Gedächtnis und Geschlecht: Darstellungen in der neueren jüdischen Literatur in Deutschland, Österreich und Italien by Mirjam Bitter (review)

Mirjam Bitter's ambitious study of the interconnectedness between memory and gender in contemporary Jewish Austrian, German, and Italian literature promises to address a number of compelling questions: How is memory represented in literary texts at the end of the millennium and inflected by gender, and to what extent do the metaphors, genres, media, and modes that articulate memory reflect or transform gender identity? For, as she reminds us throughout her study, the question of who is engaged in the processes of remembering is always directly related to what, and who is remembered as well as the modes and genres in which memory is articulated. Indeed, the premise for her study is that memory and gender are intricately intertwined; they inform one another in their (re)constructedness. She demonstrates this persuasively in close readings of eleven novels published between 1988 and 2010 that demonstrate the interdependence of memory and gender paradigmatically as they engage in the construction of contemporary Jewish identity: the novels include Massimiliano Boni's La parola ritrovata (Die wiedergefundene Sprache, 2006); Esther Dischereit's Joemis Tisch; Elena Loewenthal's Attese (Wartezeit/Erwartungen, 2004); Gila Lustiger's So sind wir (2005); Eva Menasse's Vienna (2005); Robert Menasse's Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (2001); Alessandro Piperno's Con le peggiori intenzioni (Mit bösen Absichten, 2006); Doron Rabinovici's Suche nach M. (1997) and Ohnehin (2004); Robert Schindel's Gebürtig (1992); and Benjamin Stein's Die Leinwand (2010).

Bitter prepares the terrain for her discussion of memory, history, and the construction of Jewish and gender identities in the novels with a comprehensive analysis of theoretical work by memory scholars sensitive to gender and (Jewish) identity construction. She successfully situates her own transnational analysis of the intersection of gender and memory in new fiction by Jewish-identified writers born after 1945 within a broad interdisciplinary discussion. She argues convincingly that since Austria, Germany, and Italy all have fascist pasts and all three countries belonged to Western Europe, it is productive to take a transnational literary approach. She embraces Ulrich Beck's understanding of transnationality and emphasizes an approach that does not negate national particularities but, in its function as a "Querbegriffzum Nationalen" (495), allows for cross-cultural comparisons that enhance our understanding of the construction of memory and gender.

In her transnational study of gender, memory, and the construction of Jewish identity, Bitter carefully interrogates a series of relationships traditionally considered dichotomous, i.e. memory vs. history, private vs. public spheres of remembering, familial vs. collective memory, emphasizing that, as cultural constructs, they reflect gendered valences. She identifies how the novels undermine and transform this dichotomous perception of memory and identity. Gender represents a performative, relational, and interdependent category of analysis for her.

Bitter's transnational study of the interdependence of memory and gender is organized organically rather than chronologically. While the study reads, at times, like a dissertation because there is a fair amount of repetition, her strategy of pairing literary texts according to thematic preoccupations and not necessarily along national lines and examining how each of the texts "does gender and memory" (110) is very effective. She launches her sequence of comparative close readings with a sophisticated analysis of Doron Rabinovici's Ohnehin and Schindel's Gebürtig, both examples of a "Poetik der Zeitgenossenschaft" (114). Particularly compelling is her analysis of the way repetition as trope in Ohnehin and, to a lesser extent, in Gebürtig shapes the narratives and concurrently reveals how the construction of memory and gender relies on and is structured by repetition. She also explores the novels' complex play with masquerade as a literary motif, another frequent trope that allows gender, the technologies of both individual and collective memory, and Jewish identity to be "unmasked" and deconstructed.

In contrast to the two male-authored "soziobiographischen Erinnerungsromanen," Bitter identifies Eva Menasse's and Gila Lustiger's literary...