East Prussia with its impressive landscape and eventful history has produced an amazing variety and quality of literature. Whether poetry or prose, the memory of the country and people lives on in its literature. Baltic German literature predominantly reflects the higher social life.
Important authors from East Prussia who are still widely known today include Johann Gottfried Herder, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Siegfried Lenz. Others such as Simon Dach, Johann Gottsched, Ernst Wiechert, Arno Holz or Hermann Sudermann were popular and famous authors in their time but are less familiar today. Newcomers were also inspired as was Heinrich von Kleist, who finished his book "The Broken Jug" there.
Only very few Baltic German authors of literature from the last 100 years are still known today, among them are Siegfried von Vegesack and Werner Bergengruen.
After 1945, books especially about East Prussia dealing with the loss of homeland, flight and expulsion were published on a large scale. The number of new publications remains at a high level to this day.