In a recent podcast Kateryna Mishchenko asked whether she, as a Ukrainian author, has the right to participate in German discourses, and whether she can do so through the German language. This refers both to the public debate on the ‘Krieg in Europa’, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, inextricably linked to it, memory discourses on the Holocaust and World War II. This article discusses Mishchenko’s perspective on the war in Europe in literary and non-literary texts in comparison to that of Katja Petrowskaja. Petrowskaja moved to Berlin in 1999 and made a name for herself with her family history Vielleicht Esther (2014). Both authors can be regarded as prominent voices within a post-Soviet exile community in Berlin. The article asks how contemporary authors from Ukraine who find themselves exiled in Germany are contributing to a politicization of the German literary field, and what role their contribution to a transnational memory of the Holocaust and World War II plays within this process, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of refugees as a transnational avant-garde in her essay of 1943.

Discourse on Jewish life in the German Democratic Republic has often offered a clichéd portrayal of a society in which Jewishness was subsumed into the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, leaving Jews as either self-hating (Stalinist) Jews or as citizens forced to deny their Jewish origins. In particular, Cold War narratives have often differentiated between Jewish communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, and thus seen afterwards as more loyal, and those who were in exile in the West, and thus more likely to be suspected of disloyalty. This paper focuses on non-Soviet exiles and their descendants to explore the diversity of Jewish identity, politics and culture in the GDR, ranging from assimilationist communist identity to explicit engagement with Jewish traditions and even the Jewish religion. Surveying through the generations from pre-Nazi communist activism to the GDR-born children of such activists, it finds a diversity that belies monochrome portrayals of GDR life, while also establishing that, far from being mere passive instruments in the service of an SED-led (neo-)Stalinist society, Jews in the GDR were agents in the establishing of their own multi-faceted identities.

‘Seit fast vierzig Jahren ist das Gärtnern neben dem Schreiben meine Hauptbeschäftigung’, Michael Hamburger wrote in 1994, and around this time commentators began to refer to him as a gardener as well as a translator, poet, literary critic and memoirist. However, while the role which gardens and gardening played in his life has been acknowledged, their importance for his poetry remains largely unexplored. I argue in this article that gardening served as therapy for Hamburger, whose experience of exile was outwardly less traumatic than that of many other refugees from the Third Reich, but whose life was marked by disruption and linguistic and cultural disorientation, following from his move to England at the age of nine, and that it was a way of making him at home there. However, my principal concern is with the meanings which gardening acquires in his poems, and the links with his quest for identity, his ecological concerns and a particular form of place-belonging. I seek to show that Hamburger’s experience as an émigré led him to develop conceptions of gardening and place-belonging that prefigured the understanding of the human-nature relationship demanded by our situation in the twenty-first century.

This paper considers how many of the Communist refugees — German, Austrian and German-speaking Czechs — who were in exile in Britain during the Second World War, followed the dictates of the Party and returned home after the war to help rebuild their war-torn countries physically, politically, economically and socially. While the British authorities permitted the Czechs, as ‘friendly aliens’, to leave without too much delay, obstacles were put in the way of the German and Austrian refugees who frequently could not leave Britain until late 1946 or thereafter. The paper examines the relations between frustrated refugees and British officialdom as well as the reception the refugees received from their compatriots on their eventual ‘homecoming’. Generally speaking, the returning Communists did not fare well. In Austria, the returnees, many of whom were of course Jewish, were met with continuing antisemitism as well as anti-communism; in Czechoslovakia, as the Cold War set in, some were arrested while others fled once again; and in the GDR, the preferred destination of the returning German Communists, the label of ‘Westemigrant’ could prove a considerable handicap. All in all, despite the initial idealism, the common experience was one of disillusion and disappointment.

Considering the devastating impact of Fascism and National Socialism on exiles and their literary heritage through the lens of adaptation history, this essay focuses on German-language literature in international cinema from 1933–45 and, by implication, on the role of refugees in major film industries abroad. When Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, most notable authors and filmmakers were forced to leave their homes in Germany and soon Austria. Many of them went to Paris and quite a few eventually made it to Hollywood. Several exile filmmakers sought to claim German-language literature for that ‘other Germany’ in foreign language films, but — especially after Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland — the literary canon of Germany and Austria was considered a liability by most international film producers. In desperate need of income, many exile authors actively pursued adaptations of their own works, but only rarely did their plans materialize, even for bestselling writers; Remarque, Seghers, and Werfel were among the lucky few. Max Ophuls’ effort to preserve at least a fragment of the German literary canon and ensure the survival of German culture abroad, by filming Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), was an exception. For the most part neither international film studios nor audiences were interested in German literary culture during the Hitler era unless an exile writers’ works provided useful and entertaining insights into current challenges and/or had established a wide-ranging readership.

In July 2021 Andreas Mytze died in London, where he had lived since the mid nineteen-eighties. Based on his extensive archive as well as his published material this paper offers an assessment of his contribution to Exile Literature and Exile Studies in the various areas in which he was active. As a seller of second-hand books, he sourced exile literature, completed, circulated and published lists of this stock, much of it rare and difficult to obtain. As a publisher he redressed this deficiency by re-publishing rare or forgotten works of exiled authors and offering contemporary authors, particularly those living in Great Britain, an opportunity to place material which held little attraction for conventional publishing houses. Finally, at a time when Exile Studies was in its infancy, as editor of the journal europäische ideen, he used his skills as an investigative journalist to source and publish documents and correspondence which provided scholars in the field with valuable source material.

Interpreting it as constitutive and representative of the film’s exploration of cultural memory processes, this article identifies an abundance of frames in Almanya — Willkommen in Deutschland. Visual frames — frequently in the form of photographs — abound in the film. At the same time, the film’s narrative structure entwines present and past temporal frames, with the latter embedded into the former through acts of intradiegetic narration. As well as accentuating the essential role played by narrative in present constructions of the past and pointing to the family as a key ‘social frame of memory’, both the visual and structural frames in the film accentuate the limited perspective of any retrospective account, which invariably frames the past in a specific — and selective — way. I also expose that Almanya — Willkommen in Deutschland is memory-productive as well as memory-reflective: the film does not only illustrate cultural memory processes in action within the narrative, it also contributes a new narrative about ‘Gastarbeiter’ migration from Turkey to Germany. Considering the film’s popularity with audiences in Germany as evidence of the broad reach of its memory narrative, I conclude that the film constitutes a self-conscious and situated, constructive and successful contribution to twenty-first-century German cultural memory.

The figure of the undead woman suicide features prominently in the œuvres of both Heiner Müller and Elfriede Jelinek. This article examines the significance of that figure to Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine and Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart, two plays about what kind of political action is possible in the modern media society. It argues that while Ophelia’s return from the dead is depicted as a challenge to the status quo — she stops killing herself so that she can enact change on a larger scale — Jelinek’s Ulrike is a figure who embodies modern political inertia: she cannot even manage to stay dead, much less change the world. Notably, both revenant protagonists are doubled by the postdramatic texts themselves, which can be described as both ‘undead’ and ‘suicidal’: ‘undead’, because they are subversive re-workings of previous texts, and ‘suicidal’, because they repeatedly undermine their own authority. Here again, though, the dual nature of undeadness — its capacity to represent either genuine subversiveness or mindless zombification — comes to the fore. While Die Hamletmaschine is an ‘undead’ text which aims to terrify its viewer into action, Ulrike Maria Stuart is a play which suggests that subversion is almost impossible in late capitalism.

Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797–1799) plays with the Bildungsroman as a literary form. As a story of the coming-of-age of the novel itself, it is a Künstlerroman as well. When the narrator fails in his worldly aspirations, he chooses the life of a hermit. His book becomes his cloister. This essay will study Hölderlin's novel as a response to Friedrich Schiller's philosophy of freedom in and through art. In his letters Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), Schiller posits a two-fold relationship between art and freedom. Art is freedom in the ideal and allows for freedom in history. In other words, moral freedom requires aesthetic freedom as a pledge to its possibility. But in Hyperion, aesthetic freedom appears as freedom itself, absolutely and without any ‘and’. History may have yet to separate itself out from life, but art does so, making a prophet of Hölderlin's Hyperion.

While Elfriede Jelinek scholars agree that the increasing social relevance of the early novels bukolit, wir sind lockvögel baby!, Michael and Die Liebhaberinnen is vaguely linked to a social, political, cultural or aesthetic critique, the ‘programmatic’ platform, if there is one, as well as its specific textual manifestations remain largely unexamined. Likewise, the ‘programmatic’ essays Statement and wir stecken einander unter der haut as well as Die endlose Unschuldigkeit together with udo zeigt wie schön diese welt ist wenn wir sie mit kinderaugen sehen arguably demonstrate the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic perspective of the author, but their relation to the novels have only been marginally und unsystematically considered. The article discusses the programmatic potential in the novels and the essays with respect to aesthetic methods, authorial voices, and a motivic framing of characters. It is argued that the tension between critique and autonomy forms the core of a programme committed to challenging both text and reader.