Exorcizing the Stranger: The ‘Daughter of Germany’ in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination

In his 1982 short-story “Bedbugs,” the British Jewish author Clive Sinclair relates how his fictional alter-ego Joshua dreams of avenging himself on German students at a Cambridge summer school by rubbing their noses in Nazi atrocities. His inspiration comes from an entry in Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Ghetto diary that reacts to a particularly vicious Nazi reprisal killing of Jews by quoting Psalm 137:9: “Daughter of Germany! Blessed is he who will seize your babes and smash them against the Rock.”1 The story concludes with the narrator play-acting his subconscious feelings of desire and revenge: “Daughter of Germany!” I scream. “Daughter of Germany! I shoot at her until the gun is empty.”2 In taking up the Warsaw diarist’s curse of the Daughter of Germany, Sinclair’s fictional persona assuages his guilt for his illicit desire for a German woman and his willing complicity in her seduction.