51

After the Holocaust, German literature was tainted in two ways. First, just as the Endlösung challenged the idea of culture in general, the fact that German was the “language of the perpetrators” contaminated the German language itself. In 1951, Theodor W. Adorno articulated, in a very influential way, the idea that culture was impossible after the Holocaust. This concept significantly impacted German literature and its portrayal of the genocide of the Jewish people. Analysis of post-war German literature shows the field to be highly heterogeneous. Writers’ “subject-positions” (D. LaCapra) and ideological attitudes determined their approaches to writing about the annihilation of Jews, a topic that incidentally was rarely covered by German literature. This article focuses on two canonical authors from the post-1945 period and briefly discusses Susanne Kerckhoff’s outstanding small body of work. Although both Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Wolfgang Weyrauch had already published work throughout the Nazi period, they were regarded as post-war writers. It can be argued that their writing in the years immediately following World War II was decisively shaped by the idea of guilt. Whereas Kaschnitz was concerned with a conservative Christian rejection of guilt, Weyrauch’s Jewish characters served to exonerate the Germans.