This article examines subjunctive approaches to history and memory as a novel aesthetic and ethical mode of Holocaust (post-)memory in two prominent examples of contemporary German-Jewish fiction. I argue that Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) and Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017) develop subjunctive modes of Holocaust (post-)memory as a response to a crisis of witnessing in the post-survivor era. Faced with the dying out of the survivor generation and the increasing institutionalization and hypermediation of Holocaust memories, these two authors invoke the subjunctive to self-reflexively account for their historical positionality and critique monolithic memory discourses (Petrowskaja), while also aiming to (re-)invest a stagnant culture of Holocaust memory with political urgency and futurity (Menasse). Subjunctivity thus emerges as a central yet underexamined mode of contemporary German-Jewish writing which has the potential to transform wider cultures of Holocaust (post-)memory, by moving ‘beyond the traumatic’ (Rigney 2018) in the direction of futurity.

Stef Craps is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative (CMSI). He is an internationally recognised scholar whose research focuses on postcolonial literatures, trauma theory, transcultural Holocaust memory, and, more recently, climate change fiction. He has published widely on these issues, including in the seminal Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He visited Warwick to deliver a public lecture and graduate workshop for the Warwick Memory Group in October 2017. In a wide-ranging interview, Stef Craps spoke about present and future directions in memory and trauma studies, the differences between transnational and transcultural memories, the ethics and politics of memory (studies), and the challenges faced by the field looking to the future.

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This introduction sets out the aim of the special collection which is to unmoor German-language Jewish writing from the narrowly defined context of national literatures in which it is often discussed, in an attempt to open it up to discussions around transnational and world literatures. Simultaneously, it suggests that Deleuze's and Guattari's framework can benefit immensely from being (re-)applied to its 'original', i.e. the Jewish, context, not least by investigating the ways in which it maybe no longer adequately reflects more contemporary concerns. As for the study of the authors and texts that this collection focuses on, the introduction highlights a number of issues which have the potential to innovate discussions around "minor" literatures, German Jewish literatures and the relationship between literature and theory.