Germany

Germany is evoked in Poor Things not through a sustained visit or description, but through contrasting ideas attached to it: a German public park imagined as a place of private contentment, and a rising industrial power that unsettles claims of British supremacy.

Personal and Imagined Associations

In conversation with Bella, Duncan Wedderburn describes the life that would satisfy him as that of a disgraced, unemployed former tutor who would rather talk with a brave Scotswoman in a German public park than fight for the renovation of his homeland. Germany belongs here to a modest alternative life, not to a narrated journey: Wedderburn imagines companionship and withdrawal from national struggle as preferable to patriotic action. In another imagined future, he pictures everyone living in hygienic apartment blocks with free clinics run by German dentists. The detail makes Germany part of a speculative vision of scientific and social improvement, even as Wedderburn admits he would feel out of place in that future.

Germany in the Debate over Empire

Germany takes on a sharper political significance in the discussion of Anglo-Saxon rule. The speech that promotes Britain’s imperial expansion casts Germans as racially close to the Anglo-Saxons but associates them with violent orchestral music and sabre duels. Harry Astley then qualifies the confidence of this civilizing argument: Germany’s industrial strength, he observes, has almost overtaken Britain’s. The comparison complicates any simple assumption that British dominance is secure, placing industrial competition alongside the speech’s claims of racial and imperial superiority.

Narrative Significance

These brief references give Germany two distinct functions. In Wedderburn’s imagined life it offers a setting for personal escape from political duty; in the argument about empire it marks a European rival whose material strength challenges British self-assurance. The contrast keeps Germany at the edge of the narrative while making it a useful measure of the distance between private wishes and public claims of national power.