The autobiographical element is a central theme in modern art, especially after the fall of the Wall, where a large number of writers, visual artists, photographers, etc. deal with personal history and memory. Since the Jewish emancipation, this interest in ancestry and ethnic origin has played a decisive role in Jewish artists. In a study of four writers with a Jewish background, Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, Georg Brandes, Henri Nathansen and Franz Kafka, the focus is on the relationship between ancestry and origin on the one hand and literary expression on the other.
Exodus examines how the four authors thematize the Jewish experience, memory and identity in literature and explains, among other things, why a person's ethnic origin has become a decisive identity-creating factor in the modern globalized world.
