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This article examines how the narrator of Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder recalls the figures of the Parisian flâneur and the cosmopolitan Jew, thus complicating the novel's aesthetics by reworking the privileged apparatus of French and European cultural traditions that have long eschewed acknowledging Jewishness as a constitutive element. Dora Bruder may thus be read as an attempt to emphasize the significance of Jewishness to European literature in the late twentieth century. As a man walking in the city, the narrator reveals key tensions in the novel's aesthetics, while also demonstrating that the figures he embodies may be reconciled.

Confronting the local history of the Holocaust, ethnic German writers such as Franz Hodjak, Werner Söllner and Herta Müller focus on the rural landscape and the proximity of killing to daily life in Romania, rendering innocuous agricultural activities and the beauty of the countryside – so often idealised in the German culture of Heimat – uncanny and threatening. The presence of human remains in the soil and the function of rural tranquillity in facilitating amnesia surrounding the fascist past mean that landscapes become a veneer concealing historical realities. In thematising the tension between local memory and international remembrance these authors pre-empt recent efforts by historians and cultural theorists to diversify and complicate Holocaust memory.

This article compares two encounters on trams: a scene from Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben and Franz Kafka’s Der Fahrgast. It suggests that narrative spaces are performative and narrative time complicates performances of identity. Both scenes construct apparent dichotomies between male and female, old and young, subject and object, binaries that are made ambiguous by the topography of theatricalization and cinema. The article introduces the concepts of ‘spatial and temporal concertinas’, whereby shifts in perspective alter power dynamics. The analysis suggests that the depiction of bodies, space, and time offers insight into aspects of identity and subjectivity that otherwise remain hidden.