Immigrant Literature In Germany

In recent years, with the faster pace of globalisation, there become more and more immigrants. Immigrant literature, coming into being hand in hand with the immigration phenomenon, has drawn great attention from the literary world in both Germany and China. Because of its inter-cultural nature, immigrant literature has also been one of the research focuses of intercultural Germanistic. In Germany, while the research on immigrant literature is still popular, the em-phasis remains to be literary works on immigrants from Turkey, Italy, Greece and so on. Meanwhile, in China, Chinese literature research and researches on writers who have Chinese background but do not write in Chinese have also been fruitful; however, the mainstream of such researches still focuses on the works by writers who immigrated to English-speaking countries, such as the United States, Canada, or Australia. For those who immigrated to Ger-many but with Chinese background, their literary works have been much overlooked either in Germany or in China.By analysing the novel the Chinese Delegation by Luo, Lingyuan, this thesis aims to discuss how the Chinese-immigrant-to-Germany literature rebuilds the image of hometown in foreign environment, and to draw research attention to works by writers with Chinese background in Germany.The Chinese Delegation describes a series of cultural shocks and conflicts a delegation from Ningbo, China encountered when they are on a trip in Europe. In such cultural shocks and con-flicts, the image of China as hometown stands out.The first section of my thesis introduces the history and the development of the immigration from China to Germany and that of the respective immigrant literature. I think that as a literary piece of work written in German by a Chinese immigrant novelist, Chinese Delegation is in-dissociable for either Chinese or German immigrant literature.The second section analyses hometown as a theme from both sociology and literature perspec-tive. As a salient parent theme in immigrant literature, hometown was understood between two cultures by most immigrant writers. Caused by the writers’growth environment and the cultur-al differences, this angle of understanding is very unique for the literature of both the mother country or the immigrant country.In the text analysis section, adopting the text analysis method of Annotation, I discussed in de-tail how the image of hometown is rebuilt in alien environment from three angles:the image analysis of the Chinese, the cultural comparison and conflicts, and the use of Chinese language in the novel. By the three angles of analysis, I drew the conclusion that the image of hometown is diverse and dynamic rather than static. Further, the striking characteristics of the characters in the novel represent the image of Chinese officials and businessmen, while the presence of Chinese language in the novel can be treated as strong complement for the image of hometown from the language perspective.The last section summarises the rebuilt and diverse images of hometown in a foreign environ-ment of the novel, and interprets the association among these images of hometown, contempo-rary Chinese literature, and foreign context. From the piece of work as a whole, to his hometown, the author of the novel apparently holds a critical attitude, very similar to that pre-sented in Lu Xun’s novels. Meanwhile, the critical attitude also has something to do with the fact that the novel was not written in Chinese and that it targets at German readers.The revamp of the hometown image in immigrant literature is not only a salient complement for German literature, but also an intercultural annotation for the image of China, which plays an important role for China to understand itself.