Popular culture has held a particular fascination for German elites, often for cultural but also ideological reasons. This book offers a cultural history of Germany concentrating especially on the period between 1920 and 1980. This historical period, which witnessed not only profound social changes but cultural ones too, is viewed through the work of significant writers and dramatists such as Hesse and Jelinek, Brecht and Brinkmann, who have identified with ordinary people, their everyday lives, and their pleasures or predicaments. The phenomenon of the popular that has intrigued so many important twentieth-century writers is thus pegged firmly to an historical framework of language, politics, social relationships, and the creative arts.