Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany

Studies of literary responses to National Socialism between 1933 and 1945 have largely focused on exiled writers; opposition within Germany and Austria is less well understood. Yet in both countries there were writers who continued to publish imaginative literature that did not conform to Nazi precepts: the authors of the so-called Inner Emigration. They withdrew from the regime and sought to express their nonconformity through camouflaged texts designed to offer sensitized readers encouragement reassurance and consolation. This book provides a critical historically informed reassessment of these writers. It is innovative in scope in its use of little-known sources in placing authors and texts in a detailed social and political context and in analyzing seminal topoi and tropes of oppositional discourse. One of the most extensive studies of the topic in German or English it provides a state-of-the-art text for literary historians scholars and students of German literature but also thanks to its accessibility and translation of all material serves as an introduction for English-speaking readers to this poorly understood group of writers. Two contextualizing chapters are followed by chapters devoted to Werner Bergengruen Stefan Andres Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen Gertrud von le Fort Reinhold Schneider Ernst Junger Ernst Wiechert and Erika Mitterer. ~~~~ JOHN KLAPPER is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham UK.