Reimagining Israel and Palestine in Contemporary British and German Culture

Isabelle Hesse identifies an important relational turn in British and German literature, TV drama, and film published and produced since the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). This turn manifests itself on two levels: one, in representing Israeli and Palestinian histories and narratives as connected rather than separate, and two, by emphasising the links between the current situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the roles that the United Kingdom and Germany have played historically, and continue to play, in the region. This relational turn constitutes a significant shift in representations of Israel and Palestine in British and German culture as these depictions move beyond an engagement with the Holocaust and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian suffering and indicate a willingness to represent and acknowledge British and German involvement in Israeli and Palestinian politics.

This book offers new ways of thinking about how Israel and Palestine are imagined and reimagined as topics of cultural and political interest in two countries that have had complicated histories with both Israel and Palestine, histories which are marked by each country’s memories of the Holocaust and colonialism.

Isabelle Hesse is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is situated at the intersection of Jewish, Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies and she is the author of The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism, and Colonialism (2016) and has co-edited Literary Representations of the Palestine/Israel Conflict after the Second Intifada (2022) with Ned Curthoys.