At a nearby coffee shop after the panel, Czollek explained how the weight of the past motivates him. “I am one of the few Jews that has a history in Germany from before the Second World War,” he said. His grandfather survived more than one concentration camp and spent several years in exile in China before returning to East Germany in the late 1940s.

“The only Jewish relative I have is my aunt,” Czollek said. “My father died when I was young. The thread is extremely thin. Sometimes I think the things I do are to reconnect with that thread.”

Czollek, who has a Ph.D. from the Center for Anti-Semitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin, has also written several volumes of poetry, one of which went on sale in September, and is a co-editor of “Jalta,” a twice-yearly journal on contemporary Jewish culture, which published its first special edition in conjunction with the Jewish Literary Festival. Translations of some of Czollek’s poems are online, though none of his books have been fully translated into English.

The European Jewish Congress estimates that about 200,000 Jews live in Germany today, but most migrated to the country from the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Czollek’s generation of German Jews — those who are millennials today — were some of the first who could attend Jewish schools from first grade through high school. Having Jewish spaces in which to form critical ideas, he said, “is a prerequisite for thoughts like de-integration to emerge.”