The lecture focuses on the ‘Kakan Circle’, a group of German-Jewish friends from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, all of whom survived the Holocaust and were reunited in exile in Britain after the Second World War. They can be understood as a key example of the diasporic situation of German-language literature after 1945 – and, in doing so, also as a symptom of the delayed reception of extraterritorial literature by the German public after the war. The exile circle included the later famous essayist and novelist Elias Canetti, the poet and anthropologist Franz Baermann Steiner, and the writer, sociologist and philosopher H.G. Adler. Whilst Canetti and Steiner had already arrived in Britain during the interwar period, Adler, who had survived several concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, did not reach exile in London until 1947. 

This circle of outsiders in post-war intellectual Britain constituted a kind of exilic ‘mini-public’ which, as a creative incubator with strong conceptual interconnections, preserved something of the spirit of that Central Europe, ravaged in the 20th century, whilst in exile. Despite their differences in temperament and background, they were united by a personal analytical interest in coming to terms with the recent political catastrophes marked by totalitarianism and the Shoah. Each in their own way, they translated this into key works: in the dense description of the concentration camp structure as a ‘forced community’ (H.G. Adler), in a tour d’horizon of the explosive relationship between ‘mass and power’ (Elias Canetti), or through an anthropologically informed genesis of slavery (Franz Baermann Steiner) with the aim of diagnosing the times. In doing so, differences in their thinking and approach to the phenomenon of ‘totalitarianism’ will be addressed; these differences arose – exemplified by the contrast between Adler and Canetti – from the concept of the ‘survivor’ and its ethical significance. 

A final focus will be on the distinctive writing styles of this circle of friends, who drew mutual inspiration from one another in their use of literary forms. They were all united by an anachronistic fusion of essayistic writing, poetic imagination and self-taught erudition, which transcended disciplinary boundaries and genres and may well have been, precisely in this respect, a legacy of their Kakanian background.

The presentation will be given in German.

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