THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN literature and politics in twentieth-century Germany is close and fascinating. In the course of the century the German nation passed through a series of huge political upheavals, each of which involved a public redefinition of what was politically, and even morally, acceptable in the present, measured against the immediate past. While the old imperial elites sought, more or less successfully, to resist such a redefinition under the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic after the First World War, from 1933 the process of Gleichschaltung in the Nazi state ensured that new categories of what was politically acceptable were vigorously enforced. The collapse of National Socialism involved a similar about-face: in the immediate postwar years, Allied denazification strategies meant that those who had risen to positions of power before 1945 by enthusiastically following one political creed risked losing all after 1945, when that creed was proscribed. The outbreak of the Cold War quickly altered the acceptability of these political categories too, as heroes of Nazi resistance became figures of suspicion in the midst of West German paranoia about “Reds under the bed”; and in East Germany, simply maintaining contact with friends and family in the West was enough to attract the unwanted attention of the Stasi. Towards the end of the century, the process of unification of the two German states brought a strikingly similar set of effects, especially to the citizens of the former GDR.