German exile writers are weaving quotations and references to earlier exiles into their work, creating a hidden literary network that spans two centuries. This matters because German literary studies have long treated exile literature as a phenomenon confined to writers fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. The project challenges that narrow focus by showing that contemporary authors writing about flight and migration in Europe today are deliberately linking their work to earlier exile writing—including texts from the Vormärz period (1815–1848) and the Nazi era itself. These intertextual connections, the researchers argue, are not accidental but a defining feature of exile literature across historical epochs. If the project succeeds, it could fundamentally redefine how scholars understand exile writing. Rather than seeing it as a literature of national preservation and cultural loss, the research suggests exile texts create new, transnational spaces of belonging through their patterns of interconnection. The project will produce an anthology, academic publications, and digital visualisations of these textual networks. This is primarily fundamental research in literary studies; it does not have immediate practical applications, but it may reshape how future readers and writers understand the relationship between displacement, memory, and literary tradition.
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The project’s 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 by extensive inter-reference to other texts, including the writing of German exiles from Nazism. The project investigates these acts of self-inscription into an established body of literature; in so doing, it shows how they are transforming established narratives about exile and memory in German-language literature and culture. 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 critical perspectives on exile literature. This expansion has three dimensions. First, the project challenges the narrow chronological focus on exile from Nazism that has long characterised German literary studies, by bringing together as exile literature the writing of contemporary authors as well as those of the Vormärz period (1815-1848), whom the exiles from Nazism often cited themselves. Exile literature in German is thus treated as an integrated phenomenon here, across historical epochs, for the first time in a study of this size. Second, the project analyses the transcultural and transnational dynamics of exile texts on the basis of the quotations and inter-references which it reconstructs. The project’s central thesis is that these patterns of interconnection are not only characteristic of contemporary exile literature, but can also be traced in earlier periods. This runs contrary to the rhetoric of national self-constitution and cultural preservation which has been held to be typical of exile writing in particular. Third, the project analyses key conceptual implications of these multidimensional interconnections. Patterns of inter-reference make archives of interwoven histories visible and shape multidirectional memory structures. The project critically interrogates notions of loss and strategies of re-collecting, and concepts of intertextuality and of memory. It tests out and reflects on methods at the frontiers of the digital humanities, asking how digital methods of collection, analysis and presentation alter the approach to its literary material. The project thus aims to analyse in a literary-historical and systematic way how exile texts create links between each other: through quotations, mottoes and dedications, references to specific author names, and common topoi, narrative processes or experiments with form. In this way, the project shows how new spaces of belonging are created beyond nationally and culturally determined literary-historical frameworks. The results of the project’s work will be presented in collaborative and individual publications, in a new anthology of exile writing, and in digitally prepared visualisations of the networking of texts, as well as in academic workshops and public-facing events. Together, these will fundamentally redefine the field of exile research.
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