De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century
De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century
By Max Czollek
Translated from the German by Jon Cho-Polizzi
A controversial, best-selling polemic in Germany, De-Integrate! is a battle cry against Jewish assimilation into a dominant culture that seeks to paint over the past—and a handbook for minorities on how to embrace their difference and resist rising nationalism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism.
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063182
Publication date: Jan 10, 2023
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About the Book
Max Czollek’s De-Integrate! is a polemical, often humorous examination of Jewish life in contemporary Germany that speaks to the position of minorities the world over. Rooted in sociological theory, the book offers an engaging and approachable critique of Germany’s much-lauded traditions of memory culture and Vergangenheitsbewältigung—its “successful” negotiation of its Nazi past.
Although modern Reunified Germany presents itself as having overcome historical trauma and integrated its now diverse, multicultural society, Czollek argues that this public image is merely a “Theater of Integration”: showcasing those minoritized stories to bolster Germany’s positive self-image, while sidelining the true potential of the country’s radical diversity. Czollek posits that today’s German minorities must embrace their differences and “de-integrate” from mainstream society in order to counter the rise of rightwing nationalism.
On the one hand a stirring look at integration, belonging, and cultural diversity, and on the other a passionate denunciation of bigotry and virulent nationalism, De-Integrate! speaks across cultural, racial, and national divisions and points to a livelier future for all of us.
Praise for De-Integrate!
“Poet Czollek makes his English-language debut with an unsparing critique of how Jews and other marginalized groups are viewed in modern Germany…. Czollek issues ‘a vigorous appeal for … autonomous Jewish identity’ founded in part on the ‘dazzling potential for irony and revenge to interrupt the well-established relations between Germans and Jews’.... His diagnosis of what ails modern Germany feels spot-on. It’s a righteous and uncompromising takedown.”
“The continuing influence of the past on the present—and what Czollek sees as Germany’s collective reluctance to acknowledge it—informs his latest book, De-Integrate!, a collection of politically charged essays and historical reflections that came out in August 2018 and is still making waves in the country. In it, he argues that Germany, eager to shed its past, isn’t reckoning with the rise of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism. And with the book’s title, he is calling on people who have been ostracized or singled out to stop trying to fit in and embrace their ‘otherness’ so Germany can become a truly multicultural, pluralistic society.”
—Valeriya Safronova, The New York Times
“Jews and Muslims are natural allies in fighting against the hegemony of the conformist German state and the romantic Judeo-Christian agenda it seeks to promote—in which, of course, there is no room for Muslims. But neither is there room, Czollek concludes, for Jews to express their cultural difference. His De-integrate! offers an interesting, polemical update on an older story—that of the quest for a harmonious German Jewish equilibrium that has so repeatedly failed to be realized. Aiming his sharply critical eye at its most recent manifestation, Czollek argues that it should be abandoned once and for all.”
—David N. Myers, Los Angeles Review of Books
“This 31-year-old author writes scathingly and entertainingly, he provokes and puzzles. De-Integrate! is an important contribution to the sometimes hysterical debate on integration”
—Manfred Koch, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“De-Integrate! is a well-researched, stringently argued, sometimes even funny polemic, which has come at just the right time.”
—Ulrich Gutmair, taz
“An important book.”
—Literatur Spiegel
“Unapologetic and pugnacious, loud and sexy.”
—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Sharp-tongued and entertaining, provocative and irritating.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag
“A renunciation (…) of the German self-adulation as world champions when it comes to a culture of remembrance.”
—Die Zeit
About the Author
© Jule Roehr
Max Czollek is a poet, publicist, and political scientist. He received his doctorate from the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität Berlin and is particularly well known for his theatrical and essayistic work surrounding memory culture, integration, and Jewish identity in post-war Germany.
About the Translator
© Viola Tietje
Dr. Jon Cho-Polizzi is an educator, activist, and freelance literary translator, and a Collegiate Fellow and Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan. Cho-Polizzi received his PhD in German and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley after studying Translation, History, and Literature in Heidelberg and Santa Cruz. He lives and works between Ann Arbor, Northern California, and Berlin.
Book Details
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063182 • $22.00
eBook ISBN: 9781632063199
Publication date: Jan 10, 2023
5" x 7.125" • 240 pages
Political Science: Polemic / Jewish / Germany / Integration
Rights: World English, Audio
Come celebrate the publication of German poet and political scientist Max Czollek’s fierce and funny polemic, De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century.