It’s strange that the writer Esther Dischereit isn’t much better known and hasn’t won all the prizes in this republic. She has written books such as “When My Golem Opened to Me” and “Joëmis Table. A Jewish Story” worked on a confident expression for the experience of the descendants of Holocaust survivors. With her political essays, with her radio plays, with her solidarity for those affected by German national terror today, in books such as “Flowers for Otello” and “Don’t be afraid, tell everything!”, Esther Dischereit has fearlessly changed the literary landscape .
Her new novel is not published by one of the major publishing houses, but by Benno Käsmayr’s prestigious Maro publishing house in Augsburg, whose motto is: “Independent. Unexpectedly. Undeterred.” Above all, you have to be undeterred to publish “A Pile of Dollar Bills”. As consistently as Esther Dischereit formally implements what she talks about, what she has researched and what she thinks about, this novel is unlikely to be a box office hit. Because it does not calm the uncertainty that is currently evident in the politics of combating anti-Semitism, but rather works with it.
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A Deutsche Bahn exhibition tells the family story of the writer Esther Dischereit. Her mother and sister survived the Holocaust because one man showed courage.
Dischereit tells her novel in short sections alternately between a nephew and his aunt, who are characterized by an extremely dry sense of humor. The time and locations of the action change, from 1942 to the present, from Heppenheim to Chicago and Managua. It takes a while to orient yourself historically, spatially and also in terms of family relationships. In the text, the consequences of survival and the echoes of the crimes are translated into literature: “My mother dragged my sister through the Nuremberg Laws for eight years,” states the aunt, who was born after the war and has a different father than hers older sister. The mother brought her half-sister for another “three years through the nameless time,” “when people lost their existence little by little: as business people, as listeners to the radio, as someone who licked a silver coffee spoon or sat on a park bench or a canary could have possessed; all together four years through the final solution”.
“A Pile of Dollar Bills” tells of the consequences of these years on the lives and relationships of the survivors. What is also important is the continuity of criminal behavior in the form of inheritance smuggling by non-Jewish relatives and the Federal Republic’s prevention of the so-called “reparation payments”. Or in the form of banks that refuse to hand over old deposits. These are all processes that are formally legal, but don’t fit in well with the slogan that is now so quickly on the lips of so many: “Never again is now.”
At the beginning and end of the novel, Esther Dischereit stages this hypocrisy of a society that is self-assuredly “overcoming” the past in an appropriately malicious manner through an average German voice that samples snippets of discourse, whose harsh tone betrays the aggression beneath the soft phrases. Dischereit counters this collective voice with a sentence that sums up her aesthetic: “No image wants to emerge.”
Dischereit tells of colonialism, anti-Semitism, racism and Jewish hierarchy after 1945
It’s probably not intended to create a picture, because the narrator’s sister, who knows a time before the Holocaust, had to put her life back together from splinters. Sometimes they fit together and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they suggest a connection and sometimes they don’t, but they always testify to what has happened and is not over. At some point, maybe after a hundred pages, you understand this form of storytelling.
Aunt and nephew are both “children” of those “survivors”. They react to this very differently: the aunt with “never-ending politics,” as a Berlin neighbor says about her: “She is always somewhere else. I mean, her head is rattling.” The other, politically more naive, is trying to rediscover Jewish identity in a way that is beyond fulfilling. Through these two characters, Esther Dischereit can talk about two hot topics politically in a much more analytical way than, for example, David Hadda did in the successful series “The Doubts”: the entanglement of colonialism-anti-Semitism-racism and the Jewish hierarchy after 1945, which is her main character calls “incomprehensible internal community circumstances” that “no one outside understands.”
:A great series
He wanted to create a Jewish “Sopranos,” says producer David Hadda. And with “Die Zweiflers” he actually achieved something very special on German television.
Complex one is pushed by life. The sister, who survived in hiding as a child, met a black American art student in Italy who was a football player and civil rights activist, whose mother was “from the Choctaw tribe” and who sang for the Palestinian liberation struggle. His son, the second narrator of the novel, is not allowed to visit his Jewish great-grandfather, who made it to the USA with his wife Rosa, where she “ate herself to death” out of fear of hunger. Because he lives in a “white” neighborhood. This and the old man’s patriotic attitude during the Vietnam War ensure that the aunt breaks off contact with this grandfather, who was her “everything” as a child.
It sounds complicated, and it is, and at the same time absurdly tragicomic. The comedy, on the other hand, lies in the details. For example, this one: On Thanksgiving, the family gathers in Chicago at the home of another niece’s white father-in-law, who has chosen a middle-class existence. The host competes in saying the table prayers with the niece’s black father, the man who met his wife as an art student in Perugia. Then, “when looking at the magnificent turkey,” the narrator notices the thin plastic blanket “that lies hidden under the linen tablecloth, as if the dark wood had to wear a diaper.” Their mockery affects the fear of contact that is directed against real matter. And this motif immediately points to Germany and to the complex of “Jewishness” that Dischereit describes in the figure of the nephew.
Dischereit, with his magnificently intelligent narrative, shakes up “normality”.
The nephew wants to understand and practice more of his Jewish identity. When he tells his mother, who was baptized after the war, her voice slips into the high pitch of a five-year-old and takes refuge in bed and illness. This not only has to do with the experience of having to hide one’s own identity, but also with the shame of having been declared doomed and of having to reveal this as a “Closet-Jew” when it becomes clear that she has kiddush and kashrut , who grew up in dark rooms, I have no idea.
At least that’s what the aunt suspects, who in turn has had her own experiences with “Jewishness”. For example, with the “herring-in-jelly ditch” that separates her from members of the Jewish communities who, unlike her family, adhere strictly to dietary laws, while her own mother was raised with liberal Judaism. On the other hand, Dischereit describes the fact that the leading Jews in the communities who came to Germany from Israel or Russia wanted to know so little about the survivors, for whom it was hardly possible after their experience of the camps and hiding places, their children To teach the rules of faith and knowledge of Hebrew. “Zionism,” Dischereit lets her character say, “conquered the monopoly of interpretation of everything Jewish” and beyond that the “German-Jewish table communities.” But she goes even further and lets her character talk about how, when she tried to bury her mother in a Jewish cemetery, she was asked by the community to provide proof of her ancestry. The narrator comments: “I remained unapologetic about the interest in Jewish purebredness.”
One can assume that these aspects of the novel, which are peppered with reference numbers, are not pure invention. But what makes it so spectacular is Dischereit’s handling of the symbols and connections. Through her narrative, she causes “normality” to waver. A normality that her character has to practice and hopefully never learns, because it is also the normality that kept people like her sister and mother in the files as “illegals” even after the end of National Socialism. It will not be a coincidence that when reading this you think of today’s “illegals”, who are again referred to as such without quotation marks. But that’s another story. Is that really it, the novel “A Pile of Dollar Bills” seems to ask. In response to another, programmatic question, namely whether the aunt was even allowed to tell the sister’s story as if she had been there, it was once said: “It is not reprehensible to take a place in the life of another person .” Strange how this suggestively dubious statement seems to apply to today’s discourses about advocacy and participation.
By the way, the average German voice at the beginning of the novel complains about the confusing connections between the story and its characters. With this magnificently intelligent novel, Esther Dischereit has now replaced explanations with the representation of the circumstances themselves: fragments of a reality that are as loosely, meaningfully and meaninglessly connected as a pile of dollar bills, the existence of which attests to a history that no longer even belongs to Heaven screams.