When the war ended in 1945 and the writers returned from the POW camps to the bombed-out cities, they found their homes unfit for habitation and their language not ready for literary use. The corrupting idiom of the Nazi propagandists and the bureaucratic jargon of the government had poisoned the German vocabulary with the taint of death. (p. 28)

Böll's single sentence seems to sum up the problem fairly well: "It was a difficult and hard beginning to write in 1945, considering the depravity and untruthfulness of the German language at that time."… Böll and his contemporaries had to overcome these problems and restore the literary quality of their mother tongue. (p. 29)

The linguistic problems were further complicated by the death of German literary tradition. The new writers knew that the image of man which the older generation and its predecessors had inherited could not be revived. They knew...