Political Developments

THAT THIS ACCOUNT OF WRITERS AND POLITICS in Germany should commence at 1945 should not be regarded unthinkingly as a matter of course. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, much public discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany referred to 1945 as Stunde Null (year zero), conveniently implying that everything started anew at that time and that, by implication, what had gone before had lost much, if not all, of its relevance. In the forty years existence of the German Democratic Republic, too, overlooking inconvenient facts of history was a frequent practice at an official level. Identification with the Soviet Union and its victory over Nazi Germany was so excessive that unofficially jokers coined the following gross distortion of historical fact: “The GDR won the Second World War alongside the Soviet Union,” in this way humorously exposing the ludicrous implications of the approved historiography that denied any link between the GDR and the Nazi past. The degree of continuity between pre-1945 and postwar Germany will inevitably be a question that will recur throughout this book, in relation to both political and cultural developments. At this stage it is sufficient to point to the issue.

Despite this note of caution, the significance of 1945 is not to be denied. With Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945, political power passed into the hands of the victorious Allies, each of which now administered a zone of occupation within the country.