What do you do if you want to believe in progress, but the whole thing always only moves two steps forward and then one step back? Then progress is at least one step ahead. But what if the story still seems to you again and again and even increasingly like an eternal television repeat? Ari, Maxim Biller's first-person narrator and alter ego in his new book Black Saturdays, somehow believes both. Depending on the mood of the day. As an atheist cultural Jew and Salon Zionist, he has no religious superstructure that provides comfort or meaning, but has to pull himself out of the swamp by his own hair.
His self-image as a resistant Jew helps him in this, as does, at least for a few seconds, the rabbinic idea of Tikkun Olam, Hebrew for repairing the social world. In the Kabbalah, the idea takes on a cosmic dimension and describes man's task of bringing together the sparks of divine light that were scattered after creation. Tikkun Olam has become so fashionable that there are already Jewish jokes about it: “An American Jew comes to Israel and asks, ‘What is Tikkun Olam in Hebrew?’” Done.
The repair of the world is still in full swing, thinks Ari happily one morning, but not everyone notices it. Biller wouldn't be Biller if there were no contradictions and no sarcasm. That a Jew, of all people, should believe in repairing the world might seem quite absurd given the history of persecution and its ongoing, completely unfounded demands. Especially because in Biller and Ari's world, truth and morality, as in every other world, are big words, but not big enough to understand the untimely contemporary battle between good and evil, in which neither God nor reason can help.
“Could humans alone have conceived of a bloodbath of this magnitude?” asks Ari in view of the massacres of October 7th, the titular “Black Saturday”. And why did they unleash “the greatest anti-Semitic wave in history, more global and more relentless than in the 1930s?” The golden age for the Jews is over and everything is back to normal: "From now on we live in the crosshairs again. Everywhere."
In short chapters, Biller assembles impressively artful historical sketches with column-like texts and autofictional stories in order to answer the question that has been bothering him and his first-person narrator more than any other since that Black Saturday, but to which there can be no answer because it is only based on a rumor: Where does the desire of others for the annihilation of the Jews come from?
To do this, he not only looks into the ugly faces of disguised or open anti-Semites and overly obsessive critics of Israel who are crawling out of every hole after the biggest pogrom against Jews since the Shoah. Even zealous doubters get their fill: For example, Carolin Emcke as the German Hannah Arendt (not a compliment!), Jan Assmann as the involuntary press spokesman for the anti-Semitic global conspiracy (funny and well developed), Deborah Feldman as a self-hating Jew from the Szatmar sect (you can see it that way).
In the second strand of the book, Biller brings to the fore the key moments from three and a half thousand years of Jewish history and perspectives them in the longue durée as a long present. He penetrates into antiquity and tells of the Babylonian diaspora and Haman in the Persian Empire, of the anti-Jewish pogrom in Alexandria and of the resistant Maccabees in order to make visible recurring Jewish experiences characterized by persecution, expulsion, diaspora and resistance.
The present-day observations and historical fragments alternate with chapters in which Ari tells the story. This is the third, most novelistic level of the book. When his family came to Hamburg's Grindelviertel from Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, he met anti-Semitic neighbors, anti-imperialist hippie teachers and people like Erich Fried, who admired Ulrike Meinhof. Then the move to Munich, loneliness, freedom and the first Jewish friends, even a bit of social progress, the question of whether a good Jew has to make Alija, and finally the existential experience of being pushed back into the hell of the now.
“We live in biblical times”
It is said that Majdanek had only been closed for fifteen years when it was born. Biller was born in 1960. Now he suffers from a depression called “Gaza disease”. It is not always clear what is reality and fiction, Biller condenses and exaggerates, the three strands are not clearly separated from each other - that is part of his autofictional game. There is a constant temptation to resolve the contradictions or to identify an attitude, even to put the book down in annoyance, only to be surprised again by a different perspective or by softer tones.
This is also the case when talking about another Black Saturday, April 9, 1948, when an Irgun and a Lechi unit killed around 120 Palestinian Arab residents in the village of Deir Yassin. The massacre during the War of Independence has been widely documented. Or when Ari isn't really interested in his friend Omar, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp, and after a very unsuccessful conversation with him, he plays the Hebrew folk song Hava Nagila - "Let's be happy".
The radicalism of the Zionist underground organization Irgun and Menachem Begins or the extreme Zionism of Chaim Weizmann (“full of ghetto fears”) are just as alien to the first-person narrator as the idea of a right of return for Palestinian refugees, which would probably unravel the state of Israel. Biller knows that this is happening precisely because “the self-destructive virus of fear and right-wing radicalism” is becoming more and more toxic. How could he miss that?
“We live in biblical times, always,” he writes, and there it is again, the repetition of the experience of barbarism, the never-ending struggle. So why not start with Abraham, who made one god out of hundreds and went ahead to the promised land of Canaan. “This is how the Middle East conflict began three and a half thousand years ago,” summarizes Biller.
Persecution, pogroms and resistance
A bit like a self-experiment, he repeatedly brings together his “atheistic Talmudism” with a biblical coding of political conflicts, which interprets conflicts in religious-mythological terms (including idols, pagans, fire sacrificers and Satanists) and thus often exaggerates them. Which is of course intentional and sometimes a bit of a black and white representation. Because, as an example, the Purim story in the Book of Esther includes, in addition to Haman's attempt to wipe out the Jews in the Persian Empire, the continuation of the story: after Haman's death, there is a report of revenge and how "blows of the sword" were struck against the "enemies to their heart's content." However, in view of the countless pogroms against Jews, this could almost be read as an edifying side note.
From the pogrom in Alexandria, which Biller somewhat bluntly describes as the first pogrom in world history, to the pogroms in the empire of the Russian Tsar, from German Auschwitz to the Arab barbarians of October 7th: the “laws of Sinai” and “a life in the radiant light of a civilizational ethic” were not an option for the Jew-haters. Perhaps, according to one of his speculations based on Freud, Christians and Muslims, as epigones of a religion, wanted to make the original disappear?
And of course Biller wouldn't be Biller if Jewish history wasn't also a heroic story: "It was the Jews who were the first people to lose their fear of nature and the secret laboratory from which it came, even though they continued to freeze in the winter and sweat in the summer just like everyone else."
And then another twist. “How could Israeli generals turn Gaza into a modern-day Hiroshima?” “We have to become barbarians now too,” Ari says to his girlfriend Nika and asks himself the next morning how he got the crazy idea that we were living in biblical times again.
Universal Laws
Biller is not looking for a way to think through the contradictory present. That is no more the task of a novel than it is the task of the Jews to eliminate anti-Semitism, which is solely a problem of anti-Semites. Unfortunately, you have to constantly remind yourself of this. Without wanting to psychologize too much, this book is rather a testimony to an existential pain and perhaps an attempt to endure it a little better. The virtuosity of Maxim Biller's ability to hold together the various narrative strands and narrative forms and create a variety of voices is great art that hardly anyone has mastered like he does.
There is an implicit despair in the novel that the universal laws of reason and human rights still do not apply equally to everyone. And there are the many other questions asked between the lines: Does the idea of messianic redemption translate into political sovereignty? What is the relationship between the universal and the particular and what is the relationship of the diaspora to the Israeli state as part of Jewish identity? Biller's deeply sad and disturbing book, in all its intended inconsistency, expresses a deep crisis in Israel, perhaps even in Judaism.
“‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘we used to feel like the Maccabees.’ ‘And now?’ ‘Now we’re sitting on top of the mountain at Masada, planning escape or suicide.’”
