INNER EMIGRANTS WERE a relatively small subset of the approximately five thousand writers who in 1941 were members of the Reich Chamber of Literature (RSK). However, if we accept the definition of literary inner emigration that has emerged in recent years, namely, that it is a descriptive rather than an evaluative term for a way of life under National Socialism and that the very act of social and literary withdrawal from the regime constituted dissent from its ideals, then the field is inevitably broader than was suggested in the postwar period. Between the extremes of, on the one hand, illegal dissemination of openly anti-Nazi texts and propagandistic leaflets by the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller (League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers) or the oppositional Weiße Rose (White Rose) group, and on the other, the activities of writers who put themselves at the service of the Propaganda Ministry and whose careers flourished thanks to the backing of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), there was a large number of authors whose attitudes, behavior, and literary output after 1933 placed them in an intermediate space somewhere between Grimm's extremes of open action and complete silence.

These writers, who were not assimilated to and did not conform with the regime, were far from a homogeneous group and espoused diverse philosophical, political, and religious views, covering the whole political spectrum from Left to Right. They ranged from archconservatives (for example, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen), national conservatives (Ernst Wiechert), and liberal conservatives (Rudolf Pechel), to socialists (Jan Petersen, Adam Kuckhoff) and communists (Ernst Niekisch); they included Christian writers of both confessions (Reinhold Schneider, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Ernst Wiechert, Werner Bergengruen, Theodor Haecker, Elisabeth Langgässer), academics (Victor Klemperer, Werner Krauss), journalists and publicists (Dolf Sternberger, Rudolf Pechel, Carl Linfert), philosophers (Karl Jaspers), military men (Ernst Jünger), temporary or longer-term fellow travelers (Gottfried Benn, Hans Carossa), those in semi-exile in German-occupied territory (Stefan Andres), and those who began writing in Germany under National Socialism, went into exile, and then returned to Germany (Wolfgang Koeppen and Irmgard Keun from Holland, Ernst Glaeser from Switzerland). Inner emigrants came from differing social backgrounds and different parts of Germany, belonged to more than one literary generation, and enjoyed contrasting literary reputations and standings.