[1] Sebald accused Andersch of having presented through literature a version of his life (and of the "internal emigration" more generally) that made it sound more acceptable to a post-Nazi public.

From 1946 to 1947, he worked alongside Hans Werner Richter to publish the monthly literary journal Der Ruf, which was sold in the American occupation zone of Germany.

[2] Presumably, the discontinuation of "Der Ruf" followed "promptings by the Soviet authorities, provoked by Hans Werner Richter's open letter to the French Stalinist, Marcel Cachin.

"[3] In the following years, Andersch worked with the literary circle Group 47, members of which included the authors Ingeborg Bachmann, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Arno Schmidt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Helmut Heissenbüttel, among others.

His autobiographical work Die Kirschen der Freiheit (The Cherries of Freedom) was published in 1952, in which Andersch dealt with the experience of his wartime desertion and interpreted it as the "turning point" (Entscheidung) at which he could first feel free.

Efraim's protagonist is an emigrated jewish journalist, who partakes in a desperate effort to escape from his reality by introducing himself, a person corroded by self-doubt, into his novel as a fictional character.

A work that is close in style to the one of James Joyce, in which assemblage techniques such as commentary, inner monologues, and chronicle insertions create a war-like atmosphere that tells the story of desertion as an opportunity for one’s individual and collective freedom.

Andersch also considered his audiobook Der Tod des James Dean, a story that contains texts of John Dos Passos, a radio assemblage.