In a major reevaluation of how World War II affected the writing of literature in France and Germany, William Cloonan argues that many established writers (Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) were unsuccessful in their attempts to write about the war precisely because they refused to confront the ways in which this conflict was so radically different from previous wars.

In particular, atrocities such as the Nazis' Final Solution, the atomic devastation of Japan, and the bombings of civilian populations called into question the moral and intellectual framework that had shaped Western thinking; throughout Europe, the heritage of the Enlightenment seemed to collapse.

Combining literary history and textual analyses, Cloonan turns to efforts by younger artists in France and Germany to rethink the approach to literature in a postwar context, devoting attention to Group 47 (Germany) and the New Novelists (France).