What Franco Moretti once said of German culture in general was especially true of the political situation after 1945: “Germany is a sort of Magic Stage, where the symbolic antagonisms of European culture achieve a metaphysical intractability, and clash irreconcilably. It is the centre and catalyst of the integrated historical system we call Europe.” Historically, the post-1945 division of Germany was not new, since the country had been divided into many different smaller principalities prior to the first unification of 1871. What was new with the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949 was not so much the fact of disunity as the division into only two states directly opposed to each other, each claiming to represent the best of the German tradition, and each with the support of one of the world's two superpowers. This stark opposition gave German division an ominousness it had never possessed before. The feeling of foreboding that emerged from Germany's and Berlin's new situation is given voice in a plethora of cold war spy novels, especially John le Carré's renowned The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963).

How did German literature react to the German division? Based on the long history of the German Kulturnation, one might have expected that, in the face of political division, writers would stress the importance of German unity; and indeed many writers did.