Among the most successful new stars is Thomas Brussig, a 34-year-old East Berliner whose books have inspired two hit films, Sonnenallee and Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us).
Helden wie wir is eastern Germany's answer to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a wonderfully comic, grotesque study of late puberty and eastern German petit bourgois life. The obsession with cleanliness and hygiene, omnipotence and masturbation fantasies, a mania for orderliness and tidiness and the anxieties of puberty - all these are portrayed brilliantly in a story that culminates in the protagonist's unusually large penis precipitating the fall of the Wall.
Brussig does not ignore the unattractive aspects of life in East Germany - the Wall, the secret police and the shortage of goods - but his heroes are primarily concerned with the problems of growing up: how to find a girlfriend, what to do about drugs and how to get records from the West.
Brussig's strength is that of a storyteller, a quality that German critics have often regarded with something close to contempt. As publishers and booksellers revel in the unexpected success of the new writers, however, there is a backlash against the experimental literature that dominated German writing for decades.
"That is the swing of the pendulum. After it was declared long enough that direct, straightforward accounts of your own experience were naive or even "impossible", the reaction is coming now and it's directed against the experimental writers with the same zeal and unfairness," according to Karen Duve, whose erotic stories were among last year's top sellers.
The success of the new German writers is mirrored in an unprecedented surge of interest in German pop music. Music television channels such as MTV Germany and Viva reserve at least half their playlists for German music - not out of patriotism, but because of popular demand.
Germany has long had a pop industry but, apart from a brief period in the early 1980s, home-grown music was irredeemably unfashionable and appealed mainly to an older, female audience. (Some old German pop songs have found a comfortable resting place in the diverse canon of gay camp and many young German gays are word-perfect in the more dire hits of the 1960s and 1970s).
The dance music of the 1990s liberated German musicians from their linguistic burden - chiefly because Techno music had scarcely any lyrics. But the past few years have seen the emergence of German rap, German soul and even German reggae. There has also been a boom in novelty songs, such as a recent hit Maschendrahtzaun, which samples a middle-aged woman complaining in a broad Saxon dialect about her neighbour's fence.
Few of today's young German writers will ever rival Grass and Boll and most of today's pop stars will soon be forgotten. But the new sense of confidence throughout German cultural life is unmistakable and it speaks of a society that is increasingly at ease with itself as its troubling past recedes into history.