jewish people have been relegated to bit roles in what he calls “the Theater of Memory,” a set of cultural expectations “staged by and for the Germans” to affirm the country’s redemption from WWII and the Holocaust. Refuting Germany’s “self-conception as a nation of tolerant and enlightened human beings,” Czollek documents implicit and explicit demands for Jews, Muslims, and other minorities to assimilate, and argues that the resurgence of radical neo-Nazi groups has reshaped the country’s politics and culture to a degree that ordinary Germans refuse to acknowledge. Both the right and left are driven by a desire for normality, according to Czollek, yet where liberals yearn to leave the past behind, right-wingers seek to return to it. To combat these forces, Czollek issues “a vigorous appeal for more abnormality” and the fostering of an “autonomous Jewish identity” founded in part on the “dazzling potential for irony and revenge to interrupt the well-established relations between Germans and Jews.” In Czollek’s view, “Jewish life in Germany is Ashkenazi and furious, Mizrahi and queer, impoverished and Reform, narrow-minded and excessive, clean-shaven and Orthodox.” Though Czollek’s solutions remain somewhat vague, his diagnosis of what ails modern Germany feels spot-on. It’s a righteous and uncompromising takedown. (Jan.)