Walter Kempowski - A literary chronicler

For decades he has been one of the most widely read German contemporary authors and is considered one of the great literary chroniclers of 20th-century German history.

The motto of the Kempowski Days 2019 in Rostock on the occasion of the author's 90th birthday on April 29th was "I want to become an archive". The writer and honorary citizen of the city of Rostock, who died in 2007, became known above all for his work "Echolot" in ten volumes, which condenses diary entries, letters and other documents from the time of the Second World War into a collage.

From village school teacher to author

Walter Kempowski was born in Rostock on April 29, 1929, the son of a shipowner. Three years after the end of the war he was arrested for alleged industrial espionage and was imprisoned in the GDR prison in Bautzen for eight years. In the mid-1950s he moved west, studied education in Göttingen and worked for 20 years as a village school teacher in Lower Saxony before devoting himself entirely to writing.

His well-known works include "Tadelloser &Wolff", "We're still doing well. A family novel" and "German Chronicle". He also received great recognition from abroad for his mammoth work "Echolot". His last book "Everything in vain" was published in 2006. The novel is about the dramatic escape of the Germans from East Prussia occupied by the Red Army in the war winter of 1945.

Diaries as the most important source

In his works, the author repeatedly dealt with the subject of totalitarian violence and ideology. In doing so, he processed numerous elements of his own biography, from the time in the Third Reich to the turmoil of war and the flight to the conviction and imprisonment for espionage by the Soviet occupiers in post-war Germany.

The most important source for Kempowski's work were diaries:his own, which Kempowski had kept since 1945, but also the notes of other people, which he had been collecting since the 1980s. Many of his reviewers considered Kempowski to be the representative of an entire generation of post-war German bourgeoisie.

Numerous awards

Kempowski had had to wait a long time for widespread recognition - the commercial success of his nine chronicle novels did not necessarily bring the commercial success of his nine Chronicle novels to the self-confessed anti-communist, but also the corresponding literary appreciation. That only changed fundamentally with the publication of the Sonar War Chronology in the 1990s. Numerous awards followed.

In October 2005, for example, Kempowski received the Hans Erich Nossack Prize for his life's work in Rostock. Other awards include the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (1994), the Federal Cross of Merit (1996) and the Order of Merit of the State of Lower Saxony (2004). In 2005 he received the Thomas Mann Prize.

The Academy of Arts in Berlin, which took over the writer's archive in 2005, exhibited his personal collection this year under the title "Kempowski's Biographies". Because of his illness, the writer could not see the show himself. According to his wife, this exhibition was the "highlight of his life". "The importance that you attach to my work surprised me, and the love and care that was bestowed on the realization of this exhibition makes up for a lot," explained Kempowski in a message of greeting that his son Karl Friedrich read at the opening. Kempowski was made an honorary citizen of Rostock in 1994.

Writing despite serious illness

Walter Kempowski died on October 5, 2007 after a long illness at the age of 78. He suffered from colon cancer. To the very end, he had not let his illness get him down. He continued to write a new book and invited people to literature afternoons at his house in Nartum near Bremen.

A few days later, on October 8th, the writer was buried quietly in his place of residence in the district of Rotenburg/Wümme. At the request of the family, the burial took place among close family and friends, said the spokeswoman for Kempowski's publishing house Albrecht Knaus, Susanne Klumpp. "Haus Kreienhoop" in Nartum, where Kempowski lived with his wife, is open on certain dates for literary and cultural events and can also be visited on request.