German and Austrian modernism produced such a rich body of writing that any account must be drastically selective. I shall focus mainly on the generation of conservative modernists, Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), who adapted traditional forms for new purposes and explored continuities between past and present. They will be flanked by Theodor Fontane (1819–98), who confronted modernity in his novels of the 1890s, by the somewhat older naturalist writers, and also by the younger generation, including Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Georg Trakl (1887–1914), who can be seen as early expressionists. Their work reached a peak of achievement in the early 1920s: in 1921 Hofmannsthal published his comedy Der Schwierige (The difficult man); in 1922 Kafka wrote Das Schloβ (The castle) and Rilke completed the Duineser Elegien (Duino elegies); and in 1924 Thomas Mann published Der Zauberberg (The magic mountain).

If we ask how the conservative modernists drew on philosophy, we encounter a problem. The achievements of academic philosophy largely passed them by. The major movement in German philosophy, the neo-Kantianism based at Marburg and Heidelberg, received little attention from literary figures; only in the 1920s did neo-Kantian ideas filter into the wider cultural sphere through the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) on myth and Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) on fictions. The founder of modern mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), was an obscure professor at Jena, ignored even by the few philosophers qualified to appreciate his work.