Negative Symbiosis?: Israel, Germany, and Austria in Contemporary Germanophone Literature

This article examines central tensions in literary works dealing with German–Israeli encounters, including memorialization, Germany’s purported “normalization” in the wake of its genocidal past, and the notion of a “negative symbiosis” between Germans and Jews. Katja Behrens’s short story “Solomon and the Others” and Doron Rabinovici’s novel Andernorts serve as examples of how literary texts question the presumed homogeneity of collective identities and explore the lives of characters who traverse the charged and uneven terrain of German–Hebrew contact zones. Particular attention is paid to the use of Hebrew in German texts and the unruly features of bilingualism in monolingually ordered environments.