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The history of modern German literature cannot be detached from the social and political history leading from the authoritarian but relatively benign empires of Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph II to defeat in war, the establishment of fragile democratic republics, and the rise of a tyrannical, warlike and eventually genocidal Third Reich which left all of Central Europe in a state of devastation unmatched since the Thirty Years War. The exiled Thomas Mann told a New York audience in 1937: ‘It is in a political form that the question of man's destiny presents itself today.’ Some authors, like Mann, arrived by complicated routes at a defence of democratic and liberal humanism; others placed their hopes in a conservative revolution or in the dictatorship of the proletariat. A literary history, however, must attend not only to authors' explicit political choices but, still more, to the visions of society articulated in their imaginative works. And here we shall find a network of images, visions, beliefs and rhetorics which cut across political divisions, often in unexpected and disturbing ways, to give this rich and bewildering period a complex unity. As the late J. P. Stern showed in The dear purchase (1995), the highest achievements of modern German culture can be traced to the same imaginative matrix as many assumptions of the new barbarism. Hitler's emergence was not inevitable, but the widespread acceptance of his rhetoric was not anomalous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This period, which begins before the Reformation and ends with the dawning of the Enlightenment, laid down the foundations of the thought and writing of the modern age and determined the future course of the German-speaking world. Germany in the modern sense did not yet exist, so the territory under discussion is the Holy Roman Empire. We must also remember that in this period most writers moved at will between Latin and German. Not until 1681 do the catalogues for the German book fairs show that more books were being published in German than in Latin. Books and writers before the Reformation Around 1445 in Mainz, Johann Gensfleisch (c. 1400–68), better known as Gutenberg, succeeded in printing with movable metal type. He also used paper, invented in the twelfth century, but only readily available in Germany in the fifteenth. Manuscript and print survived side by side and the boundaries between them remained blurred for a long time. Scriptoria producing multiple copies of manuscripts for sale already existed in the fifteenth century, anticipating the mass-production of the printing press, while books in the early decades were so costly as to constitute luxury items on a par with manuscripts. Books were printed on parchment and manuscripts written on paper. Many early printed books were designed to look like manuscripts, while the manuscript itself survived as a prestige tailormade item for rich, usually courtly patrons. But the book as commodity had come into being and it is no accident that the early centres of printing and publishing were important commercial towns on international trade routes: Mainz, Strasbourg, Basle, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Cologne and Leipzig. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]