Questions of guilt and innocence, age and responsibility, and the impact of a moral education during the Nazi era pervade the work of arguably the three most famous and canonical writers of post-1945 German literature, Günter Grass (b. 1927), Martin Walser (b. 1927), and Christa Wolf (b. 1929), all of whom were members of the Hitler Youth generation who came of age in Nazi Germany. Yet, the way in which their upbringing during the Nazi era has shaped this generation of writers in their aesthetic and political work after 1945 remains a comparatively neglected subject in the field of post-war German literature and cultural and intellectual history. I attempt to fill this gap by reevaluating Grass’, Walser’s and Wolf’s literary work as well as their astonishingly important influence as public intellectuals against the backdrop of their generational identity.