NEITHER THE LITERATURE of the Third Reich nor the literature of the Inner Emigration or the resistance played an essential role after the war in building a new literature in the occupation zones and the two German states that followed. Still, 1945 was not the absolute zero hour; especially in the Federal Republic, numerous leading representatives of National Socialist literature happily went on publishing, some of them even in the same spirit as before, for example, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer. Others switched over to harmless topics, such as Hans Friedrich Blunck with his Neue Märchen (New Fairy Tales, 1951), Edwin Erich Dwinger with Das Glück der Erde (Happiness on Earth, 1957), a “Reitbrevier für Pferdefreunde” (Riding Guide for Horse Lovers), Hanns Johst with his novel Gesegnete Vergänglichkeit (Blessed Transitoriness, 1955), or Gerhard Schumann's “thoughtful, cheerful verses” of the Stachel-Beeren-Auslese (Gooseberry Selection; Stachel also means stinger, 1960), in which, for example, he gives the reader the following advice:

The inner emigrants could have their unprinted works published, but in doing so had little response. Authors such as Reinhold Schneider got into new difficulties when they objected to the failure to deal with the National Socialist past and the rearmament of Germany. Reinhold Schneider, highly respected immediately after the war, fell into disfavor at the beginning of the fifties because he criticized the restorative policies of Adenauer. Schneider was denounced as a communist and withdrew for a second time into inner emigration.

The new literary scene in the young Federal Republic was largely determined by the Gruppe 47; in the German Democratic Republic, it was for the most part the returnees from emigration, such as Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, and Friedrich Wolf, who set the tone, if not without difficulties with the narrow-minded functionaries.

Much of the literature presented in this volume strikes today's reader as a fossil from times past but it is part and parcel of German cultural and literary history.