Interconnecting Exile. Practices of Recollection, Intertextuality and Memory in German-language writing (19th-21st centuries)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Doerte Bischoff; Privatdozentin Dr. Esther Kilchmann
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566639314

The project’s central focus is the special significance and function of intertextual references in exile literature. It is based on the finding that a new German-language literature is currently developing that articulates experiences of flight, migration and exile in Europe and that is inscribing itself into German literature by extensive inter-reference to other texts, including the exile literature of the Nazi era. The project investigates the connections which are established by this process and asks how established memory narratives are transformed. The links which exile writers make to the literature of exile in other places and periods are the starting point for the project’s programmatic expansion of scholarly perspectives on exile literature in three respects. First, the narrow focus on exile from Nazism exile that has long characterized German literary studies is problematized by integrating contemporary texts as well as literature from the Vormärz period, which in turn was cited in exile from Nazism. Exile literature in German is thus treated integratively here, across epochs, for the first time in a study of this size. Second, exile texts are analyzed in their transcultural and transnational dynamics on the basis of the quotations and references which the project reconstructs in detail; this also includes the context of the author’s culture(s) of origin. The project’s central thesis is that these patterns of inter-reference are not only characteristic of the contemporary texts, but can also be traced in many of the historical texts: this runs contrary to the rhetoric of national self-constitution and cultural preservation which has been held to be typical of typical of exile writing in particular. Third, the implications of such multidimensional reference structures will be analyzed. Patterns of inter-reference makes archives of interwoven histories visible and shape multidirectional memory structures. The project’s aim is to analyze in a literary-historical and systematic way how exile texts create links between each other: for example, through quotations, mottoes and dedications, references to specific author names and common topoi, narrative processes or experiments with form. In this way, it is possible to analyze how new spaces of belonging are created beyond nationally and culturally determined literary-historical frameworks. The results of the project work will be presented in collaborative and individual publications and in digitally prepared visualizations of the networking of texts. These will fundamentally redefine the field of exile research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Steffan Davies, Ph.D.