Onder de waterspiegel, voorbij de golven. De esthetiek en politiek van oorlog in naoorlogse duikbootromans en -films

This dissertation charts the aesthetics of postwar German and Anglophone novels, movies, and television series that depict submarine warfare. In these narratives, the subaqueous realm appears as an at once scientifically fascinating space of discovery and 'thrilling' adventures, and a battlefield to be explored and controlled. Particularly in popular fiction, this combination of techno-scientific discourses and military dynamics, of knowledge and power, and of security, secrecy, and warfare quickly turned the military submarine traversing the world beneath the waves into an object of fascination that is situated at the intersection of political and cultural imaginaries. Despite the broad popularity of scenarios in which submarines lurk invisibly as they stalk enemy ships, the narrative, acoustical, visual, and rhetorical dimensions of this productive stream of narratives remain largely neglected in scholarly research. Nevertheless, the military submarine's specific setting raises topical questions concerning the representation of (submarine) war, posthuman identities and agency in times of technological warfare, (post-)heroism, (bio-)political societies, and cultural memory more generally. To answer these questions, this dissertation develops a framework that combines research in the fields of the blue humanities and war and culture studies through an approach grounded in media studies. Each chapter shows that the media-technological interface dominating the interior setting surpasses readings of submarine war fiction as merely exciting stories of technological ingenuity and military prowess. Rather, by paying attention to the aesthetics of technology and (bio-)politics, this dissertation uncovers the genre's cultural-critical potential. Submarine war narratives, that is, reflect the intertwinement of media, human agency, and (socio- and geo-)political quandaries in oceanic imaginaries. Chapter I examines what it calls the 'submarine soundscape discourse.' This particular language used by the sonar operator is an illuminating means to describe how auditory technology mediates and (re)configures the invisible battlefield beneath the waves. Chapter II focuses on how the technological setting leads to the dissolving of cliché-ridden ideals of masculinity and heroism in the onboard post-heroic, homosocial micro-society. Chapter III further elaborates on these tendencies by showing that the (self-)destructive search for security in the submarine society reflects similar shifts in the (bio-)political imaginary of contemporary Western societies. Trying to distinguish between friend and enemy, for instance, is rendered increasingly futile and often leads to situations in which the 'real' threat resides inside the submarine itself. Chapter IV, finally, converges the insights developed in this dissertation into a multidimensional heuristic model, which it illustrates through Lothar-Günther Buchheim's novel Das Boot (1973) and Wolfgang Petersen's movie adaptation (1981).