A German literature of literature, which begins immediately after the end of the Second World War in 1945 and can be imitated until the beginning of the 1950s, is being described as rubble literary literature, also home literature and literature of the hour zero, whereby it is replaced by more demanding forms. The representatives of the rubble literature had mostly returned home from the war and tried to draw a realistic and true picture of the world of the post-war period. At the same time, the language – which in the Nazi regime was regarded as an ideologue carrier – should not be lyrically transfigured, but clearly show the reality. Writers of the rubble literature portray the experiences of the war, but also show how the present is presented to them in post-war Germany. The language of prose was often denigrated by the Nazi period, which led to the creation of numerous lyrical works. Popular genres are the short story, the sonnet and the satire, while the drama contained only a few pieces, which found a large audience. The literary epoch of debris literature forms the prelude to what later is called “postwar literature.” Postwar literature can be documented in 1967.
Term
The term describes what the generation that returned from the war found in the home: namely debris. The noun debris denotes the fragments of a larger, destroyed whole. After all, nearly all the German cities were destroyed and many ruins testified to the previous war. Many, who came home from the war, literally stood before the ruins of their existence, had lost home, family, and friends, and were inwardly destroyed. Metaphorically, this could be described as a debris of the soul. Heinrich Böll, an important representative of this epoch, described this form of literature in an essay as follows:
The first literary attempts of our generation after 1945 have been described as rubble litterature, one has tried to abort them. We did not object to this designation because it was right: indeed, the people we push from lived in ruins, they came out of the war, men and women were equally injured, even children. And they were sharp-eyed: they saw.
They were by no means in complete peace, their environment, their condition, nothing in them and around them was idyllic, and we, as writers, felt so close to us that we identified with them. With black merchants and the victims of the black merchants, with refugees and all those who had become otherwise homeless, above all, of course, the generations to which we belong, and which was to a great extent in a memorable and memorable situation: she returned home. It was the return from a war, at the end of which hardly anyone could believe. (Source: H. Böll, Confession to the rubble literature, 1952)
In this short excerpt from Heinrich Böll’s confession to the rubble literature from 1952, Boll sketched quite aptly what the literary works of this period were about. It is about literature written by those who return from the war, which is why it is a whole generation that returns. Beyond this, Böll betrays yet another detail, which is regarded as an essential feature of the epoch: the writers are sharp-eyed. They thus looked closely, showed the real, unhappy reality, and wanted to grasp exactly what had happened and what existed. Epochs of literature as a time-beam
Overview: Characteristics of debris literature
The literature of the rubble, partly also of the homeland literature, is often used as a synonym for post-war literature. However, the important features of this epoch can only be proved in the years following the end of the war by many authors, while the post-war literature, that is, the processing of the war, can be arranged longer. The following overview summarizes the characteristics of both streams, but with a focus on the period between the end of the war and the beginning of the 1950s.
Overview: The essential features of debris literature
With the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 the Second World War ended in Europe. Four months later, on September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to Japan, which ended the last hostilities of the Second World War. The Allies, that is, the countries that joined together in the war against Germany and its allies, were victorious. At the Potsdam Conference, a meeting which lasted from July 17 to August 2, 1945, the Victory Powers decided to divide Germany into four zones: the American, Soviet, English and French Besat