Agnes Mueller, "Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

September 5, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In October 2023, while Agnes Mueller was finishing a book about contemporary German-Jewish literature, the Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza forced the writers she was studying into a new kind of public visibility. Suddenly, authors who had spent years exploring Holocaust memory and migration through fiction found themselves pressed by journalists and audiences to take a clear position on Israel, often regardless of what their novels actually said. Mueller decided to open her book with this moment, not to chase headlines, but because it crystallized the tensions her research had been tracking for a decade: the way Holocaust memory remains the dominant frame for German public life, the emergence of a generation of Jewish writers who came to Germany as post-Soviet migrants, and the growing pressure to connect—or compete—with other histories of trauma and displacement.

Memory after the witnesses

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What you'll learn

1 (01:31) **Introduction & Opening Frame** - Host Amir Engel introduces guest Agnes Mueller and her book *Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures* (Cambridge UP, 2026), setting up the discussion of fourth-generation Holocaust writing and migration.
2 (05:41) **Why the Book Opens with October 7th** - Mueller explains her decision to begin the introduction with the Hamas attacks and their aftermath, using it as a crucible that sharpened the book’s focus.
3 (11:07) **Literature as a Unique Lens** - The conversation turns to why fiction offers a privileged perspective on social psyche and identity, distinct from journalism or public statements.
4 (16:23) **Key Author Recommendations** - Mueller names specific texts that exemplify the thematic complex of migration, memory, and post-October 7th responses.
5 (20:22) **Divergent Forms of Memory** - Mueller defines the key memory models she uses to analyze the shift from direct witnessing to mediated, diversified memory.
6 (27:14) **Sebald’s Anti-Memory in Practice** - How Sebald’s use of disconnected photographs and text enacts anti-memory, making viewers create their own connections.
7 (30:22) **Israel in German Jewish Literature** - Mueller discusses the divergent, often contradictory ways Israel is imagined by German Jewish writers, from idealization to horror.

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Show Notes

In Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026), analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and antisemitism.

Her new readings of German-language texts by younger authors present robust challenges to entrenched ideas concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, multidirectional memory, and a range of other memory debates. Jewish identity and Muslim identity are shown in direct conversation with other migrants' experiences, and literature is revealed to be a brave space where Holocaust memory is newly imagined. Mueller's study invites a radically new way to think about the Holocaust and sheds new and valuable light on adjacent contemporary discourses.

Agnes Mueller (M.A., LMU Munich, Germany; Ph.D., Vanderbilt U), Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature. She is core faculty in Jewish Studies and affiliated with Women's and Gender Studies. Her essay publications are on German American relations, contemporary literature, German Jewish studies, and Holocaust memory. Her 2004 anthology German Pop Culture: How "American" Is It? (U of Michigan P) is still widely used for teaching and research. Her 2015 monograph is entitled The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature, (Northwestern UP), available in German translation as Die Unfähigkeit zu lieben (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017). With Katja Garloff she edited German Jewish Literature After 1990 (Camden House, 2018). In Spring of 2025 she was the Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy in Berlin. Her new book, Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how, in recent German Jewish literature, Jewish and Muslim migration stories converge to shape the future of Holocaust memory. She is currently at work on a new monog