German literature: Postwar Literature

The postwar decades saw a gradual literary resurgence, with the social and critical novels of authors like Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Max Frisch gaining prominance. Two important centers of literary activity were Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter in Germany, and the Vienna Circle, which attracted a number of experimental writers, such as H. C. Artmann and Ernst Jandl in Austria. East Germany's writers generally upheld the tenets of socialist realism, while those in the west were more varied.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, both groups were preoccupied with the Nazi period. Among the significant German writers were Ingeborg Bachmann, Horst Bienek, Johannes Bobrowski, Uwe Johnson, Arno Schmidt, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Christa Wolf. Some of the German-language writers who have received the greatest recent international attention are the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Postwar Literature
• Symbolism, Impressionism, and Expressionism
• The Nineteenth Century: Realism and Naturalism
• Romanticism
• Sturm und Drang and Classicism
• The Protestant Reformation, High German, and Literary Academies: The Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
• Old and Middle High German: From Early to Medieval Literature
• Bibliography

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