The writer Gabriele Wohmann, photographed here in 1973, read with Group 47 in 1960.
Image: Brigitte Friedrich
Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger and Gabriele Wohmann were not the only authors in Group 47. Nicole Seifert explains in the interview why the other women in the group are so unknown.
DGroup 47 is considered the nucleus of German post-war literature. Young authors such as Heinrich Böll, Günter Eich and Martin Walser gathered regularly around the writer Hans Werner Richter for meetings to read texts and discuss them. Günter Grass and Peter Handke became stars after their performances. Especially in the early years, under the influence of dictatorship, war and propaganda, the ideal of realistic, straightforward “clear-cutting literature” prevailed. Despite the clear departure from the past, deficits in dealing with the Holocaust in particular soon became apparent. And despite famous authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger, the group remained a men's club until the end; a good two hundred authors appeared until 1967, fewer than thirty female authors. The literary scholar Nicole Seifert has now written a book about this disproportion and the story of seventeen authors from Group 47.
How did the idea for this project come about?
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