Later when Wolfgang grew up, he purified his creation by destroying many poems that were irrelevant to that time period. In Wolfgang's eyes, what was left of his poems were not of high quality. Therefore, what survived from his poems were mostly included in his letters to Aline Bussmann, Ruth Hager, Carl Albert Lange and Hugo Seiker. Those poems were not to be published, or at least that was the intention of Borchert. However, in 1960, his mother Hertha Borchert and the American Stanley Tschopp gathered around two hundred poems to be published but that did not happen until 1996, when "Allein mit meinem Schatten und dem Mond (Alone with my shadow and the moon)", a compiled selection of Wolfgang Borchert's poems, was published.