German literature is the literature of the German-speaking peoples of central Europe. It includes works from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and such nearby regions as Alsace (now part of France), Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), and Silesia (now mostly Poland).
Characteristics of German literature
In comparison with other European literatures, German literature often has more regional variations. One reason for this variation is that, until the rise of Berlin in the late 1800’s, the German-speaking peoples had no single capital or center of culture, such as the French had in Paris or the English had in London. In addition, Germany was deeply divided for long periods. Such divisions occurred during the religious wars of the 1600’s and during the Cold War of the mid-1900’s, when Germany was divided into Communist East Germany and non-Communist West Germany.
Germany was the birthplace of the religious movement called the Reformation, which led to the development of Protestantism in the 1500’s. The Reformation emphasized the inner spiritual life of the individual. A similar spirit of inwardness and philosophical reflection shapes much German literature.
Early German literature
Germanic tribes began to migrate into what is now Germany from northern Europe sometime after 1000 B.C. These tribes composed ballads and stories about their gods and heroes, passing them orally from generation to generation. The migrations ended about A.D. 800. At that time, monasteries became centers of learning and literature. Monks spread Christian teachings through poems and stories based on the Bible and Christian legends. Monks also began to record old heroic sagas and to compose new ones to glorify the ruling lords of their time. In about the 800’s or 900’s, the Germanic adventure tale of Walther with the Strong Hand was turned into a Latin epic called Waltharius. 
The first golden age (1150-1250)
The Germanic epic
was a major literary form during the first golden age. The most famous is the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs), a 12,000-line tale of revenge, valor, and loyalty that apparently was written in Passau, Austria, about 1200.
The romance,
a story of heroes and noble deeds, was another major literary form. The most famous romances were Parzival (about 1200-1210) by Wolfram von Eschenbach and Tristan and Isolde (early 1200’s) by Gottfried von Strassburg. Parzival longs to become a knight but must undergo many trials before he eventually becomes king of the Holy Grail. Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde retells an originally Celtic tale about a young couple whose love affair ends with their death.
Minnesingers
were poets who became popular in the 1100’s and 1200’s. Many of their lyric poems imitated the songs of the French troubadours, poets and composers who wrote mainly about love and chivalry. The most famous minnesinger was Walther von der Vogelweide. He transformed the often insincere poems of the troubadours into warm and genuine expressions of love.
Between the golden ages (1250-1750)
Popular literature.
From 1250 to 1600, increased trade brought growth and prosperity to German cities. A new social and economic class emerged—the middle class. The middle class became the cultural leader. The aristocratic style of courtly love yielded to middle-class realism, sobriety, and satire. Such epics as Meier Helmbrecht (written between about 1250 and 1280) by Wernher the Gardener described the decline of knighthood.
Fables became popular as a means of teaching practical lessons. So did the satirical epic Reynard the Fox (about 1487), Sebastian Brant’s moral and satirical poem Ship of Fools (1494), and the comic stories in Till Eulenspiegel (about 1500). Religious plays, such as the Redentin Easter Play (1464) and Oberammergau Passion Play (1634), combined religious fervor with crude humor.
The Renaissance
in Germany brought a new emphasis on understanding people and their nature and place in the world. This intellectual movement became known as humanism. The humanism of the German Renaissance led directly to one of the most transforming events in European history, the Reformation.
Humanism reached its height from 1480 to 1530. The humanists explored the philosophy and history of ancient Greece and Rome in their search for a new ideal of humanity. Outstanding German humanists included Johannes Reuchlin, a leading scholar of Hebrew, and Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Luther’s chief associate in starting the Reformation.
The Reformation,
which began in 1517, left a lasting mark on German life and culture. Most of the literature directly inspired by the Reformation took the form of religious essays and pamphlets. Martin Luther, the leading reformer in Germany, translated the Bible into German. He used the dialect of east-central Germany, particularly the region called Saxony. His translation, completed in 1534, shaped the development of the German language and influenced German writers much as the King James Version of the Bible influenced English writers.
Baroque literature.
Baroque writing was often artificial and filled with exaggerated language. Baroque poetry shifted between contrasts of faith and despair, sensuality and otherworldliness, and violence and refinement. Andreas Gryphius ranks as the greatest German lyric poet of the Baroque age.
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1668) is a lively and highly realistic novel. It portrays the suffering of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), in which about one-third of the German population died. The hero of the novel, Simplicius Simplicissimus, is foolish at first but gains wisdom through bitter experience.
The second golden age (1750-1830)
To a far greater extent than other European writers, German writers saw the arts as the key to education (in German, Bildung). The great German dramatist Friedrich Schiller expressed his belief in the power of the arts to transform the individual and society in the essay On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795).
The Enlightenment,
or the Age of Reason, emphasized the use of reason as the best means of learning truth. This period was short-lived in Germany compared with France and England, occupying roughly the middle third of the 1700’s. A spirit of enlightened reform swept German literature along with a resurgence of national pride and a rejection of French influence.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Germany’s first important literary critic, laid the basis for the rapid development of a national German literature that began toward the end of the 1700’s. Lessing began by rejecting the ideas of French Neoclassicism, a literary movement that imitated the classics of ancient Greece and Rome. Instead, he modeled his own plays on the dramas of the English playwright William Shakespeare. The best-known of Lessing’s plays, Nathan the Wise (1779), preached religious tolerance.
German Preromanticism
is perhaps better known as the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement. The movement began about 1770. It emphasized strong emotion, originality, and rebellion against authority.
Sturm und Drang was a rebellious, often chaotic movement that protested against middle-class social values, tradition, and authority in politics, art, and theology. Two of Germany’s greatest dramatists, Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, were prominent members of this movement as young men. The Robbers (1781), Schiller’s first play, tells the story of two brothers. One brother plots to kill his father, and the other forms a robber band and roams the forests. Many of Schiller’s other early plays protest stifling social conventions, tyranny, and political corruption. Goethe’s melancholy first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, revised 1787), became a European best seller. The novel consists largely of letters written by a young man named Werther describing his hopeless love for a married woman.
The philosophical inspiration for the Sturm und Drang movement was Goethe’s mentor, the great philosopher and cultural historian Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder tried to free German writers from imitating French Neoclassicists, who wrote according to superficial rules taken from ancient Greek tragedy. He collected and translated poems from all over the world, cherishing each for its unique expressive power.
German Classicism
was led by Goethe, Schiller, and Germany’s greatest lyric poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. Classicism flourished for roughly 30 years, beginning in 1787 when Goethe undertook a two-year pilgrimage to study the classical antiquities of Italy.
Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-1796) centers on Wilhelm, a young man who seeks fulfillment as an actor and playwright. The work is widely regarded as the first example of the literary form called the Bildungsroman (novel of personal development). Schiller’s later plays combine lofty philosophical arguments, a sophisticated understanding of the workings of European history, noble sentiments, and a grand literary style.
Hölderlin’s poetry combines poetic beauty with philosophical depth. His classical odes and elegies, such as “Bread and Wine” (1800-1801, revised and published in complete form in 1894, after his death) and “Patmos” (1801-1803), masterfully evoke the style and spirit of ancient Greece.
Romanticism
was an important and influential movement that emerged in the late 1790’s. The Romantics stressed imagination and strong feeling, and they promoted freer forms of literary expression. Perhaps the finest of the Romantics was Prinz Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pen name Novalis. Together with his collaborator Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis sought to explore the powers of the human imagination. In his group of mystical poems Hymns to the Night (1800), he celebrated night as a symbol of death and eternity, which could be seen as a doorway to spiritual union with his dead fiancée and with God. Other important Romantic writers, notably Friedrich Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann, also explored the world of the unconscious.
Most Romantics wrote lyric poetry. After Novalis, the finest of these poets was Joseph von Eichendorff. His poems are simple on the surface, but profound on closer reading.
One characteristic of German Romanticism was the strong patriotism expressed in the works of many writers. The German fairy tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800’s reflected not only German nationalism but also the Romantic interest in legends and folklore. 
Other writers.
Some of the finest writers of the early 1800’s composed works so personal that they do not fit into any conventional classification. These writers include Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, and Georg Büchner. In 1808, Goethe finished part one of his masterpiece, Faust. He did not complete part two until 1832, the year of his death. Faust is Goethe’s version of a legend of the 1500’s about a theologian who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for magical powers.
Kleist wrote dramas that combine stylistic brilliance with philosophical reflection and psychological depth. The hero of Kleist’s drama Prince Friedrich von Homburg (completed in 1810, published in 1821) is a prince sentenced to death for disobeying a military order. Kleist also wrote subtle short novels, such as Michael Kohlhaas (1808, revised 1810), about a swindled horse trader who seeks revenge, and The Marquess of O… (1808), the story of a noblewoman who finds herself pregnant without knowing how it happened. Büchner’s drama Danton’s Death (1835) portrays the French Revolution. His play Woyzeck (written 1835-1837) depicts an army orderly who is humiliated by his superiors and pushed into madness.
German literature from 1830 to 1880
The Young Germany
movement consisted of radical Germans who became active in about the 1830’s and used literature to express political opinions. These writers strongly opposed the conservative policies of Prince Klemens von Metternich, the leading European statesman of the period. The best-known poet of this period was Heinrich Heine. He came to disdain German culture so strongly that he lived most of his adult life in Paris. Heine satirized Germany in widely read and translated works, such as Germany, A Winter’s Tale (1844). Heine was also a fine lyric poet.
Realism
sought to portray everyday life as it actually existed, with believable people and commonplace events. Realism in German literature often took a form called Poetic Realism, which tried to create an artistic vision of ordinary life.
Realism elsewhere in Europe sought to capture the tensions and contradictions of predominantly urban societies. German Realism remained largely rural and regional. The Realists continued the Bildungsroman in such novels as Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer (1857), about a young man who chooses to become a scientist. Another Realist Bildungsroman was Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1854-1855, revised 1879-1880), about the struggle and development of a Swiss painter.
German literature from 1890 to 1945
Naturalism.
After 1890, Realism gave way to Naturalism, a literary movement that emphasized social injustice, crime, slum conditions, and the role of heredity in human development. The Weavers (1893) by Gerhart Hauptmann is perhaps the finest example of Naturalistic drama. The tragedy describes a revolt of oppressed textile workers against their employers.
Impressionism, Neoromanticism, and Symbolism
are terms better known in painting but also used to describe writing styles. The Impressionists tried to evoke a mood or state of mind by emphasizing the impressions made on observers by objects and events. The Neoromantics revived the Romantic movement’s admiration for human feelings and passions. The Symbolists were fascinated with poetic symbols, fantasies, and psychoanalysis. They argued that truth could not be portrayed by logical thought, but could only be suggested by symbols. The three terms are vague, and critics often put authors of the period into more than one category. Many of the authors’ works are difficult to classify.
The poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal can be described as Impressionist in the way they evoke atmosphere. Hofmannsthal has also been called a Neoromantic because he opposed Naturalism.
The novels of Thomas Mann exhibit a wide range of forms and themes. His early novel of society, Buddenbrooks (1901), is thoroughly Realist in its description of the history of a merchant family. Mann’s Bildungsroman called The Magic Mountain (1924) is much more philosophical and can be considered both Impressionist and Symbolist. In the book, patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium represent the conflicting attitudes and political beliefs of European society in the early 1900’s. 
Arthur Schnitzler’s Impressionistic dramas and stories set in Vienna explore the psychology of human emotions, such as sexual jealousy in his short novel Dream Story (1926).
Expressionism
was a major movement in all the arts. Expressionists tried to portray life as modified and distorted by their personal interpretation of reality. Expressionism arose in response to World War I (1914-1918) and the chaos created by the dissolution of traditional social and political structures. Much of Expressionism had a nightmarish quality. Above all, Expressionism was a movement of radical experimentation that rejected all traditional artistic standards.
Perhaps the greatest Expressionist writer was Franz Kafka. His dreamlike style blends grotesque images, disguised references, and psychological torment with deceptively simple prose. The result is a style unique in the history of literature. In Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925), a man is arrested, convicted, and executed by a mysterious court.
Some of the best examples of Expressionist drama are the plays of Bertolt Brecht , especially those written during the 1940’s. Along with Brecht, leading Expressionist playwrights were Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller. The finest Expressionist poets included Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn.
Literature under the Nazis.
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. The Nazis immediately began to persecute the Expressionists, whom they viewed as immoral and politically untrustworthy. One of the first Nazi acts was to publicly burn Expressionist books outside a university library in Berlin.
Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-1945) produced much propaganda but little literature of any value. Leading writers, such as Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, immigrated to the United States, where they continued to write in German. Others were arrested and eventually died in concentration camps.
Postwar German literature (1945-1990)
After World War II (1939-1945), German literature dealt primarily with the psychological traumas of life in a Germany that had been devastated by the war. Germany was split into two states—East Germany, controlled by the Communist Soviet Union, and West Germany, allied with the West. The leading German novelists included Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Grass became noted for the boldness of his experimentation with literary forms. His Danzig Trilogy—consisting of The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), and Dog Years (1963)—is a satirical account of Nazi rule and postwar prosperity in the German-Polish city now called Gdańsk.
Some postwar literature struggled to come to terms with Germany’s Nazi past. In Thomas Mann’s version of the Faust legend, Doctor Faustus (1947), a composer rejects love and moral responsibility in favor of artistic creativity. His story suggests that the whole history of German culture bore responsibility for the rise of the Nazis. Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963) accuses Pope Pius XII of tolerating the Nazi murders of Jews.
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann wrote an influential collection of poems called Die Piloten (The Pilots, 1968). The collection inaugurated a Postmodern German literature. Like other Postmodern writing, the poems exhibit disjointed recollections of earlier historical styles, often expressed in a kind of urban slang.
The most important German-language dramatists of the postwar period were not Germans, but the Swiss writers Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch and the Austrian dramatists Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke. The two Swiss writers continued the tradition of social criticism typical of Brecht. The two Austrians wrote dramas that were more psychological.
East German literature was fundamentally different from West German writing. East German authors were generally socialist in outlook and tended to be critical of the capitalist West. Uwe Johnson, who moved from East Germany to West Germany in 1959, probed the anxieties of a politically divided Germany. Johnson’s novel Speculations About Jakob (1959) concerns a man who is killed after refusing to cooperate with Soviet agents.
German literature from 1990 to the early 2000’s
In 1989, the East German government suddenly collapsed in the face of public protest. The collapse was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city. In 1990, East and West Germany were reunified. After unification, former East German writers, such as Wolfgang Hilbig, Erich Loest, Monika Maron, and Christa Wolf, struggled to come to terms with their past in autobiographies, novels, and essays. Maron had written an earlier novel, Flight of Ashes (1981), in which a journalist crusades to expose dangers from a power plant that is poisoning the environment. After 1990, Maron’s many prizewinning novels and essays continued to explore the moral dilemmas created by the former East Germany’s Communist past.
Herta Müller grew up as a member of Romania’s German-speaking minority. Her early works, notably the novels The Land of Green Plums (1994) and The Appointment (1997), describe life under the often cruel and violent rule of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Müller based her novel The Hunger Angel (2009) on the reminiscences of fellow Romanian Oskar Pastior, a lyric poet who also wrote in German. The novel is an account of the Soviet deportation of many people from Romania’s ethnic German minority to forced-labor camps near the end of World War II. Müller won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2009. 
Christoph Hein’s novels The Tango Player (1989) and Willenbrock (2000) depict ordinary people who find themselves in nightmarish situations. Hein also won praise for his essays.
W. G. Sebald wrote in German, though he lived most of his adult life in England. Sebald is widely regarded as the greatest German novelist of the late 1900’s. His major theme is memory as an attempt to come to terms with the traumas of Nazism and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. Sebald wrote The Natural History of Destruction (1999 in German, 2003 in English in an expanded edition) to discuss the effects of the bombing of German cities during World War II. The book, consisting of documentary essays, includes harsh critiques of his fellow German writers for paying so little attention to the massive casualties Germany suffered from the bombings. Sebald’s masterpiece is the novel Austerlitz (2001), which narrates the biography of Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian who had been sent to the United Kingdom as a child to escape the Nazi persecution that followed Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. His family perished in the Holocaust. The narrator seeks to revive painful memories of a cultural world destroyed by Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.
Durs Grünbein grew up in East Germany before unification. He has been praised as his generation’s greatest lyric poet writing in German. Grünbein is one of the youngest writers ever to receive Germany’s highest literary award, the Büchner Prize, which he won in 1995 at the age of 33. Grünbein’s writing is somber, complex, and often morbid. His work combines scholarly knowledge with social satire and a keen sense of human vanity and mortality. His poems often employ medical imagery to reflect a constant awareness in the German mind of postwar political divisions that persisted even after unification. Grünbein is also a fine essayist. Notable collections of his essays include Descartes’ Devil: Three Meditations (2008) and The Vocation of Poetry (2010).
Several Turkish-German writers have emerged as major figures in German literature from the 1990’s into the early 2000’s. Most of them were born in Turkey but later settled in Germany and write in German. Much of their work explores identity crises created by conflicting political views and by the contrasting attitudes that separate younger and older generations of Turkish-German writers. Leading Turkish-born German writers include the poet Zehra Çirak; the novelists Yadé Kara, Feridun Zaimoglu, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Aras Ören; and the essayist Zafer Senocak.
Çirak’s poetry often suggests the tension of living in two cultures while using the language of one of them to express herself. Ören focuses on the identity crisis facing migrant Turkish workers in Germany in such works as his novel Please, No Police (1981). He addresses the feelings of loneliness and of being an outsider that such workers endure. Özdamar’s novel Life Is a Caravanserai (1992) and its sequel, Bridge of the Golden Horn (1998), are partly autobiographical stories about life in Turkey and Germany from the 1950’s to the early 1970’s. Zaimoglu won praise for his first novel, Kanak Sprak (1995), which celebrates the tough slang spoken especially by young Turkish-German males in Germany’s inner cities. Kara’s best-selling novel Selam Berlin (2003) is the story of 19-year-old Hasan, who together with his family has moved back and forth between Turkey and Germany. On the day the Berlin Wall falls, he decides to leave Istanbul, Turkey, and return permanently to Berlin.
Many of Zafer Senocak’s essays on culture and politics discuss the increasingly multicultural aspects of German society. Some of Senocak’s essays have been published in English in Atlas of a Tropical Germany (2000).
A number of notable German writers emerged during the early 2000’s. Jenny Erpenbeck’s short novel The Book of Words (2004) portrays a young girl who grows up under a brutal dictatorship in a nameless South American country. Zsuzsa Bánk, in her novel The Swimmer (2002), wrote about the inner lives of a young brother and sister in politically troubled Hungary in the 1950’s. Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (2005) became a Europe-wide best seller. It deals with the relationship between German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss during the early 1800’s.
Timur Vermes attracted international attention with the satirical novel Look Who’s Back (2012). The book imagines supposedly dead German dictator Adolf Hitler returning and becoming a star on German television and YouTube. Other important German authors of the early 2000’s include Thomas Brussig, Ulrike Draesner, and Wolfgang Herrndorf.
