German literature in the first half of this century has a value and an interest which can now be taken for granted. There is, I think, a fairly general agreement that some of its greatest writers are Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; and also Gottfried Benn, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and Georg Trakl; and finally (in an order of decreasing agreement) Ernst Jünger, Karl Kraus and Hermann Hesse. The achievement of each of these authors is individual and unique, each of them has received and continues to receive the attention of readers and critics throughout the Western world, and the fame of the most renowned – Rilke, Mann, Kafka – transcended the ideological divide.

These writers did not form a school, they overlap in time but do not belong to the same generation; the oldest of them, Stefan George, was born in 1868, the youngest, Ernst Jünger, is still alive, at ninety-eight, as this goes to press. They are German by virtue of their language. For the rest, their allegiance to the six states in which they lived – Wilhelmine Germany, Austria-Hungary, Weimar Germany, the First Austrian Republic, the Third Reich and Federal Germany – is almost always problematic; but so is their attitude to the language they share. What they have in common, first and foremost, is simply the distinction of their achievement: they have staked out areas – very different areas in territory hitherto uncharted – on the margins of experience; here lies the interest and overall value these authors have for us.