Koeppen's Der Tod in Rom is one indication that postwar German culture generally and literature specifically were fundamentally implicated in and cognizant of a nexus of knowledge, guilt, and catastrophe. However Der Tod in Rom was not published until 1954, well after the zero hour itself. It shows one postwar German writer's response to the situation that had led Johannes R. Becher, in January of 1946, to express a desire for the development of “something like a … national conscience” in and around the zero hour, but as a work that appeared almost a decade after the zero hour, it is a mediated response, reflecting not just the zero hour but the German restoration and rebuilding that was already well underway in the middle of the 1950s.

In order to explore the mechanisms by which literature comes to imagine itself as “something like a … national conscience” at the zero hour it-self, it is necessary to return to the mid-1940s and analyze two works that show the way in which the consciousness of the writer can become synony-mous with a more generalized conscience as the agent of an absolute power associated with the divine — much in the way that Koeppen's Siegfried is associated with the divine judgment of art and Koeppen's Adolf with the Christian God.