Explaining the Enemy: Images of German Culture in English-Language Fiction by German-Speaking Exiles in Great Britain, 1933-45

The fact of the matter is that I have never written a word in German having been much too young to write books before my flight in England in 1933 and I cannot therefore see a point in my joining a German PEN Club. Please do not misunderstand me. I never for a moment deny my German origin as unfortunately so many of my fellow refugees do, but when I left Germany at the Machtübernahme I decided to forget all about that country for ever. Personally I believe neither in the cultural nor the political revival of Germany, or/rather it is of complete indifference to me if that country will ever print another book or be bombed from the face of the earth, which I sincerely hope it will.

(Feiner, Letter to Richard Friedenthal)

Ruth Feiner's response to Richard Friedenthal's invitation to join the German PEN Club in Exile in 1942 leaves, at first glance, little doubt as to the author's deliberate and manifest rejection of her native culture. The excerpt from her letter above, however, is misleading, and some of the author's claims are simply untruthful: Feiner's first four novels, although published in English, were in fact translations and had been drafted by Feiner in her native tongue, German. Although Feiner seems to have abandoned her native language as soon as she was capable of producing English-language fiction, she continued to resort to Germany as subject-matter, even when the British public and critics may well have been sated with what was frequently dismissed as refugee fiction or atrocity stories. Feiner's ostensible efforts to distance herself from her native culture, as expressed in her letter to Friedenthal, are simply not substantiated by her literary work. Her alleged desire to draw a definitive line between her original nationality and her adopted British culture emerges as questionable when one considers a series of novels that continually weave German topoi and cultural references even into her most "British" romance fiction. As for Feiner's comments on Germany, her novels demonstrate an ambiguous attitude towards her native country, vacillating between loathing and nostalgia.

That an exiled writer's textual response to his or her native culture is inconsistent is not surprising, particularly considering the fact that experiences of the loss of one's homeland are inevitably varied and highly subjective. Such considerations are compounded by the particular historical dimensions of the German exile experience in Great Britain. With the declaration of war, German culture became virtually synonymous with the Nazi enemy. Intense Germanophobia was fuelled by the speeches of Lord Vansittart, first broadcasted in 1940 and published with fourteen reprints in 1941 alone. According to Richard Löwenthal, the furore caused by Vansittart's Black Record. Germans Past and Present surpassed even the Germanophobia arising from the declaration of war and the spy hysteria following the fall of the Low Countries (96). If refugees had already been discouraged from manifesting their German identity in public by assistance organizations prior to the war, open hostilities and the policy of wholesale internment and deportations of 1940 certainly intensified the scrutiny under which German-speaking refugees were placed. Mourning the loss of the German or Austrian homeland in British exile not only ran the risk of appearing utterly insensitive, ungrateful, and regressive, but may even have jeopardized personal freedoms. As refugees found themselves under increasing pressure to profess their loyalty to their host country, and constructs of cultural and national identity were integral tools for identifying enemy and ally, language itself began to assume a powerful significance. According to Richard Dove, internees adopted English as their textual language partially "as a demonstration of their attachment to their adopted country" (159). Such reasoning may help explain why more exiled writers switched languages in England than in any other country of asylum, a point Klaus Mann made in his essay "Das Sprach-Problem" in 1947 (133).

An examination of the generic characteristics of English-language novels by German-speaking exiles in Britain also...