by Dr. David White
“Our literature has no places. The tremendous, often painstaking effort of post-war literature was in fact to find places and neighbourhoods again.” Heinrich Böll[1]
Gruppe 47 began in 1947 as a circle of German writers who were friends. Several had been prisoners-of-war together in Allied camps. Although never possessing a programmatic statement, from the earliest days they were motivated by political and social concerns. All were strongly anti-Nazi and pro-democratic, with most espousing either a social-democratic or democratic-socialist viewpoint. They were keen to disseminate political and social ideas to a German population which had not only been devastated by total defeat in war, widespread infrastructural devastation and socio-economic dislocation, but was also labouring with the legacy of twelve years under the extremist ideology of National Socialism. The task of recovery and breaking free from its poisonous ideological weight was a daunting prospect. The context for this rebuilding was made more difficult as the emergent Cold War pitched the occupying powers against one another.[2]
Just like the political, social and economic chaos of post-war Germany, its literary world was fragmented and debilitated. After 1933 most of the nation’s major writers had been forced to cease their output, or write propagandist material for the Nazis, or emigrate like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Erich Maria Remarque.[3] The regime decreed that literature had a prescribed social function in the new Reich: “It would have to abandon all experimentation and social criticism and become a part of the great brown whole.”[4] Under such oppressive and creativity-destroying conditions, not to mention the moral odiousness of Nazism, approximately 1500 writers went into exile.[5] Operating in a post-war lacuna, and faced with a head-in-the-sand arch-conservatism of what remained of the domestic literary establishment,[6] the group transformed itself from a socio-political pressure group into a literary-criticism and creative-writing entity, becoming in the process the “centre of a literary renascence”.[7]
The esteem, influence and success of Gruppe 47 rested upon the quality of the writers which it fostered, but it is also arguable that it was pushing against an open door. There was a distinct lack of competition for acclaim and prestige elsewhere in the German world of literature. Despite the presence of luminaries such as Brecht and Anna Seghers, German exile literature produced little great work during the war years. While the polemic and tone of its anti-Nazi writing was commendable and effective, it was not of a high artistic quality. The output of those who remained and wrote under the constraints of the Nazis was even less worthy.[8] Since many of the most distinguished exiles did not return to Germany after the war, the domestic field was wide open for new talent to emerge and become innovators and leaders.
Gruppe 47 remained a loose organisation throughout its existence. Even the awards of its literary prizes were spasmodic. It did, however, produce a fortnightly magazine whose stated aim was to create a “new literary public and a genuine appreciation of the younger German writers.”[9] In 1952, a contemporary observer, John Frey, stated that the ethos of the group was humanistic, or more precisely “social humanist”, that it was committed to Europeanism, shunned provincial parochialism, rejected German exceptionalism, was liberal, internationalist and rational, and that it rejected the political radicalism of both left and right.[10] This view was largely reiterated fourteen years later by other observers who saw the group’s worldview as little changed but augmented by heightened criticism of the path taken by the post-war West-German government. By this time, Gruppe 47 had judged the Wirtschaftswunder as grossly materialistic and preventing Germany from facing up to the full horrific reality of the Nazi era.[11]
Their critique of the Federal Republic earned them much enmity from Christian Democrats who branded them alternately as communists or Nazis because of their collectivist culture. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who had been expelled from the Hitler Youth for uncooperative behaviour,[12] replied to this line of attack by saying, “Literature is created not by groups but by individuals, yet it can function only if these individuals defend their vital needs by political means. That is why we need Gruppe ’47 and why, for my part, I wish it – despite its euphoria and its oddballs – a longer life than its enemies.”[13] This statement could easily have been uttered by a centrist liberal, a social democrat or even a liberal conservative in the mould of Angela Merkel. Enzensberger, like most of Gruppe 47, was politically attuned to a deep-seated anti-Nazi worldview. He had lived through the era and in his youth was a neighbour of Julius Streicher, one of the most virulently anti-Semitic and personally violent of the leading Nazis.[14] Preventing anything like that happening again was one of his strongest motivators.
Rebecca Braun, however, describes Gruppe 47 as “a markedly left-wing grouping of individuals”.[15] She asserts they were inclined towards an egalitarian utopia and that it was this ideological urge rather than literary ambitions which provided the glue and impetus which sustained the organisation over its lifetime. She sees the group’s worldview as a left-wing variant of the well-entrenched concept of Heimat which had traditionally been associated with a conservative, parochial sense of identity and homeland, allowing both the Wilhelmine and Nazi-era regimes to appropriate it for aggressive nationalist purposes. Gruppe 47 was laying claim to the deeply-felt concept of Heimat and subverting its previous political usage. In a manner well practised throughout history, the intended cultural revolution and new future for Germany was to be achieved by actually looking to an element of the past as a vehicle for its acceptance.[16]
Braun says that by the mid-1960s, just as Gruppe 47 was about to disband, it had not only been accepted by the literary world and wider German society, but had become part of the establishment which it had once attacked. It was derided by the radicals of 1968 as elitist and unrepresentative of modern German society.[17] This begs the question, had its members sold out or had they achieved their purpose in bringing round Germany’s literary world or its broader culture to their stated aims? Braun concludes that, because criticism of the group came from the right and conservative voices in the late 1940s and 1950s, while from the mid-1960s it emanated from the left, it is more persuasive to think that German culture and mainstream ideology had itself moved leftwards. The election of the socialist Willy Brandt as Chancellor in 1969 tends to support this observation.
An effect of Germany’s movement to the left was that some, usually far-left, hostile portrayals of Gruppe 47 reinforced their case by casting personal aspirations on the individuals within it, especially its founders. They characterised them as ehemaliger Nazi-Soldaten (former Nazi soldiers) disregarding the perilous desertion from the Wehrmacht of one founder-member, Alfred Andersch,[18] and the historical fact of rigorously-enforced conscription in the Third Reich. Castigating these writers as petit bourgeois was also commonly employed, but this was insult rather than critique. More valid was the accusation that the group was overwhelmingly male and unconsciously sexist, and, in seeking to elevate literary excellence as a primary goal rather than encourage broader participation, it was an elitist venture.[19]
It is true that one of the founders, Günter Eich, appears to have slipped through the net. He was an anti-modernist in the Weimar era, a writer of 160 plays for Goebbels’ state-controlled radio, and an applicant for membership of the Nazi Party in May 1933 who was turned down as a bandwagon-jumping opportunist or ‘March Violet’. His postwar anti-totalitarian works were, by the most generous interpretation, the writings of a staunch conservative who had practised “inner emigration” during the Third Reich, but from a more critical viewpoint they were finely-crafted hypocrisy.[20] There is less to sustain the accusation of cant against Günter Grass, author of The Tin Drum, which was a searing condemnation of a whole generation of Germans. A teenage believer in the Third Reich, he was drafted into the Hitler Youth, the Labour Front and finally the Waffen-SS. When the war ended he was still only 18. His views changed radically thereafter, and a central theme of his subsequent writing was investigating how the German people had embraced such a repulsive and anti-human ideology as Nazism. However, his failure to reveal his Waffen-SS service for 60 years was mana for his critics. Grass was an extrovert and occasional contrarian who loved the spotlight and embraced his fame, but his moral stance against Fascism and his support of social democracy were genuine, and he instrumentalised those for the purpose of furthering his political convictions.[21]
In a literary sense, Gruppe 47 had a major influence upon German writing. There is a wide consensus that the traditional Bildungsroman, or account of a young person’s (usually male) spiritual and moral development in a coming-of-age narrative, virtually disappeared from its previously prominent position in the German canon.[22] The new writers branched out into a wide range of genres including the ironic, sarcastic poetry of Enzensberger, Böll’s parallel-time novels and political satire, Grass’s magic realism, Andersch’s essays on politics, morality and free will, Uwe Johnson’s fragmentary-prose novels, and Peter Weiss’s avant-garde politically-engaged plays and historical writings.[23] This explosion of styles, not always successful or accessible, arose in substantial measure from the exclusion during the Nazi era of foreign literature and the banning of works which ventured into expressionism or any modernist territory. German writers had a lot of catching-up to do and many only discovered Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner and other innovative authors after 1945. Gruppe 47 emerged as a filter and sorting house for this somewhat chaotic effusion of newly-liberated German literature. Although not its initial intention, they took it upon themselves to judge the merits of new writers and promote them if they liked what they encountered.[24] Inevitably, this meant that what emerged from their somewhat brutal selection process was based upon the aesthetic and ideological preferences of a small group – buttressing the accusation of elitism. Furthermore, although the whole group participated in these procedures, such participatory democracy was circumscribed by the absolute power of its founder and principal driver, Hans Werner Richter, to decide who should be invited and when events were to be held.[25]
From this semi-benign, imperfect, autocratic democracy there emerged a flow of talent which soon atttracted the attention of literary agents, publishing houses, the film industry and radio. Here was a reliable nursery of creative artists to help re-establish Germany’s cultural industries which, in many cases, had to start from a virtual year-zero because of the extent of previous Nazification. It is arguable that had Gruppe 47 not existed, another similar forum would have emerged to fulfill its function of repopulating the West German literary world. For all its imperfections and dubious internal democratic credentials, it was a positive development in the cultural arena, the breadth of talent which it released standing as testament to that, the variety of literary styles a further gain.
It was to West Germany‘s benefit that Gruppe 47 was not driven by a desire for fame or fortune, but inspired by a deep commitment to literature and to remaking Germany as a model nation embedded firmly within a European context. Above all, it maintained an unbending hostility to Germany’s recent Nazi past, refusing to airbrush it from the national consciousness or make excuses for its deep immorality. After Gruppe 47 achieved a position of influence within the Federal Republic’s cultural realm, and therefore indirectly upon its political-ideological Zeitgeist, it did not cash in by expanding into publishing or acting as a literary or talent agency. It continued to pursue the same activities in the middle 1960s as it had done in the early 1950s, and voiced similar critiques of modern society and politics. When the radicalism of the late 1960s turned against Gruppe 47 and it disbanded, it could be said to have fulfilled the model of that much revered German literary figure, Georg Hegel, who said that the process of historical development consisted of Thesis (Gruppe 47), Antithesis (Radical Socialism) and Synthesis (Willy Brandt).
Bibliography
Ascherson, Neal, et al, “Günter Grass: the man who broke the silence”, The Guardian, 18 April 2015.
Bentley, Eric Russell, “German Writers in Exile 1933-1943 (A Stock Taking)”, Books Abroad, 17, no. 4, 1943, 313-17.
Braun, Rebecca, “The Gruppe 47 as a Cultural Heimat”, The German Quarterly, 83, no. 2, 2010, 212-29.
Cuomo, Glenn R., “Opposition or Opportunism? Günter Eich’s Status as Inner Emigrant”, in Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945, edited by Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner, 176-87, New York, Berghahn Books, 2003.
Frey, John R.. “”Gruppe 47″”, Books Abroad, 26, no. 3, 1952, 237-39.
Michalski, John., “German Fiction, 1964”, Books Abroad, 39, no. 3, 1965, 280-83.
Oltermann, Philip, “A Life in Writing: Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” The Guardian, 5 May 2010.
Osterle, Heinz D., “The Other Germany: Resistance to the Third Reich in German Literature”, The German Quarterly, 41, no. 1, 1968, 1-22.
Philpotts, Matthew, The Margins of Dictatorship: Assent and Dissent in the Work of Günter Eich and Bertolt Brecht, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2003.
Stern, Guy, “Trends in the Present-Day German Novel”, Books Abroad, 43, no. 3, 1969, 334-44.
University of Edinburgh, “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, University Review (Edinburgh University Press) 3, no. 9, 1966, 48-57.
[1] Quoted in: Rebecca Braun, “The Gruppe 47 as a Cultural Heimat”, The German Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2010), 221.
[2] University of Edinburgh, “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, University Review (Edinburgh University Press) 3, no. 9 (1966), 48-49.
[3] Eric Russell Bentley, “German Writers in Exile 1933-1943 (A Stock Taking)”, Books Abroad 17, no. 4 (1943), 313-14.
[4] Heinz D. Osterle, “The Other Germany: Resistance to the Third Reich in German Literature”, The German Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1968), 1
[5] Osterle, “The Other Germany”, 2.
[6] Osterle, “The Other Germany”, 2-3.
[7] “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, 49.
[8] Bentley, “German Writers in Exile”, 316-17.
[9] John R. Frey, “”Gruppe 47″.” Books Abroad 26, no. 3 (1952), 238.
[10] Frey, “”Gruppe 47″”, 238.
[11] “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, 52.
[12] Philip Oltermann, “A Life in Writing: Hans Magnus Enzensberger”, The Guardian, 5 May 2010.
[13] John Michalski, “German Fiction, 1964”, Books Abroad 39, no. 3 (1965), 282.
[14] Oltermann, “A Life”.
[15] Braun, “Cultural Heimat”, 213.
[16] Braun, “Cultural Heimat”, 213-16.
[17] Braun, “Cultural Heimat”, 219.
[18] “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, 48
[19] Braun, “Cultural Heimat”, 225
[20] Matthew Philpotts, The Margins of Dictatorship: Assent and Dissent in the Work of Günter Eich and Bertolt Brecht (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003), 170-85; Glenn R. Cuomo, “Opposition or Opportunism? Günter Eich’s Status as Inner Emigrant” in Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945, edited by Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 176-87.
[21] Neal Ascherson et al., “Günter Grass: the man who broke the silence”, The Guardian, 18 April 2015.
[22] Guy Stern, “Trends in the Present-Day German Novel” Books Abroad 43, no. 3 (1969), 334
[23] Stern, “Trends”, 335.
[24] “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, 50.
[25] “Group 47 and Recent German Writing”, 51.
