Final Report Summary - BEYONDENEMYLINES (Beyond Enemy Lines: Literature and Film in the British and American Zones of Occupied Germany, 1945-1949) This project investigated the cross-fertilisation of Anglo-American and German literature and film during the Allied Occupation of Germany. It was the first study to survey the cultural landscape of the British and American zones of Occupied Germany in detail. By doing so it offered a new interpretive framework for postwar culture, focusing on the histories of the German occupation, postwar Anglophone and Germanophone literature (more intertwined than previously suggested), and the relationship between postwar and Cold War. Combining Anglo-American and German literature and film history with critical analysis, cultural history and life-writing, this ambitious, multidisciplinary study opened a major new field of research. The King’s College London project team included three academics (from the English and German departments), two postdocs (working on newspapers, magazines and the history of UNESCO) and two PhD students (working on literature and film). The wider network included colleagues in English, German, film, history and anthropology from Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Italy and the US. The network discussed the German occupation at a workshop in Berlin (2014) and a conference in London (2015). Collectively we produced several publications, notably including the PI’s study The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich (Bloomsbury, 2016) and two edited journal special issues: The Transformative Power of Culture in Occupied Germany, Comparative Critical Studies 13.2 2016; Narratives of Identity and Nationhood in Occupied Germany, German Life and Letters 71.2 2018. The Bitter Taste of Victory traces the experiences of 20 of the writers, filmmakers and artists who went from Britain and the US to postwar Germany to witness or effect cultural transformation. The special issues use case studies encompassing literature, film, music, theatre and journalism to examine the Allied attempt to effect cultural transformation in occupied Germany. In the final year of the project we comparatively studied the role of culture in the occupations of Germany, Japan, Italy and Iraq in a 2-day workshop in Venice and a 90-minute podcast. We also took WG Sebald’s writings on the ruins of postwar Germany as inspiration for an exhibition at Somerset House in London (Sept-Dec 2017). Entitled Melancholia: A Sebald Variation, this used the bombed cities and swarming refugees of 1945 to make a case for melancholia as an affect uniting European artists and a force for change. The exhibition was a collaboration with the CCCB in Barcelona. Alongside works by artists featured in their recent Sebald exhibition, including Susan Hiller, Jeremy Wood and Guido Van der Werve, we assembled Albrecht Dürer's 1514 Melencolia (a major loan from the British Museum); works by German artists including wartime photographs by Hermann Claasen (the ruins of Cologne cathedral) and Erich Andres (Dresden), and Anselm Kiefer’s photographs of bomber planes, made from lead recovered from the roof of Cologne cathedral (bombed in WW2); and works by British artists including Dexter Dalwood’s portrait of Sebald’s car accident in the English countryside, and Tacita Dean’s Bless Our Europe, specially commissioned for the exhibition. We used the UK’s vote to leave the European Union – which occurred half way through the project – to reflect on the EU’s origins and consider the role of culture in the idea of Europe, fostering a new sense of European citizenship that was missing from the Remain cause. King’s research, demonstrating that culture was fundamental to the inception of the EU, made a case for the continued importance of culture in conceptualising European identity. The Idea of Europe (held a week after the 31 October 2019 deadline to leave the EU) brought 12 activists and cultural leaders together to use our research to articulate a new (cultural) vision of being European.
