A foundational novel for German Modernism is Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Set in Paris and presented in the form of fragmentary jottings, the novel depicts modern city life as the multiple reflexes of a disoriented narrator who tries in vain to recapture the straightforward narrative logic he recalls from stories heard and read in his youth. Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain), a bildungsroman set in the self-contained and seemingly timeless world of a tuberculosis sanatorium, interweaves an exploration of human psychology with philosophical reflection in an attempt to reveal the subtle interplay of rationalism and the irrational in modern culture. In Der Steppenwolf (1927; Eng. trans. Steppenwolf), Hermann Hesse also developed many concerns of Modernism, depicting the ordeals of a divided psyche torn between the conventional and the artistic worlds, the feminine and the masculine, reason and hallucination. The novel ends with a grotesque surrealistic episode set in a “Magic Theatre.” Other novelists of this period continued to experiment with the presentation of consciousness in a fractured world. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz, Berlin) by Alfred Döblin, the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1930–32; The Sleepwalkers) by Hermann Broch, and the unfinished novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930–43; The Man Without Qualities) by Robert Musil use multiple techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration, montage, essayistic reflection embedded in the narrative, and experimental visionary passages to explore the problematic relation between individual consciousness and a modern world that is experienced as a threat to individual identity. All three writers took a deep interest in the psychological and social determinants of criminality: the protagonist of Döblin’s novel is a released prisoner; the main character in the third volume of Broch’s trilogy becomes involved in a life of crime; and several characters in Musil’s novel are obsessed with the fate of a condemned sex-murderer.
A substantial part of Musil’s experimental novel was written during his Swiss exile from Adolf Hitler’s Reich. Similarly, Broch’s stream-of-consciousness novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil) was written during his exile in America, as was Thomas Mann’s pathbreaking novel on the genesis of Nazism and its relation to the aesthetic, Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus). Anna Seghers’s novel Das siebte Kreuz (1942; The Seventh Cross) depicts the escape of seven prisoners, only one of whom survives, from a concentration camp. Other important exile writers were Bertolt Brecht, Joseph Roth, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig. Among the communist writers who had fled from Nazi Germany a major debate took place about the merits of realist as opposed to Modernist techniques. The issue was whether straightforward presentation of reality or formal experimentation was a more effective way of raising social consciousness in readers of literature. The main proponent of the realist cause was the theorist and literary historian Georg Lukacs (György Lukács); on the Modernist side were Brecht and Seghers. This debate was later to have significant repercussions in East Germany. The post-1945 period: “Stunde Null”
In the part of Germany that became West Germany in 1949, the immediate aftermath of World War II was known as the “Stunde Null,” or “zero hour.” Writers felt that the need to make a clean sweep after the defeat of Nazism had left them in a cultural vacuum, but in fact the postwar situation made it possible to establish new connections with European and American literature. Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre were among the most important literary influences of this period.
Radio plays—for example, Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür (1947; “Outside the Door,” Eng. trans. The Man Outside)—were a highly popular form. Stage drama also exercised considerable influence throughout the early postwar years. The Swiss playwrights Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt used drama to reflect on Nazism and the postwar period. Bertolt Brecht, who had returned to East Berlin in 1949, exerted considerable influence, even though many of his major plays—including Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan), and Leben des Galilei (1943; Life of Galileo, also translated into English as Galileo)—had been written during his exile years. His theoretical writings developed a new theatrical model designed to overcome the Aristotelian principles that had dominated German theatre since Lessing. Instead of the three unities of time, place, and action, Brecht argued for what he termed “epic theatre,” in which plot is developed in the manner of a chronicle by means of a loosely linked series of episodes. The audience was to focus less on the outcome of the dramatic plot than on the characters’ motivations and on alternative actions they might have chosen. Brecht’s principle of the Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”) called for a deliberately artificial style of acting that drew attention to the fact that what was taking place on stage was a play, not the “real life” suggested by naturalist drama. The alienation effect, designed to discourage empathy with the protagonist and to stimulate critical responses in the audience, became a touchstone for postwar dramatists.
Despite concerns, codified by German philosopher Theodor Adorno in 1949, about the possibility of “lyric poetry after Auschwitz,” poetry was in fact produced quite prolifically during the immediate postwar years. The exile poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan emerged as two of the most prominent poetic voices to reflect on the concentration camp experience. Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue,” from his collection Mohn und Gedächtnis [1952; “Poppy and Memory”]) is perhaps the best-known poem of the entire postwar period. Gottfried Benn’s lecture “Probleme der Lyrik” (1951; “Problems of the Lyric”), essentially a restatement of the formalist precepts of early 20th-century Modernism, enabled postwar German poetry to reconnect with the European tradition. Under Benn’s influence, much postwar poetry tended to be abstract and hermetic; but there was also a more socially critical tradition, initiated by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his volume Verteidigung der Wölfe (1957; “In Defense of Wolves”).
Short stories by Borchert, Heinrich Böll, and others took stock of the postwar situation in a straightforward, realistic style, and early novels, such as Böll’s Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953; And Never Said a Word, also translated in English as Acquainted with the Night), depicted the misery of family life among the ruins. Though maligned as “Trümmerliteratur” (“rubble literature”), these works played a significant role in documenting and reinforcing the change of values that had taken place in Germany since the end of the war.
In East Germany the literary situation was very different from that of West Germany. Established in 1949, East Germany declared itself the cultural “heir” of the communist resistance to Nazism. Adapting the doctrine espoused by Georg Lukacs during the Modernism debate of the 1930s, the official literary mode was Socialist Realism. By this was meant a type of literature that avoided formal experimentation, was concerned with social reality, and turned upon a “positive hero” (or heroine) whose ultimate affirmation of community ideals is intended to serve as a model for the reader’s own approach to the vicissitudes of life. In response to various attempts to break the rigidity of this prescribed form, a writers’ conference at Bitterfeld in 1959 called for closer cooperation between writers and workers. Erwin Strittmatter’s Ole Bienkopp (1963; “Old Beehead,” Eng. trans. Ole Bienkopp), a novel about an old man who establishes a peasant commune, and Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963; Divided Heaven), in which a young woman decides to return to East Germany after having experienced the lures of the West, are good examples of Socialist Realism. The late 1950s and the ’60s