The German defeat in 1945 has long ceased to be considered a cultural and political “zero hour” after which postwar Germans rebuilt their societies on the ruins of the past. Aaron D. Horton's book crosses the divide between war and postwar, using the experiences of Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter to explore German responses to the “dual catastrophes of Nazism and World War II” (ix). In particular, Horton investigates the paths that led these two authors from a period as prisoners of war (POWs) in the United States to their role as central figures in Group 47, the iconic institution of postwar West German literature. At the heart of Horton's account are two newspapers, both named Der Ruf (The Call), for which Andersch and Richter wrote and edited. The first was a paper created under American auspices in March 1945 to promote democratic ideals among German POWs in the United States. Andersch and Richter founded the second version in August 1946 after they had returned to Germany, but were removed from the paper by American Occupation officials in April 1947 after being accused of promoting German nationalism.

Horton sees these newspapers as important way stations in the literary evolution of these two authors, who used their experiences of war and imprisonment to legitimate their desire to speak on behalf of a German public that had endured similar traumas. He traces continuities between their work for the two versions of Der Ruf as a way to claim Andersch and Richter for both sides of an ostensible divide between émigré writers like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, and those who remained in “inner emigration” in Nazi Germany. But in offering this sympathetic reading of their stories, Horton too easily equates Andersch and Richter with “countless other Germans who lived under the Nazi regime” (174). That formulation draws a stark line between “Nazis and ordinary Germans” (20), even as Horton's material suggests a much more blurred line between German practices of complicity and resistance.

This succinct book uses five chapters to explore how Andersch and Richter, as well as the two versions of Der Ruf, fit between the German POW experience in the United States and the legacy of Group 47. Horton explores the “archipelago” (45) of German POW camps in the United States, as well as American efforts to reeducate captured German soldiers. American authorities struggled to distinguish between Nazis and anti-Nazis among the men they had captured, and Horton faces a similar dilemma as he navigates Andersch's and Richter's life stories in the aftermath of World War II. Andersch deserted from the Wehrmacht in June 1944, and was classified as anti-Nazi by his American captors. Richter, despite remaining “internally opposed to the Nazi government” (41), fought with his unit until he was captured in November 1943; he entered American captivity as part of a general population of soldiers that included at least some still dedicated to the Nazi cause. Horton endorses Richter's rejection of any policy that declared German “collective guilt” (24), but he seems more willing to recognize the multiple motivations that might have allowed a German to collaborate with American authorities than to consider how similar participation in a Nazi-led war effort might, even on the part of one-time Communists like Andersch and Richter, also be considered collaboration.

The first version of Der Ruf—which was published in Fort Kearney, NJ, and which Andersch and Richter (the latter as editor) joined in April and September 1945, respectively—existed from March 1945 to March 1946 and eventually achieved a print run of 75,000 copies. Horton suggests that the generally well-written paper was popular with German prisoners, but he remains skeptical about the degree to which it achieved or even pursued the American policies it had been founded to promote. At the very least, its writers openly pushed back against any notion of German collective guilt for the Nazi regime and its crimes. Horton discusses a June 1945 article by Andersch that identified German soldiers as representatives of a youthful generation removed from Nazi crimes “committed in their name” (70), but that argument seems less a rejection of American policy than an effort to make their own war stories safe for postwar consumption—i.e., an early effort to craft a usable past out of the war fought by the Wehrmacht. A June 28, 1945 petition addressed by the paper's prisoner-editors to their American supervisors also suggests an additional incentive for the prisoners’ efforts to dissociate themselves from guilty Germans, namely, their desire to return to Germany as soon as possible. As much as Horton sketches out these multicausal explanations for the decisions made by writers for Der Ruf—in both versions of the newspaper—the rapidly changing material and political contexts in which they occurred remain peripheral to this study.

Interpretive context remains elusive in other ways as well. Residual editorial remarks still found in the text on pages 100 and 156 suggest that Horton has not been particularly well served by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Unfortunately, those missteps matter, not least because they make it hard to decipher whether, for example, Horton's rendering of Richter's 1946 essay, “Die Chance der SPD” as the “The SPD's Change” is a typo or a mistranslation. In other matters as well, Horton's interpretive voice remains hesitant. There are numerous occasions where he deploys quotations without any analytical framing, which makes it unclear where Horton stands on the issue at hand. Especially in Richter's case, where the only real sources on his POW experiences are found in his fictional work, it is inadequate simply to wonder whether Richter's “portrayal” of his patriotic military service and simultaneous critique of Nazi rule “is to be believed” (49). The critical scrutiny directed at contradictory elements in the war narratives of two other Group 47 authors—Heinrich Böll and, in particular, Günter Grass—have gone far beyond questions of personal believability and instead engaged broader themes, such as the German experience under bombardment or participation in criminal organizations like the Waffen-SS.

Horton seems to share with Richter a nostalgia for the brief period during which he worked on these two postwar papers. Writing to Andersch in 1955 to defend the Grünwalder Kreis, a short-lived group he founded to promote artists’ and writers’ political engagement in West Germany, Richter reminded his colleague of their time spent on “our good old ‘Rufs’” (166). Those transatlantic experiences offer a useful corrective to any sense that categories like exile, resistance, inner emigration, or collusion can ever exist in pure form. But such experiences mattered as more than just a “constant source of reflection and internal struggle” (174) that shaped these authors' postwar writings. Even as Horton charts the way stations in Andersch's and Richter's paths from Weimar-era communists to Wehrmacht soldiers to postwar authors, he fails to articulate how they matter—other than as evidence for an almost universal tendency to “passively acquiesce[…] in the Nazi regime” (174). In the end, inner emigration, “internal opposition” (176), and “inner resistance” (173) cannot operate as synonyms.