Literature: German Literature Post 1945

Each of the texts and authors will be studied in depth, with context, textual analysis, and an investigation of the text’s style and unique themes to the fore. In Boschwitz’s work, we will recognise a terrible prescience, and this will create the stage for our later assessments of the themes of memory, guilt, and German suffering itself in the post-war years. Each of these themes will provoke us to consider moral, ethical and philosophical responses to the trauma of mid-century Germany and Europe, a legacy with which we are still contending.

Our second text, Vertigo by the late, and were it but for his untimely death, a Nobel Prize winner in waiting, is a genre defying tale of pursuit and the pursuit of memory across Europe. Our third text, Lost, will illustrate the persistence of memory but in the context of a family’s loss through displacement.

Our fourth and last novel is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which has enjoyed widespread praise since its publication. It is a beautiful and profound work.

Our final author is the poet Durs Grunbein, among Germany’s leading post-war poets, and we will evaluate a selection of his poems, discovering in these works a sensitivity of perspective and humanity.

The course offers much to discover and discuss and illustrates why German writers have been at the forefront of postwar European literature.