Summary: I argue that National Socialism and the ruptures created by the ensuing war produced a seismic shift in the world of these women writers that expressed itself in their intellectual and aesthetic production. This is the result, as I read it, both of a Scheherezade effect, a production born of circumstantial desperation, and of a deep emotional need to explain these political developments. In addition, because of the ways in which gender inflected this particularly difficult and painful history, women writers occupied highly complicated political positions. I suggest that it is out of their sense of their own moral ambiguity in a world so fraught with aggression and destruction that women writers reached for one form of representation after another, in an attempt to work themselves into a more comfortable moral position. Ultimately their efforts constituted a historically-induced experimental movement.