Horst Lange (6 October 1904 – 6 July 1971) was a German poet who published during the Third Reich and is regarded as a proponent of Inner emigration.
Lange returned to Liegnitz, finished school and in 1925 began studying art history, literature and theatre at the University of Berlin.
Other members of the Naturmagie literary movement were Eich, Peter Huchel, Elisabeth Langgässer, Wilhelm Lehmann and Oskar Loerke.
In 1935 the historian Sebastian Haffner tried to persuade the couple to follow him into exile, but Lange "felt tied to the German language".
In line with Schopenhauer's philosophy on fate, and in the absence of the invisible net (harmonia praestabilitata) with which all men are bound, Lange expressed the deep conviction "that all their hands and feet are tied".
In the novel Lange confronts the reader with adultery, incest, faithlessness, lust, rape, and the feelings of guilt and self-incrimination.
During the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin the Nazi regime concealed its radical tendencies and aesthetic modernism was tolerated so long as it was not political.
This literary movement comprised young authors who had stayed in Nazi Germany, were bitterly disappointed with the Weimar Republic and explored in their works the Modernist fusion of rationality and irrationality, with a tendency to the hermetic and magic.
Magic realism remained important in post-war Germany and was developed further by authors such as Wolfdietrich Schnurre and Günter Grass.
In it he wrote "one had to be exposed to whatever the ... dark and formless powers had decided, one could not free oneself, and one was obliged to accept it, even if it meant death itself, which would thrive upon it.
[11] In his diary and letters Lange used the concepts of barbarism (Barbarei (de)) and decline (Niedergang) to draw the picture of "sinking worlds".
On 29 July 1943 Lange wrote in his diary "The apocalypse has already existed for a long time next to our bourgeois cosiness, the plush sofa.
This mankind is therefore so helpless and so abandoned that it falls prey to its seducers without resistance, because they are no longer capable of separating good from evil.
[15] Lange was regarded as a Zwischenreichautor (author of an intermediate realm) and his prose like that of Stefan Andres, Werner Bergengruen and Wolfgang Weyrauch was very popular.
Provided the author did not openly criticise the Nazi state or the NSDAP various niches existed for the publication of expressionist or left-wing views.
[19] When Alfred Andersch assessed German literary output during the Nazi reign in 1947 he categorised Ricarda Huch, Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Hans Carossa and Gertrud von Le Fort as older and established poets who had stayed in Germany and upheld a tradition of "bourgeois classicism".
Andersch counted Lange alongside the poets Stefan Andres, Hans Leip, Martin Raschke and Eugen Gottlob Winkler among the younger generation who stayed in Germany and contributed to the resistance against Nazi authorities with their literary work.
[20] The political moto in the Federal Republic of Germany was "no experiments" and German poets imitated the old masters Kafka, Proust, Robert Musil and Karl Kraus, while conjuring up a metaphysical unity.
Ein Schwert zwischen uns (A Sword Between Us) was published in 1952 as an indictment of moral corruption and materialism in post-war Germany.