Distant Kinship

Matthias N. Lorenz is Professor of German and Comparative literature at Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany) and Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He led two Swiss National Science Foundation projects on ruptures and continuities in Group 47 and on the phenomenon of disruption in the work of Christian Kracht and he is part of a Volkswagen Foundation research group on doing memory of right-wing violence.

This study of Joseph Conrad's influential work "Heart of Darkness" presents for the first time the German-language reception of this reference text in the debate on postcolonialism. The spectrum ranges from Conrad's contemporaries (like Kafka) to many canonical authors of the 20th century (including Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Christa Wolf) to the most recent names in literature (i.e. Christian Kracht und Lukas Bärfuss). Beyond the readings of their works, the study contributes to the study of cultural transfers as well as to Conrad philology, and it expands the theory of intertextuality with parameters that capture the complex factor of power in postcolonial relations.