Germans give us a lesson in Eng Lit

A writer's conference in Potsdam reveals an extraordinary familiarity with contemporary British feminist fiction

Potsdam has its problems. It was a small garrison town until 1744, when Frederick the Great adopted it as his country seat. Here he built Sanssouci ("without cares"), a holiday home in flamboyant high baroque - read camp - style.

In April 1945 the town centre was bombed in a spectacularly heavy raid; thereafter the Allied division of Germany placed it in the East. Perhaps not surprisingly the Communist regime felt uneasy with the city's imperial associations and attempts to build a "new, socialist Potsdam" were hardly aesthetically successful.

With moves towards reunification starting in 1989, West Berlin rediscovered its connections with Potsdam, and an enormous amount of western cash is visibly pumping into the city - so far with rather mixed results. In the beautiful "Dutch quarter", where red-brick gabled houses were built for the construction workers from Holland, there is an awkward mixture of derelict squats, enterprising arty shops and exquisitely restored town houses. Capitalism recolonising the East - with problematic charm.

So you might think that Germans there would have better things to think about than contemporary women writers in Britain. You would be wrong. I have just returned from a conference - held, I should add, entirely in English - entitled "Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain", organised by the University of Potsdam, with papers contributed from 17 different universities from both sides of the old East/West divide and from Britain. Unlike most such conferences, they had also invited eight of the women novelists themselves, and organised public readings in Berlin.

This is unusual and bold - literary conferences are usually rigorously divided: either academic or writerly. To be innovative in a foreign language is itself impressive. The young German intellectuals there are going to be leading Europeans in the next generation - bilingual, cross-culturally informed and creative. Distinctively German.

I had a wonderful time. It was ego-enhancing and interesting. But underlying the pleasure was an increasing sense of shame: Britain is so insular, so provincial - so unfit, candidly, to be a European country.

Of course, the papers were given by university teachers and graduate students from English departments; you would expect them to talk English - but fluent, witty, idiomatic English, which even attempted regional accents? I have rung a couple of friends from modern European language departments in British universities and none was able to contemplate a conference here, held in German, on contemporary German authors, let alone well-attended public readings in which all questions from the floor came in German.

Now why would nearly 100 German academics, mostly but not exclusively women, want to hear from, and lecture on, British feminist writers, when clearly their British equivalents have no parallel interest? One reason seems to be that the German literary curriculum is so fixed around a "grand canon" that it is difficult to study German women writers. Shifting to English (or American) studies offers a chance to study more contemporary women's books.

In casual conversations, I also learnt that these Germans are asking questions about themselves. German ideas of nationality have meant that while large numbers of "Germans" have "come home" from eastern Europe, it is proving terribly hard to accommodate the larger Turkish population. The fact that four (Eva Figes, Ravinder Randhawa, Debjani Chatterjee and Suniti Namjoshi) of the eight invited British writers (the others were Maureen Duffy, Zoe Fairbairns, Gillian Hanscombe, and me) did not have English as their mother tongue cannot have been coincidental. Ethnicity is, as ever, an important social issue for Germans.

Feminism is another reason: German women, since reunification, are looking for a shared history. Professional women from the East do not feel they have done as well as they might out of reunification - they have lost as much as they have gained.

"In the East," said an Easterner to me, "we had social feminism - nurseries, workplace rights, equal pay. In the West, they had better orgasms! Better orgasms without nursery places feels pretty useless." Meanwhile, the West has pursued an ideal of self-fulfilment as a self-evident good. These concerns may help explain why a surprisingly large number of papers were about connections between writers, on sources on a history of modern feminist ideas refracted through novels.

These are all good reasons for German interest in contemporary British writing, but I believe that the main source of their concern is a self- confident and straightforward curiosity. There is nothing to lose, they were saying - in contrast to British fearfulness - and potentially a lot to gain by knowing more writers, more women, more stories. It was not British experience, in particular, that they sought to learn about, so much as that which is human, and different.

To my shame, if I am honest, I could not even name eight contemporary German women writers. But in German bookshops, ordinary non-specialist bookshops, British books - not world bestsellers, not bonk-busters, just middle-run literary novels - were readily available in paperback, both in translation and in the original. I did not encounter a shop assistant or taxi driver who did not know at least the basic civilities of English, and show a willingness to have a go at communication.

I have always been a pro-European, on abstract, anti-nationalist grounds. Now I want to be in a Europe with these people (along, I have no doubt, with just as many self-righteous, prejudiced idiots, bigots and bores as we have here). We need to invest, on our side, in these sorts of exchanges. Everyone needs more friends, new friends. It's good for you.

Potsdam was fun. I certainly don't want ignorance and fear masquerading as superiority and xenophobia to be seen as "distinctively British". We have a lot to learn.