Out of the theatres of memory: the plural Judaism of Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Marija Stepanova

Abstract

The article deals with literary representations of Jewishness in Sasha Maria Salzmann’s recent works. While her oeuvre has been often juxtaposed to those of other German writing authors who immigrated from the former Ussr to Germany during the 1990s as Jewish quota refugees (namely Olga Grjasnowa, Lena Gorelik and Dimitrii Kapitelman), an unprecedented comparison is here drawn with a Russian writing poet and novelist, Marija Stepanova, whose acclaimed book Pamjati pamjati (translated in German under the title Nach dem Gedächtnis) represented for Salzmann a point of reference, as reflections about post-traumatic memory are concerned. The theme of “postmemory” (to quote Marianne Hirsch) is also at the core of Salzmann’s first novel Außer sich, (Beside Myself), published in 2017 almost simultaneously with Stepanova’s book. By establishing a possible filiation between Außer sich and Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (Mameloschn Mothertongue, 2012), the article shows how concepts of Jewishness are enmeshed in the main characters’ quest for the possibility to shift among different identities. This is echoed by Salzmann’s criticism of exploitations of Jews in the ongoing public debate in Germany, in the framework of what the sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann called “the German Theater of Memory”. On one hand, Salzmann’s own experience as a post-Soviet Jew allowed to deconstruct her the equation Jew = victim, on the other, her sensibility for supranational and multicultural hybridization led her to pledge for the valorization of plural Jewish identities.