Literary Depictions of Germany in Contemporary British Fiction

This PhD project is concerned with contemporary (mostly Post-Wall) British literary discourses of Germany and its culture. It analyses what literary discourses project onto this area that was formerly known as ‘enemy territory’ and examines why and how Germany is used as a setting. By choosing a geo-centered approach, in which the site determines the corpus, I hope to discover patterns in British literary discourses of Germany that avoid a discussion of stereotypical accounts of Germans and their wartime past as has been scrutinised by other scholars. First-hand memory of wartime Germany is diminishing and thus we are experiencing a shift from communicative to cultural memory. This distance in time to World War Two has evoked writers’ interests in Germany as a setting anew and has produced narratives that move away from themes that are directly associated with war.

A preliminary research phase has unveiled that quantum physics, psychoanalysis and homosexuality are prevalent recurring themes in the British literary discourses of Germany. Quantum physics is the most pressing theme because it is strongly entangled with conceptions of space and time; interestingly, those two notions that are inherent to the approach of this project: ‘space’ as literary space and ‘time’ in terms of its discourses that negotiate the cultural meaning (or memory) of a place in relation to time, i.e. the past, present and future. As quantum physics functions in very opposite ways to classical physics it questions our common understanding of space and time and, therefore, it may prove fruitful to look at literary space and memory in the light of quantum theory.

Psychoanalysis and homosexuality may also manifest themselves in literature as notions that are connected to space and time, and it remains to be examined how the three themes can be related to each other in order to discuss the characteristics of Germany as a setting in British literary discourses. Apart from the interrelationship between quantum physics, psychoanalysis and homosexuality, though, this project is also concerned with other forms of exchange, that can be considered as cultural transfers: First of all (and stated very simply), there is a cultural-topographical exchange between a place belonging to one culture (in this case German) and its literary representations in another (in this case British). Furthermore, there is potentially cultural interaction between British and German characters within literature and, finally, an exchange between the culture of literature and the culture of science, as for instance shown by the integration of quantum physics into fiction.