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Trends and Symbols in Contemporary German Fiction At the end of the war, once the publishing ban had been lifted, German fiction poured forth in steadily increasing volume. After a survey of the first decade of resumed literary activities it can be stated that the promise of the late nineteen-forties has been largely fulfilled by subsequent achievements. Credit for this must go to a number of younger talents or at least new names. The share of those writers whose reputation was well established before the advent of National Socialism is by no means impressive. Hermann Hesse has attended to his garden and left literature alone. One can sympathize with those who wish that Ernst Wiechert had done the same. Ernst Jtinger, never a novelist of compelling imaginative power, has gone from bad-Heliopolis-to worse--Besuch auf Godenholm . Hans Carossa in Der Tag des jungen Arztes and Ina Seidel with Dos unverwesliche Erbe have to be sure enhanced their prestige as cultivated writers in the humanistic tradition, but they have done so by skirting around, as it was their right to do, the problems of post-war Germany. The same is true of Werner Bergengruen. Even if his reoent works, Der Starost, Der letzte Rittmeister, and Die Rittmeisterin, show him in complete control of form and thought, they have their roots in a soil which barely registers the tremors of the Second World War. Younger novelists may covet nothing more ardently than the wholesome attitude and serene acoeptance of the world which Bergengruen has reached, but they have to get there at their own pace, and the pace is slowed down by huge barriers of rubble. It is different with Thomas Mann, who always managed to set his sails to the trade winds of the literary climate. The last work to come from his pen, Felix Krull, is no exception and will be dealt with briefly in its proper place, that of contemporary trends and symbols. 32 CONTEMPORARY GERMAN FICTION 33 By and large the concerns of present-day German fiction are with the contemporary scene. There are, of course, a few writers of historical novels whom nothing, least of all the history of their own time, can distract from an interest in the love affairs of Cleopatra or the financial plight of Charles V. Vinzenz Erath, on the other hand, has delved into his childhood, with obvious inspiration from Carosssa and, admittedly, from Raabe, to write movingly of the strength of Catholic belief in moulding rural life before the First World War, and Hans Ltischer has made Protestantism the leaven of destiny. The desire to avoid contemporary problems and to be entertaining, in contrast to the obsession of others with the resurgence of spiritual values, is almost blatantly manifest in a handful of picaresque novels, notably those by Martin Schips. The latter, a Swiss, may have felt free from any obligation to German concerns, but some German novels take the same road of escape. In der grossen Drift by Rudolf Kriimer-Badoni belongs among them, and so does A. V. Thelen's best-seller Die .Jnse/ des zweiten Gesichts, in spite of the fact that the bulk of the material they both consume was thrown up by the pre-war and war years. But these and other exceptions merely attest to the dominant urge of German fiction to cope with post-war affiictions, even if style and composition swerve sharply away from realism. Rumour has it that the first publisher to see Theodor Plievier's Stalingrad returned the manuscript with the terse stricture that, while it was packed with raw material, it failed to satisfy artistic expectations. Another publisher is said to have had rejection slips printed bearing the laconic information: no demand for actualities. They were both wrong, as Stalingrad, once it was published, proved. Soon enough a popular craving for just such books seems to have prompted a steady supply of autobiographical novels conjuring up the horrors which their readers had themselves gone through. By putting the fictional segments together we obtain a fairly complete map of the geographical area over which the Germans, by choice or cruel fate, had to enact the drama of their...

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