6 - A German-Jewish Symbiosis?

Summary

Weil die Deutschen und die Juden in Auschwitz ein Paar geworden sind, das auch der Tod nicht mehr trennt.

— Barbara Honigmann, “Selbstporträt als Jüdin”

IN MAXIM BILLER'S HARLEM HOLOCAUST (1990), the German narrator pictures how the American-Jewish author Warszawski is caught up in the guilt-induced yet self-serving philo-Semitism of his German girl-friend. “Ihr Volk tut mir ja so schrecklich leid!,” she screams while receiving oral sex from him, “worauf sie in seinen hungrigen jüdischen Schlund hineinejakulierte.” The narrator — whose “Jewish” name Rosenhain is ironic given that his grandfather wrote anti-Semitic tracts and his great-uncle tortured Jews in the Berlin headquarters of the SS (HH, 8–9) — similarly ingratiates himself with Warszawski and yet also exploits him in pursuit of his own “Gier nach Schuld und Entsühnung” (HH, 9). In the end, the text turns out to be a product of Rosenhain's paranoia. One Hermann Warschauer of Columbia University had taken it upon himself to ensure the posthumous publication of this “Dokument eines selbstzerstörischen Talents und der großen deutschen Krankheit” (HH, 61).

The symptoms of Rosenhain's “deutsche Krankheit” are an excessive philo-Semitism combined with a paranoid conviction that Jews, especially Warszawski, are more astute and sexually potent than Germans. In a rerun of anti-Semitic clichés, Rosenhain catalogues the prodigious talents of the Jew and frames himself as the naïve, yet sincere German who is the victim of the more worldly, more cosmopolitan and more savvy interloper.