The manipulation of the German culture by National Socialism, the failure of the humanitarian ideals and of the “aesthetic education” led post-World War II poets to a critical confrontation with the writers of the past,
which resulted in poetic rewritings, i.e., in poems where biographies, forms and works of classic authors were transformed and reinterpreted. The essay focuses first of all on the “rediscovery” of Schiller, Goethe and Hölderlin
in the two Germanies; three paragraphs are then dedicated to specific poetic rewritings in the GDR (Erich Arendt, Johannes Bobrowski, Heinz Czechowski), the FRG (Günther Eich, Gottfried Benn, Peter Rühmkorf,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and Austria, including the territories of the former Habsburg Empire (Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan)
