With increasing insistence after 1945, German writers asked: what is the political role of literature? This question went beyond the ethical question of the writer's relationship to political authority in a totalitarian state; implicitly and explicitly, men and women of letters asked not just what they should have been doing during the Nazi dictatorship but also what they should do in the future, during the postwar period then beginning. As Ernst Wiechert put it in an impassioned article published in January of 1946, “What we must ask ourselves is no longer or not yet the question how it could have happened but rather the question: what is happening now, and what is to be done?” Hermann Brill phrased the same fundamental question somewhat differently a year after Wiechert: “What can the writers, what can the poets do to help the German people on the way to a real, genuine, internalized democracy?” The question about writers' responsibility to society necessarily raised the question about writers and politics. As the journalist Gert H. Theunissen suggested in June of 1946, “The question about the German intellectuals and their relationship to politics is more than just a literary or academic affair; never before has this been such a question of conscience in Germany as it is today.” After the political failures of so many intellectuals during the Nazi years — ranging from passive acceptance to active complicity with the regime — many believed, with Wiechert, that there were ethical lessons to be learned for the present and future.