Helmut Böttiger

Group 47 – the meeting of poets and writers orchestrated by Hans Werner Richter for twenty years, starting in 1947, with invitations issued by postcard – continues to have a huge influence on literary history. Its members include two later Nobel laureates and many winners of the Georg Büchner Prize. At its gatherings, the ever-familiar critics Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Walter Jens, Hans Mayer and Joachim Kaiser whetted their critical knives in spontaneous discussion. Legendary authors attended, including Ingeborg Bachmann and Siegfried Lenz, who were born in 1926, Martin Walser and Günter Grass, who were born in 1927, and Peter Rühmkorf and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who were born in 1929. They all read from their works, engaged in discussion and became famous. (...) Literary critic Helmut Böttiger has now published a comprehensive history of the group, in which he impressively demonstrates how skilfully Group 47 members manipulated radio and the newspapers. (...) Böttiger clearly presents the main and minor characters, conflicts, mechanisms and institutions as well as the transition from one generation of authors to the next in the early sixties, which Hans Werner Richter, himself nearly sixty, and who was aesthetically limited in any case, became less and less able to bridge. Group 47 ended the moment it had fulfilled its main mission – to establish our modern literature market, including writers’ communitarisation rather than their isolation.

Alexander Camman: “Eine Art Hauptstadtersatz”
© Die ZEIT, 1 December 2012