The Surrogate Jew in the Postwar German Novel

An interesting facet of the postwar novel is the appearance of the surrogate Jew, a non-Jewish outsider who by his suffering fills the role of the "Jew." Only rarely does the surrogate Jew serve as a vehicle for masked anti-Semitism; Gerd Gaiser's Eine Stimme hebt an and Schlußball may admit of such an interpretation. Usually novelists treat the surrogate Jew from the aspect of the scapegoat as a symbolic warning against anti-Semitism and develop many situations which reflect the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Wetchy, the Hungarian Calvinist in Herman Broch's Der Versucher, represents the best portrayal of such a surrogate Jew. Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras and Walter Matthias Diggelmann's Die Hinterlassenschaft carry the theme one step farther by using the scapegoat to symbolize the Jews and to demonstrate the continuation of prejudice and persecution against postwar minorities, American Negro soldiers and Communists respectively. The reception of these novels that treat the surrogate Jew as scapegoat accurately reflects the public's attitude toward both this theme and postwar literary portrayals of the Jew himself