The Modern Restoration

Re-thinking German Literary History 1930-1960

Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, Matthew Philpotts

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783110181135
• eBook ISBN: 9783110906127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book seeks to move twentieth-century German literary history away from its stubbornly persistent reliance on the political turning-points of 1933 and 1945. In the first part of the book, the authors analyze a synchronic corpus of literary journals, identifying a restorative aesthetic mood in the years 1930-1960 which persists across political date boundaries. In the second part, the careers of five writers are considered diachronically against this prevailing restorative climate: Gottfried Benn, Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Eich, and Peter Huchel. Combining these two approaches, the authors show that a fresh perspective that challenges established literary-historical periodisations can shed light on the common cultural and aesthetic ground shared by writers, editors and critics across the ideological divides of the era.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Literary Journals
• Literary Journals at 1930
• Literary Journals 1933–1945
• Post-1945 Literary Journals
• Part Two: Authors
• Gottfried Benn
• Johannes R. Becher
• Bertolt Brecht
• Günter Eich
• Peter Huchel
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index