It has long been a commonplace that there was no 'zero hour' or clean break in German literature in 1945. However, this insight had little impact on the historiography of 20th-century literature, which continues to orient itself around the historical dates of 1933 and 1945, excluding the time in between. Continuities of literary modernism that persist beyond the period of the Nazi dictatorship, despite censorship and repression, are thus overlooked. In a double manner, many poems, prose texts, and radio plays by authors such as Günter Eich, Peter Huchel, Wolfgang Koeppen, Friedo Lampe, Horst Lange, or Elisabeth Langgässer were excluded from the literary canon: due to their specific modernity and aesthetic complexity, they did not conform to Nazi cultural policy; after 1945, they were also tainted by being part of the 'Dr.