In response to the question, ‘When is literature pop?’, the author Georg M. Oswald, whose work occasionally is categorised as such, articulates the problem most succinctly: ‘Since a definition is lacking, the question can only be answered empirically. It's pop, when people call it pop.’ This was the case in the 1960s when Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Jörg Fauser and Hubert Fichte, but also more established authors such as Peter O. Chotjewitz, Elfriede Jelinek and Peter Handke, were denounced as ‘pop’ because they had left the ivory tower and mingled with the popular and trivial articulations of life and culture. Some thirty years later, an advertising campaign in late 1998 was credited with the revival of the pop label in the Berlin Republic. It grouped the latest publications of three Suhrkamp authors (so called on account of their connection with the high-brow publishing house of that name), Andreas Neumeister's Gut laut (Good Loud, 1998), Rainald Goetz's Rave (1998) and Thomas Meinecke's Tomboy (1998) under the term ‘pop’ because popular music was central for these texts.

Thanks to the fast and furious pace of the cultural sections in the newspapers and arts programmes on radio and television, the pop label quickly and quite literally gained currency beyond the marketing departments of the book industry and a media debate on pop literature ensued, lasting from the late 1990s into the first three years of the new millennium.