Fabian Wolff admits that he is not a Jew

AAs a young Jewish publicist, Fabian Wolff has made a certain career, in the “Jüdische Allgemeine” for example, in the “Welt” as well as with articles about pop music in “Zeit online”, where his narcissistic, monstrously long article with the headline “My life as a son” was published. The allusion to the German title of Philip Roth’s book “Patrimony” (1991), which tells of the father’s death and the values ​​of an Eastern European Jew on the American east coast, has an ulterior motive: Wolff also wants to tell about his life as a son and the cards put …. on the table. But he is grotesquely far removed from the clarity and invulnerability of a Philip Roth, not to mention his style.

On around thirty printed pages, Wolff conjures up a complicated mother and family history, including the GDR and communism romanticism, the distrust of the German perpetrators and – if you follow Wolff’s account – a highly complicated identity, because for the critical Jew of today there are also BDS, criticism of Israel, left-wing and right-wing Judaism and the overriding question of who is allowed to have a say in whose name in German debates. In any case, he himself was allowed and able, accredited by what he believed to be, if one is still allowed to believe this “belief” at all. Because at the end of his memory gymnastics, Fabian Wolff reveals that he is not a Jew at all. A simple research on his grandmother in 2022 revealed that his own mother deceived him when he was a high school graduate.