and remembrance, death, violence, and especially guilt were frequent topics of his writings. Blencke has stated that Schnurre's "fundamental feeling of guilt became the crucial driver of his writing", and that his own memory served as the most important source of literary material. Schnurre is sometimes characterised as an exponent of the rubble literature movement, a short (1945c. 1950) period in German literary history during which some German authorsoften former soldierssought to capture the psychological and physical destruction they encountered after their return and to re-establish German literature by explicitly distancing themselves from the language and ideology of Nazi Germany. Schnurre was uncomfortable with political labels and never joined a party, but expressed support for socialist ideas, specifically for the ideology of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, a short-lived offshoot of the Social Democratic Party of Germany that had dissolved long before he reached adulthood. Unlike many other German authors of the time, however, he did not intend for his writings to function as a vehicle for political agitation, but primarily as a means for "moral-ethical activation of the reader". He wanted to "write as a contemporary", and explicitly intended for his stories to be read by "average" and young readers. In his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize of 1983, he described his approach to writing: Major works In (The funeral), Schnurre tells the story of a man who unexpectedly receives a letter containing an obituary that informs him of God's death. He decides to attend the funeral; there are only seven other people in attendance, including two gravediggers and a priest who struggles to recall the name of the deceased, calling him "Klott or Gott or something like that". Schnurre employs colloquial language and uses ellipsis and parataxis as literary devices, making short, simple sentences that are strung together without use of conjunctions. , whose central themes are guilt and the loss of faith and hope during World War II, was completed in 1946 and first published in the magazine (Yes. Newspaper of the young generation) two years later. According to his own account, Schnurre had "written the story at night on an upturned crib", with revisions resulting in a total of twelve or thirteen different versions. It was read both at the first and the last meeting of the Gruppe 47. and (When father's beard was still red) and (When father shaved his beard