German literature in the aftermath of World War II started from a new beginning, with many authors attempting to find a way of describing the shocking, nihilistic experience of war and devastation – often taking their cue from foreign models or existentialist and traditional Christian trains of thought. Wolfgang Borchert’s drama “The Outsider” (1947), short stories by Heinrich Böll (“The Train was on Time”, 1949) and Arno Schmidt (“Leviathan”, 1949), poetry by Paul Celan (“Poppy and Memory”, 1952), Günter Eich and Peter Huchel are examples of the trend of not depicting political matters directly and realistically, but reflecting on German guilt and the German defeat through religious images and symbols for ways of looking at the world. In doing so, the authors take up the tradition of literary Modernism, which had been condemned during the Third Reich.
In the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, a current emerged whereby the manner involved in coming to terms with recent history itself became a literary topic. In many of the works that appeared in West Germany at the time, criticism of the post-War “economic miracle” is combined with efforts to work through the National Socialist past. The focus on quickly establishing new affluence was often interpreted as a method of escaping responsibility for what had happened during the Third Reich. The plays and prose of the Swiss writers Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch illustrate this. The most important works by German authors were by Wolfgang Koeppen (“The Greenhouse”, 1953), Heinrich Böll (“And Never Said a Word”, 1953, “The Bread of Those Early Years”, 1955, “Billards at Half-Past Nine”, 1959), Siegfried Lenz (“The German Lesson”, 1968) and Günter Grass (“The Tin Drum”, 1959, “Cat and Mouse”, 1961, “Dog Years”, 1963).
The “Gruppe 47” played a pivotal role. Instigated by Hans Werner Richter in 1947, this was an informal association of German-language writers, whose annual meetings until 1967 were a literary event, and increasingly a political highlight. Many of its members, who included many well-known authors of the day, saw themselves as the champions of moral values. Their most famous representatives, Heinrich Böll and Günther Grass, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 and 1999 respectively.
In addition to these authors there was a whole host of others interested less in interpreting the realities of society as depicting it without emotion: Jürgen Becker, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Alexander Kluge and Dieter Wellershoff. Concrete poetry stood at loggerheads with all these currents (Max Bense, Eugen Gomringer, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Franz Mon), attempting to avoid any substantive content behind the words they used.
In the mid-1960s, the Federal Republic of Germany as well as every other western country, started to undergo a fundamental change. The student uprisings of 1968 instigated a clearly radicalized form of criticizing the “silence of our fathers” and thus the crimes perpetrated by the National Socialists. Glorifying aesthetic trends in literature were interpreted as camouflaging the social and economic reasons for an economic structure that was deemed unjust. Many authors strove to be active socially and politically – while at the same time refusing to be cornered politically. The fact that several literary figures spoke out against the war in Vietnam and in favor of the new Ostpolitik was symptomatic of this. The search for a new role and new forms for literature was also characteristic. Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory of the “death of literature” and Peter Weiss’ “aesthetics of resistance” were both radical expressions of this new train of thought.
Documentary theater also played a role in this political literature (Rolf Hochhuth: “The Representative”, 1963; Heinar Kipphardt: “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, 1964), which in terms of both content and intention was related to partisan reporting (Günter Wallraff: “Ihr da oben – wir da unten”, 1973) and literature featuring the world of work.
In addition to these trends there were also individuals who nevertheless made their mark as important authors of their day: Arno Schmidt and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard are outstanding examples. The oeuvres of these two writers represents a serious and at times deeply ironic portrayal of the existence of the artist in a world full of indifference and unimaginativeness. Moreover, Peter Handke, a highly acclaimed Austrian writer at the end of the 1960s, was one of the most influential writers during the first ten years of his creative output.
If the 1960s were full of beginnings, stimuli and change, the years that followed seem to have been characterized by an exhaustion of artistic devices and potential. The novels and short stories written by those successful authors of the first decades after the war were conspicuous by their lack of originality and cutting-edge characteristic of their ideas, with very little literary output from the generation of 1968, which preferred other genres of artistic expression.
Not dissimilar to 1945, the years 1989-1990 – the end of communism, the GDR and the Soviet Union (1991) – marked a profound turning point not just in political history but also in culture. This applied in particular to those authors living in the GDR who supported a state which, despite all its shortcomings, they considered to be the better of the two states on German soil. From the very beginning, once it had been initiated into the Soviet literary idea of “socialist realism”, literature in the GDR had developed in a completely different direction from that in the West.
Those that refused to submit to this pressure left the country: Uwe Johnson, Günter Kunert, Reiner Kunze, Sarah Kirsch, Jurek Becker as well as Wolfgang Hilbig escaped the grasp of the state’s intervention in the domain of literature.
As such, in the GDR of the 1950s and 1960s there emerged a form of literature that was widely conformist, advocating the idea of reconstruction and historical optimism without formal innovations and any discussion of 20th century avant-garde theories. Only the work of Christa Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner and Heiner Müller towered above this intellectual mediocrity and ideological uniformity. Even in the last throes of the GDR, the output of literary critics such as Christoph Hein, Volker Braun, Ulrich Plenzdorf, Peter Hacks, Stephan Hermlin and Stefan Heym remained infrequent and restrained.
Among the outstanding German language authors of the past 20 years are Botho Straus, whose stories and novels are an attempt to capture the present at the very moment of its outrageousness by borrowing from mystical images in language and scene sequences and the Austrian Elfriede Jelinek with her vehement attacks on all forms of authoritarian and restorative trends.
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