Between Social Criticism And Concrete Poetry : Germany

In the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, a current rapidly became discernible which took as its subject the manner in which people were dealing with the recent past. In many of the works appearing during those years, criticism of the “economic miracle” of the postwar period was conjoined with endeavors to come to terms with the past. The preoccupation with swift attainment of a new material prosperity was often interpreted as flight from responsibility for what had transpired during the National Socialist era. Examples include the plays and prose of the Swiss natives Friedrich Diirren-matt (”The Visit”, 1956; “The Physicists”, 1961) and Max Frisch (”I’m Not Stiller”, 1954; “Homo Faber”, 1957; “The Firebugs”, 1958; “Andorra”, 1961). The most significant works by German authors came from the pens of Wolfgang Koeppen (”Das Treibhaus”,

1953), Heinrich Boll (”And Never Said a Word”, 1953; “The Bread of Those Early Years”, 1955; “Billiards at Half-Past Nine”, 1959), Siegfried Lenz (”The German Lesson”, 1968) and Gunter Grass (”The Tin Drum”, 1959; “Cat and Mouse”, 1961; “Dog Years”, 1963). A crucial role was played by “Group 47″, a fluctuating group of German-language writers formed by Hans Werner Richter whose annual meetings (which continued until 1967) were both a literary and, as time passed, increasingly political event. Many well-known authors of the period belonged to this group; some of them - most notably Heinrich Boll, who was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature - considered it their role to pass moral judgment.

In addition to these authors, there were a number of others who, less concerned with interpreting social reality, instead sought to present an (ostensibly) dispassionate picture of it. They included above all Jurgen Becker (”Felder”, 1964; “Rander”, 1968), Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (”Keiner weiss mehr”, 1968), Alexander Kluge (”Lebenslaufe”, 1962) and Dieter Wellershoff (”Ein schoner Tag”, 1966). Running counter to these currents was the genre of concrete poetry (Max Bense, Eugen Gomringer, Helmut Heissenbtittel, Franz Mon), which attempted to divorce itself completely from content. Here language itself became literature.