When I did English A-Level a very long time ago , our inspirational head of English, the late Peter Coulson, would tell us the only information we needed to glean from a poem or a novel was contained in the work itself. He rejected both biography and periodicity. It struck me there was something almost Lutheran about this: the book alone would provide all we needed to understand the book.
There were other tools, however: Coulson positively encouraged us to read literary criticism. He had read English at Oxford, something that he found hard to live down. Boys who desired to do English were told to apply to Cambridge. I studied history and became a historian specialising in France then Germany.
I still love literature, however, but I confess that when I read a novel I am not immune from using it to feed my understanding of some aspect of the historical period in which it was written. If I want to know something about Thomas Cromwell, I read a proper book about him, not a novel. It explores the circle of the adolescent Daniel Lenz, a bright, working-class boy growing up in the bleak eastern suburbs of Leipzig.
Daniel inhabits a panorama of slab blocks and ruins bisected by roads and railway lines, the only relief provided by a few grimy pubs filled with sodden old topers. With time they might aspire to Party membership. They are decadent. They drink, smoke, take drugs, steal, look at porn and fight rival gangs; and relax by watching football, boxing, playing pool and dreaming about girls.
This nihilistic drink-and-drug-fuelled existence could just as easily be set in Glasgow or Dublin, or any other run-down, post-industrial city, but there is an important difference: the political legacy of Leipzig and its key role in bringing the East German regime to an end.
