This week, we see the second installment of Israel upon Danube, Guy Konopnicki’s uchronistic novel which imagines the creation of a state for the Jews in the heart of Europe. Last week, he described Beria’s proposal to Churchill, on Stalin’s orders, to give Austria to the Jews so that they could build their own state. This time, he relates how, in the space of a few months, two million Jews from Europe and Palestine settled in Vienna after the war…
Each weekly episode of our summer novel comes with a series of four articles, already published in our pages, but gathered around a few key themes. This week’s feature is devoted to Germany, present and past, and to the way in which the Germany of yesterday affects the Germany of today. In “30 January 1933, or the day humanity died”, Julia Christ reopens the file on the “silence” of Karl Kraus – a major intellectual figure in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century – who, in 1933, wrote the famous phrase: “I have nothing to say about Hitler”. His reflection on the position of yesterday’s pamphleteer, which can also be read as a fascinating portrait of the complex figure that was the Viennese essayist, takes us right up to the present day, on what is said and not said – or said badly, or not yet said – about Hitler in contemporary Europe. In “Why do Jews in Germany speak Russian?”, Lisa Vapné retraces the stages in the immigration of the 200,000 Russian-speaking Jews who have arrived in Germany since the early 90s, and analyzes the legal, political and, above all, symbolic stakes involved. In “The Luxembourg Agreement: the mirage of reconciliation”, Constantin Goschler discusses the Luxembourg Agreement signed in September 1952. “Reparation” agreement? It is also referred to as a “compensation” agreement, or even a “reconciliation” agreement. The historian looks back at this historic episode in detail, and reflects on the misunderstanding it has generated within the German consciousness, right up to the present day. Finally, in “Jacob Wassermann: his Way as a German and a Jew”, Barbara Honigmann takes us to the heart of the tension experienced by writer Jacob Wassermann (1873-1934) between his two identities, Jewish and German, revealing the discomfort of a generation. She shows how this tension gave rise to heartbreak, uncertainty and bitterness, as well as to prodigious intellectual productivity.
