Doron Rabinovici - Overview

Overview

In 1994, Suhrkamp published his first book Papirnik, a collection of short stories most of them set in Vienna's Jewish environment. Three years later his first novel, Suche nach M. (Search for M.), was published which was translated into English by the US publishing company Ariadne Press. Search for M. is the portrayal of two families with Shoah survivors and their sons who live with memories they can’t express in the midst of the Austrians’ negation and denial of their past. In 2004 his new novel, Ohnehin (Anyway) was published. In this novel, the main protagonist Stefan Sandtner, a young neurologist, is confronted with a patient whose sudden and bewildering illness of the mind causes his memory to fail and sets him back in the year 1945. Herbert Kerber is stuck in his past as an SS officer. The novel's apparent lightness contrasts with the fundamental issues dealt with: hidden and present past, remembering and forgetting.

His doctoral thesis concerns the reaction of the Viennese Jewish community’s administration to the persecution by the National Socialists and the community’s consequent extermination. In 2000, the Suhrkamp branch Juedischer Verlag published his thesis under the title Instanzen der Ohnmacht. („Authorities of Powerlessness") which raises the painful questions of resistance and collusion that have come to dominate recent debates on the Holocaust.

In 2001, he wrote Credo and Credit, a collection of essays and articles about literature and politics. By combining serious and ironic texts, he speaks about his identity as a Jew who was born in Israel, lives in Vienna and writes in German. He has been awarded numerous literature prizes, most recently the Clemens-Brentano-prize of Heidelberg and the Jean-Améry-prize, both in 2002. In Austria Doron Rabinovici is known as an intellectual voice against racism and anti-semitism.