Although the immediate postwar period known to Germans as the “Stunde Null” (zero hour) laid the foundation for the subsequent development of literary and political culture in the two German states that emerged in 1949 and the reunified Germany that succeeded them in 1990, it has received surprisingly little attention in literary scholarship, particularly in English. Most literary histories of the postwar period tend to stress the importance of figures like the later Nobel prizewinners Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, who emerged as major writers over the course of the 1950s, while eliding the complex and contradictory literary-cultural situation of the zero hour itself.

Contemporary scholars are in broad agreement that the absolute break in continuity denoted by the concept of a literary zero hour simply did not take place, at least in West Germany, and probably not in East Germany either. Franz Schonauer, for instance, begins his examination of postwar literature with the programmatic statement that “neither in the east nor in the west did the history of German literature after 1945 begin with the so-called ‘zero hour.’” Heinrich Vormweg places the negation of the zero hour into the very title of one of his own contributions. As Stefan Busch observed in 1998, “since the 1970s no work dealing with the topic of postwar literature has failed to point out … that there was no such thing as a ‘zero hour.’” And yet the ongoing and almost ritual debunking of the zero hour has, paradoxically, contributed to its dominance as a concept.