Introduction

The forty-five years from the collapse of National Socialist Germany in 1945 to the unification of the two German states in 1990 might seem to be an era with a self-evident beginning and end, for how could events of such magnitude and with such profound social and cultural consequences fail to exert epochal influences on literature? This led, after 1945, to the widespread expectation and assertion of a new beginning, a ‘Stunde Null’ or ‘Zero Hour’. Equally, the end of the era was announced as early as 2 October 1990, one day before unification, in the critic Frank Schirrmacher’s essay ‘Abschied von der Literatur der Bundesrepublik’ (‘Farewell to the literature of the Federal Republic’) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

But the continuities of German literature across the supposed divide of 1945 are as numerous as the discontinuities; and the apparent end of duality in 1990 made manifest continued divergencies, unsurprising after forty years of ideological division and cultural separation. Literature is not immune to social and political processes; but the rethinking provoked by major upheavals in society may take many years to be reflected in the themes and forms of literature. In this sense, the literature ‘of’ the Federal Republic is still to be written.

Schirrmacher’s purpose was in any case not a balanced retrospective but a new campaign in a controversy which had accompanied West German literature through most of its history as part of the perennial German question of the relationship of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ (‘spirit’ and ‘power’): is literature’s importance to be measured by its role as a socially and morally responsible force within a society, whether affirmative or critical of that society?