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German Author and Chronicler Walter Kempowski Dead at 78
Walter Kempowski, chronicler of German history and one of Germany’s most important contemporary authors best known for his “German Chronicle” series of novels and his monumental project “Echolot,” died last week. He was 78. Kempowski was born in Rostock in 1929. In the fall of 1944, he was mandatorily inducted into the Hitler Youth and then conscripted as a courier for the Luftwaffe in Feburary of 1945. He moved to West Germany after the war, but while visiting his family in 1948 he was arrested and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal for alleged espionage. He served eight years in the notorious Bautzen prison. After his release, he took up his studies and then worked as a teacher in West Germany. His first novel “Im Block” or “In the Cell” dealt with his experiences in the East German prison. He gained widespread recognition with his next book, “Tadelloeser & Wolff,” the first of nine novels in the “German Chronicle” series. Written between 1971 and 1984, these autobiographical works give an account of the author’s youth in Rostock before the Second World War and his experiences during and after the war. In addition to his novels, Kempowski garnered international recognition for his monumental “Echolot” work, a project which took him 26 years to complete. It is a mosaic, a collage of the reflections and personal accounts of many thousands of individuals during the Second World War. Comprised of 10 volumes and divided into four parts, this “collective diary” is based on the personal items—diaries, letters, and photos, for example—that Kempowski had been passionately collecting since 1980. Federal President Horst Koehler aptly described the author and his work: “He preserved the voices of many individuals and sustained them for all time. In this sense he was a people’s poet in the best sense of the word.”
Among his numerous honors and distinctions, Kempowski received the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Konrad Adenauer Prize for Literature. Since 2005, Walter Kempowski’s voluminous archive, which includes the many biographies and documents from his “autobiographical diary archive” as well as his own personal archive and photography collection, has been housed by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where part of it was exhibited earlier this year. October 11, 2007 Links
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