From Colonised to Coloniser: Reading the Figure of the Jew in Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur and Jurek Becker’s Bronsteins Kinder

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that the idea of the Jew functions as a link between Jewish, Israel/Palestine, and postcolonial studies. Edgar Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi und der Friseur (1977) and Jurek Becker’s Bronsteins Kinder (1982) can be read as challenges to Zionism and settler-colonialism and the Israeli political leadership’s uses of victimhood in its national discourse by interrogating the conflation between Jewishness and victimhood in post-war Germany and Israel. They critically engage with the shift from the Jew as “colonised” to “coloniser” by aligning ideas of Jewishness in relation to the Holocaust, Zionism, and Israel and in this way question prevailing geographical and ideological routes in postcolonial studies as well as indicating new directions for postcolonial and Jewish postcolonial studies.