Selective Affinities
The Story of British-German Cultural Relations
Ruediger Goerner(Author)
Oxford University Press
Will be published approx. on 19. November 2026
Book
Hardback
560 pages
978-0-19-882401-5 (ISBN)
Description
Selective Affinities offers in-depth insights into the formation, historical development, and present-day features of British-German cultural relations. Based on rarely considered source material, it tells the story of a uniquely rich relationship in cultural history and examines its synergies and controversies, its misunderstandings and the prejudices resulting from them. It discusses aspects of British Germanophobia and German Anglophilia with a particular focus on the nineteenth century, which influenced British-German relations into the twentieth century.
The emphasis is on 'affinities' between British and Germanic culture throughout the last five centuries; at times they were too close for comfort but they were shaped by particular individuals who acted as 'transferants', or mediators, between both cultures. Accordingly, the work of artists, translators, and in some cases diplomats, takes centre stage, ranging from Hans Holbein the Younger, as the portraitist of the late Tudor period, to Michael Hamburger, the German-born exile poet and translator of Hoelderlin and Celan. The role of German immigrants to Britain throughout the centuries but predominantly after 1933, is an integral part of the story; but so is the presence of English culture in Germany, first in the shape of the nineteenth-century traveller, or early tourist along the Rhine and Danube, and later, after 1919 and in particular after 1945, through the educational and organizational work of the British Occupation Forces. Ten years after the Brexit-referendum, Selective Affinities provides a balanced and analytical account of these strands in the cultural history of both countries with its fruitful ups and tragic downs that provide us with insightful pointers towards a continuation of these relations, once again in precarious times.
The emphasis is on 'affinities' between British and Germanic culture throughout the last five centuries; at times they were too close for comfort but they were shaped by particular individuals who acted as 'transferants', or mediators, between both cultures. Accordingly, the work of artists, translators, and in some cases diplomats, takes centre stage, ranging from Hans Holbein the Younger, as the portraitist of the late Tudor period, to Michael Hamburger, the German-born exile poet and translator of Hoelderlin and Celan. The role of German immigrants to Britain throughout the centuries but predominantly after 1933, is an integral part of the story; but so is the presence of English culture in Germany, first in the shape of the nineteenth-century traveller, or early tourist along the Rhine and Danube, and later, after 1919 and in particular after 1945, through the educational and organizational work of the British Occupation Forces. Ten years after the Brexit-referendum, Selective Affinities provides a balanced and analytical account of these strands in the cultural history of both countries with its fruitful ups and tragic downs that provide us with insightful pointers towards a continuation of these relations, once again in precarious times.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-19-882401-5 (9780198824015)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ruediger Goerner is Emeritus Centenary Professor of German with Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London and Founding Director of the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations. Between 1999 and 2004, he was Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies where he founded the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature. He is member of the German Academy of Letters.
Author
Emeritus Centenary Professor of German with Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
Content
- A Personal Introduction
- Part I. Laying the Foundations
- 1: Towards a Definition of British-German Reciprocity, or Imaging the Other
- 2: Institutionalizing Cultural Relations?
- 3: Curious Beginnings
- 4: National Mythologies, Landscaping Nature (with Notes on the 'Englische Garten', the Square, and the Allotment)
- 5: In Praise of Translation
- Part II. Specifics
- 6: Some Musical Exchanges with the 'Land without Music'
- 7: Physics, Astronomy, and other Mutual Pursuits: From Newton to Herschel with Lichtenberg as Illuminator
- 8: The Enlightened Traveller
- 9: Brief Dramatic Interludes around 1800
- 10: British-German Romanticism and its European Implications
- 11: An Early Anticlimax: Heinrich Heine's English Fragments
- Part III. Victorian Highlights
- 12: German Shakespearianism: A Tale for All Seasons, followed by a comment on British Goetheanism
- 13: Victorian Engagement with the Land of Poets and Thinkers
- Part IV. Ruptures
- 14: Envy, Rivalry, Menaces: The Road to (Inevitable?) Disaster
- 15: 'On or about December 1910': Modernism as Anglo-German Difference
- 16: Entrenchments and a Role for Poetry in the Age of War
- Part V. Trauma and Transition
- 17: Anglo-German Roarings in the 1920s, a few Literary Echoes, and the Example of Hamburg
- 18: Harry Graf Kessler, and other Anglo-German Go-Betweens in the 1920s
- 19: Anglo-German Dubieties in the 1930s
- 20: Austrian and German Exiles in Britain: Cultural Fertilization by Default
- Part VI. "In my end is my beginning"
- 21: Emerging from the Ruins: Laying Foundations for Cultural Life after 1945
- 22: Renewed Mutuality? Anglo-German Perceptions in the (immediate) Post-War Period
- 23: German Popular Culture: Made in Britain?
- 24: The British-German Legacy in the Age of Brexit, or a Chance for a Breturn?
- Inconclusive Conclusions
- Bibliography