Literature : Germany

The New Beginning After 1945. After the Second World War, German writers made a new beginning. One cannot, however, speak of a “zero hour” of German literature, given the biographical and literary continuity of many authors, the most prominent of whom in the first half of the century were Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht. A new beginning - for many writers that meant attempting to make the shocking, in the very sense of the word nihilistic experience of war and devastation describable, often by falling back on foreign models or the thought processes of Existentialism or the Christian tradition.

Wolfgang Borchert’s drama “The Outsider” (1947), stories by Heinrich Boll (”The Train Was on Time”, 1949) and Arno Schmidt (”Leviathan”, 1949), and lyric poetry by Paul Celan (”Mohn und Gedachtnis”, 1952), Gunter Eich and Peter Huchel are prime examples of this tendency to refrain from directly and realistically addressing political subjects, reflecting instead upon German guilt and the German defeat using religious or philosophical metaphors. Often the authors picked up the thread of modernist literature which had been banned for twelve years under the National Socialists.