Walter Kempowski | |
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| Born | April 29, 1929 Rostock, Germany |
| Died | October 5, 2007 (aged 78) Rotenburg an der Wümme, Germany |
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Walter Kempowski (German pronunciation: [ˈvaltɐ kɛmˈpɔfskiː] ⓘ; 29 April 1929 – 5 October 2007[1][2][3]) was a German writer. Kempowski was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental Echolot ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War.
Kempowski was born in Rostock.[1] His father, Karl Georg Kempowski, was a shipping company owner and his mother, Margarethe Kempowski, née Collasius,[4] was the daughter of a Hamburg merchant.[5][6] In 1935 Kempowski began attending St. Georg School; in 1939, he transferred to the local high school ("Realgymnasium").
As a teenager, Kempowski, who was unathletic and had acquired a taste for American jazz and swing music through his older brother, chafed under compulsory service in the Hitler Youth, and was transferred into a penalty unit (Strafeinheit) of the organization.[7] In early 1945 he was drafted into the Flakhelfer, the youth auxiliary of the Luftwaffe, serving in a special unit that performed courier functions. Kempowski's father, who had volunteered for military service at the beginning of the war, only to be turned away because of his membership in the Freemasons,[7] was accepted for service in summer 1940, and died in combat on 26 April 1945.
In the immediate postwar period, Kempowski worked for the U.S. Army in Wiesbaden, in the American zone of Allied-occupied Germany. In March 1948, during a visit to his home city of Rostock, in the Soviet zone, in what would later become communist East Germany, he was arrested by Soviet authorities and accused of spying for the U.S.[8][2] Convicted by a Soviet military tribunal and sentenced to 25 years,[8] he served eight years in a prison in Bautzen, and was released in 1956.[2]
In West Germany he became a teacher in Breddorf (as of 1960), in Nartum (as of 1965) and in Zeven (between 1975 and 1979).
Kempowski died of intestinal cancer, aged 78, in Rotenburg on October 5, 2007.[8]
Kempowski's first success as an author was the autobiographic novel Tadellöser und Wolf, in which he described his youth in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a well-off middle-class family.[1] In several more books he completed the story of his family from the early 20th century into the late 1950s.
Between 1993 and 2005, he published his enormous chronicle Das Echolot, a collection and collage of documents by people of many kinds living in the circumstances of war. The ten-volume work consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and autobiographical accounts that he began collecting in the 1980s and which he referred to as a "small library of the nameless".[8][9][10] The documents are now deposited in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.[9] The last volume of Das Echolot was translated into English by Shaun Whiteside under the title Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler's Birthday to VE Day (Granta, 2014).
Shortly before Kempowski's death, journalist Peer Teuwsen asked the author why he collected nearly 3.5 million pieces of paper on the Holocaust. Kempowski replied:
"I've got this thing for specific details. It never means anything to me when people say that three or four million people were gassed. But when I hear that an SS man in Dachau tortured poor Pastor Schneider, things that are long forgotten but that have been documented – I can get a picture of the monstrous horrors. The very idea of wiping out an entire people, pure madness. And all that time I was sitting in the parlour on a rug, playing with little cars."[11]
