A 2004 COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, published under the auspices of the London Institute of Germanic Studies with the title Politics in Literature, has as its subtitle “Studies on a German Preoccupation.” This formulation undoubtedly implies that German writers have always been concerned, or even overconcerned, with matters political. In fact, given the course of German history, it might seem surprising if such a concern had not been evident. Nevertheless, any suggestion that writers' preoccupation with politics is uniquely German has to be questioned, for example by reference to France. The concept of committed literature (littérature engagée) was invented in France by Jean-Paul Sartre, as was the use of the term intellectual with reference to writers and others from the world of learning who take it upon themselves to intervene in political debates. The origins of this usage go back over a century to Emile Zola's essay “J'accuse,” written at the time of the Dreyfus affair in 1898. For the quintessential British political author George Orwell, the significance of politics in literature is not a question of nationality but a consequence of the act of writing itself. In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” he claims that, “no book is genuinely free from political bias. The attitude that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” If this is the case, then German literature is inevitably political. All that it might be possible to claim is that, to amend one of the best-known passages in Orwell's writing, some literatures are more political than others.