Wolfdietrich Schnurre is best known as the writer of deceptively simple post-war Kurzgeschichten, but the truth is far more complex. The tension between the wish to confront personal guilt and the desire to reclaim an ideologically compromised past gave rise to a unique body of work. Schnurre repeatedly returned to a nucleus of autobiographical events, applying to them a range of literary styles and ideologies, in order to lay the past to rest and to rediscover a lost sense of identity. The present study traces his thematic and narrative development throughout a fifty-year literary career, encompassing the collapse of National Socialism, the Cold War and the growing political and economic success of the Federal Republic. Schnurre, as presented here, becomes a representative figure, both of a generation and of a nation’s sensibility. His work stands as a fascinating testimony to Germany’s struggle with its Nazi past.