The first response of many cinema-goers to Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, which opened in Dublin earlier this month, is one of astonishment. But it is not the mix of styles and media - video, 35 mm, black and white, colour, stills and animation - or the breathtaking pace of the film that causes most surprise. It is the fact that such a stylish, upbeat film could have been made in Germany.
Germany - the home of Angst and Weltschmerz, where an evening at the theatre lasts five hours and characters in films can go for 30 minutes without exchanging a word. This is, after all, the culture that introduced millions of tortured adolescents to the gloomy thoughts of Hermann Hesse and the grim, cinematic vision of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. How could such a people produce an anarchic, witty creation like Run Lola Run?
Tykwer's film may be the most talked about German production for a decade, but it is part of a bigger trend that embraces the theatre, music, books and visual art as well as the cinema. After decades of self-doubt, moralising and deep seriousness, a new generation of German writers, directors and performers has emerged full of confidence, style and - most remarkably - humour.
Apart from Run Lola Run, the past year has seen such box-office hits as Sonnenallee, a good-natured comedy set in the former East Germany that ends with a crowd singing and dancing through a heavily fortified border post. Home-grown stars such as Til Schweiger - a heart-throb for women and men alike - have built careers on a boom in romantic comedy. And when Berlin hosts its 50th International Film Festival next month, many Hollywood producers will be turning their sights on the section showing new German films - formerly an unhappy dumping ground for worthy, unloved arthouse productions.
At the Schaubuehne in the west of the city - home to Peter Stein's beautiful, meticulous productions of Chekhov and Shakespeare during the 1970s and 1980s - a new team of twenty-something directors has taken over. This generation knows little of Stein, who is now 62 and even less of Germany's other big-name theatre director, Peter Zadek, who is 73.
They have been exposed instead to the likes of Christoph Schlingensief, a gifted satirist who has spent as much time presenting television talk shows, making films and running a post-modernist political party as he has directing plays. Schlingensief and his kind occasionally strike a political target but most of the time, they are providing entertainment and keeping their young audience rolling in the aisles.
It is in the world of literature that the most dramatic transformation has taken place, however, as the post-war generation of writer-thinkers such as last year's Nobel laureate, Gunter Grass and the eastern novelist Christa Wolf, gives way to a new group of hugely successful young writers.
They are marketed like pop stars, appear in advertisements for fashion houses and sell books in numbers most new writers would not dare to dream of. Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Lebert, for example, has already sold almost a quarter of a million copies of his first novel, Crazy. And Germany's best-seller lists are suddenly full of the works of indigenous equivalents to Nick Hornby, Helen Fielding and Nicholson Baker.
"The flood of English-language bestsellers becomes monotonous and prohibitively expensive as time goes on," according to Dietrich Simon, chairman of the eastern publishing house Volk und Welt.
But the new enthusiasm for German writing owes less to popular weariness with imported works than with the character of the books being written by the new German generation.
Writers like Grass, Heinrich Boll and Martin Walser, who belonged to the postwar Gruppe 47, produced their greatest work at a time when the legitimacy of literature itself was being called into question. How could any writer adequately react to the horror of the Holocaust? Many post-war writers set their faces against narrative altogether and, in the spirit of the 1968 student revolt, declared that all "bourgeois literature" was dead.
By the 1980s, German literature itself appeared to be dead and, apart from Patrick Sueskind's Perfume - which was published in Switzerland after numerous German publishers rejected it - not a single German novel made an impact abroad.
In contrast with the Grass generation, the new writers appear unburdened by history, political purpose or literary theory.
"The eternal question of whether it is possible to tell a story hardly plays a role any more. There is a new carefreeness there," said Josef Haslinger, an Austrian writer who teaches at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig.