This subproject examines the first half of the nineteenth century as a formative era of literary exile. Due to the restrictive, restorationist policies of Prussia, Austria, and other parts of the German Confederation, numerous authors in the ‚Vormärz′ period and after the failed Revolution of 1848 were forced to leave the German states, most frequently relocating to Britain, France, or Switzerland. Writers who are traditionally associated with the Vormärz movement will, for the first time, be systematically analyzed as authors of exile literature, thereby addressing a longstanding gap in nineteenth century literary history.
The project combines a quantitative survey—recording author names, causes and places of exile, timelines, and publications—with qualitative case studies on the literary representation of exile, focusing among others on Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Georg Weerth and others. It investigates how these authors model the experience of exile by refer-ence to canonical world literary texts such as Ovid, Dante, and the Bible, creating a lasting repertoire of images for life and writing abroad that later authors would take up again.
A further focus lies on Georg Weerth’s and Ferdinand Freiligrath’s experiences in Britain. Here, the project explores how these authors used their position in exile as a space of cultural mediation and, not least through translation, fostered transtemporal and transcultural literary connections.

This subproject searches for the range and flexibility of literary inter-reference in exile from Nazism. It examines the work of exiles as literary critics, both in the exile press and in literary periodicals of their host countries, and it explores exile authors’ relationship with the concept and contents of the literary canon. Here the project’s shift to understand textual interconnection is a step away from seeking exiles’ connection through a national-literary lens, such as their country of origin or the language in which they wrote. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Krackauer are studied as literary journalists whose criticism and publishing networks were inherently multilingual and transnational and whose writing was shaped consciously by translation, adaptation and interdisciplinarity. The dense interconnections in exile journalism will emerge from this research as a precursor to the globalised and digitised media environment of today.

The project also uncovers the importance of canonicity, as a concept, in exile writing, and its overlap with many of the exiles’ key concerns: national and ‘portable’ identity, memory, effective writing for new audiences and recuperation of personal loss. The project brings a wide range of responses to the canon, and redefinitions of it, to the surface, and it interrogates the particular importance of a ‘world’ canon in German exile writing, indicated by anthologies such as Alfred Wolfenstein’s Stimmen der Völker (1938) and Hermann Kesten and Klaus Mann’s Heart of Europe (1943), but not yet examined in depth. Two early-modern case studies in this section of the project, whose fit to German exile culture was tight but productively ambivalent, are Shakespeare and Montaigne.

The starting point is the observation that a new form of German-language exile literature is increasingly emerging – one that is not, as before, shaped by persecution and flight from Germany, but rather one in which German-speaking countries themselves have become the setting for authors who have fled dictatorships and crisis regions, such as those in the Near and Middle East and Eastern Europe. The corpus consists primarily of texts already written in German; however, since for many relevant authors, language shifts and multilingualism are not only biographically significant but often literarily relevant as well, language criteria are treated flexibly and translations are included where appropriate. The study examines the extent to which the texts refer to earlier exiles reflected in German-language literature and how they thereby inscribe themselves into this tradition. At the same time, the study examines the extent to which the juxtaposition of Western and Eastern European narratives of memory, as well as reinterpretations of Western concepts of the Orient in the context of current stories of flight and exile, lead to constellations of multidirectional memory that expand national history or challenge its supposed linearity and coherence. It is also taken into account that the designation and framing of contemporary texts as exile literature are strongly linked to the programmatic perspectives and activities of institutions such as museums, theaters, foundations, or publishing houses. In addition to literary texts, discursive constellations within the contemporary literary field are therefore also examined.