Introduction: locating the nation

Summary

When, in August 1995, the German news magazine Der Spiegel featured a cover story – and attack – by the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki on Günter Grass's recently published novel Ein weites Feld [Too Far Afield], it was confirming once again the central importance of literature in the German national imagination. Although the argument is not universally accepted, I am by no means the first observer to point out the tremendous importance of literature in Germany during the current conjuncture. In his study The Future of German Literature, Keith Bullivant devotes considerable acuity to demonstrating that literature, particularly in the West German Federal Republic, has played and, in the reunified Germany of the 1990s, continues to play, a political role that would be unthinkable, for instance, in Britain. Notwithstanding the strategic protestations of German writers to the contrary, Bullivant argues, “it is the British, rather than the Germans, who have lacked an ongoing intellectual discourse, within which imaginative writers played their part.” Indeed, Bullivant, along with many others, ascribes to a West German writer like Heinrich Böll the role of “conscience of the nation,” and he argues that other West German writers have at times played a similar role. Even the sometimes “vicious attacks on writers by conservative politicians and newspapers” in Germany are, Bullivant suggests, “perhaps the clearest indication of the seriousness with which these writers' views were considered.”