Desc: Gruppe 47: Directed by Dieter Ehlers. With Alfred Andersch, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Hans Werner Richter. About the informal association of German-speaking writers that was founded in 1947. Gruppe 47 originated with a group of war prisoners in the United States who were concerned with reestablishing the broken traditions of German literature. Feeling that Nazi propaganda had corrupted their language, they advocated a style of sparse, even cold, descriptive realism devoid of pompous or poetic verbiage.