German Modernism

The post-1945 period: “Stunde Null”

In the part of Germany that became West Germany in 1949, the immediate aftermath of World War II was known as the “Stunde Null,” or “zero hour.” Writers felt that the need to make a clean sweep after the defeat of Nazism had left them in a cultural vacuum, but in fact the postwar situation made it possible to establish new connections with European and American literature. Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the most important literary influences of this period.

Radio plays—for example, Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the Door,” Eng. trans. The Man Outside)—were a highly popular form. Stage drama also exercised considerable influence throughout the early postwar years. The Swiss playwrights Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt used drama to reflect on Nazism and the postwar period. Bertolt Brecht, who had returned to East Berlin in 1949, exerted considerable influence, even though many of his major plays—including Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), and Leben des Galilei (1943; Life of Galileo, also translated into English as Galileo)—had been written during his exile years. His theoretical writings developed a new theatrical model designed to overcome the Aristotelian principles that had dominated German theater since Lessing. Instead of the three unities of time, place, and action, Brecht argued for what he termed “epic theatre,” in which plot is developed in the manner of a chronicle by means of a loosely linked series of episodes. The audience was to focus less on the outcome of the dramatic plot than on the characters’ motivations and on alternative actions they might have chosen. Brecht’s principle of the Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”) called for a deliberately artificial style of acting that drew attention to the fact that what was taking place on stage was a play, not the “real life” suggested by naturalist drama. The alienation effect, designed to discourage empathy with the protagonist and to stimulate critical responses in the audience, became a touchstone for postwar dramatists.

Despite concerns, codified by German philosopher Theodor Adorno in 1949, about the possibility of “lyric poetry after Auschwitz,” poetry was in fact produced quite prolifically during the immediate postwar years. The exile poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan emerged as two of the most prominent poetic voices to reflect on the concentration camp experience. Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue,” from his collection Mohn und Gedächtnis [1952; “Poppy and Memory”]) is perhaps the best-known poem of the entire postwar period. Gottfried Benn’s lecture “Probleme der Lyrik” (1951; “Problems of the Lyric”), essentially a restatement of the formalist precepts of early 20th-century Modernism, enabled postwar German poetry to reconnect with the European tradition. Under Benn’s influence, much postwar poetry tended to be abstract and hermetic; but there was also a more socially critical tradition, initiated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his volume Verteidigung der Wölfe (1957; “In Defense of Wolves”).

Short stories by Borchert, Heinrich Böll, and others took stock of the postwar situation in a straightforward, realistic style, and early novels, such as Böll’s Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953; And Never Said a Word, also translated in English as Acquainted with the Night), depicted the misery of family life among the ruins. Though maligned as “Trümmerliteratur” (“rubble literature”), these works played a significant role in documenting and reinforcing the change of values that had taken place in Germany since the end of the war.

In East Germany the literary situation was very different from that of West Germany. Established in 1949, East Germany declared itself the cultural “heir” of the communist resistance to Nazism. Adapting the doctrine espoused by Georg Lukacs during the Modernism debate of the 1930s, the official literary mode was Socialist Realism. By this was meant a type of literature that avoided formal experimentation, was concerned with social reality, and turned upon a “positive hero” (or heroine) whose ultimate affirmation of community ideals is intended to serve as a model for the reader’s own approach to the vicissitudes of life. In response to various attempts to break the rigidity of this prescribed form, a writers’ conference at Bitterfeld in 1959 called for closer cooperation between writers and workers. Erwin Strittmatter’s Ole Bienkopp (1963; “Old Beehead,” Eng. trans. Ole Bienkopp), a novel about an old man who establishes a peasant commune, and Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963; Divided Heaven), in which a young woman decides to return to East Germany after having experienced the lures of the West, are good examples of Socialist Realism.

The late 1950s and the ’60s

In the other German-speaking countries, the late 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of a number of novelists whose works have since become contemporary classics. In Switzerland, Max Frisch explored the problem of guilt in his novels Homo Faber (1957; Eng. trans. Homo Faber), the story of an engineer who becomes a modern Oedipus, and Stiller (1954; I’m Not Stiller), about a man who refuses to take responsibility for his past. In West Germany, Heinrich Böll produced his Billard um halb zehn (1959; Billiards at Half-Past Nine), a brilliant novel in several voices that plays two generations of Germans off against each other as they look back at Nazism. At the same time, Günter Grass, perhaps the most important writer of the period and later, in 1999, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, began to publish what eventually became known as his Danzig trilogy, consisting of Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum), Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse), and Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years). The trilogy presents a grotesquely imaginative retrospective on the Nazi period. The narrator of Die Blechtrommel is the dwarf Oskar Matzerath, who claims that he deliberately stopped growing on his third birthday out of protest against the corruptions of adult society under Nazism. He expresses his opposition by means of his toy drum as well as by his almost supernatural ability to shatter glass with his voice. Despite his initial protest, however, Oskar allows himself to be co-opted by the Nazis, joining a performing group that entertains soldiers on the Atlantic front. After the end of World War II, Oskar chooses to become involved in the slick deception of the government-sponsored West Concert Bureau, which promotes collective repression of the Nazi period. The novel’s ultimate irony lies in the fact that Oskar is telling his story from a mental hospital. With its virtuosic command of language, its innovative reworking of the picaresque tradition, and its sophisticated approach to German social history, Die Blechtrommel was a landmark in postwar German literature.

Dramatists of this period were increasingly concerned with the relation between the Nazi past and the political realities of the present. Documentary drama, using material from the war-crimes trials of 1961–65, proliferated: Der Stellvertreter (1963; The Deputy), by Rolf Hochhuth; Die Ermittlung (1965; The Investigation), by Peter Weiss; and Prozess in Nürnberg (1968; “Trial in Nürnberg”), by Rolf Schneider, are famous examples. Tankred Dorst, Peter Weiss, Dieter Forte, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger also explored the theme of the “lesson of history” in a number of plays written circa 1970. The play Kaspar (1968; Eng. trans. Kaspar), by Peter Handke, takes its starting point in the story of the foundling Kaspar Hauser and his gradual acquisition of language and culture, showing him being browbeaten into learning German and becoming increasingly dehumanized in the process. Although this play did not explicitly address the question of the Nazi past, it explored the degree to which an individual can preserve the spirit of resistance in the face of overwhelming pressures.

The 1970s and ’80s

The 1970s were marked by an inward turning that became known as Neue Subjektivität (“New Subjectivity”). The dominant genre was lyric poetry. Its authors had formerly been involved in the “student revolution” of 1967–68, which had called for a new politicization of literature in the face of the Vietnam War and the problems of the Third World. After the student movement died down, the young writers returned somewhat reluctantly to everyday domesticity, which they described in their poetry in affectionate detail, though also with a distinct touch of irony. The New Subjectivity is documented in Jürgen Theobaldy’s anthology Und ich bewege mich doch: Gedichte vor u. nach 1968 (1977; “And Yet I Move: Poems Before and After 1968”). In the novel, the turn inward was powerfully represented by Peter Handke in autobiographical works such as Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (1972; Short Letter, Long Farewell), an account of an American tour that is also about the collapse of his marriage, and Wunschloses Unglück (1972; “Wishless Unluck,” Eng. trans. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams), a sensitive portrait of his mother and her suicide. His novel Die linkshändige Frau (1976; The Left-Handed Woman) delicately explores the inner feelings of a young married woman who tries to live on her own with her child in the Frankfurt suburbs. Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) splits its autobiographical persona into a sensitive, feminine self and a masculine double who is a writer; the novel contains visionary and lyrical passages. Walter Kempowski’s series of novels beginning with Tadellöser & Wolff (1971) reached a wider audience by depicting the everyday life of a middle-class family during the Third Reich. Sentimental, nostalgic, and gently ironic, these quasi-autobiographical novels explore the problematic nature of the positive family memories still somewhat guiltily cherished by many of those who were not persecuted by the Nazis.

In East Germany, where the official socialist line still eschewed subjectivity and inwardness, Christa Wolf brilliantly explored the problems of interiority in her novel Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The Quest for Christa T.), a meditation about a dead friend who is, in essence, an alter ego of the narrator. In Flugasche (Flight of Ashes), written in East Germany during the 1970s but not published until 1981 and then in West Germany, Monika Maron depicted the tension between inner and outer reality in the attempt of a young woman journalist to present unpleasant truths about the lives of workers in the industrial town of Bitterfeld. While she does succeed in writing an article that causes the power plant to be shut down, she herself is under threat of expulsion from the Communist Party at the conclusion of the novel.

Subjectivity was not the only theme of the 1970s, however. In West Germany, writers such as Enzensberger, Grass, and Böll continued to follow political developments in their writing. Two vast novel projects originating in this period combine techniques of perspectivized narration with the problem of fact versus fiction that was increasingly dominating the retrospective on Nazism: Jahrestage: aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (1970–83; Anniversaries: From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl), by Uwe Johnson, and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975–81; “The Aesthetics of Resistance”), by Peter Weiss. Weiss’s novel, an ambitious attempt to depict the intellectual and political development of a young communist Resistance fighter, is a remarkable mixture of history, myth, and fantasy embedded in a running discussion of political and aesthetic theory.

The feminist movement in Germany led to the emergence of a prolific and innovative group of women writers. Women were encouraged to feel and write through their bodies rather than through conventional rationality, and the distinctiveness of feminine sensibility became a hotly debated issue. Karin Struck’s novel Klassenliebe (1973; “Class Love”), an exploration of female sexuality, and Verena Stefan’s Häutungen (1975; Shedding), a collection of notes and jottings that trace a young woman’s search for identity, became classic works of German feminism.

This period was also marked by a preoccupation with generational differences, brilliantly developed by Peter Schneider in Vati (1987; “Daddy”), in which a young German lawyer travels to South America to meet his father, who has fled there to escape trial for Nazi crimes (the figure of the father is modeled on the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). Auslöschung: ein Zerfall (1986; Extinction), by Thomas Bernhard, takes the form of a violently insistent and seemingly interminable diatribe by a first-person narrator who returns from Rome to Austria for a family funeral. Bernhard’s novel expresses intense feelings of disgust and anger about Austria’s collaboration in Nazism. Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher), the story of a musician dominated by her possessive mother, is a terrifying story of family violence told from a feminist perspective.

Postmodernism

In the last decades of the 20th century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions to other types of cultural production are characteristic of postmodernist literature. Günter Grass’s Der Butt (1977; The Flounder) and Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), with their convoluted inset narratives, lyric interludes, recipes for favorite German dishes, revisions of fairy tales, and ironic representations of contemporary feminism, were at first misunderstood because they were judged by the standards of the canonical modern novel. Once viewed in the light of postmodernism, however, these novels underwent a critical reevaluation. Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum: die Geschichte eines Mörders (1985; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), with its brilliant imitations of literary styles from various periods, was another work of German postmodernism that became an international best-seller.

After reunification

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, writers began to explore the tensions between the economic, social, and cultural values of West and East Germany. There was intense debate about the East German experience under communism, in particular about whether the psychological need to come to terms with this experience was comparable to the soul-searching that had been undertaken after the end of World War II. Monika Maron addressed this issue in her novel Stille Zeile Sechs (1991; Silent Close No. Six), set in the 1980s and ostensibly a story about the discovery of guilt incurred by an important East German party functionary during the Third Reich. By exploring the rift between actions and desires, the novel becomes an inquiry into the responsibility of historians and writers in general. The link between the communist and the Nazi eras is established in a key scene that metaphorically brings together violence past and present. One year earlier, Christa Wolf’s narrative Was bleibt (1990; What Remains) had unleashed a violent controversy about the form and function of reflections on the East German past. The subject of the story was Wolf’s reactions to surveillance by the East German state security police. Some readers saw the tale as a self-serving portrayal of the author as a victim of communism; these readers failed to notice, however, the thread of self-critique woven into the narrative. In 1993 it was revealed, in a further twist of irony, that Wolf herself had given information to the security police for a brief period. The Christa Wolf case became paradigmatic for the difficulties of coming to terms with East Germany’s communist past. It was succeeded by another debate that broke out after the secret police files of several other well-known writers became available. One outraged victim of surveillance, Reiner Kunze, published a selection from his own files under the title Deckname “Lyrik” (1990; “Code Name ‘Lyric’”). At the same time, some members of an apparently oppositional group of East German writers, known as the Prenzlauer Berg poets after the district in Berlin where they lived, were shown to have acted as informants for the secret police. The resulting discussions stimulated a probing reexamination of the problem of autonomous art and the relation of aesthetics to ideology.

The turn of the 21st century

In the mid-1990s a new generation of writers emerged who finally provided the “reunification” novels that critics had expected immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Brussig’s grotesquely comic novel Helden wie wir (1995; Heroes Like Us) was a satiric reworking of the debate about the East German secret police. Thomas Hettche’s Nox (1995; “Night”) has a strangely omniscient narrator in the form of a young man whose throat has been slit in a sadomasochistic sexual act during the night the Wall came down. Nox draws a rather too obvious equivalence between its narrator’s wound, from which he is dying, and the “wound” of the divided Germany, which, on the face of things, is about to be healed. Nonetheless, Hettche succeeds in transforming this central metaphor into a multilayered analysis of postunification psychology. The cityscape of Berlin comes to stand for national and individual memory, conserved, as it were, beneath the surface of streets and canals and the no-man’s-land of the former border.

In these and other novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Nazi past continues to haunt German writing. Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (1995; “Flying Foxes,” Eng. trans. Flughunde) recounts the deaths of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s children through the eyes of two narrators: the eldest daughter, Helga, and a sound technician who had worked for Goebbels. Long after the children’s deaths, the technician begins to recognize his own role in their murders at the hands of their mother. Thomas Lehr’s experimental novella Frühling (2001; “Spring”) employs drastically ruptured syntax to reproduce, in the form of a hesitating interior monologue, the final 39 seconds of its protagonist’s life. Only toward the end of the story does the narrator, who has just completed a suicide pact with his female lover, come to understand his father’s guilt as a former concentration-camp doctor. This guilt, which has already caused the narrator’s young brother to commit suicide, is revealed as the solution to a childhood scene that the narrator has never fully understood. In contrast to German novels of the 1960s, which attempted to “master” the Nazi past through narration, these more recent novels belong to what has come to be called “memory culture.”

Linked with debates about the problem of memorializing the victims of Nazism in the form of public monuments, German-language novels of the 1990s explicitly probe questions about how memories of the Nazi period can best be represented. The Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr’s powerful Morbus Kitahara (1995; The Dog King) is set in a dystopian landscape that resembles Mauthausen concentration camp and in an imagined alternative history in which Germany has not been permitted to redevelop its industrial capabilities following World War II. W.G. Sebald’s haunting novel Austerlitz (2001; Eng. trans. Austerlitz)—the story of a man who had been saved from Nazi Germany and adopted by an English couple but who has been traveling in search of the places he believes to have been way stations in his early life—has had international success as a moving, though puzzling, exploration of memory, real and imagined.