The Jewish Member

Doctor of Science, specialist in Jakob Wassermann’s work, and literary agent Katharina Föhlkmer’s debut novel "The Jewish Member" became one of the most scandalous and discussed books in England in 2020. Here religion intertwines with emancipation, totalitarianism with eroticism, boys’ pop groups with childhood traumas, and psychoanalysis with robotics. This novel can rightfully be called one of the first novels of the 21st century. Not in the sense that the entire 20th century is present as a pretext for the author’s reflection—but rather as the trauma of birth, leaving marks on the psyche simply because it happened. And Föhlkmer tries to analyze this trauma the way childhood traumas are usually analyzed: in a doctor’s office. Now it is possible to darkly joke about the horrors of recent history, but that does not make them less monstrous, and the sins of the past, even if they are no longer quite as painful, are still not forgiven. In her reflections, Föhlkmer’s heroine is as frank as possible and as free as possible. In this passionate monologue that balances on the edge and is deeply personal, she tries both to make sense of how the history of the 20th century affected contemporary life, and to determine the place of a woman in this world, and to understand how a modern person—bearing the marks of psychoanalysis, Nazism, chauvinism, and the Holocaust—should live at all.