October 7, 2023, the worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust, with more than 1,200 dead, according to other estimates 1,400 dead, just as many seriously injured and more than 200 taken to Gaza, some, as under the Nazis, starved to the bone or massacred: This day will - you get the feeling by the time you've finished the Maxim Biller novel - somehow but underestimated. What Hamas did there, both in the bestial practice on defenseless and unsuspecting civilians, including a large number of children, and in the subsequent joy that spread not only among the perpetrators, but also in Muslim-pro-Palestinian milieus outside the Middle East, over what they had done, and in the mockery and desecration of the victims, undoubtedly bears the characteristics of a break in civilization, which it is not clear how one can deal with it with the idea of one “Liberation struggle” can be associated at all.
However, this does not prevent local “culture” magazines from using church conference rhetoric to call for “different perspectives, experiences and narratives” on the Middle East war and, instead of facing the possibly inextinguishable hatred, to ask: “How to live together?”, as if there were no evil in the world. On Monday, someone in the “Kulturzeit” mockingly pointed out that Israel “likes to see itself as the only democracy in the Middle East.” How do you know that Israel is “happy” to do that? It's just a democracy. Complete.
Rather, “democracy” as the be-all and end-all of politics in general is asserted at every opportunity in the language area from which such contributions come, in which it is always said that there are supposedly no “simple answers” and it is noted with embarrassment that in the Israeli debates “hardship always comes through” (“Culture Time”), as if Israel still existed without hardness. In this country, however, attacks on individual lives are seen as an “attack on democracy”.
Something like this still sets the tone today, not to mention the historically underexplored cries of “genocide”, “apartheid” and “colonialism” at any cultural festival, like now again at the Venice Film Festival. Just recently, a Hamas official could be seen online saying: “If we do nothing, Palestine will be completely forgotten and disappear from the international map.” It doesn't look like that.
Even against this background, Maxim Biller's "Novel of a Year" (Kiepenheuer & Witsch), as it is subtitled "Black Saturdays", fills you with a certain satisfaction that comes with an author who not only doesn't avoid conflict, but actually seeks it out and doesn't set out to make people like him. His bluntness, written in a brilliant, polemically sharp and at the same time tangible style, has been the tried and tested method since the times of “100 Lines of Hate”. And Biller, almost like Israel, has experienced boycotts: and not just because of his court-banned novel “Ezra”. Last summer, “Zeit” took one of his columns out of circulation online: “Israel disease. Why are Germans always so upset about the Jews of the Middle East?” and provoked the expected but unsubstantiated protests. If the doctor's joke with which Biller garnishes his thesis about the "strategically correct but inhumane hunger blockade of Gaza" is really as "tasteless" as many subsequently did, then one should also take a closer look at one or two Ephraim Kishon books.
Now Biller dedicates himself to diagnosing a closely related and essentially identical disease, “Gaza disease,” and in doing so takes aim at the world public's obvious obsession with the war there, which ultimately only confirms his suspicion of anti-Semitism, which he pursues like a narrative divining rod. He does this from the fictitious, although hardly intended as a camouflage, perspective of the first-person narrator Ari, to whom he has clearly given a lot of himself, including the anchoring in a journalistic, writing and, in a broader sense, humanities-influenced milieu. The essentials are familiar to the Biller reader in an almost intimate way: birth in Prague in 1960, moving to Hamburg in 1970, the family home where people watch so much television again, studying in Munich and finally Berlin as a place to live and work, in between, of course, Israel, always Israel, mostly Tel Aviv.
To give an idea of the spirit of this book, which is not easy to grasp in its layout and is and is not fictional, reference should be made to a rather inconspicuous passage in which the narrator lists who went in and out of his parents' house in Hamburg: “Heinrich Braasch always came, the Frankfurter Rundschau's beefy correspondent for northern Germany ... a leftist like I never met at school or university: so modest when it came to Jewish topics like a sincerely grieving guest at a funeral – and never a wrong word about Israel.” That's difficult enough in the presence of Biller, this still underestimated compassion ethicist. So it's better to keep your mouth shut than to say well-intentioned phrases.
The novel is set on several narrative levels, both materially and temporally, and alternates between the present around October 7, 2023 and the resulting discourses; Ari's life story and everyday life; and the Judaistic reflections and stories interspersed again and again, right down to the origins of Judaism. Biller sees it briefly like this: With its Ten Commandments, it is a single civilizational project that was, so to speak, overwritten by Christianity and Islam and, moreover, is in conflict with Greco-Roman polytheism. The idea of the chosen people, which Biller experimentally takes at his word, and the Jewish, strictly this-worldly, Enlightenment civilization were from the beginning, according to Freud, an object of non-Jewish "jealousy" and ultimately also the reason for fantasies and actions of extermination from antiquity to the Holocaust and October 7th, now interpreted as an "attempted Holocaust", the horrors of which Biller repeatedly shows in snapshots.
A scholar of antiquity will be able to better assess what the wide-ranging religious-historical passages are all about. Jan Assmann is no longer an option; He is dead and, like his wife Aleida and many other protagonists from the left-liberal milieu (Carolin Emcke, Alexander Mitscherlich) that is so hated by Biller and is ambitious in terms of memory politics, is being attacked harshly.
"Go somewhere else. You're in the wrong place," says the barman. As complicated as this structure may seem, the narrative itself is not; it is catchy, full of life and, typical of Biller, starts off confrontational. Ari goes to his favorite cafe in Berlin, but the Syrian barman greets him coldly: "Go somewhere else. You're in the wrong place." Word has just gotten around about the Hamas massacre. Using purely narrative means, a psychological pattern of interpretation is introduced that runs through the entire book: the Jew, even in his current, living form, is a victim and as such a reproach for every perpetrator, and basically for the entire non-Jewish world. Biller was not the only one who expressed his disbelief that so little compassion was shown for the Jews on October 7th and afterwards and that anti-Semitism did not decrease but increased dramatically everywhere. This apathy will come from somewhere. And in the same way, the Germans did not forgive the Jews of Auschwitz - this interpretation of the so-called secondary or guilt-defense anti-Semitism put forward by the doctor and psychoanalyst Zvi Rix should be familiar to the narrator; He applies it to the Muslim waiter, who also doesn't want to see any Jews anymore.
October 7, 2023 was and remains a pitch-black Saturday. But the title of the novel, which, as it were, sets up the hostility against the Jews in a series, is authenticated by the fact that Ari basically narrates his way through the many Saturdays that followed, which were not exactly bright for him, an extremely irritable Jew who was allergic to any form of thick-skinned, violently compassionate Jew. Biller sends him through time as an obsessive person, but also as someone who simply and honestly does not understand the world, always looking for an answer to the question that has probably been asked a dozen times: “Why?” Why does anti-Semitism exist, where does it come from?
When it comes to that, Biller has of course been hearing the grass grow for a while. But reality proves him right, although current Israeli policy is assumed rather than discussed as a reason or sometimes just a pretext for criticism of Israel, which for Biller ultimately amounts to anti-Semitism. He sees no alternative to realpolitik, which relies on military strength and defensiveness out of the will to survive - a position that only the historian Michael Wolffsohn publicly represents with this determination.
This book is bold because it is written for, or rather against, a public that Biller considers to be conflict-averse and that prefers to be guided by definitions of anti-Semitism and genocide. This author does not rely on this or on “science” at all; Holocaust researchers are not featured. He is more interested in defining Judaism as such - almost a little like Thomas Mann's Joseph novel, which Biller is known to not appreciate: a Jewish novel in anti-Jewish times. Ari is just like Jaakob: “full of stories”, a sensitive memory store for all international injustice.
The hatred of Jews, the willingness to kill them, to exterminate them, and the exuberance shown in radical Islamic milieus about every dead Jew, which Biller records in disgust - all of this is completely irrational. You can't get around this with reason, understanding, “dialogue”. Instead, Biller tries, sharply agreeing with the relevant opinion pieces, with a literary self-questioning that in no way hides its obsessive traits, that, despite its furor, works with ambivalence, psychologizes and thus shows what literature can do.
Finally, a mock joke with a staff that doesn't even exist at Biller. Mickey: “How can you believe in God when the Nazis existed?” Mickey's father: "How am I supposed to know why there were Nazis? I don't even know how a can opener works!" This is from “Hannah and Her Sisters” by Woody Allen, who also gains insights by looking at life and listening. Maxim Biller does it roughly, really just roughly, sometimes.
