The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20

Tradition versus Amnesia: Peter Suhrkamp in the

Immediate Postwar Period, 1945–1950

Jan Bürger

To cite this article: Jan Bürger (2014) Tradition versus Amnesia: Peter Suhrkamp in the
Immediate Postwar Period, 1945–1950, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 89:3,
308-314, DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2014.935693

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2014.935693

Published online: 30 Sep 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 31

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vger20

Download by: [Princeton University] Date: 03 June 2016, At: 04:55

 The Germanic Review, 89: 308–314, 2014
Copyright 
c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online

DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2014.935693

Tradition versus Amnesia: Peter Suhrkamp

in the Immediate Postwar Period, 1945–1950

Jan Bürger
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

Literary historians normally associate the success of the “Suhrkamp culture” with the
legendary Gruppe 47 because of the overlap between the members of both literary circles.
But, in fact, Peter Suhrkamp, who was regarded as a representative of a “better Germany”
and who received the first publishing license in postwar Berlin, assessed the cultural
situation among the ruins differently than the majority of the writers and intellectuals of
his time. This article explains why Peter Suhrkamp could not agree with the widespread
notion of a “zero hour” after 1945.

Keywords: Gruppe 47, Hermann Hesse, literary culture, politics of memory, postwar
Germany, publishing strategies, Peter Suhrkamp

1. A CLIMATE OF FORGETTING

D uring the second half of 1945, it certainly seemed reasonable for Germans to repress
many things. As we know, the situation in Germany was almost impossible to imagine:
Though the war was over, the cities lay in ruins, and all previous rules and standards had
become relative. “All that has befallen each and every one of us during the last five years has
simply been too much to bear for anybody,” the publisher Peter Suhrkamp wrote in 1947.
“Had these things penetrated one’s thoughts and feelings at every moment, had one been
forced to acknowledge their existence, it would have been unendurable.”1 At that time, what
mattered most to Germans was to be alive, and to go on living. Only in the second place did
Germans see themselves as individuals—as perpetrators, as followers (Mitläufer), or, in the
rarest cases, as victims—whose lives had been fundamentally defined or transformed by the
preceding years. The short letter that Gottfried Benn wrote to Peter Suhrkamp on November
15, 1945, to congratulate him on receiving the first publishing license in postwar Berlin, can
be seen as representative of many others dating from these hunger months:

1
Peter Suhrkamp, “Gegenwartsaufgaben des Verlegers,” Merkur 5 (1947): 791–795, esp. 792. Unless
otherwise noted, all translations from the German are by the translator of this article.

308
 BÜRGER  TRADITION VERSUS AMNESIA 309

Dear Mr. Suhrkamp, if I have not written earlier to suggest a date for our next
conversation, it is because I am so melancholy that I am incapable of any quid
pro quo for the time granted to me by distinguished intellectual and literary
figures; maybe things will be different once I have stoves in my apartment,
and coals, maybe then it will be possible to thaw out again. In the meantime,
please allow me to send greetings and compliments to your esteemed wife
and yourself, and believe me to remain, your devoted Benn. Congratulations
on license no. 1!2

If, like Benn, you were cold and hungry, you did not have the time to deal with your past,
let alone resume your literary work. In such a situation, in such a climate of forgetting, Peter
Suhrkamp, too, must have realized the near absurdity of devoting himself to the publication
of literary works—with literature being, after all, by definition an art of remembering. There
was, however, quite a strong public interest in novels, poems, and plays, and soon a new
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

generation of writers emerged around the legendary Gruppe 47, who explicitly defined
themselves as critical and anti-Nazi and who were buoyed by the pathos of a new beginning,
of a fresh start.
It was this very fresh start, however, that gave Peter Suhrkamp pause: He did not
believe that it was possible to make a radical and, at the same time, healing break with Nazi
barbarism. Rather, he was convinced that one had to come to terms with one’s past sooner or
later. In his “Brief an einen jungen Heimkehrer” (Letter to a Young Returnee), he therefore
proposed a clear-cut criterion by which to judge people’s behavior under the Hitler regime:
For him, the decisive turning point was the pogrom night of November 9, 1938; those who
had still supported National Socialism after this date could be justly accused. In Suhrkamp’s
view, November 9, 1938 had been more critical to the destruction of Germany than all war
damage combined.3
From today’s perspective, this does not seem a sufficient criterion; nor is it an adequate
touchstone to judge the behavior of that group of postwar writers whose conscious or
unconscious literary strategy was to deliberately break with the writing styles of the previous
generation. This applies in particular—as has been pointed out again and again during the last
two decades4 —to Hans Werner Richter, the self-declared “boss” of the Gruppe 47. Terms
such as Kahlschlag (literally: clearcutting) and Stunde Null (zero hour) served him and many
others extremely well in their bid to win the audience’s favor as well as literary recognition.
On the one hand, these slogans were used to distance the speaker from the aesthetic standards
that had been propagated during the Nazi era; on the other hand, they also served to block
out key events in one’s personal as well as collective past.
For a while, the perhaps most important medium of this movement was Der Ruf
(The Call), a journal edited by Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter. Embracing an

2
Unpublished letter, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (German Literary Archives in Marbach).
3
See Peter Suhrkamp, “Brief an einen jungen Heimkehrer,” Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1951), 55–86.
4
See Klaus Briegleb, Mißachtung und Tabu. Eine Streitschrift zur Frage: “Wie antisemitisch war die
Gruppe 47?” (Berlin and Vienna: Philo, 2003).
 310 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 89, NUMBER 3 / 2014

autonomously socialist and explicitly “young” perspective, its authors took a skeptical view
of the possibility of “re-education,” if for no other reason than that “re-education” implied
the notion of collective guilt.5 For them, it was not about reintegration or a return to the
prewar past, nor about an admission of guilt and responsibility; rather, they championed a
programmatic new beginning predicated on at least partial amnesia. In the Gruppe 47, which
emerged from Der Ruf , this attitude manifested itself in a particularly shocking way after
Paul Celan’s reading in front of the group in the spring of 1952.
Walter Jens remembered Celan’s performance as a debacle. Celan’s “Death Fugue,”
perhaps the most important poem of the postwar era, had been a “disaster” in the group, Jens
recalled, which had been due not only to Celan’s pathetic recitation but also to the fact that
he had seemed out of place in this environment: “This was an entirely different world—a
world that the neo-realists who had, as it were, been raised on this program, just did not
get.”6 What’s more, Hans Werner Richter had not made the slightest effort to empathize with
his guest. On the contrary, he had treated him as a “deranged person” who was “constantly
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

preoccupied with himself” and thus incapable of listening.7 As moderator of the discussion,
Richter seems to have been mostly concerned with downplaying the effect of Celan’s poem
in order to disqualify him as a candidate for the group’s prize. “Oh well . . . ” was how
Hermann Lenz recalled Celan telling him later. “One of them said to me: The poems you
read struck me as quite unpleasant. On top of it, you read them in the tone of Goebbels.”8
Lenz discreetly failed to mention that it was Richter himself who had made the perfidious
Goebbels comparison.9
This helpless-aggressive response to Celan’s reading may have been extreme, but it
was certainly symptomatic. The Kahlschlag slogans not only served to do away with the
literature that had been created during the National Socialist era; they also marginalized the
lifetime achievements of writers who, unlike Günter Eich or Wolfgang Koeppen, could not get
published at all or only with the greatest difficulty during the war years—I am thinking here,
above all, of the authors who went into exile. Against this background, some older authors,
such as, for example, Hans Erich Nossack (1901–1977) or Ernst Kreuder (1903–1972), self-
confidently turned down the invitations from the Gruppe 47. Walter Boehlich, the influential
editor, translator, and essayist who worked at the publisher Suhrkamp until 1968, once
summarized the literary strategy of the writers around Hans Werner Richter in a benevolently
critical but probably appropriate manner:

5
See, for example, Alfred Andersch’s essay “Das junge Europa formt sein Gesicht,” Der Ruf 1 (August
15, 1946): 1–2.
6
Walter Jens, cited in Paul Celan – Gisèle Celan-Lestrange: Briefwechsel, Vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Badiou
et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 52.
7
Ibid.
8
Hermann Lenz, cited in Paul Celan – Hanne and Hermann Lenz: Briefwechsel, ed. Barbara Wiede-
mann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 8.
9
See Hans Werner Richter, Mittendrin. Die Tagebücher 1966–1972, ed. Dominik Geppert (Munich:
C.H. Beck, 2012), 158.
 BÜRGER  TRADITION VERSUS AMNESIA 311

It was understandable that they resolutely distanced themselves from the paladins
of a writing style tolerated and promoted by the Nazis. It is less understandable
that they apparently never tried to woo the émigré writers, whom they certainly
did not despise.10

2. SUHRKAMP VERSUS GRUPPE 47

Literary historians and critics often associate the “Suhrkamp culture” (George Steiner) with
the Gruppe 47, ascribing the success of the former to the significant overlap between the
members of both circles. After 1955, this alliance—or “cartel,” as it was called by Walter
Boehlich and other critical contemporaries—was indeed conspicuous. During the first years
of the Gruppe 47, however, the situation was completely different: The conclusions that Peter
Suhrkamp drew from the sight of the surrounding ruins cannot be made to align with the
notorious notion of the Nullpunkt (literally: zero point) nor with the literary histories written
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

by those born during or after the war. To Suhrkamp, it was not the destruction of the German
cities that mattered most. What he personally found much more devastating was that he was
now part of a mentally and emotionally destroyed people. “The ruins do not give a complete
picture of the destructions,” he wrote in 1947,

part of it is within us. We are not an ordinary defeated people, we do not merely
suffer the defeat, we are the defeat. Just like we say that somebody is a loser
(Niete), it is in this sense that we are the defeat. The fact that we lost this war
was not just a matter of talent and material; we had lost this war even before it
was started.11

Suhrkamp wanted to fight this spiritual and emotional defeat through books, that is, through
avowedly elitist means. This was made possible by the fact that he soon became, in Wal-
ter Boehlich’s phrase, the “poster boy of a ‘better Germany,”’ at least within intellec-
tual circles—a role that brought with it the problem, as Boehlich also pointed out, that
he often had to serve as an alibi “for the followers and yea-sayers, the crooks and the
villains.”12
One of Suhrkamp’s most important collaborators, both in intellectual and practical
terms, was no less a figure than Hermann Hesse: Suhrkamp had endured the Nazi era in
connection with Hesse; and after the war, the 1946 Nobel laureate became the key supporter
of Suhrkamp’s two new beginnings, in 1945 and in 1950, and later also during the difficult
search for a successor. With the exception of Peter Suhrkamp himself, probably no one had

10
Walter Boehlich, Die Antwort ist das Unglück der Frage. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Helmut Peitsch
and Helen Thein-Peitsch (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011), 599.
11
Peter Suhrkamp, “Brief an einen jungen Heimkehrer,” Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1951), 69.
12
Walter Boehlich, Die Antwort ist das Unglück der Frage. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Helmut Peitsch
and Helen Thein-Peitsch (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011), 116.
 312 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 89, NUMBER 3 / 2014

a bigger influence on the development of the new publishing company than Hermann Hesse.
It was therefore not surprising that, as early as Christmas of 1945, Hesse reflected on the
publisher’s mission in a letter to Suhrkamp’s wife, Annemarie.
Like Suhrkamp, he wanted to make exile literature and translated works the main
pillars of the program. The “hunger for books” was enormous, Hesse noted, and he, too, put
his faith in education and reconciliation—re-education, as it were:

For the benefit of the German prisoners in France, I have granted permission,
free of charge, to the Young Men’s Christian Association to reprint 5,000 copies
of Knulp. The English information agency asked for permission to reprint parts
of my Rigi diary and the letter to a young German. Now and then I also receive
translation requests; wherever possible I turn them down . . . my energy is no
longer sufficient, and thus I was merely amused when a U.S. Army press chief
wrote to me, telling me that I was not among those who should be allowed to
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

be heard again in Germany. This guy is none other than the son of Bekessy,
that great Viennese press czar who was defeated by Karl Kraus after years of
struggle. That kind of garbage continues to grow like a cancer.13

What is striking is that Hesse viewed the behavior of the occupying forces as critically as
that of the German population. He therefore supported Peter Suhrkamp’s efforts to reconnect
to the intellectual culture that had been systematically destroyed after 1933 with the aid of
writers like him, Bertolt Brecht, or Thomas Mann. However, Suhrkamp’s first publishing
idea, born out of necessity, did not find favor with Hesse: Suhrkamp’s plan was to begin with
a series of Literaturbriefe (literary letters)—small booklets in which he wanted to present,
and comment on, extracts from key works of modern world literature. The first five volumes
were to deal with Hesse, Charles Morgan, Paul Claudel, Franz Kafka, and Hugo Ball.14
These Literaturbriefe have never been published, but this list of names alone is revealing of
Suhrkamp’s aesthetic and educational intentions. Through his program, he wanted to promote
the kind of literature that had been ostracized between 1933 and 1945. It was to this plan that
Hesse’s somewhat unusual and unselfish Christmas wish refers to, with which he concludes
his letter to Annemarie Suhrkamp:

I do not have many wishes left other than that your publishing company publish
literary works instead of books about books, bread for all, no high-brow stuff.
Oh well, do as you like. Not much can happen to me anymore.15

13
The letter is part of the Siegfried Unseld Archives, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach; the quoted
paragraph has been omitted from the published correspondence between Hesse and Suhrkamp; see
Hermann Hesse – Peter Suhrkamp: Briefwechsel, 1945–1959, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 14.
14
See Siegfried Unseld, Peter Suhrkamp. Zur Biographie eines Verlegers in Daten, Dokumenten und
Bildern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 115.
15
Siegfried Unseld Archives, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.
 BÜRGER  TRADITION VERSUS AMNESIA 313

This was Hesse’s way of criticizing a man to whom he owed much, with whom he agreed
on almost all literary matters, and who had been charged with high treason on April 13,
1944, taken into Gestapo custody and, in January 1945, deported to and tortured at the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, probably in no little part because of Hesse.
Still, there never seems to have been a fundamental disagreement between Hesse and
Suhrkamp. Both saw themselves as members of an intellectual “order”—an idea that seems
strange today and that stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Gruppe 47, but that was
in no way unusual for those who had grown up before 1933. After the Second World War,
Suhrkamp again and again expressed himself in ways that explicitly sacralized the arts: for
him, book publishing, too, was primarily about this “order” and not about economic success,
and he directly traced his libertarian-elitist and, at the same time firmly anti-chauvinist,
convictions to his experience in prison.
In 1948, he explained this in an essay whose wording clearly gave away Suhrkamp’s
youth movement and northern German Protestant background:
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

Wherever Europeans reside and live, a thing, an appearance, an utterance holds

only one specific meaning for them. It was during the time I spent in a prison cell
towards the end of these bitter years that I felt this connection to people most
strongly. At that time, all my experiences boiled down to a single observation:
during the interrogations in prison, I realized one day—after having done my
best for weeks to defend myself—that every word I said made me guilty. I
only had to open my mouth: everything that came out of it made me guilty.
My face alone made me guilty. . . . For all my fear and shyness, I was unable
to conceal my absolute personal freedom; and this freedom was a function of
my imagination, which I had preserved and kept alive through my life-long
engagement with the arts. . . . Although chances were that I would leave my
prison cell only to be thrown into an even smaller dungeon, it was then that my
faith was strongest: after this time of horror, the invisible and widely dispersed
order would gather from all over the world, and then this community would
become the nucleus of a new order.16

In a radio speech entitled “Forderung an die Geistigen” (Appeal to the Intellectuals), broadcast
that same year, he went even further in his sacralization of art, arguing that

their [the intellectuals’] task is to rebuild, like the monks of earlier days in wild
and desolate parts of the earth, a moral and humane climate in our devastated
world, to build spaces and habits that protect man against the threat of absolute
nothingness. To achieve this goal, the German émigré intellectuals are our natural
allies in the rest of the world. As long as our relationship with them is defined by
vulnerability, rivalry, and criticism, as long as we continue to be hypersensitive
to the idiosyncrasies of certain emigrants, the situation at home is not yet well.17

16
Peter Suhrkamp, Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), 25–26.
17
Peter Suhrkamp, “Forderung an die Geistigen,” Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 2 (February 1948): 23.
 314 THE GERMANIC REVIEW  VOLUME 89, NUMBER 3 / 2014

Nowhere else did Peter Suhrkamp more strongly emphasize the contrast between his con-
victions and those of the majority of the population: While most Germans, including most
writers, wanted a new beginning despite the concentration camps, despite Auschwitz, he
wanted to create a new order that arose, as it were, out of the experience of the camps and
persecution. Whereas most Germans repressed their guilt, Suhrkamp hoped for a culture of
forgiveness.
It is therefore all the more surprising that his publishing company was destined to have
such a great future. However, the success of the “Suhrkamp culture,” which would indeed put
its stamp on the intellectual life of the Federal Republic of Germany, became evident only
toward the end of Peter Suhrkamp’s life and, after 1959, was consolidated by his successor,
Siegfried Unseld. It is revealing, for example, that there was initially almost no readership for
the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose rediscovery had been initiated by Suhrkamp in 1950
with the publication of Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900)—not
even after the publication of the first two-volume edition in 1955.18 It was only one and a
Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 04:55 03 June 2016

half decades later, in the context of the student movement, that Benjamin became one of the
most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This article was translated from German by Manuela Thurner.

Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

18
Walter Benjamin, Schriften, ed. Theodor W. Adorno and Gretel Adorno (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1955).