Politics and aesthetics in postwar German literature: Heinrich Boell, Hans Erich Nossack, Paul Celan

This dissertation examines a paradigmatic shift in the nature of politically engaged literature in post-World War II Germany. In the late 1940s a new strand of writing emerged alongside traditional, primarily realist forms of engagement. Its defining feature was the conjoining of political engagement and autonomous aesthetics. I argue that our understanding of postwar literary history cannot be complete without expanding the established models of literary historiography.; Chapter one explains why this important tendency in postwar writing has not yet been studied systematically. The combination of political engagement and aesthetic autonomy has long escaped our view, because literary histories tend to categorize literary trends of the 1950s and '60s by social groupings---for example, the writing of former exiles, inner emigres, the young generation, or members of Gruppe 47. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the literary field, I introduce an alternate model for charting the literary history of this period. It focuses primarily on aesthetic correspondences, which do not necessarily overlap with social groupings. In the following chapters I analyze texts by authors who normally fall into different categories of literary historiography: the former Wehrmacht draftee and Gruppe 47 member Heinrich Boll, the former inner emigre Hans Erich Nossack, and the Holocaust survivor and German-Jewish poet Paul Celan. All three authors considered aesthetic autonomy a prerequisite to evading political utilitarianism. Chapter two examines texts by Heinrich Boll, which through their form and content critiqued the institutionalized repression of war memories in postwar Germany. Chapter three investigates several texts by Hans Erich Nossack, which visualize the widening rift between the individual and a social existence he called "the benumbing collectivism of modern societies." Chapter four examines Paul Celan's poetics of "u-topia" in light of his literary commitment to a radical individualism. Each of the three chapters highlights the kinship between this new strand of politically engaged writing and Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory.