Gruppe 47

Gruppe 47, or Group 47, was an influential association of German-language writers, founded in 1947 by Hans Werner Richter, that met regularly from the late 1940s through 1967 to read and critique one another's unpublished work in an effort to rebuild a serious German literary culture in the aftermath of Nazism and the Second World War. Rather than a movement bound by a shared style or manifesto, the group functioned as a loose, self-selecting workshop and prize-granting body that nonetheless became the single most important institution shaping postwar West German literature, with members and prizewinners including Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan and Martin Walser passing through its meetings over the decades. Politically engaged and broadly left-leaning, the group's writers shared a commitment to confronting Germany's Nazi past and to a socially and politically conscious realism, and Gruppe 47's influence on which writers gained early recognition made it, for two decades, an unofficial arbiter of literary reputation in West Germany before it dissolved amid the political tensions of 1967.