Max Czollek

Max Czollek (born 6 May 1987 in East Berlin) is a German writer, lyric-poet, stage performer and curator. He is a member of the "G13" authors' collective.

Life
Czollek was born in Berlin in 1987. His paternal grandfather was a German Jew who survived several concentration camps, lived in exile in China for several years, and then returned to East Germany in the late 1940s. His only surviving Jewish relative is his paternal aunt. Max Czollek attended the Jewish Upper School Jüdisches Gymnasium Moses Mendelssohn (JGMM) in Berlin, passing his school finals (Abitur) in 2006. During his time at school he took a year abroad in Texas. Between 2007 and 2012 he studied political sciences at Berlin. Then, from 2012 to 2016 he worked on his doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (TU Berlin) and at Birkbeck, University of London. He was supported with a stipend from the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Fund. Since 2016 he has been a member of the producers' collective "Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart" ("Yalta - Positions on the Jewish Present").

Czollek has been part of the lyric-poetry collective G13 since 2009. In 2013 he initiated the international "Babelsprech" lyric-poetry project, in order to network a young German language "lyric scene".

Since 2014 he has teamed up with the novelist Deniz Utlu to organize the literature series "Gegenwartsbewältigung" at the Maxim Gorki Theater (Studio Я). Together with Sasha Marianna Salzmann he was co-instigator of the "Disintegration Congress" (2016) on contemporary Jewish thinking and of the "Radical Jewish Arts Days" ("Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage" 2017). During 2016/2017 he was co-leader with Esra Küçük of the Maxim Gorki Theater's "Young Berlin Council" project.

Controversy about Jewish identity
Czollek self-identifies as Jewish. In 2021, Jewish writer Maxim Biller accused Czollek of appropriating a Jewish identity, as, according to traditional halakha, Czollek is not a Jew, having only one Jewish grandfather. In his column in the newspaper Die Zeit, Biller compared Czollek to Benjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss writer who had confabulated his alleged Jewish origins.