ABSTRACT
The contemporary Austrian‐Jewish writer Vladimir Vertlib (b. 1966) is often regarded as either a Jewish author or as a cosmopolite. The following article will examine his novel Letzter ...Wunsch from both perspectives against the background of the author's reflections on Jewish national identity after the Holocaust and the problem of identity in a very broad sense. It will emphasise Vertlib's attempt – as a secular Jew denying religion as an identity‐forming factor – to question the relevance of the traditional definition of Jewish identity and to revise it in terms of the general and the universal. Special attention will be given to an identity clash between the secular self‐understanding and the religious‐Orthodox concept of Jewish identity within Judaism.
Der zeitgenössische österreichisch‐jüdische Schriftsteller Vladimir Vertlib (geb. 1966) wird oft entweder als jüdischer Autor oder als Kosmopolit gesehen. Der folgende Artikel untersucht seinen Roman Letzter Wunsch aus beiden Perspektiven, hinsichtlich der Reflektionen des Autors zu jüdischer Identität nach dem Holocaust und dem allgemeinen Problem von Identität und Zugehörigkeit. Der Schwerpunkt wird auf Vertlibs Versuch liegen, als säkularer Jude, der die Religion als identitätsstiftenden Faktor ablehnt, die Relevanz der traditionellen Definition von jüdischer Identität in Frage zu stellen und sie im Rahmen des Allgemeinen und des Universellen zu revidieren. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird dabei auf das Aufeinanderprallen von säkularem Selbstverständnis und religiös‐orthodoxer Auffassung von jüdischer Identität innerhalb des Judentums gerichtet.
Taking as its starting point Vladimir Vertlib's noted ability to cross borders and represent otherness in his writing, the article examines this Russian-Austrian-Jewish author's use of narrative form ...in all his work to date. While his deceptively conventional realist narratives achieve provisional closure at the level of plot, they are structured so as to juxtapose voices, times and modes in a way which probes, but does not resolve, a range of contemporary problems. These concern migration (in Abschiebung and Zwischenstationen), memory, remembrance and twentieth-century European history (in Das besondere Gedächtnis der Rosa Masur), Jewish identities and the negative German-Jewish symbiosis (in Letzter Wunsch), and the remembrance of the Third Reich in central Europe (in Mein erster Mörder and...und alle Toten starben friedlich...). Close readings reveal Vertlib's increasing integration into Austrian culture, while stressing the global import of his dialogism and border crossings. (Author abstract)
The development of a new Jewish culture in Germany since 1990 is parallel to the new Jewish culture beginning to appear from the Russian Jewish community in the United States and Israel. The context, ...however, makes this writing and these writers unique in their often contradictory dealing with what it means to be a Jew and what it means to be a German.
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