Henryk Marcin Broder: German thinking with Jewish rationality and a Polish heart

Another characteristic of migrants from Poland, which obviously also shaped Broder, is the fear of the question about their heritage and their national identity. If you first have to find yourself and then position yourself in your new environment, then answering that kind of question does not just seem impossible, it is also annoying. In most cases, the so-called majority societies simply do not understand this aspect. This has been experienced particularly by prominent Germans of Jewish and Polish heritage, including Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and so they have consistently refused to give answers or have used symbolic literary constructions to sidestep the question.

Perhaps this is also the reason why Broder, like most migrants, feels so at home in the United States of America, a country in which, as a foreigner, you simply belong, almost as an incontrovertible matter of course.

From the 1970s, Broder addressed issues relating to the re-emerging anti-Semitism in Germany. It was in this context that his infamous confrontation with the left-wing scene occurred, which had two particularly serious consequences: Broder became a bestselling author and he left Germany for Israel in 1981. Without planning to, he ended up living there for ten years.

From his writings from this time, it is clear that Broder had systematically developed an analytical rationality which he used to deal with the complexity, taboos and tensions in German-Jewish relations in the future. The intellectual precision of his analyses and reasonings are characteristic of him. And in this way, his work is undoubtedly one of the birthplaces of a new Jewish rationality, which is aimed particularly at guaranteeing security for Jews and their state in the face of the new global anti-Semitism.

The unmasking of political untruths and the fight against that which Jean-Paul Sartre called the mauvaise foi[3] (bad faith – the insincerity towards oneself) runs like a red thread through Broder’s work and through his increasingly intensive media presence. For Broder, this special feature of the psyche, which Sartre considered a basic characteristic of human existence which one cannot cast off, is one of the main reasons for the misunderstandings between humans, against which he repeatedly takes up the fight.