12 German Writers Travel to the U.S.A. (1976)

From late January to mid-February 1976 a dozen West German poets, novelists and playwrights, all born between 1938 and 1947 and therefore part of the youngest post WWII generation of writers at the time, visited the United States. The idea had been born a year earlier, at a bilateral cultural conference at the Harrison House in Glen Cove, Long Island, when Fred Viebahn, board member of the German Writers Assocation (Verband Deutscher Schriftsteller), suggested, as a possible remedy to lingering anti-American sentiments among German intellectuals of the post-WW2 generation because of the Vietnam War, to let young writers experience the United States for themselves.