German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour

Examines the intense intellectual debates in immediate postwar Germany, often conducted in literature or literary discourse. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, German intellectuals and writers were forced to confront perhaps the most difficult complex of problems ever faced by modern intellectuals in the western world: the complete defeat and devastation of their country, the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship, the onset of the Cold War, and ultimately the political division of t