Writing Competition 2008

What Happens Next?

What Happens Next? was the motto of the DAAD 2008 competition, whereby students were encouraged to come up with fictitious encounters between a famous German and a famous British personality. Find out below how Gok Wan transforms Einstein’s looks, how Beckham challenges Nietzsche’s claim to fame or how Thomas Mann and Jane Austen converse at the launderette, to name but a few of the sixty Anglo-German encounters so far unheard of!

The response we received from students across the country was fabulous and we would like to thank everybody who participated in the competition and those who supported us. The diversity of Anglo-German encounters our participants have come up with and their imaginative representation of these encounters were truly inspiring. It was a huge challenge for the jury to select a small number of prize winners, as all works were of an extremely high standard.

‘The variety of the entries was very striking – both in terms of the different German-British encounters which competition entrants had thought up and the forms in which they presented them: essays, dialogues, poems, mock news articles and TV interviews, photographs, drawings, paintings, animated films, cartoon booklets, a quilt, a collage, and a Beuys-style “found object”… It is very inspiring to see how diverse a sense of German culture and cultural heritage today’s students have and in what imaginative ways they represented the encounter between Germanness and Britishness.’ says Dr Georgina Paul, Tutor in German, St Hilda’s College, Oxford.