Group 47’s Farewell Tour

Sign and Sight translates an excerpt from a review of an evening in Berlin with Günter Grass, Martin Walser and Joachim Kaiser commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Group 47.  This legendary group of writers came together in the rubble of the war’s aftermath in an effort to revive German literature, which had been destroyed in Germany.  This also meant reappropriating the German language, defiled by war and dictatorship, by reducing it to a spartan vocabulary of about 300 words. Hemingway was the new model; literature would return to its elemental directness; the flowery Innerlichkeit of the past was rejected.  Gruppe 47 was a closed group; the members were left-leaning but democratic.  Right-wing writers like Ernst Juenger were not welcome, nor were the proponents of Inner Emigration, who continued publishing during the NS-period.  On the other hand, the Group was not particularly welcoming of exile writers or of immigrants. The great war novelist Gert Ledig read aloud from his novel Vergeltung at one of the Group’s early meetings, but did not feel particularly welcome and never returned.  The greatest of the postwar novelists – Wolfgang Koeppen – is listed as a member, but to my knowledge he never attended any of the meetings, nor did he win any of the annual awards the Group 47 gave out.  Koeppen, the masterful modernist, embraced Joyce and Alfred Döblin as his literary models – not Hemingway.

The true contribution of the Gruppe 47 may be for how it shaped the international perception of postwar German literature, rather than for its influence on German writers. Joachim Kaiser alluded to this at the Berlin event:

Die Gruppe 47, sagt Kaiser, habe dazu beigetragen, dass im Ausland das Vertrauen in die Bundesrepublik gewachsen sei. Das sei eben Dialektik, wenn man draußen als Botschafter einer demokratischen Erneuerung, im Inneren aber weithin noch als Nestbeschmutzer wahrgenommen werde. (trans. Kaiser said that the Group 47 contributed to the growing confidence in the young Federal Republic abroad. That’s how the Dialectic works: outside of Germany they were the ambassadors of a democratic renewal while at home they were accused of fouling their own nest.)

By the time of the student unrest of the 1960’s, the Group 47 had lost its sense of purpose and pretty much dissolved into internal squabbling.  Grass and Walser went in opposite directions, with Grass throwing his lot in with Willy Brandt and the SPD.  Only Heinrich Böll remained true to the Group 47’s original ethos.  But all the acrimony of the past appears to have been forgotten in this one last nostalgic reunion.