Open Access

Tobias Gruenthal

• The concern of this thesis is a discussion of the way German-Jewish identity manifests itself in two literary texts before and after 1933. Using the examples of Sammy Gronemann’s novel Tohuwabohu and Martin Beradt’s Die Straße der kleinen Ewigkeit, it offers a textual analysis of two works which share close connections in terms of subject matter, style, and their respective authors’ background, but are historically divided by the fundamental experience of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. I argue that space is a crucial factor through which identity is constituted in each text, both of which use and partially subvert the romanticized image of the Eastern European shtetl brought to Germany by authors such as Arnold Zweig in the aftermath of World War I. Space in this context always has a twofold quality to it. It functions as a space of identity, but also as a space of identification through which a group of people label others as either belonging or not belonging to a specific space. Furthermore, both texts reject monolithic definitions of Jewish identity, emphasizing instead the diversity of Jewish life in Europe before the Rise of National Socialism.