London, New York, Paris … and Bath: German literary exiles since 1790 – a talk in English by Dr Steffan Davies

Dr Davies will begin with a brief historical overview of exile and migrant writing in German, and a few remarks on the problems with categorising ‘exile literature’ and ‘migrant writing’. He will then talk, crossing historical periods, about a pair of exiles to Germany (Adalbert von Chamisso and Saša Stanišić), a pair of German exiles in London (Johanna Kinkel and Veza Canetti), and finally, Stefan Zweig, who spent a period of time in exile from Nazism in Bath.

Exile is as old as antiquity and as contemporary as this morning’s news. In Germany’s case, ‘exile literature’ has conventionally denoted the writings of refugees from Nazism; this talk, however, reaches further back, asking how German-language exile literature since the French Revolution – some of it written on our doorstep – might deepen our understanding of what it is to live in the ‘age of the migrant’ today.