Re-articulations of German-Jewish Identity in Adriana Altaras’s titos brille and Dmitrij Kapitelman’s Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters

This article examines the emergence of new forms of German Jewish identity after unification, the arrival of over 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union, and the fading of the generation of Holocaust survivors. It is argued that Adriana Altaras's titos brille (2015) and Dmitrij Kapitelman's Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (2016) suggest a spectrum of potential actualizations of German Jewish identity along three related axes: continuity↔innovation; apartness↔normalization; and particularity↔cosmopolitanism. More generally, the article proposes that these axes might structure a comprehensive examination of the growing corpus of fiction by authors with a Jewish background to which the two novels belong.