Title
Rafael Seligmann (1947-)
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2003
Abstract
Rafael Seligmann was born in 1947 in Tel Aviv to German Jewish parents who had fled to Palestine in 1934. His father, Ludwig Seligmann, was a commercial clerk and his mother, Hannah (née Schechter) had been a textile worker before marriage. Despite the reasons behind the move to Palestine, the Seligmanns remained strongly bound to their German heritage and raised their son with German as his first language. When Rafael was ten, his parents returned to Germany and settled in Munich. Since the end of the 1970s, Seligmann has worked as a journalist while pursuing other career interests. He studied political science and history in Munich and Tel Aviv and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Israeli security politics. From 1980 to 1984 he lived in Bonn, West Germany, where he worked as a political adviser for the Christian Democratic Union and as a reporter for Die Welt. In 1985, he founded the Jüdische Zertung (Jewish newspaper). From 1985 to 1988 he taught at the University of Munich. He became known as a fiction writer with the publication of his controversial first novel, Rubinsteins Versteigerung (Rubinstein's Auction), in 1989. As of 2001, Seligmann had published five novels, a book on German-Jewish and German-Israeli relations, and numerous essays and was living in Berlin with his wife and son.
Recommended Citation
Bower, Kathrin M. "Rafael Seligmann (1947-)." In Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, edited by S. Lillian Kremer, 1138-1141. Vol. 2. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003.
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Copyright © 2003, Routledge. This article first appeared in Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work.
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